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“You loved me enough to let me die.”

He closes his eyes.

“You don’t have to carry me anymore.”

She reaches forward—just once. A palm to his chest, over the heart I know still aches in silence. He doesn’t lean away. He lets her touch him.

Then she’s gone. Not vanished. Not dissolved. Just—moved. Back into the crowd. Into memory. Into the place we left her long before today.

And suddenly, I see it. Not all love is meant to survive. Some is meant to destroy. And some is meant to teach you who you’ll never be again.

I step forward, not out of impulse, but certainty. The others still linger in the aftershock, but my eyes are only for her now.

Luna.

She watches me as I approach, gaze unyielding, jaw set like she's already braced for whatever truth I'm about to offer her.

I stop close—close enough to feel her breath shift, the barest curl of energy flickering across the inches between us.

"That could’ve undone you," I murmur. “Her. All of it.”

Her voice is quiet. “It didn’t.”

I tilt my head, taking her in—not as something to tame, not to console—but something tohonor. "You’re not afraid of the dead."

“I’ve lived in their shadow too long to be.”

Gods, she speaks like ruin dressed in warmth. I let my fingers brush hers, slow, deliberate, not asking permission—just making it known that the space between us was never meant to stay untouched. She doesn't pull away.

“I want you to know,” I say, low, certain, “that I’ve loved before.”

Her breath stills, just slightly.

“But I’ve neverchosenlike this.”

Her throat tightens. And that—that—is the difference. The others still carry her. But I am standing here, offering everything Maeve never asked me for.

A future.

And Luna—She’s not a second chance. She’s the reason I want one.

Lucien

I thought it would feel like resurrection. Seeing Maeve again.

The last woman I allowed myself to love—so soft she made war seem quiet, so steady I let myself imagine forever in the hollow between her collarbones. When she died, it tore something from me. That’s what I told myself. That there was something sacred in the way she broke open in my arms and bled out the last good part of me.

I carried that loss like a weapon. Used it as justification. I loved her. I lost her. I don’t love anymore. And now she’s walked into the square, smiling like she remembers the taste of all our names, and I felt…

Nothing.

No pain. No hunger. No fury.

Just a slow, indifferent silence. Bittersweet. Like a wine gone stale. Like a memory that doesn’t bleed anymore. I needed to see her to understand that. I let her go long before she ever left. And that should be the end of it.

But it isn’t.

Because Luna’s still standing there, not looking at me, not asking for anything, and I can feel the pressure building in my chest like she’s a question I refuse to answer but can’t stop hearing. She doesn’t belong in this. Not in the past. Not in Maeve’s ashes. But she fits into the space Maeve once carved out like it was built for her.