Page 123 of Ballad of Nightmares

“When people beg for me… it’s not usually a challenge as you called to me the other night,” he said slowly, lashes lifting to her. “It’s usually a prayer. Cathartic and euphoric. As though one tiny push over the edge will release every pain they’ve ever felt. And I wait it out with them. I hold them in my shadows as they teeter on that final second until they remember that life…” he gestured to the vacant air “…all of this… It’s worth it. Because what is greater than that edge is having the strength to go on. It’s fighting and defeating your own monsters, your own haunted dreams. And knowing… knowing whatever pains and struggles you might face, you can make it.”

Ana wiped a tear from her cheek, sniffling back her tears. “And those that don’t?”

Sam hesitated. He thought of them. Of those begging on their knees, and those he’d looked into the past of. Bearing the hurt of their lives and trying to ease some of it, if only for a moment. To the ones he’d looked at and given a choice. To the ones who had chosen to go on into a new beginning instead of an extension of this life and to live as one of his demons as both Millie and Rolfe had chosen to.

And to the ones he’d cradled in his arms and wiped their tears away as they pleaded for it all to stop.

“We fall together.”

Ana watched him, and he could tell by the glisten in her eyes and the way she glanced up at the ceiling that she was shaking. Uncontrollable tears dripped down her cheeks. Like something had broken within her, and while he could hear Millie calling him an idiot in the back of his mind, he couldn’t stop himself.

Sam opened the dungeon door and dropped to her side, and Ana…

Ana shattered. She crumbled into sobs, and she fell into his arms.

Death held her.

He held her as he had never held her before. He came to her as she had begged for her entire life.

“Let me fall,” she whispered into his chest, her hands gripping at his shirt. He wrapped his arms tighter, chin settling on her head, his shadows curling even more as he and they enveloped her into an embrace she could not turn away from.

“Let me fall.Let me fall,” she continued to sob.

Sam’s heart broke. He pulled back and cupped her face in his hand, seeing her pleading expression’s desperation and ruined rawness. She gasped on a high-pitched breath, her face so wet with tears that Sam felt himself drowning before her.

“No,” he whispered. “I won’t.”

“Please.” The word was a choked breath, those green eyes so bright and sad, mascara running down her cheeks. “You should have let me go that night,” she whispered. “You should have taken me for all that I had done.”

He wondered if she had ever let herself go like this. If after everything she’d done and felt, she’d held it all in and simply pushed on to the next thing.

Sam swallowed and shook his head. He shook his head at the thought of life without her. At the thought of going back to the mundane routine he’d been in for centuries. At the thought of never seeing her face again or holding her in his arms.

And he swore right there that he would never return to that life.

“I won’t let you go,” he whispered.

She fell into his arms again, and his own tears streaked his cheeks as he rocked her in that cold cell, with no more than the purple dusk coming in from outside.

Ana calmed down after a while, but Sam didn’t let her go. He held her closer, listening to her tears stop, stroking her hair and kissing her head. He wouldn’t let her go. He wanted her to know he was there. That he would hear her, he wouldalwayshear her.

“Why you?” Sam asked once it seemed her tears had stopped. “What made your father think you were the one to do all this? Why not someone else?”

Ana shifted in his arms. “I was an only child,” she began. “My father worked in the mines after the fire legions took over northwest Firemoor. He used to come home with burns all over his body from their whips. We were poor. Starving.” Her lashes lifted up to his, their eyes meeting, and she leaned her head against the wall instead of his chest. “I will not speak badly of him because he wished me a better life. He wanted more for our community and for me… He wanted revenge for all those that had been oppressed for years.”

She swallowed and held a breath, and Sam let her take the time she needed to get it all out.

“I cradled that vengeance,” she continued. “I stirred it and I held it. I learned everything I could from the witches and the demons, the soldiers that turned on their kings… And I climbed my way through their ranks, one kill at a time. Until the princes fell at my feet and the kings begged me to choose them in the tunnels. In secret, and in plain sight.”

“What was the end game?” Sam asked. “What was to be after you’d taken me?”

Her eyes moved to his. “Power over life itself,” she whispered.

Sam didn’t blink away from her. “Go on,” he found himself saying.

“With you…” she began, almost hesitantly. “With you, I could keep them all suffering endlessly. They would feel how we felt all those years—the people they enslaved, whipped, and marked. You…Death… you could hold them all at their edges and make them beg as we did. A never-ending cycle of gasping breaths and agony. Fearful of their next moments and pleading for it to end.”

She stared at him a moment, and Sam let the words sink in.