Page 158 of Evermore

I met his gaze, letting him see the certainty in mine. “I’m sure. This is my choice, Thorne. Not destiny, not prophecy, not gods playing games with my life. Mine.”

He held my gaze for a long moment, searching for something in my eyes. Whatever he found there must have satisfied him, because he nodded, but I didn’t miss the swallow. The set of his jaw. The evisceration of his heart. “Then I will take the memories of anyone that ever believed we were married.” He forced in a breath. “I will help you now and always.”

In that moment, I witnessed the breaking of a god.

It wasn’t loud or violent, no power surged, no shadows rose, no ground trembled beneath us. It was quiet, devastating in its silence. A supernova collapsing in on itself, leaving only dust where a star had once burned. His eyes, those ancient, beautiful eyes that had watched civilizations rise and fall, that had witnessed the birth and death of entire worlds, dimmed. Not all at once, but like a candle slowly drowning in its own wax, the flame guttering, fighting to stay alive even as it died.

For a heartbeat, he let the mask slip. Let me see the full measure of what my choice was costing him. A thousand lives. A thousand times we’d found love, only to watch it end in blood and pain. A thousand lives he’d found me, won me, lost me. And now, in this one, the one he’d claimed mattered most, he would stand aside and watch me marry another. Would help make it happen with his own hands.

His hand trembled almost imperceptibly where it rested on my shoulder, the only outward sign of the cataclysm happening within him. But through that small point of contact, I felt everything, grief so profound it had no bottom, love so vast it had no horizon, and beneath it all, a terrible, beautiful acceptance.

The cost of letting go.

I wanted to say something, anything, to ease the necessary pain. But what words could possibly bridge this chasm? What comfort could I offer when I was the source of his agony? When I was bathing in it myself and couldn’t show an ounce of that.

Levanya appeared beside him, staring into his face as she whispered,It is your nature to break his heart. As it is his to let you.

Before I could respond, Thorne straightened, the mask sliding back into place with such smooth precision I might haveimagined its absence. But I knew what I’d seen. Knew what he’d allowed me to see.

“We should go,” he said, his voice steady, his hand falling away from my shoulder. The absence of his touch left me cold in a way that had nothing to do with the night air. “Dawn will break soon, and we have to be quick.”

As we made our way through the devastated streets, I couldn’t stop myself from glancing back at him. He walked a few paces behind us, close enough to help if needed, far enough to give us space. His face was composed, serene even, revealed in brief flashes as we passed beneath streetlamps.

But once, when he thought I wasn’t looking, I caught a glimpse of him in shadow. His eyes closed, his head bowed, one hand pressed against his chest as if trying to hold together something that was already shattered beyond repair.

In that moment, I understood with terrible clarity what true sacrifice looked like. Not the grand gestures of legends, not the battlefield deaths of heroes, but this, a man who had loved me across lifetimes, choosing to let me go. Choosing my happiness, my freedom, my choice over his own heart’s deepest desire.

I turned away, unable to bear witness to such naked grief when my own eyes burned with unshed tears. Levanya’s voice echoed in my mind, softer now, almost gentle.This, too, is love. The kind that sets free what it most wishes to keep.

Ahead of me now, Archer limped onward, seemingly unaware of the silent breaking happening behind him. Unaware that with every step we took toward our future together, we were walking away from a love story that had spanned millennia.

I swallowed hard against the knot in my throat and kept moving forward, carrying the weight of what I’d seen, a god’s heart crumbling to dust. Some wounds never truly heal. They just become part of who we are, scars we carry beneath our skin where no one else can see them.

49

Thorne

Three weeks.

I had lived through the birth of gods, the rise and fall of empires, watched stars burn out and be reborn. Yet these three weeks stretched longer than centuries, each passing day an exquisite form of fucking torture as I watched the castle transform around me. White silk rippled through hallways like ghosts of futures I’d never have. Summer tulips appeared in every corner, their presence a deliberate knife; they were apparently her favorite. The steady tap of Minerva’s cane as she followed Paesha and Quill from room to room felt like a heartbeat counting down to my execution. Minnie still hadn’t forgiven me, but she’d stepped in to love where I couldn’t. Because one day, the mortals would die, and we would be left with only each other again. As we always were.

I haunted the castle’s shadows, a guardian who could no longer claim what he protected. Present but not. Breathing but not living. Existing in that hollow space between what was and what could never be.

Now, sitting in the last pew of the cathedral, I traced my fingers over the aged wood, seeking something solid to anchor me to reality. Each candle the servants lit was another secondcloser to the end. To letting her go. To giving her to the better man.

“You don’t have to stay,” Tuck murmured beside me.

I tried to argue, but the words died in my throat. How could I explain that I had to be here? That I needed to witness this so thoroughly, so completely, that even my immortal heart would finally accept it was over? That I needed the pain as much as I needed her.

The sacred circle at the altar gleamed with silver markings of binding and protection, symbols I had seen a thousand times, in a thousand ceremonies, but never like this. Never from the wrong side of forever. Twin crowns rested on midnight velvet, their stones gifted from this land. The golden thread that would physically tie their hands together lay coiled like a serpent, waiting.

When Archer took his place at the altar, something in my chest contracted painfully. Not because I hated him. How could I, when he loved her so purely, so selflessly? But because his presence meant she was coming. My Ever. My heart. My destruction.

The first bell tolled, deep and resonant, each echo another crack in my carefully maintained composure. The doors swung open, and the world stopped turning.

She appeared like starlight breaking through storm clouds, like the first breath after drowning, like everything I had ever loved and lost wrapped in a gown the color of moonlight on snow. Not pure white, she had never been that, but something shifting and ethereal, like the space between darkness and dawn. Winter roses crowned her chestnut hair, and her Remnants swirled around her feet like living shadows, more controlled now but still wild. Still hers.

Still everything.