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All Margot knew and may ever know again was dirt. Thick, dark, suffocating. Sheets of rock crashed through the center of the temple—hundreds, if not thousands, of years’ worth of history sliding with it. A wall of sediment separated Margot and Van from the staircase back to the surface. They’d only barely made it far enough away to avoid getting crushed, and Van’s arms folded around Margot’s shoulders and head, shielding her.

She slithered back, just enough for his face to come into focus. Van batted his eyes open, bits of dust and debris clinging to his lashes. One, two breaths. They lay nose to nose, chest to chest. Together.

“It’s okay,” she whispered. “We’re okay.”

Van sat up so quickly that he banged his skull against the underside of the marble altar. He didn’t even bother to rub the sore spot. “No, we’re not. Astrid’s gone.”

His voice took that robotic timbre it always did when he was stressed—even-keeled but clipped. Margot wanted to smooth out the tense fold between his brows.

“Astrid’s gone,” Margot repeated. “And we’re okay.”

Van hauled himself fully upright just so that he could start to pace in front of the altar. His eyes lingered on its smooth surface, like he could still see the shards on it. “She took them.”

The corner of Margot’s mouth lifted. “Did she?”

Van pressed the heels of his palms against his forehead. “Yes. You saw her. She took the shards and ran, and now we’re here with—”

“With the shards?” Margot unzipped her backpack and reached down to the bottom. She cradled five black-and-gold fragments in her hands. The Vase of Venus Aurelia was all right here.

The sight was enough to stop Van cold. “What did you do?”

A smile flared across her face, impossible to snuff out. “What any good partner would. I made her look somewhere else.”

The guardians had helped, whether they knew it or not. Slicing Astrid’s bag, letting the shards scatter across the floor. Astrid hadn’t even noticed that the clay fragments she picked up were the cracked pieces of a coffee mug while the real shards had been stuffed way down at the bottom of Margot’s one-strap backpack. Too preoccupied with gloating as she offered them up to Venus that she hadn’t paid any attention to the little white letters of Hotel Villa Minerva’s logo on the backs of the shards.

It was exhilarating, the way Van looked at her. Margot’s stomach bottomed out—not in a bad way.

Van swept Margot into his arms. Her feet lifted off the ground as he twirled her. She looped her arms around his shoulders, burying her face in the hollow of his neck.

Murmuring into her curls, he said, “There is no one like you, Margot Rhodes.”

She laughed, weightless. When she finally found her footing again, she felt like a can of shaken-up soda. Her heart was trying to burst out of her chest. A sheen of silver lined her eyes, blurring Van’s edges. “So, now we just have to find a way out.”

Her hand trailed down Van’s arm until it latched around his fingers and squeezed. He didn’t reciprocate. His eyes focused on something over her head.

Margot lifted onto her toes, forcing herself into his line of sight. “What is it?”

“There is only one way left.” When he finally dragged his gaze to meet hers, it had hardened.

The set of his jaw. The firmness of his gaze. Whatever it was, she wasn’t going to like it.

“When I put the shards on the altar, there was a door that opened, I remember. Presumably to the treasure room. I never got to see inside, but when they built this temple, they would’ve made sure there was a second exit.” His palm was warm against her cheek, but it didn’t change the cold precision of his tone. That voice was a surgical knife cleaving them apart.

Margot shook her head. “But we can’t open that door without remaking the Vase.”

Van’s lips thinned, smiling although it was hardly the time. “I know.”

“I can’t,” she said. “I won’t.”

Van looped his arms back around her shoulders, pressing her against her chest. Quiet enough she thought maybe she’d imagined it, she heard him say, “You get the Vase, and I get the treasure, remember?”

“If we do this, you won’t get the treasure.” Margot pulled back—how was she being the rational one right now?

He brushed a loose curl behind her ear. It did little to quell the dread weighing down her bones, an ache that permeated all the way down to the marrow. “But you will, and what’s that thing Dr. Hunt is always harping on? The buddy system. A win for you is a win for me.”

Margot’s voice cracked with emotion. “You’re the one who said there’s always another way. There has to be something else we could do.”

Every muscle in his body coiled tight. His shoulders rose, fell. He looked her square in the eye, spine straightening. “Not this time.”

“But I—”

The ceiling shuddered, threatening to send more soil cascading down.

“Margot, you can’t stay here. It isn’t safe,” he said. His words slowed with intention. A dam holding back the river. “All you have to do is put the shards on the pedestal. When the door opens, look for a staircase. Put your name on the discovery. You did it. You earned it.”

“What about you?” she asked. “It’s yours as much as mine.”

He scanned her face. Cataloging, remembering. But he didn’t waver. “I was never meant to leave this temple. You were my one last adventure. Go. Before it’s too late.”

Van backed himself into the circle of wilted myrtle blossoms, but determination staked Margot to the ground. Her arm stretched, holding onto his hand as long as possible. Until, finally, their fingertips fell.

No. No.

Margot’s heart shattered into five jagged pieces she’d bury at the bottom of her ribs like the Vase itself. She knew, even if she didn’t want to believe it, that Van was right, and what it meant for him to be.

The curse had a price that demanded to be paid.

One by one, she set the shards on the altar until the Latin inscription stared back, taunting her. Aureus, amor aeternus et cor lapideum. Everything she thought she wanted. Useless to her now.

Behind her, Van said, “You never needed the Vase, you know. Anyone would be a fool not to love you.”

A sob rattled through Margot, but he gave a reassuring nod. Hands shaking, she added the last shard to the altar.

With one last desperate breath, he said, “I’m so in love with you, Margot Rhodes.”

She didn’t get the chance to say it back.

On the altar, the shards lifted on invisible hands. Suspended midair, the Vase sewed itself back together with a golden thread of light. When their jagged edges met, a hot, bright light flashed through the temple, and Margot winced, covering her eyes.

When she opened them, Van was still standing there, the remnants of a smile carved onto his lips. But he was completely still. White marble dripped down his jaw, his neck, his shoulders. It clawed down his arms, hungry. Ivory stone encased him before she could reach him.

Her hand rested against his blanched cheek. All the warmth had seeped out of him. Her lips pressed to the tilt of his marble grin, leaving a red stain behind. Nothing like how her first kiss was supposed to be.

“I love you, too,” Margot wept. “Isn’t that enough?”

In the quiet that followed, floodwaters poured through her, furious and unyielding. Strong enough to carve out canyons. A mudslide she wouldn’t withstand.

Please, please, her heart begged, heavy in her ribs. Come back to me.

It did nothing. Van was gone.

How could the goddess of love do this to her?

“Are you happy now?” she asked the empty temple, hoarse. Hopefully her voice lifted straight to Olympus. She wanted Venus to hear her. “Because I totally don’t get it. I did everything you asked. Everything!”

Margot might not have received the Pliny Junior Scholastic Award of Linguistic Achievement in Latin, but she understood the inscription. Some part of her knew the Vase would never have granted her Venus’s mystical power. The only way to be revered and adored forever was to be carved by a sculptor’s hand. Frozen in marble to be admired from afar—distant and lifeless. A blank canvas for everyone to paint upon, forcing yourself to become what they wanted to see.

But to be loved—to let yourself be known, every soft, scared part of you? It couldn’t be defined by a cinematic moment or a picturesque snapshot—it required flesh and blood, scars and blemishes. A once-broken nose and an unbalanced dimple. A broken heart, healed again.

The Vase, sparkling and whole, floated back down to the altar. As if that could replace the boy she’d turned her back on to rebuild it. On the far side of the temple, an archway lifted. Light shone from within, reflecting streaks of gold across the temple walls. Treasure. Margot barely registered it. The sight twisted a blade of guilt in her stomach.

“Take your treasure! I don’t want it,” she screamed.

Margot was hardly a girl anymore. She was a storm, forty-seven different emotions all hurtling into each other. They writhed around Margot’s torso with hurricane-force winds. Her ears burned, her blood boiling. A cry ripped up her throat.

She didn’t think, just moved. The Vase was in her hands, the clay now cooled. Distantly, Margot heard the treasure room door slam shut beneath the howl of heartbreak in her ears. Who cared? The amphora hummed with enclosed magic—magic that was supposed to fix things for Margot, not make them worse.

With a single downward pike, she shattered the Vase against the stone floors.