With her lips an inch away from Lisa’s ear, Bennett was murmuring promises, even though she knew her assurances were false. There would be no tomorrow. There would be no more dinners or bantering or art shows, and as Bennett spoke the lies, she struggled to get the words out between her sobs.

Ruby hung her head, only to raise it a second later. The hum of the world had come back to her, and with it, she could now hear the buzz of the fluorescent lamps in the kitchen, the low whirr of the heat coming from the vents, and the sound of hearts beating…the sound of three hearts beating.

“She’s alive.” Ruby rushed over, grimacing as she gently extracted the sword. Setting it aside, she fell to her knees on the other side of Lisa’s body. “Bennett, she’s alive. I can hear her heart beating. We can save her.”

Bennett shook her head. “No. No…it’s too late for that.”

“It is not too late,” Ruby snapped. “We can—”

“Goddammit, look at her,” Bennett yelled back. “They fucking gutted her, Ruby, and everything’s broken. They broke fucking everything.”

Ruby had been trying her best not to pay attention to Lisa’s gruesome injuries, but they had splayed her open like a science class frog. The right side of her face was now a crater, and her limbs were twisted and shattered.

“But we have to try, Bennett. We have to try.”

Before Bennett ran into Lisa’s apartment, she believed she had eight more years to change Lisa’s mind. All guardians were given a choice. Finn hadn’t yet to make his, but Gunnar had chosen his father’s path, and upon reaching the age of fifty, he and Bridget could live out the rest of their lives on a healthy retirement package. Lisa had made her choice as well. At forty, Lisa would become a vampire, but Napoleon’s revenge had pushed up that timeline, and as hard as Bennett tried to convince herself to sink her teeth into Lisa, she couldn’t. She just couldn’t. She wanted to remember Lisa the way she was, not the way she’d become when this disease turned her into yet another shrew, another murderer, another unrecognizable bitch whose family would end up hating her or, worse yet…end up dead.

Bennett turned stoic, her expression as unemotional as her voice. “No, we don’t. We can just let her go…let her die as she lived. Mortal and positively the most perfect person I’ve ever known.”

“Oh, Jesus Christ, you need to put all that other shit behind you, Bennett,” Ruby shouted. “You can’t predict the fucking future, and you can’t fucking penalize Lisa because you’re fucking scared. She’s going to die unless you do something, and you love her, Bennett. You fucking love her!”