“Do you want me to make you forget him?” he asked. “You’ll feel better.”

She blinked at him. “You can do that?” she whispered.

“I can. You won’t remember watching him die.”

“Will I remember … anything?”

Raphael frowned. “What do you want to remember?”

“He said he loved me.” Her eyes filled with tears again. “Tonight. He told me he loved me.”

I closed my eyes.

“If you like,” said Raphael, “I can make you think he’s left here, that he’s merely moved away. Would that be better?”

“Anything would be better than seeing him die over and over again. Anything would be better than that.”

I stepped back into the yard, my neck throbbing and aching, the numbness buzzing down my arm and up the side of my face, anger throbbing in my heart. Raphael wasn’t doing this for Tegan. He’d refused to take away my hurt, my heartbreak. And he’d never healed a human, never stepped in to save an innocent. He’d always let things run their course—unless they interfered with our ability to complete our mission. So now he was pretending to be compassionate, but only because Tegan could tell people about Juri, about Jim’s murder, about our involvement in all of it. Raphael was doing his job—covering for the Guard so that we could get on with business, just like always.

Tegan nodded, blindly accepting this offer of forgetting because she was too destroyed by grief and terror to question it. Her new reality would be that Jim took off without saying good-bye. Instead of sorrow, she’d have outrage. Instead of terror, she’d have bitterness. And I had to wonder—if I had the choice, would I want to believe Malachi had chosen to leave? Or would I want to know what had actually happened to him?

The noise inside my brain was endless and overpowering as I remembered him in his final moments, head thrown back, fighting a frenzied losing battle. It sent me to my knees, doubled over and nerveless. From my toes to my legs to my gut to my chest to my head, there was nothing but a rupturing wail, nothing but the pain of what I’d lost, and how thoroughly I’d lost it. I would never recover from this, even if I did live through it. Which I didn’t want. Not at all. I didn’t want to live through it.

I rose to my feet. I shouldered my way past Raphael as he carried Tegan to the Guard house. I trudged up to Henry, knowing I was about to fail him completely. But when Henry’s dust-colored eyes met mine, all I saw was understanding.

“I got to know Malachi pretty well,” he said. “He never told me in so many words, but I could tell how he felt about you.”