I know what you are thinking. His voice in her mind was soft. His skin under her hands was so warm. She knew it was fever, but she told herself it was not. She lifted her face and looked into his, the cruel runes shutting his beloved eyes forever, the unchanged planes of his countenance. I think of it too. What if it ended? What if it were possible for us? A future? What would we do?

“I would seize that future,” she said. “I would go with you anywhere. Even if the world was burning, if the Silent Brothers hunted us to the ends of the earth, I would be happy, if I was with you.”

She could not quite hear him in her head, but she could feel him: the edge of a jumble of emotions, his longing now as desperate as it had been when they had fallen together onto the carpet of the music room, the night she had begged him to marry her as soon as possible.

He caught her in his arms. He was a Silent Brother, a Gregori, a Watcher, barely human. And yet he felt human enough—his lean chest hot against her skin as she tilted her face up. His lips met hers, soft and so sweet it made her ache. It had been so many, many years, but this was still the same.

Almost the same. I am not what I was.

Almost the fire of lost nights, the sound of his passionate music in her ears. She put her arms around his slim shoulders and clung to him fiercely. She could love enough for both of them. Any part of Jem was better than all of any other man alive.

His musician’s hands drew over her face, over her hair, over her shoulders, as though he was seizing a last chance to memorize what he could never touch again. Even as she kissed him and insisted desperately to herself that it was possible, she knew it was not.

Tessa, he said. Even when I cannot see, you are so beautiful.

Then he grasped her shoulders in his beautiful hands and gently put her away from him.

I am sorry, my darling, he told her. That was not fair of me, or well done. When I am with you, I want to forget what I am, but I cannot change it. A Silent Brother can have no wife, no love.