In the center of the bric-a-brac and scattered papers there still dwelled the vase of roses.

Keeping my gaze on the flowers, my hand went to the cravat lacing my throat, pulling it free. Next, I undid the buttons of Valor’s waistcoat.

Distress sneaking over me, calling me to stop as I had last time, I seized one of the blooms before I could convince myself to delay this dark surgery further. I snapped its head from its stem, prepared to do what I should have done. What the medium had instructed me to do. But then the ominous click of the basement door followed by the slow creak of its opening halted me.

“Shall we ever forget it?” asked a horrible voice.

I spun to find him framed in the cellar doorway, a blood-red figure backed by the blackness of our basement.

“Her voice, you mean?” I asked. Because, with the invisible barrier between houses separating us, it was safe to converse with him.

“Her arms,” Wrath corrected. “Locked around us that way. Like we were more to her than what we are.”

“Than what we ever could be,” I said, taking my turn to correct him.

“Yes,” he agreed, the calmness in his answer startling me.

“You want her that badly,” I whispered. “Enough to take her by force? To keep her with you against her will?”

“I tried to tell you.”

“You tried to trick me.”

For once, his skeleton’s face seemed to echo as much sorrow as it did rage. “So make me go away,” he said. “Make us all go away. If you can.”

“And here I’d thought you’d come to dissuade me,” I remarked bitterly.

“I think we agree she must return,” replied Wrath. “Bereft of Hope, you now hold in your hand your final defense. Hers. So I know what you will do. Unlike you, I do not expect Valor to behave any other way than how he must. As is true of the rest of us, you cannot help yourself.”

Could it be he was being genuine? Or was he merely trying to enmesh me in some new plot? Either way, it didn’t matter. Wrath was right. There were no other options left to me.

Without another word, I seated myself in one of the Armands’ chairs. Keeping the rose clasped loosely in one gloved hand so as not to damage it, I then pried open with the other the final barrier of Valor’s white dress shirt.

The slit made by the Egyptian priest in my lower left side still existed and so would serve as my avenue. And with no muscle or sinew, no organs or collagen to contend with, I found the contortion needed to properly place the rose within the center left of my rib cage easy enough to execute.

The moment I released my hold on the rose was the moment that flower became heart.

With a crackle of straining bone, I withdrew my arm and hand.

Though I did not have to look to know Wrath had vanished, I turned my head to peer at his doorway anyway.