“You speak as though you have not already lost,” he replied, the calmness in that horrible voice slicing deeper the pain that resonated all the louder within me.

Stephanie. My Stephanie.

“Ours,” hissed the figure of Wrath.

“No.” My hand returned to clench the inexplicable wound in my chest, stoppering the blood, the presence of which should not have been possible.

“I shall not cross,” I wheezed, taking a step back, away from the door and from him. “And . . . even you cannot take . . . what does not lie within your reach.”

“I can only agree,” he said before ever so slightly tilting his head at me. “But when, dear Erik, have any of us, least of all me, ever truly existed outside of you?”

With these words, Wrath parted the cloak that had heretofore swathed his figure, revealing a pit in the center of his own chest. But the hole was not hollow so much as it was a transparent nothingness through which the wall behind him could be viewed.

And that nothingness. It grew.

“W-wh—” I murmured, unable to comprehend what it was I was witnessing. One of my masks dissolving from the center out?

That’s when the horror of the correlation occurred to me.

With terror I glanced down at myself, at the blood that, even as it covered me, transformed me, vanquishing Valor’s garments in favor of heavier vestments of the deepest and most devouring of crimsons.

“You . . . cannot,” I said as I moved into the doorframe and then through it, toward the figure whose form peeled back on itself from the center, dissolving even as the same crimson garbs began to envelop me. “Please. No.”

Wrath spread his arms, several of his ringed fingers gone already.

“Take heart, Valor,” he said mockingly, his mask disintegrating now, too. “If you held any power to stop this, do you think I would just stand here?”

Panic gripped me. I grasped for my mask, prepared to rip it free.

But . . . then, with gloved and ring-lined fingers pressed to the mask’s altered outline, I halted.

Because was I not now free? As free as I might ever be? Unfettered and at liberty to now take what I desired? And to destroy, in good time, what I loathed.

Was there anything I wanted more than Stephanie?

Contrarily, was there anything I hated more than the boy?

FIFTY-ONE

Stephanie

“Wes,” repeated Lucas as he took a step back from me. “After the dance . . . he told me he was going to make a move if I didn’t. Do you like him?”

I folded my arms, trying to get a grip on his thinking. Two seconds ago, I’d been showing him just how much I liked him, and now here he was asking about Wes?

“You asked me on a date,” I took the liberty of reminding him.

“Y-yeah, I know.”