He really loved her.

The truth of that came crashing around me, landing hard enough to break my own heart.

Why hadn’t it dawned on me before this moment—when it was already too late—that he wouldn’t have asked me to do this if that had not been completely and utterly true?

The light Rastin had summoned had now begun to shrink. The portal was closing. My chance—his chance—was fading.

Erik’s heart would collapse when the portal did. I had no doubt of it. Then his soul would shatter. Now that it was linked with Stephanie’s, what would that mean for her?

I shook my head and locked eyes again with Erik.

Tightening my hand around the dagger, I started forward. Then I ran right at him.

He uncurled his skeleton’s hand from around the rose, his arm falling away as I raised the blade.

And plunged it home. Into the target that had been too easy to impale: the rose.

As I used both hands to twist the knife, destroying the flower completely, several things happened at once.

The light inside those two pits for eyes went out. The portal holding him up closed with the sound of a snapping live wire. And, as the now lifeless corpse fell, dagger and all, to the petal-strewn floor, someone screamed.

EIGHTY-TWO

Stephanie

I gripped my chest as my eyes took in the scene before me. As if I had been the one stabbed.

Tears rushed down my cheeks, seeming to bring the silence with them.

Both Rastin and Lucas stared at me, but I didn’t see them. I couldn’t.

I only saw him. Lying crumpled at Lucas’s feet. Dead, but now also gone.

My breath abandoned me as my feet hurried to the form that, somehow, during the last moments, had been rendered a thing, lifeless and inanimate.

Someone said my name. Lucas.

I couldn’t hear him, though. I could only see. This thing he had done.

I fell to my knees beside my ghost. My hands then went to his chest but stopped short of the broken cage, which, in addition to the dagger, still held the remnants of the heart I’d given him.

“Oh.” The noise escaped my lips.

And instead of touching him, I drew my hand up to stifle the sob that burst forth.

Pain came with the sight of his face. His skull. His closed eyes.

He has lights for eyes.

Charlie’s words from that night swam from the black mire my mind had become while I watched and waited for those eyes to open and the lights to return.

“No,” I murmured when they didn’t. “No,” I whispered again as I took his face in my hands.

Bending over him, I pressed my lips to his forehead. “I mean yes.”

I shut my eyes, tears tumbling onto the face that I had realized too late I loved more than any other. “Yes, damn you.”

But now he wasn’t able to hear my answer. The one I should have given him before but had not been brave enough.