Of course she will come back, you idiot.

And when she does, all you will want—all you might ever long for now until forever—will be to hear, to feel, those liquescent notes filling the void you have become. That angel’s voice that allowed you to taste for the first time the heaven you shall never know.

I spun to face the room that, like all of the house—both versions—served as just another chamber of my sprawling tomb.

But the accumulated clutter from all the lives the home had known could not barricade me—or insulate her, for that matter—from what would now hurry to consume us both.

Now that I knew what she was to me . . . Now that I understood what I had allowed to happen . . .

Wrath.

Was he waiting for me on the other side even now?

If he were to conquer me, would he not—would we not—then take the girl?

There would be no reasoning with myself. For, with the donning of that mask, all reason would dissolve—vanish as the day does into night.

Oh, Stephanie. Before this hour, before this day, your name had been but a collection of syllables attached to a face I had believed—perhaps in folly—that I could still have eventually forgotten. Now . . . now it was a song. One I wanted to whisper if for no other reason than its pronunciation counted as a music I could make.

I cringed beneath the mask and, with the steps of a man condemned, carried myself to the tarnished version of the chaise that sat in the parlor. Collapsing onto the seat, the one Wrath had occupied nights ago on my side of the house, I scoured my mind for a solution to this cruel twist.

But, with the first sliver of bliss I had tasted in nearly one hundred years fading, hatred, deep and dark as a mire, began to well up within my emptiness to blot out all equanimity.

The roses she had brought with her. Had the boy given them to her?

But then, who else?

I did not despise him for coming here. Nor for telling Stephanie the things he had about me. No. I hated him because he had dared to occupy a space I could never hope to. The one next to Stephanie.

I hated him almost equally for being all the things I had once been.

Handsome. Strapping. Charming. Alive.

These emotions, Envy and Spite, would both converge upon me if I could not wrest them from my consciousness.

Perhaps Madness and not Wrath would have me then.

And there would be no telling how that would end.

Stephanie. What would happen when she returned to her house?

What would happen to either of us, both of us—all of us—when I made the inevitable return to mine?

TWENTY-THREE

Stephanie

I’d texted Lucas late last night. Which was probably why he’d never texted back.