“She was trapped in a basement with you! You were the only other human here!” The words were cruel, but I couldn’t stop them. “Of course she loved you, if you protected her from them!”

He slapped me, but his heart wasn’t in it, and I barely felt the blow. “Don’t say these things to me! Do you think I haven’t thought them myself? She loved me. She loved me and I—”

His face crumpled and tears spilled over his eyelids. “She loved me,” he repeated, grasping my shoulders, shoving me against the cinder blocks over and over.

I could have reacted with anger. I could have knocked him out and dragged him back to the van. There was still the threat of the Fangs, and the even greater threat that a passerby might notice the supposedly burned-down church had been reassembled.

Despite all this, I put my arms around him and pulled his body to mine, murmuring words of apology and comfort and true remorse. I couldn’t look at the girl on the bed. She deserved better than what she’d gotten if she’d managed to crack Cyrus’s cold facade.

The Fangs might have pulled him out of the afterlife, but she had made him human. It would take a lot more than few days in captivity and a bad case of Stockholm Syndrome to manage that.

I’d wanted to treat him as a thing, an ingredient in my recipe for saving Nathan. My plan had been to swoop in and snatch him up, then drive back to Grand Rapids without a care in my heart. If I had known then how naive and insensitive that plan was, an innocent girl’s life could have been spared.

Cyrus wept so long, he ran out of tears, but the violent sobs that racked his body wouldn’t subside. With my hands on his shoulders, I gently pushed him back. “Calm down. You’ll make yourself sick.”

“Calm down?” He glared at me through reddened eyes. “How can you tell me to calm down? She’s dead!”

Okay, bad tactic. “I know she’s dead, and it hurts you. But you’re not doing her any favors if you stay here and get yourself killed.”

He nodded, though I suspect he only forced himself to appear reasonable because he thought I didn’t care or understand. “You’re right.” He rose and went to the bed. “We’re not leaving her like this, though.”

“Do you want to bury her?” It sounded extremely crass and earthy, but I didn’t mean it that way.