She shook her head. Seemed that was about all she did lately. “So much could go wrong.”

“I know it’s risky,” he said. “But it’s a chance we have to take.”

“I’ve had time and plenty to think on what it’ll mean to be ‘dead.’ This was tossed at you like hail in a storm. You’ll suffer for it.”

He pressed a kiss to her cheek. “Once we get on the other side of this, it will be worth it.”

“I hope so.” But as time passed and he weren’t able to do his doctoring or watch over his safe houses and continue his rescues, “the other side of this” might start to feel like a burden. She might start to feel like a burden.

“I know that expression, Gemma,” he whispered. “And I know what you’re worrying about. I won’t resent or regret this. Being together is what I want, not what I’m being forced to accept.”

“You’d not need to accept it if not for—” She tried so hard not to think about the reasons he’d married her three and a half years earlier. No matter what he might feel now, there was no escaping the fact that he had been forced into connecting himself with her.

“We can hold a wake for the two of you at your house,” Fletcher said. “There’ll be mourners, obviously, but we cannot risk any of them knowing that you’re alive if they don’t absolutely have to know. Secrets don’t keep well when held by too many people.”

Gemma nodded. “People being seen grieving over the two of us in open caskets will show my uncles and the Mastiff that we really are dead.”

“The open caskets do give us spot of trouble,” Stone said. “They have to be open so you’ll be seen in them. But no one’ll believe you’re dead if they can see you breathing. Neither of you can hold your breath through the entire wake.”

Gemma lowered her brow. She was so tired, so overwhelmed. “The best we can do is breathe as shallow as possible.”

“Even shallow breaths raise the rib cage,” Baz said. Hearing his uncertainty chipped away at hers.

“Could we hide you with flowers?” Fletcher asked. “Place blooms all around you two? No one’d see your chests move.”

“The flowers would move,” Stone said.

Gemma held her hands up in a gesture of helplessness. “I haven’t the first idea how to prevent a person from breathing for an hour or two if that person’s meant to still be alive at the end.”

“Could we build something in the casket itself?” Baz asked. “Like the false bottom in the hearse, we would actually be lying underneath a wood plank or whatever it might be. Then we set the flowers on top of that. Then they would hold still, and we could still breathe.”