“I need you.”

Maybe he did. But Trollus needed him more. “You have to keep fighting. You cannot let him win.”

“He already has.”

His hands shook where they gripped me, and I thought of Guerre, the game of strategy that everyone around me played so masterfully, and in which I’d always been a pawn. But I’d be a pawn no more. “Only the battle,” I whispered, turning my head to look in Tristan’s direction. “The war is yet to come.”

My vision was filling with blackness, the world falling away, and I wasn’t ready. Wasn’t ready for it to be over. Wasn’t ready to be parted from him. “I’m afraid.”

“Don’t be afraid,” he said, kissing me gently on the lips. And though I could still feel him, still hear him, the thread binding us together was fraying. Diminishing. “Pénélope, if there’s a place we go in death, I’ll follow you there.” He sounded so distant. So far away. “I’ll find you.”

Not yet. Not yet.

“Pénélope, please.”

“I love you.” I needed him to know that, even as I was falling. Even as the world was fading. I needed that to be my legacy, the one thing he remembered above all else. “I love you. I love you. I

Epilogue

Tristan

Marc screamed.

In my life, I’d seen men injured. Tortured. Killed.

This was something different.

This was something worse.

Grief, in its purest form. The sort that carved into a soul, ruthlessly destroying everything good: love, hope, passion, devotion. Leaving behind only the blackest of emotions to drag one down and down until the slice of a knife, the twist of a neck, or a bullet in the skull seemed like a blessed relief. A mercy.

I hadn’t known there could be grief like that.

For all my preparation, it froze me in place in the corner where I lurked.

He screamed again, her name this time. Dragged her up into his arms. Pénélope’s head lolled back, silver eyes dull and sightless. Even in death, she was lovely. But lovely like an object. A thing. It was an echo of the beauty she’d once possessed, because what had made her her was gone. And even though I had not loved her – had, perhaps, even hated her in the end – the absence of that radiance hurt.

Marc sobbed into her hair, the sound ragged. His lips were pressed against her ear, and though I couldn’t hear what he said, the intention in them would have been clear even without his hand reaching for the knife concealed in his boot.

I moved.

My magic lashed around him, binding his limbs, prying his fingers from Pénélope, the sound of bones snapping and popping out of joint making my stomach twist. Marc didn’t even feel the pain, shrieking only in anguish as Pénélope’s body fell to the floor.

“Stop,” I said. “Marc, you need to stop this.”

His face twisted toward me, eyes bloody from capillaries bursting and reforming, his fractured features full of manic hate. “Let me go.”