“Why not?” I didn’t even recognize the sound of my own voice. “Were you so ready to be Frankie’s⁠—”

“Because all I could think about was you,” he whispered.

I gasped.

He took a deep breath, then let it out, but it sounded ragged. “Because while I was supposed to be excited and feeling something for my soulmate, all I felt was suffocating pain that it wasn’t you.”

I squeezed my eyes shut and shook my head. My stomach turned, so I wrapped my arms around my waist. “We already knew it wasn’t me.”

“Apparently my heart was in denial,” he said softly.

I cried and leaned back against my bedroom door.

But Cooper didn’t stop there. “And when Everest ripped the fake mark off my body, all I felt was relief and hope. Dangerous, lethal hope that somehow it could still somehow be you⁠—”

“Stop.” My legs trembled and threatened to give out. I swallowed through a hot lump in my throat. “Just stop saying this⁠—”

“And when I came out of that damned castle, despite the war raging in front of me, I looked right to you as if it was somehow going to give me what I wanted. And when it didn’t happen, I felt as ripped raw as the day I held your dead body on that beach.”

“Why are you telling me this?” I screamed, my voice burning a path up my throat.

Something snapped inside of him, some kind of barrier he’d kept up just vanished. “Because I love you.”

I choked on the gasp I made. My body turned ice-cold.

He didn’t stand or raise his voice. He just stared at me like I was his whole world and spoke softly. “I’m in love with you, Savannah Grace, and every single moment I look at you and don’t see the glyph on your body marking you as mine makes me wish I’d walked through that tunnel into the light so I wouldn’t have to feel like this anymore.”

That did it. He’d destroyed what was left of my heart right then and there. I buried my face in my hands and sobbed, whispering, “Stop, stop, stop.”

“Why? Why not tell you how I feel? Why not tell you this is killing me as much as it’s killing you?”

I didn’t look at him. I couldn’t. “Because there’s nothing we can do about it. It doesn’t matter if I love you, you’re not mine to keep.”

“You can be mine for now,” he whispered.

I jumped and dropped my hands to look at him. “What did you say?”

“I’m saying be mine now while you can.”

Despite these words piercing new holes in my heart, I heard myself let out a deranged sounding laugh. “And sign my heart up for slaughter when your soulmate shows up for real?”