"Stay with me."
The moment I heard those words—whispery, desperate, broken with feeling—I smiled.
It was the kind of smile that doesn't come from pleasure, but necessity. One borne of finality. For the space of a single beat, I believed I was going to die—I was finally going to catch up on her. Not the woman lying at my feet right now, but the memory of the girl she once had been. The one I cherished. The one that caused me to resort to magic in the first place.
There was something nearly poetic in the chance that I might end up with her once more, wherever souls drift when they relax from the body. A part of me wanted it—wanted to escape the pain, the blood, the weight of all that I'd become. Death, in that moment, was some kind of mercy.
But then. a bitter taste in my mouth. The idea of dying for her—or worse, dying because of her—made something twist violently within me. Disgust. Revulsion. Not at her. At myself.
Why couldn't I hate her?
She'd betrayed me. She'd sold me out to the same people who'd murdered my family, who'd hunted me like an animal. Because of her, I'd lost blood, I'd lost pieces of myself that I'd never be able to get back. I told myself I'd drained that love from my chest. That I'd incinerated the memory of her from my mind.
And yet, there she was.
And the ugly truth crawled its way up from the depths:
I hadn't forgiven her.
But I hadn't stopped loving her either.
And that. that was the worst pain of all.
Love does not die neatly. It festers sometimes. Sometimes it clings like smoke after a fire—bitter, choking, unavoidable. I had tried to drown it in hate, in anger, in silence. But when I heard the voice of her again, trembling with fear and grief, I felt that old pull. An anchor I had severed myself from years ago.
In the haze of blood loss and pain, I walked. Eyes unfocused, sound warped. The battlefield dissolved into nothingness. In the blackness, I saw a light. Pale. Soft. Gentle.
I thought it was heaven.
I didn't want to go.
Not because of hell. Maybe I did deserve it. I've done things—terrible things. I've burned, I've lied, I've killed with and without cause. But that wasn't it.
I did not want to die. because I was not yet finished.
Not with her.
Not with me.
But what did I know about defying nature? What did I know about resisting death when it came to me, still and certain?
And yet—somebody did.
Somebody smashed it. As I slid into the black, I felt a presence pulling me back. Gentle at first, then ferocious. At the edge of that nothing, I believed it was her—the one who'd betrayed me. The one I'd loved enough to ruin myself for. My sliding mind clung to the illusion, desperate for something familiar, even if it was torment.
It wasn't her.
It wasn't her voice that was reaching out to me.
It wasn't her hand grasping mine with that intensity.
It was someone else. A stranger. But. not exactly.
She pulled me back—not with spells, not with raw power, but with something much more frightening: conviction. She would not let go. Would not allow nature to run its course. She willed me to remain, as if that in itself could counter the natural order of life and death.
It didn't make sense.
She had no idea who I was. What I'd done. She had no idea what type of curse she was taking to rescue from the fire. And still, she struggled for me—as if my mangled, shattered body was something to struggle for. As if there was something inside of me to be salvaged.
Her hand was warm. Not with love. Not with comfort. But with presence. With something as heinous in its own right: hope.
And that hope did something to me.
It seared.
Not hate. Not guilt. But memory—new and clean. A second chance I hadn't earned.
I resented her for it.
I needed her for it.
And in the space between breath and forgetting, something occurred to me that I'd been denying myself for years:
I was tired of dying.
And this woman—whatever she was—she didn't merely slow the bleeding.
She cracked something open in me.
She had no say over my past.
But at that time, she held my future in her hands.