“I know you’re sorry. I know you wish it hadn’t happened—that Jason hadn’t done that, but no matter how hard I try, I can’t let it go.” I tapped my head with a sharp finger. “I can’t forget, and I don’t hate you, David. I don’t hate you but I’m so hurt. So hurt.” My voice disappeared under sadness as I pressed my palm to my chest.

His mouth opened to speak, but nothing came out.

It occurred to me then that none of this was relevant. Nothing changed. Just because he knew the pain I was in, didn’t mean he was going to stay. He couldn’t stay—I knew this much—the Set, the laws, the...punishments.

But I didn’t care. I really just didn’t care anymore.

“You’re right,” he said, toughening up. “That doesn’t change things. I can’t stay.”

“I know. But you know what hurt the most, David? Out of everything that happened?”

He looked at me cautiously, shaking his head. “Please don’t.”

I opened my mouth, determined to tell him what he didn’t want to hear. “You asked me to give up my life for you—but you won’t give up anything for me.”

He took a quick step toward me. “I won’t give them something else that I love. Something else to take from me, something else good to destroy.”

Those words resonated in my thoughts for a second. When he reached for my fingertips, I pulled away and stepped back. “So that’s it?” I said, swallowing all the useless emotions. “You’re not back, are you?”

He shook his head. “You knew that.”

“Fine.” A surge of rage moved my arms; I shoved him, with all my heart and soul driving my hands. “Just go! If you’re going to do it—do it now. Spare me one more second of seeing your face.”

“Ara, please?”

“No! Just go—just leave me to die, David.” I ran for the lake and stepped out into the icy cool, losing my breath to the chill in two layered intakes, unable to catch it for a second as the water touched my waist.

“Ara!” David called, and everything went quiet under his voice. The moonlight lit the water with a pale-blue line, the wind stopped blowing and the trees became so still I was afraid I’d managed to die in the first rush of cold.

“How did you do that?” I turned back to look at him, standing on the shore, his head angled to the ground, his trench coat dripping, seeming heavy with the weight of water. “How did you stop the storm?”

“I can manipulate many things in my world, Ara-Rose.” His fingers folded around my arm suddenly. “But the one thing I cannot control is you. And what scares me is that I know—” He sharply turned my face to look at him. “I know, from the thoughts in your head, that you will—that if I leave you, you will kill yourself, and it scares me. How do I compete with that? What am I supposed to do with that?”

The stillness in the lake, the trees and the breeze made me feel almost breathless. The water around us felt warmer than it first was, and even David’s icy touch became heated somehow. “Just let me die, David. You won’t stay, and I’m no good without you. I don’t know why you keep taunting me with this falsified love.”

“Falsified!” His eyes darted over my face. “You know exactly what you are to me, Ara-Rose.”

I tried to pull away, but he wouldn’t let me.

“Don’t. You. Ever. Think—for one second, that you don’t matter to me.” He planted a restless, aching kiss to my lips and pulled away. “You are everything to me. Do you understand?”

I responded only with a sniffle, being silent like the night before speaking. “But not enough to risk punishment.”

“Ara—”

“Did you think of me?” I asked. “When you were gone, did you ever even think of me?”

He shook his head. “I tried not to.”

“Why?”

“Because I couldn’t imagine you in my dreams the way you really were.”

“What did that matter?”

He swallowed hard, his throat moving with the lump. “I had to force myself to close my eyes, just to picture the way yours lit up when you smiled—the way your eyelids fluttered in your sleep, the way your body shivered under my touch. All those little subtleties were so uniquely you. No other creature in the world responded to me the way you did. There was no movie I could watch to compare your touch, no actress I could look upon to see the turn of your lip when you were thinking, and when I laid awake, remembering you, remembering the things we did with each other, it was sterile. Bland. All those little things were gone. I could never have imagined them—could never have dreamed of such beauty, because you are not anything like I’ve ever encountered before.”

“So you tried to forget me?”

“No. I just didn’t want to insult your memory by picturing you wrong. It would be like hanging a Monet in a hall lit with disco lighting.”

I smiled at that.

The calm of David’s magic on the night remained, a feeling like silk on my heart, and I knew the storm was constant up above our secret little world, raging, and I’d be called to return to it too soon, leaving David, the calm, the warmth, the lake, behind.

“Can we pretend?” I looked at him in the darkness, wishing I could see his face clearly. “Just—can we pretend you’re staying? Just for a while?”

“What good would that do?”

“So I can feel alive again—to know what it feels like.”

He raised a brow. “You sound like a vampire.”

“Ha.” I wish I was.

“No, you don’t.” He grabbed my hand and pulled it gently until we faced each other, the silky water lapping just under my bra line, dragging the ends of my hair downward in a weighted tug.

“No, but I do wish we could have been immortal together.”

“If there was a way—” He left it hanging. I wondered why he didn’t mention the Lilithians. Wondered if it was because it was too late to choose that option, or if maybe he didn’t want that anymore.

“We can have one thing, though,” I said. The hopeful glint in my smile, hinting at the obvious things I wanted to do with him, brought a surge of heat to my chest.

David checked his watch. “I don’t have long.”