The world tilted.
Thea blinked. “You… bought a plot.”
He nodded once, curtly. “If I’m going to spend eternity surrounded by Blackwoods, I’d rather face the firing line than be left outside the fence. For you. With you. Always, Thea.”
She opened her mouth. Closed it. Her entire brain was white noise.
He was standing beside her family’s plot, and he was telling her, with the same level of intensity one might use for confessions or crimes of passion, that he had purchased burial real estate next to her family.
Her family.
“Oh my God,” she whispered, the words catching on a laugh and a sob and an existential crisis. “You meant it. Last night—when you proposed—”
“Yes.”
Her knees nearly buckled. “So we’re… engaged.”
“Yes.”
“Like…really.”
He exhaled, stepping closer, the heat of him curling around her in the cool dawn air. “Thea Blackwood, I’ve never been more real about anything in my life.”
She stared up at him, heart thundering, lungs collapsing, and her soul halfway to the veil.
And still—still!—her only coherent thought was:Damn, where have those shoulders been hiding all these years?
*
Beyond the veil…
“Well,” said Alicewith a satisfied sigh, perching primly atop the wrought-iron fence of the Blackwood family plot, her ghostly skirts swaying gently in the breeze. “He’s finally gotten his hand on her thighs. About damn time.”
Celeste groaned and pinched the bridge of her transparent nose. “I threw a gargoyle arm at them, Mother.”
“Yes,afterthey went at it against a tomb.” Alice grinned. “I was about to be a literal grave prop in their pre-coital theatrics.”
“You’re dead,” Celeste snapped. “They can’tseeyou.”
“Which is why I appreciated when you launched a very tasteful bit of stone architecture,” Alice said brightly. “For dramatic effect. And look how nicely it worked. A delicious, unresolved yearning now simmers between them. Spectacular tension, really.”
Celeste narrowed her eyes. “You’ve been reading those penny dreadful novels again, haven’t you?”
“Only the ones with the shirtless inspectors.” Alice preened, glancing toward the cemetery gates where Alaric’s retreating form had vanished. “Andthis onecould crush a ribcage with his arms alone. I’m terribly proud of her taste.”
Celeste moaned into her ghostly hands. “He kissed her in a cemetery, Mother. Inmycemetery. While she’s still wearingmourning lace.”
Alice floated off the fence and spun in midair, her glee so potent that the ivy seemed to twitch in response. “She’s alive, Celeste! Gloriously, radiantly alive—and she’s finally got someone who might actually keep up with her without losing his trousers or his temper.”
“He nearlyarrestedher.”
“Yes,” Alice cooed. “Twice.It’s practically foreplay.”
“I don’t want to know that,” Celeste spat. “I don’t want tohauntthat.”
“You’re haunting it right now, darling.”
Celeste scowled and drifted toward her own headstone, arms crossed. “She should be safe. Settled. Married to someone reasonable, like that nice widower with the bakery—what was his name? He made excellent currant buns.”
