“Don’t look at them,” Arawn urged, his forehead brushing mine, his claws black with curse sliding across my cheek, holding me to him. “I’ll protect you, I swear.”
My heart pounded so hard it hurt. I nodded. I didn’t want them to steal our moment. His antlers unfurled from his back, his coat spreading into wings, a shield of shadow. I clung to him, crushing him so tightly, as if holding him could anchor him here. With me. I buried my face against his chest, clutching him with the fervor of despair. But him… he touched me as though I might break. His lips, burning, pressed, skimmed my throat. Too soft. Too slow. A grazing caress across my nape.
I tipped my head back, a shiver coursing my spine as he traced a line of kisses over my collarbone.
“You showed me it was never a question of magic. It was a question of the heart,” he murmured against my skin.
“Arawn… what are you doing?”
I choked, gripping him, refusing to let go—but already, something was changing. Tears slipped down. The Cursed advanced—arachnid, disjointed puppets—their limbs dragging in the clatter of broken bones.
Arawn held me tight, and with a sweep of wings made of mist, he blasted the Cursed away. A crash echoed, dull andbrutal, followed by a shudder through the stone. Behind the veil of mist, something was collapsing.
“Thank you,” he said with a smile infinitely tender and painfully irrevocable. “Thank you for teaching me what it is to be human.”
Panic ripped through my throat. He was speaking like a man without a future. Like a man already dead.
“Thank you for giving me a reason to exist,” he continued. “To protect you. To give you the future you deserve.”
“No… stop,” I begged, my voice breaking. “I didn’t make the elixir. You can’t?—”
“I trust you,” he said, his gaze unshaken. “My Sugarplum, you are the greatest confectioner I know.”
Arawn’s wings folded around me, a rampart of shadow and bone. All around, the Cursed clawed, pounded, hammered at that living prison, their twisted fingers sliding through the gaps. But he did not move. He took it all without flinching.
Something cold and heavy slid into my trembling hands.
His heart.
Blackened. Veined with violet. Its weak, dying beat pulsed faintly against my palm, like an ember fading.
A heart made of sucremort.
He had given it to me.
“No! You promised we would do this together. After.”
A broken sob escaped me. My vision blurred, the stench of blood and death burning my nose. Around us, the Cursed screamed. Unleashed.
His lips brushed my ear, his whisper a sugared poison. “I would want no one else to end my life. But the choice is yours.”
And then he kissed me.
A fevered kiss. Desperate. Like a last shared breath, or a falling star burning out in its final light.
I cried against his lips, and he drank my tears. He stole my grief, swallowed the pain, as though it were a wound he meant to keep forever.
No. No. No. Not now. Not like this.
“We need more time. We had nothing… nothing at all,” I sobbed.
I had glimpsed only a fragment of what we could have been, before it was gone.
He framed my face in his palms. “My Sugarplum.”
I looked up, breath shorn, clutching his heart to me as if that could stop my own from breaking.
“I fell in love with you twice.”
