The sun dares to show its face. Mocking. I make the mistake of meeting her eyes again. The violet-blue pulses more vividly through the tears clinging to her lashes, reflecting the sunlight back to me as if to remind me that she is my light.
Her chin quivers. What a small frail thing. What a beautiful thing. And now, I must make her go. Attempt to save my shattered heart, attempt to survive heartbreak again.
“Leave,” I growl.
She stiffens. “Leave?”
I bare my teeth in the need to make this easier for me because I am one second away from complete annihilation. “This plantis the only reason you came here,” I spit her own words back at her. “You are no different than those that came before you. You want to take it for yourself, and damn the consequences.”
Another lie, my mind says. But my heart, it knows. My soulknows. She is different. She is mine. But the biting words come anyway. A torrent of pain once unleashed, unable to be damned.
“Leave me here with my ghosts. The world is vast, but this corner is mine. Go find something else. I won’t be used, not again.” I rip my eyes away and stare into the bright morning light, marvelling that the sun has not fallen from the sky and that the world still spins.
And when she goes—I let her.
Even as I shatter.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Dahlia
The weight of his words crushes me, pressing down with the same force that buried me beneath the avalanche. Only this time, no one is coming to save me.
I always thought that finding theSilene vitaliswould mean salvation, that I would leave these mountains victorious, my hands full of something precious, something powerful enough to change my future. Dreamed that, at the end of this journey, my heart would be bursting with triumph, with possibility. Instead, I am leaving with nothing. No plant. No cure. No Eryon.
Nothing. Again.
A black vortex of grief opens inside me, swallowing everything—hope, purpose, even reason. I thought this place, these stolen moments, was paradise, but now I see it for what it truly was. Just another dead-end, another dream slipping through my fingers.
Had I ever really had a chance? Or had I been clinging to a fantasy that was never meant to come true?
The thought chills me deeper than the cave air. I have spent my entire life searching for knowledge, chasing meaning, convinced that I was building something greater than myself.
Do the research. Find the plant. Ensure my survival.
I thought it would be simple. I thought all I had to do was follow the thread of science, of truth, of the one thing I had always believed in. The one thing that, no matter what else had failed me, was my true north.
But standing here, gutted and empty, I wonder—what is the value of a life, human or otherwise? Would it have been right to take what I needed, even if it cost him everything? Would I have done it anyway if given the chance? Am I any better than the man who betrayed him before?
After all, I had been planning to leave him despite knowing that we had forged some type of bond. But would I have left if he hadn’t forced me? Or had some part of me already belonged to him from the moment he saved me?
The weight of the questions has me staggering, trailing a hand against the stone wall to guide my exit through the dark tunnel. My fingers drag over the rough, damp rock as I force my feet forward. The cold leeches into my skin, but I barely feel it. My mind is too tangled with everything I wish I could take back.
My fingertips catch on an uneven ridge of stone, and something about the texture stops me. Not the slick dampness of the cave walls, but something smoother.
Paint.
Although I can’t make them out in the dim lighting, there are more cave drawings here. I remember when I discovered the others—tracing the ochre shapes with my fingers, marveling at the figures—how they faded and dwindled until only two remained. The last of their kind, drawn together, standing over something small, nestled between them.
A child. A family.
I looked at those paintings with the fascination of a scientist, an observer, a researcher standing at the edge of someone else’s story. I thought them beautiful, thought them historical—proof of something that once was.
But now, I see them for what they truly are.
Not history, but his life. Eryon’s life. It was the weight he carried in his bones, the story of everything he lost. And I stood before it like it was an exhibit in a museum, admiring it with detached curiosity, unable to understand that I was staring at his grief carved into stone.
I press my forehead against the cool rock, my breath shallow, wondering if I had ever understood him at all. When had I ever understood anyone?
