And I think, distantly, absurdly, that if the world were to end and take me with it, this would be the memory I would carry with me into the dark. The fragile illusion that she is meant only for me and feels the same way I do.
Then the rope slides over my skin.
And the moment shatters.
And the wrongness of it sinks its vile claws into me.
The absence of power.
I know somehow that if she completes the knot she’s winding around my wrists, my immortality will go with it. She’s stealing it from me.
Had I waited even a fraction longer—who knows—but I don’t. I tear my hands apart, latching one around her throat, the other shoving her hand away, forcing the rope off my skin. The instant it breaks contact, my power surges back in a violent rush.
I gasp and stare up at her.
She stares back with undisguised fear shining out of her glorious pale eyes, which tells me all I need to know but don’t want to believe.
I hurl her off me and flip her hard onto the bed, bearing down—only for her legs to snap up between us. She kicks and catapults me across the room. As I crash into the shelves, books rain down on top of me.
I stare at her in shock.
She climbs off the bed and retrieves her blade from the floor at the foot of the bed. It’s as if she placed it there sometime recently for this possible outcome. Then she rises, slow and beautiful and deadly, to face the chain reaction she set into motion.
“Why?”
It’s the only word, the only question, I can give voice to.
Because how in the fuck has this day turned on me so completely? Why has the greatest moment of my immortal life fractured into a mirror of my past, into the same familiar horror I once lived through before everything went black?
Pollock, my twin, the other half of my soul, had done the same in the end.
He betrayed me.
I had given him loyalty far and above anyone else, revering our bond, believing it unbreakable. And he saw me as his rival for leadership—as something standing in his way of taking our father’s place as head of our clan. Had he simply asked, I would have gladly stepped aside without hesitation.
When our world fell into chaos and war followed, when those we loved died around us, one by one, and the strain of it stretched our bond to its breaking point, my fealty remained with him.
Instead of pausing—of speaking to me, of seeking counsel—he chose his own path. A swift, solitary one. A future where I was neither at his side nor guarding his back.
That was when I understood, too late, that my twin was not the man I knew him to be.
Not after the days.
The months.
The years we had shared.
Something had twisted inside him. I thought it was our uncle’s influence then, but I never had the chance to learn the truth. Or time to pull my brother back from the edge. Pollock would not listen to reason. He would not hear me. And in the end, he became a stranger wearing my twin’s face.
He buried the blade in my belly with a quiet, broken I’m sorry. And he watched me bleed out at his feet because he could not see past his own desire for power to understand that I would have given him everything. Leadership. Legacy. Loyalty. All of it. Freely.
Now, in this rebirth, he remembers none of it.
The end.
The betrayal.
My death.
