There was a pile of bloody towels in one corner, gruesomely vivid, pans full of now cold water that had all turned red pushed against the baseboards along one wall. A tray of bloodied instruments lay on a dresser near the door, and Mel’s ruined shirt hung from the back of a chair, tossed there in an obvious rush. And Mel was on the bed, still, silent as a corpse.

D had cleaned her and washed the blood from her face and arms, and he’d covered her up to her neck with a sheet and folded her hands over her chest. She was peaceful and ghostly pale, and if she wasn’t already dead, she looked as if she soon would be.

On the white sheet just at the center of her chest was a tiny spot of red.

She sank down beside the bed and took Mel’s icy hand in her own. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I’m so sorry.”

Mel didn’t answer. She didn’t move. The long dark plait of her hair had come undone and lay bedraggled on the pillow, wisps like eiderdown from the softest underbelly of a black swan. With shaking hands, Eliana unwound the braid and ran her fingers through the strands, tidying them, brushing them smooth over the pillow until they lay in a glossy fan all around her head. She was barely holding herself together, and only because she thought Mel would be horrified if she could see her face, all screwed up and red with the effort not to cry. She knew she’d tell her to snap out of it and grow a pair, and then she’d laugh her wonderful, witchy laugh at what a sissy she’d turned out to be after all.

Eliana thought maybe she should pray, but all that came out of her mouth was a plea instead. “Please. Please, Mel. Don’t leave me. Don’t die. Please don’t die.”

But Mel’s pale lips formed no encouraging words, and her bluish lids stayed closed, and finally the dam broke and Eliana dissolved into tears. Her body was wracked with sobs, and she gave herself over to it, kneeling at the bedside with her face pressed to the mattress, Mel’s hand beneath her forehead, her cold, cold fingers getting wet with tears.

Time passed. Her tears slowed, then stopped. Her legs went numb. She slid from her knees and sagged against the bed, still clinging to Mel’s hand, unwilling to let go. Her lids grew heavy and she let herself drift, and finally she fell asleep in the same spot, still holding Mel’s hand.

And that’s exactly how D found the two of them when he returned hours later.

He stood in the doorway a long, silent moment, watching with a heavy heart. He thought it might only be moments now; in fact, he was surprised Mel hadn’t already passed into the arms of Anubis, god of the afterlife. He’d seen much stronger men than she bleed out and die from lesser wounds.

She was a fighter, but she wasn’t immortal. There was only so much trauma a body could take. He’d done what he could—stopped the bleeding, repaired the ruptured artery and the torn flesh around the wound—but she’d lost too much blood, and he didn’t have the tools to do a transfusion. What was left of his hope was quickly fading.

His gaze rested on Eliana. In sleep she looked younger and vulnerable as she never did when awake. Her face had lost all its hard edges, and her generous mouth was slack. She looked almost as peaceful as Mel did, except for the little line between the dark crescents of her brows. Slumped on the floor against the bed, her head bowed and her knees drawn up to her chest, she also looked cramped and uncomfortable, and he couldn’t bear to see her like that. D drew a breath and moved forward.

He picked her up as gently as he could without waking her and disentangled her hand from Mel’s. She made a little protesting noise but didn’t open her eyes, and when he lifted her she rested her head against his chest and sighed like a child. When she wound her arms around his neck, he had to swallow around the tightness in his throat.

He carried her to the bedroom he thought of as theirs, though there was certainly no they, she’d made that perfectly clear. He laid her down, gently removed her boots, and unclipped her sword from her belt, putting it aside on the table beside the bed so she could see it as soon as she opened her eyes and know he hadn’t tried to disarm her. He leaned down to pull the sheet over her, and when he straightened she was awake, watching him.

“Thank you,” she whispered, eyes shining. “I know you did all you could. So…thank you.”

He nodded. His heart did a strange, painful flip-flop inside his chest. He turned to go, but she sat up and caught him by the hand, and he looked back at her, arrested.

“Please. I…”

She seemed unable to go on. Her throat worked, and her face held the expression of someone entirely lost, or surrendered. Their eyes held, and hers were wet, beseeching. Her voice breaking, she said, “Demetrius.”

She said his name like it meant something else, like it meant something to her, and he had to gather every ounce of his will not to fall at her feet, had to physically force himself to stand there with his face wiped clean of emotion because that’s the way she wanted it between them, that’s what she’d proven by leaving him in the middle of the night and putting her hand on her sword at the abbey and with the phone call to Alexi, whoever the hell that bastard was. And he knew, he knew on some level exactly who Alexi was, but he wanted to unknow it. He wanted to burn it out of his mind.

But he couldn’t. He wouldn’t. Lying to himself was never his strong suit.

“You should get some rest,” he said quietly. “I’ll go in. I’ll wake you in case…I’ll wake you in a little while, and we can sit together with her. There’s nothing else we can do tonight.”

Her look was pure torture. He couldn’t remember ever seeing such anguish on someone’s face, and the fact that it was her face—her beloved, beautiful face—made it all the more terrible. He looked away, drew his hand away, but she tightened her fingers around his and used his hand to pull herself up so she stood in front of him, just inches away, staring up into his face. She was shaking, shaking and breathing as if she’d just run from across the city and looking into him as if she was trying to find some kind of answer to a question she hadn’t asked.

What he saw when he looked back at her was someone whose soul was in cinders.

“I don’t know how to love you,” she whispered. “I don’t even know if I can. I’ve spent years cursing your name, wishing you dead, and years before that infatuated with you and I hardly even knew you and almost just as soon as I began to get to know you, we—you—it was over and I was here and you were there and everything was so wrong—so wrong and I thought it could never be fixed but now I don’t know what to think—I don’t know what to do—I don’t—I don’t know anything…”

She blurted it out in one long, run-on sentence, breathless and broken and stammering her way through it until she petered out to silence at the end and stared at him, eyes huge and dark and haunted. D stood there in shock, stomping down his heart when it wanted to soar out of his chest, smothering the heat and the passion that rose in him like magic conjured from a sorcerer’s spell, and he felt bathed in drenching golden sunlight, his arms longing to crush her to him, a sharp, sweet thrill running through him as if he were a live wire, conducting electricity through his veins.

Then he thought of Alexi, of her face when she’d called him, her palpable relief, and the sweet thrill turned sour. She might not know how to love him, but it certainly seemed like she knew how to love someone else.

Bitterly, hating himself because jealousy was a pettiness he’d once thought beneath him, he said, “It must be easier, having the kind of heart that lets you choose what you want. Unfortunately, I don’t have that problem.”

And he turned around and walked out of the room without looking back, each step fresh misery, every beat of his heart a shrill, clanging din in his ears.