I opened my eyes, seeing the dark smoke-like veins that covered his pale flesh. Signs of his true form when using his blood magic, like a pattern drawn by an ancient artisan, and I was captivated in my delirium to see him as he was meant to be. Bathed in that golden light.
My weak fingertips traced his jaw, leaving a smear of blood on his skin, following the lines over uneven flesh before he captured my hand in his own, pressing my filthy palm against his lips. Skin damp with his tears.
‘Stay with me, Kat.’ He bowed his head, breath brushing against my lips.
The darkness of his eyes, of the power that rested in his soul. So much the opposite to mine and yet it unmanned me all the same. None of it mattered, just that he was holding me, and I wasn’t alone.
‘Amartis,’ I breathed, tasting blood on my lips. My mother’s last promise. Now mine.
I didn’t have the breath left to tell him what lingered in my soul, the intensity in his gaze telling me he could sense it.
‘Kat,’ he begged, his forehead resting against mine as his hand came to cradle the side of my jaw, our breaths mingling. ‘Please.’
It was too late. Blackness seeped into the corners of my vision with a horrid coldness, but before I could let it take me, he shook me again, his hold tighter, the pressure on my throat firmer.
‘Kat. Stay and fight with me.’ An order, his breath brushing upon my lips. He kissed my skin, but it stayed cold. ‘Stay and forgive me. Please.’
I already had. I’d forgive him anything.
‘Y-you came,’ were the only broken words that could escape my lips. How easing it felt not to be alone as that dark came for me.
‘I’ll always come for you.’ His thumb brushed my cheek. That promise he’d given me. The one he’d kept. Even till the end. The thing I held closest to my heart, that soothed everything else.
I wasn’t alone as that darkness crept closer. Numbness flooded too swiftly through my body.
Serus. Something whispered distantly in my mind, desperately trying to hold on. Dark enough to come from his lips, but I lost it as I tumbled into the nothingness of my death.
