“After dinner,” I brushed her hair back from her face. My fingers lingered on her cheek. “We’ll tell her. Lay it out.”
She didn’t stir.
God, I wished she would wake up now. I missed her voice. Missed the way she softened even the hardest parts of me.
“She’ll be sore when she wakes up,” Bastion muttered, flicking ash into the tray before stubbing his cigarette out. “She’ll pretend she isn’t.”
My mouth twisted. He wasn’t wrong. She’d smile, shrug it off, pretend she was fine. Pretend we hadn’t broken her open for hours.
“We didn’t do proper aftercare,” Bastion tone lower. “She fell asleep.” He ground the last of the cigarette into the tray, final, certain.
“That just means we get more time when she wakes up.”
A strange comfort feeling ran through me. More time to fuss over her. To check every ache, every tremor. To run my hands over her body until she remembered she wasn’t a burden.
That was what I loved most—the ritual of care. The quiet after. The way she let us hold her when the fight drained out.
I leaned back against the headboard, and let myself look at her.
Our girl. Our angel. Our wife already in everything but law.
The city could burn. The syndicates could claw. The dynasties could circle while we were gone.
We’d still take her name, take her hand, and take her home.
And anyone who tried to take her from us would learn the same lesson we’d been teaching for years, no one survives trying to steal what belongs to the Crows.
Chapter Fifty-Six
BASTION
Her lips were the wrong color.
Not pink, not flushed from sleep or laughter. Blue almost like porcelain. When I touched them, my fingers went numb. When I pressed my mouth to hers, I couldn’t feel her breathing. No breath to steal. Only cold.
“Baby,” I said, and the word was already breaking. “Baby, wake up. Come on. Please?—”
Her skin didn’t give. I rubbed her arms hard enough to burn, tried to coax the color back the way I did after a nightmare or a migraine. Her wrists felt like stone in my hands.
“Em.” I leaned in. “Please.”
Silence.
There were flowers in there. White ones, too many. Wax candles everywhere.
The light was wrong, low and yellow, like an old chapel that had forgotten how to open its windows.
My knuckles bumped wood when I reached for her shoulder. Too smooth to be a table or a bench. I looked down and the world tilted.
A coffin.
I was standing beside her coffin.
My throat closed, and it wasn’t a sound that came out of me, not at first. More like an animal scream.
“No, no—no.”
I tried to lift her. But she wouldn’t move.
