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The world documented her only as a mugshot, a case file, a patient number—the evidence of her crimes, never the evidence of her joy. No one ever once photographed her simply because she was beautiful and alive and worth remembering. The injustice of it sharpens something in me to a fine and permanent point. I will fix it. I will fix all of it, one stolen golden afternoon at a time, until she has a thousand proofs that she was loved.

Instead, I pat my lap again, gently this time.

“Then we’ll start now,” I say. “Come here, Genevieve.”

She comes and settles onto my lap, fitting against me like she was carved for the space, and I lift the phone, and we pose—a few absurd ones first, her crowning me again, the two of us pulling faces, monsters at play in a field of flowers.

She’s laughing again by the third one, the shadow chased off, and I capture each one like a relic. I think, even as I press the shutter, of what these images will become. The first room of whatever house we finally steal back from the men who tried to end us—I will hang them there, where the morning light can find them.

Not the armored selves, not Crowe and not Vex, but the two quiet true things beneath: a flower-crowned undertaker and the luminous woman who taught him his life could be a beginning instead of a vigil.

Proof, framed and permanent, that we were here, and we were happy, and someone wanted to remember it.

I have spent my whole life ensuring the dead are remembered well. I intend to spend whatever I have left ensuring she is remembered as what she is—adored.

Then, for the last, our laughter quiets.

She turns her head, and our eyes meet, and the moment shifts into something deeper and undefended—both of us caught in it, the two performers with no performance left between us. So I lean in. I press my lips to hers, soft and slow and reverent, my thumb finding the button as I do—and I capture it.

The kiss.

The first photograph of her new life, and of mine: a flower-crowned undertaker and his luminous queen, sealing a tender kiss in the gold of a borrowed afternoon.

A first that shows the vulnerable beauty of falling in love.

CHAPTER 30

~Vex~

Aweek after the daggers and the wildflowers, Silas takes my hand at dusk and tells me, with uncharacteristic quiet, that he wants to show me somewhere he has never shown another living soul.

That gets my attention.

Silas guards his vulnerabilities the way I guard exits—obsessively, and behind several locked doors—so an offer to open one is not a thing he makes lightly.

We slip beyond the edge of town, past the last of the mossy arches, down a forgotten track that Barney pointed him toward with a knowing tilt of his grizzled head.

Our blacksmith friend has been doing that lately, blessing us with small smuggled freedoms, cracks in the walls of our pretty cage—an afternoon here, an unsanctioned errand there—and I have stopped questioning the generosity and started simply pocketing it.

We are, after all, only marking time.

Waiting, with as much patience as four impatient monsters can muster, for my ex-husband to grow tired of his own restraintand finally make his move. Until then, the stolen hours are all we have, and I have learned to hold them close.

Then the track opens, and I stop walking, and the breath goes thin in my throat.

It’s a greenhouse.

A great Victorian glasshouse, vast and abandoned, its wrought-iron bones gone to rust and its thousand panes cracked and clouded and webbed with age—and nature has reclaimed every inch of it, pouring back through the broken glass in a slow green riot.

Black roses climb the ruined walls, their petals so deep a crimson they read as ink in the failing light. Flowers bloom in colors that have no business existing, impossible blues and bruised violets and a white so pale it glows.

Strange, beautiful plants thrive in the forgotten corners, the overlooked places, flourishing precisely where nothing was ever meant to grow.

The whole structure is luminous and ruined and hauntingly, achingly lovely.

It is, in other words, perfectly Silas.

“My sanctuary,” he says softly, watching my face for the verdict with a rare flicker of nerves beneath the elegance. The scent of the place rolls out to meet us—damp earth and green growth and blooming sweetness, threaded through with the loamy perfume of slow decay, of leaves returning to soil. It is his scent made architecture:cold lilies and graveyard cedar and candied violet, beauty and death braided so tightly you cannot find the seam.