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“The world sees death as a tragedy,” he goes on, quieter. “A rupture. The worst thing that can happen. But when you live in it, day after day, year after year, it stops being tragic and becomes something else entirely. Inevitable. A certainty. The one appointment none of us misses. And once you truly understand that—once it’s in your bones that everyone you meet is simply a body that hasn’t finished yet—it does something to you. It unhooks you from the living.”

He turns to me then, and the loneliness in his face is so naked it nearly stops my heart.

“I stopped being able to attach to anyone. Why would I? I had seen, intimately, how every story ends. Everyone leaves, Genevieve. Everyone I have ever touched has eventually passed through my hands as a corpse or walked out of my life as a stranger. So I simply… stopped reaching. It seemed kinder. To myself, mostly. You cannot grieve what you never let yourself hold.”

“That’s the logic, anyway,” he adds, with a hollow ghost of his usual wit. “The undertaker’s arithmetic. If everyone is simply a future loss, then loving anyone is just volunteering for grief, and I had quite enough grief in my working hours without inviting it home for supper. So I admired the living the way I admire a fine antique—from a careful distance, behind glass, never letting myself forget that it would outlast me or I it. I told myself this made me wise. Protected. Above the messy business of needing people.” His mouth twists. “It simply made me alone. There is a word the living use for a man who keeps everyone at arm’s length so nothing can ever hurt him, and the word is not wise, Genevieve. The word is lonely. I just dressed mine in better tailoring than most.”

I don’t make a joke.

That, more than anything, is how I know this matters to me—because deflection is my native tongue, the reflex I reach for the instant a moment turns too sincere to survive, and I feel it rise in my throat now, the urge to lighten it, to sharpen it, to bury the tenderness under a quip before it can touch me.

I swallow it. Let the silence stay soft.

I lower myself onto a moss-cushioned bench beside him among the flowers and I simply let him tell me the truth, all of it, without once reaching for my armor.

It is harder than it sounds, holding still for someone else’s pain.

My whole survival was built on movement—on staying three steps ahead, on never sitting long enough in any feeling to let it pin me down.

Listening,truly listening, means staying.

It means letting the words land and not deflecting the impact, letting his grief sit beside mine on the bench without rushing to fix it or fence it or make it funny.

The strange thing, the thing that unsettles me even as I do it, is how badly I want to. Not because it’s strategic. Not because a listened-to man is a loyal one, though the strategist files that away on reflex.

I want to give him my stillness because he is hurting and I cannot stand it, and that motive is so foreign, so frighteningly uncalculated, that I almost flinch from my own tenderness.

He notices, which seems to give him the courage for the last of it, the thing he’s been circling this whole time.

“You terrified me,” he admits, so quietly the words nearly dissolve into the green hush. “From the very first. Not because you’re dangerous. I adore that you’re dangerous; danger I understand, danger I can hold. No.” He turns the full weight of those amber eyes on me. “You terrified me because youmade me care. Again. After years of being so certain that the part of me capable of it had simply… died, somewhere among all those bodies, quietly, without my noticing. I had built an entire identity on being incapable of love. I had made my peace with the cold. Then I discovered you, refusing to perform your fear for any of us, and dismantled that conviction without even trying. You didn’t lay siege to my walls, Pretty Peony. You simply bloomed in front of me, and I discovered to my horror that I had never stopped being able to want the spring.”

The confession lands in my chest like a stone dropped down a deep well, and I feel the splash of it echo through every locked chamber I own.

I know exactly the terror he’s describing. The specific horror of discovering, after you have so carefully amputated the part of yourself that can be hurt, that it has quietly grown back.

That you are, against all your engineering, still capable of the one thing that ever destroyed you. He is not confessing love so much as confessing a vulnerability, handing me the precise location of the soft place under his armor—and the trust in that, the sheer reckless faith of showing a woman who burns her betrayers exactly where to aim, steals the breath clean out of me.

He has given me a knife and pointed it at his own heart.

The only thing more frightening than holding it is realizing I would sooner turn it on the whole world than ever use it on him.

Silence settles between us then, soft as falling petals, and I study him in the last of the amber light.

I look at him properly, the way he is forever looking at the rest of us—and for the first time the elegance falls away under my gaze, the unsettling confidence, the theatrical poise, all of it thinning until I can see straight through to the thing underneath.

The loneliness.

Vast and old and patiently borne, the loneliness of a man who taught himself not to need anyone because needing was just grief with a delay built in. He has been so alone for so long that he stopped recognizing it as a wound, the same way I stopped recognizing my own ceaseless vigilance.

We are, the two of us, experts at injuries we no longer feel.

The worst of it, the thing that cracks me clean open, is how beautiful he looks wearing it—there in the last amber light, draped in the green ruin of his sanctuary, a gorgeous lonely thing blooming in a graveyard.

He matches this place exactly.

A creature the world found too strange to keep and too lovely to quite throw away, left to flourish untended in the dark. I have spent weeks being intrigued by Silas Crowe, charmed by him, undone by him in firelight.

This is the first time I have simply ached for him, and the ache has no strategy in it at all.