Crown Me Yours — Chapter 16

Chapter

Sixteen

Elara

eath stayed gone for days.

Not in the literal sense, of course. After all, the business ofD collecting souls is ceaseless. By all accounts of my ministers, my husband has been a diligent god, sweeping through the realm of Issoria with an efficiency that doesn’t pause for grief or ceremony.

I spent just as many days out in the biting cold, sitting beside the mound of Daron’s grave. For hours, I sat in face-numbing stillness, trying to conjure him just so I could ask why. Why did he wipe my tear with his bloodied hand before he said he was sorry? Why did he stay with Daron?

Why is he avoiding me now? Why, why, why for so many things.

But where his wife is concerned, Death remains absent…

A heavy, wet flake sticks to my eyelashes before it melts against the numb skin of my cheek. I don’t brush it away. I sit unmoving on the frozen ground, my woolen skirt fanning out like spilled wine across the white blanket that covers the graveyard.

Snow makes the world quiet in a way that isn’t peace.

More like the arrest of time, muffling the rot-stink rising from the soil.

It softens the sharp edges of broken headstones. It covers the mud where too many feet walked too recently. It hides the fresh dirt, and the brother who lies frozen beneath.

My fingers tremble in my lap, pink-tipped and numb, holding down the priest’s new translation, where ink blurs under the moisture of melted snowflakes. I read the words again, their true, unadulterated meaning letting a darkness settle inside me so profound that it feels like I’m trapped at the bottom of a deep, deep well.

To eak e crown, love must rise,

Dea binding his qun

in lover’s guise.

In e bed of e night,

his wife sha yield,

Receiving Dea

on e cpse’s field.

F e string restes

not by e blade’s cruel art,

But snaps only

wiin his shattered heart.

His shattered heart.

Not my heart. His.

Kael was mostly right, yet wrong on one part as crucial as it is hopeless.

Whatever this warmth is at my core—be it gratitude, growing affection, or

even inklings of devastating love—it’s useless. It’s not my heartache, not

my love that the gold wants.

It’s his.

Death didn’t lie when he said he cannot break the curse. Trying to draw love from him is about as reasonable an attempt as drawing blood from a stone.

Whatever grudge against Vale or Death sustained me for weeks finally fizzles out, leaving me with nothing but the cold hard truth: I can’t blame a stone for not bleeding…and I can’t hate a shattered heart for failing to love.

The snow thickens. My red cloak grows heavier. My knuckles go numb.

Still, I don’t move, watching the sun bedding down on the mountain ridge ahead under the scrutiny of the rising moon.

“Every day, you sit there.” Human cadence, not the rumble that shakes bones. Vale. “Aside from getting frostbite that heals within minutes, what are you endlessly doing out in the freezing cold, Elara?”

I close my eyes for a moment, sensing the grief in my chest make room for the tiniest spark, like a match struck on a rib. “Waiting for Death. As

always.”

Long silence.

“I assumed—” He stops. Clears his throat, a human sound that seems ill-suited for Vale, and most definitely Death. “I thought you probably didn’t want to see me again for a while…if ever.”

The vulnerable honesty of his words, the guilt-stricken weight in his tone, touches me deeper than I want to admit. He expected my anger, didn’t

he? My hate.

So did I.

Perhaps we’re both confused.

My neck crackles as I turn my head slowly to where he stands a few paces away, black jacket buttoned high, his curls equally dark against the white backdrop. Snow clings to his shoulders and melts there, dampening wool, his eyes going to Daron’s grave before they return to me.

“Death does as Death is.” Not even my grief will let me pretend otherwise anymore. “You know full well it was never your nature I held against you.” I lift the translation with a shaky hand and reach it back toward him. “And now it seems like I can’t even blame you for a curse that simply can’t be broken.”

Vale steps close enough to take the parchment. He doesn’t fully read it.

He merely glances at the ink before he returns it to me.

“Was it you who ensured the first translation was wrong?” I take the document back, folding it neatly before it disappears into the pocket inside my cloak. “Make sure generations stay in the dark? Keep Kael stumbling in search of light, hiding that there is none?”

“There was no urging required on my part.” He looks down at the grave again, then slowly—almost reluctantly—lowers himself to the snow beside me. “The king who first wore the crown was a cautious, power-hungry… cunning man. It was he who requested the translation be altered, ensuring that any reference to a wife of mine vanished, that any risk of a predecessor breaking the curse was diminished.”

“Diminished? It’s impossible in its very nature.” My throat tightens because, even though I already knew it, hearing it aloud makes it final.

“The curse is unbreakable. Because you cannot love. You can never

love…”—a gulp—“…me.”

My teeth grind together.

I don’t know why I said it like that.

The wind picks up, whipping his black curls across his forehead. The skin along his cheekbone pales and thins beneath the rising moon, the illusion of Vale stripping away more with each passing minute. Yet he stays, eyes going to the horizon where low-hanging clouds go from dark purple to night.

I let my gaze settle on the same spot. “If you could undo the curse, would you?”

Vale shifts, angling one leg to brace his boot against the snow. “I cannot undo it.”

“I understand that.” But for once, I want to understand him, too. I pull my knees to my chest, trying to hoard what little warmth I have left. “But would you? Break the crown? Return your heartstring?”

A muscle twitches near his throat. “No.”

The answer chills me more than the cold of winter. “Why not?”

Vale’s mouth tightens, and for a second, I think he won’t respond. Then he gives a small nod—one of those stiff, controlled motions that suggests even he agrees he owes me answers.

“I have walked this earth for a long, long time, Elara,” he says softly.

“Long enough to witness things that startled even Death. A man, a farmer,

who loved his wife with a ferocity that bordered on worship.” He pauses for a breath. “Then he found her in bed with his brother.”

I glance sideways, watching how his face pales, speckles, a slow revealing of the bone beneath. “What did he do?”

“He strangled him dead.” Vale’s jaw shifts once, the motion letting flickers of teeth flare beneath those first, untainted rays of the moon. “The guilt drove him mad. I watched him succumb to drink, and then…I watched him beat the very woman he claimed to adore.”

I nod solemnly, if only because the story doesn’t shock me. I’ve buried its aftermath—women with bruises blooming like dark flowers beneath cotton.

“Then there was a woman,” he continues. “Her husband left her, abandoning her with two newborn babes. She loved him so much, she couldn’t breathe without him.” His voice fractures, the warmth of Vale’s lilt slowly replaced by the hollowing grind of Death. “On a storming spring morning, I watched her cradle them, one in each arm, walking through the rain toward a river churning with snowmelt.” Death shakes his head, half of his curls now faded from his skull. “She waded into it, deeper and deeper, crying, wailing for her husband, her love…until the current swept them under and carried their souls straight to me.”

The wind howls once more.

A shiver wracks my entire body, trembling straight into the crown that clings to my head. Snow melts through the wool at the motion, sending a damp chill into my skin that makes my teeth chatter. The more I listen, the less his heart reads like a tragic mistake.

It reads like a refusal. Protection.

“When I guided those tiny, pure souls, it occurred to me,” Death says quietly, his jacket melting with the darkness as it spreads and folds, “that love only ever brings loss, grief, and madness.” He looks down at his hand, fingers brightening to bone. There’s no urgency to hide it from me, as if he’s too exhausted to fight the truth tonight. “When Eamon died at the king’s sword, I merely grasped a glimpse of this agony.”

The memory of the ferryman hangs over me like another funeral, quiet at first, then all at once—weight settling into places already torn raw. It isn’t my grief, not truly, yet it moves in, anyway, gentling its shoulder beside Daron’s like it belongs. And perhaps it does.

“And yet it was enough for me to make certain I would never feel such grief again.” Death finally looks at me then, his eyes dark, the whites consumed by the encroaching shadows of his black sockets. “I…I don’t want to love, Elara.”

Nodding, I glance over at Daron’s grave, the sight of the snowy mound making me shiver anew. The grief drives it deeper, a tremble in my bones.

Yes, I understand what he means. But given the chance, would I tear that ache of loss out of my chest? If it meant surrendering my love for Daron?

The question summons his voice from the depths of the grave, the echo in my head so clear it almost drowns out the wind. “Daron said that grief is just love hiding in a mourning dress.”

He turns toward me, towering but somehow not looming, just a man seated in the snow beside me. And for the first time, I don’t experience him as half anything. Just Death, and the familiarity of that settles deep in my marrow, letting my spine curl on a long, shuddering release of tension.

With that release, the last of my strength abandons me. I simply stop fighting the pull of gravity and sink sideways, collapsing against the warmth of his arm. And still, a violent tremor wracks my frame, shaking me against him, teeth chattering a hollow rhythm as the snow spirals down in thick, blinding sheets.

Death lifts his gaze to the churning sky. With agonizing slowness, he gazes back down at me to the lifting of his arm. The heavy darkness of his cloak unfurls around me, folding over my shoulders to shut out the wind.

His arm curls inward, hooking firmly around my waist. Then he pulls.

He inches me off the frozen ground and onto his lap, crushing me flush against the solid heat of his chest, the sound of his long exhale stuttering

from his throat. “Better?”

“Yes.”

I bury my face in the hollow of his shoulder without thinking, tucking my knees up to make myself small within his tightening grasp. The crushing expanse of grief in my chest begins to displace, pushed aside by a languid warmth. A feeling so terrifyingly close to what I felt once before in the tower… Somehow, my hand reaches up, fingers hooking into the folds of cloth that pool at his chest, the sense of gravity eerily…comforting. “Did you take his soul to a dark pit?”

Death looks down at me, and a dark, ragged brow knits toward his nasal cavity. “What do you mean?”

“Daron.” My brother’s name almost drowns under a sob. “Did you take him to a dark pit like you said you’d do with me?”

He lets out a long sigh, his shoulders slumping. “There are no dark pits, Elara. The place where souls go…it has no boundaries, no structures like this world, but…”

A long pause, followed by a twitch in his exposed jawbone. “No mortal word can describe it. It is simply…rest. A return to the all.” Teeth grinding, he slowly shakes his head. “I…I don’t know why I said that. Anger. Perhaps something else.”

I nod, not even bothering to count the many things I said to him out of anger…or something else. “Mother said you were with him. That you told him not to be afraid.”

“With or without me, he had no fear.” His expression softens into something unreadable. “Because of you.”

“Me? Why would—” A sob catches in my throat. “I wasn’t ever there.”

He tortures the little bit of upper lip he has, bony fingers coming up to comb stiff but gently through my hair. “Daron spoke a lot about you in his final moments,” he murmurs. “You always joked with him about death, he said, even when rot climbed his fingers, replacing fear with laughter. And by the time Death came, he embraced me as…his sister’s husband. A relative most welcome.”

A little cry tears out of my throat, barbed and jagged, ripping through days of numbness. Tears well from my eyes, flooding so hot down my frozen cheeks that each pearl seems to scrape into my skin like a prickling shard. I collapse completely, wailing into his chest, a raw, ugly sound of absolute devastation.

Death stiffens beneath me. Then he shifts with palpable unease, as if the sheer volume of my humanity is something he can’t weather.

“I… You should go inside.” His hands shift to my waist, firm and resolute, trying to gently pry me from his warmth and inch me back toward the empty snow. “I shall leave.”

“No!” My fingers clench a fist around his cloak. I yank hard, fighting the shift of gravity, and drag myself deeper into those arms that somehow feel like the only sanctuary—ever-present and reliable. “Don’t go. Don’t

leave me alone again.” I look up at him, his face a blur of smooth skin and

bone. “Please stay.”

Death hesitates.

His gaze drags over my tear-streaked face, a thousand different emotions he claims not to feel flitting across his features. He looks at the grip I have on his cloak, then back to my eyes. His hand slides from the tangle of my hair to cup my jaw, his thumb brushing away a fresh tear.

He nods. A single, solemn dip of his chin.

A motion that brings our faces so close. Close enough, even the wind slows in the narrow space between us. And in that heavy stillness, something shifts. It’s a bright expansion. A warm turn. A visceral intertwining.

I don’t know who moves first. Perhaps we both lean, letting the gap vanish. My mouth meets lips and bones in a trembling, desperate urge for contact, a taste of longing and loss, sweet and painful.

For a heartbeat, Death stays there. But then, with agonizing slowness, he pulls back. Not away, just…enough to break the connection, replaced by how his forehead presses against mine once more.

“No,” he whispers, his voice thick with a worry that nearly breaks me.

“Not when grief is dulling your senses, I understand that much. Best not do something you might regret in the morning.”

I nod, the rejection smoothed by the gentle truth, the sincere care of his words. I’m tired, bone-deep. So I simply close my eyes for a moment and rest my cheek back against the hard warmth of his chest. But when my eyes drift open again, the angle is different, revealing something that wasn’t

there before.

Not like this.

My violent yank on his cloak left it askew, exposing two curved ribs, stark and white. Behind them, his heart beats steadily, a rhythmic drumming that I can feel against my skull. But it isn’t the beat that catches my breath.

It’s the strings attached to it. The first is as I remember—a single, solid line, unwavering and intact. But the second… I blink, trying to focus through the lingering tears. Thousands of threads seem to have spun together in a chaotic, shimmering rope of red silk. Only a few loose frays shiver with his lungs where a tear had been.

No…not shiver… Strain.

They reach against each other, seemingly stretching, trying to mend

together. When did this happen? How?

My heart seems to stumble.

What does this mean?

“My wife possesses an exasperating talent for mending things that, by all rights, should remain destroyed.” Vale’s voice echoes through my head with a strength that seems to vibrate into the crown on my head. “It is dangerous. Terrifying beyond your understanding.”

I breathe the shivers from my voice before I look up at him again. “Why did you stay with Daron?”

His jaw works for a moment, the shift of bone beneath skin visible in the half-light, as if he’s searching for a logic that fits the shape of a feeling he refuses to claim. “I don’t know.” Finally, he fixes his gaze on the distance again. “It means nothing.”

I flatten my palm against his chest, sensing the quickening of his heart.

And I’m not sure if he just lied to me again…or if he lied to himself.