Crown Me Yours — Chapter 19

Chapter

Nineteen

Elara

spent the afternoon in a tub of hot water, scrubbing until my skin turned pink and raw. Not to wash him off. To give my hands something to doI while my mind tore itself apart.

Now I lie in bed, the sheets cool against my freshly scrubbed skin, staring at the canopy above me without seeing it. The fire in the hearth has burned down to embers, casting the royal chamber in a low, amber glow.

He vanished.

Not retreated. Not walked away. Vanished—mid-breath, mid-apology, his cloak swallowing him whole while my hands still held the shape of his face.

I roll onto my side, pulling the blanket to my chin. The soreness between my thighs is a dull, warm ache that refuses to let me forget a single

detail. The weight of him. The sounds he made. The way his hands shook when he looked down and saw.

“There is a…new element, my love. One I would rather avoid, lest we complicate things further. You, Elara, are starting to bleed again.”

His words from weeks ago surface like a leaf turning over in a riverbed.

With the ghost of his warmth still mapped across my skin and his seed tossed out with my bathwater, the pieces slide together with a click as final

as a lock.

He didn’t panic because of what we did.

He panicked because of what we might have made. And I think…I think I understand why. It crossed my mind before, after all.

The temperature drops. Not dramatically, just enough to raise the fine hairs along my arms beneath the blanket. A shift in the air, the way a room changes when a door opens somewhere far away, letting in a draft from a

place that has no name.

Heel bones click over stone.

Slow. Deliberate.

Fabric thuds heavily to the floor. The blanket shifts. Then, the mattress dips.

Death slides into bed behind me, the length of him pressing against my back—warm skin on one side, smooth bone on the other—and his arm comes around my waist. He pulls me into the curve of his body with a gentleness that makes my throat ache.

His mouth finds my temple. Lingers. “I shouldn’t have left,” he whispers against my skin, his voice low and rough as unfinished wood.

“No.” I keep my eyes closed, my hand settling over his skeletal fingers where they rest against my stomach. “You shouldn’t have.”

A kiss to the hinge of my jaw. Slow. Apologetic. “I’m sorry.”

“I didn’t want you to disappear.” My voice is smaller than I intend. “I wanted you to stay…like in the tower.”

His arm tightens around me. His forehead drops to the curve of my neck, bone pressing cool against my spine, and I feel his breath shudder out of him in one long, unraveling exhale. “I’m here now.”

I turn in his arms.

The embers paint him in orange and shadow, catching on the ridges of exposed bone, the curve of his jaw where skin yields to skull. His arm resettles around my waist, and I press my palm flat against his chest—

against the open architecture of his ribs, where two strong heartstrings thrum beneath my fingers.

I let my gaze trail their taut lines. “In the forest, when you first showed yourself, one of them was completely severed.”

His hand covers mine, pressing it harder against his chest as if he wants me to feel the vibration down to my marrow. “I think…I think they healed

because of you.”

“How?”

A pause, and then, “You know how.”

My heart beats faster, and I look up at him, at those fathomless black hollows that rest on me with undivided attention. “Then let’s return the third. Heal your heart.”

His jaw tightens. The heartstrings seem to shudder, and his thumb traces a slow circle against my hip. A touch meant to soothe, though I’m not sure which of us it’s meant for.

“You know what the third requires,” he says carefully.

“Yes.” I keep my voice steady, casual, as though I’m discussing last night’s supper and not my own slaughter. “My sacrifice and a resurrection.”

He shakes his head. “Elara—”

“You told me yourself that you have the power. That you can bring someone back.” I lift my hand from his chest and bring it to his face, my thumb tracing the seam where skin gives way to bone along his cheek. “Just do it. I’m not afraid. And whatever pain there might be…it’s brief. I can handle it.”

He closes his eyes. Or whatever that slight narrowing of those hollow sockets is, the deepening of that blackness there. His hand comes up to cradle mine against his face, and he turns his mouth into my palm, pressing

a kiss there that quivers.

“You make it sound so simple.”

“Isn’t it?”

“No.” The word fractures on its way out. His sockets tighten once more, and the black hollows brighten with something I’ve never seen in them before—something sparkling, catching the firelight. “No, it is not simple at all.”

He’s quiet for a long time. His fingers thread through my hair, tucking a strand behind my ear with a tenderness that feels like it’s costing him

something vital. When he finally speaks, his voice is so low, I have to lean closer to hear it.

“I have longed for you…” he whispers gently, “longer than I had a name for longing. My own wife. My own companion.” The words settle between us like stones sinking into still water, letting that gold-tinged warmth in my chest rise. “I have likely loved you longer than I realized.”

My forehead shifts against his all on its own, lips straining for teeth and bone. I kiss him, soaking up the connection it holds, how he answers it with no hesitation, no restraint.

“Then let me give you the third string,” I whisper against his mouth before I shift my head back. “Let me…”

Something glistens in the hollow of his left eye socket. A single, impossible trail of light, luminous and slow, tracing down the curve of bare bone like liquid starlight. It catches the ember glow and burns gold before disappearing into the shadow beneath his jaw.

“And then what?” His voice cracks like a rock splitting. He takes my wrist and holds my hand against his chest, over the two restored strings.

“Say I break the curse. Say I slit your throat and bring you back, and my heart is whole for the first time in a thousand years. Then what, Elara?”

The question hangs between us. I open my mouth, but he presses on, and there’s something building in his voice now—something enormous and barely contained, a grief so old it has its own gravity.

“I am eternal. I do not age. I do not end. The stars will burn out, and I will still be here, walking between worlds, guiding souls to what comes after.” His grip on my wrist tightens, desperately, as if he fears me slipping away. “But you…”

A knot expands in my throat. “I’m mortal.”

“And you will never not be,” he grinds out. “Your hourglass has sand in it, Elara. A finite amount. And when the last grain falls—” His voice breaks.

Stops. He swallows hard, and I watch the muscles of his throat work on the side that still has them. “There is nothing I can do. No power I possess, no bargain I can strike. No resurrection that will take the age from your body.

When your time comes, it comes, and I will be the one to carry you through, and I will not be able to bring you back.”

The fire pops in the hearth. A log settles, sending a cascade of sparks up the chimney, and in the shifting light his face is a landscape of devastation.

“You’re afraid of losing me,” I say softly.

“No. I am terrified of losing you.” He sits up slightly, propping himself on one elbow so he can look down at me, and the raw, stripped-open expression on his face is almost more than I can bear. “Eamon was with me for two years. Two years, Elara, of quiet companionship, and when he died, the grief—” He presses his fist against his sternum, against the heartstrings.

“It nearly undid me. And he was a friend. A father, perhaps, in the only way I’ve ever understood the word.”

He lowers himself back down and pulls me closer, his forehead pressing against mine. Bone on skin. Cool on warm.

“But you,” he whispers, his breath sawing in uneven waves. “When you die…in twenty years, in thirty, in however many grains of sand remain, I will have three whole heartstrings for the grief to tear apart. For eternity.”

The silence that follows is the loudest thing I’ve ever heard.

I lie there, my forehead pressed to his, and feel the awful, obvious truth

of it settle into my bones.

Mortality.

The most mundane thing in the world. I’ve buried friends. Buried my brother. Carried the grief, yes, the pain…but never thought of it as anything but a part of life until I drop dead and join them, eventually.

But watching it from where he stands, from the endless, unbroken shore of forever?

“I never thought of it that way,” I admit, my voice cracking at the edges.

“Dying is so…ordinary to me. Everyone I’ve ever known has done it or will do it. I never considered what it looks like from the other side. From where you’re standing.”

I press closer, tucking myself beneath his chin, and his arms fold around me like he’s trying to memorize the shape of me through his skin. I feel his lips move against my hair.

“The grief will lessen,” he murmurs, as though testing the truth of it.

“Perhaps. In a century. In two. But it will never fully disappear. I know this because I still feel the ache of Eamon’s absence on boats he’ll never ferry.”

A pause. “And he was not the woman I adore, respect, and love so dearly.”

His hand drifts down my side and comes to rest against my belly. The touch is feather-light, barely there, but I feel the weight of what it means like a body straining toward the grave.

“And if I put a child in you today,” he says, and his voice is gone, so careful, so brittle, that each word sounds like glass being set down on stone.

“If I’m even capable of that. The child…”

“Could be mortal,” I finish the thought, old and familiar, yes, but now blooming slow and terrible in my chest.

“And if it is, then it would…” His fingers spread across my stomach, and I feel them tremble. “Would grow. Would gray. Would die. And I would bury my child, Elara, and stand at the grave with a whole heart and feel every fracture of it.” His thumb moves in a slow arc across my skin. “And then their children. And their children’s children. Generation after generation, each one carrying some small piece of you in their face, their laugh, and each one dying while I remain.”

I close my eyes. The image he’s painting is so vast, so mercilessly lonely, that it makes my lungs feel too small for the breath I’m trying to

take.

“Eternal grief.”

“Eternal grief,” he confirms. “Not a single loss to mourn, but an unending succession of them. An infinite lineage of goodbyes.” His hand stills on my belly. “That is why I panicked. Not because I regret what we did. Never that. But because the consequences of loving you do not end when you do. They compound. They multiply. They go on and on, and I—”

He stops. His chest shudders against me, those two heartstrings vibrating with a low, resonant hum that I feel in the crown on my head.

“I cannot die,” he finishes simply. “And yet, I cannot fathom how I am supposed to survive it.”

I pull back just enough to find his mouth in the dark.

The kiss is slow. Not the desperate, consuming thing from the stable, but something quieter. Something that tastes like salt and sorrow and the stubborn, impossible persistence of two people holding on to each other at the edge of an abyss. I cradle his face in both hands, bone and skin alike, and kiss him until his breathing steadies, until the tremor in his chest softens to a low, steady hum.

When I pull away, my lips brush the corner of his mouth as I speak. “It’s

a shame, really.”

“What is?”

“That I’m not the one who has to slit your throat.” I trace the line of his jaw with my fingertip, feeling the hinge where bone meets tendon. “We could end this whole curse tonight.”

The silence that follows is absolute. The embers tick in the hearth. His heartstrings go still beneath my palm—perfectly, breathlessly still—and then they resume with a strong throb.

His hand finds my cheek. His thumb traces beneath my eye, catching moisture I didn’t realize was there. “Could you really?” he asks, and his voice is stripped of everything. No gravel. No command. No ancient authority. Just a raw, naked question from a man who has waited a thousand years to ask it. “Could you really love the one who took your brother from you? Who would one day take your child from its bed?” His thumb stills.

“Who will, when the final grain falls, take you?”

I consider the question the way it deserves to be considered. Not with the rushed certainty of passion, but with the slow, deliberate weight of someone who has always felt most at ease between headstones, inside graves, and among death.

“When my sand runs out,” I say, holding his gaze in the dark, those fathomless hollows, “and you come for me… I think I’ll smile. I think it will feel like coming home.” My hand shifts over his heartstrings, feeling their steady pulse. “Like settling into the place where I belonged all along.

With Death.”

He stutters out a breath. Then he pulls me into him, burying his face in my hair, his arms wrapping around me so completely that I can’t tell where

his bones end and my flesh begins.

Neither of us says anything more.

I lie there in the dark, his arms around me, and I think about the snowball. The cold crust of it under my fingers. The stone at its heart. How I packed it tight and hurled it straight at Death, and how he laughed. How the sound had boomed across the courtyard and bounced off the palace walls and filled up all the places grief had hollowed out.

Just for a moment.

Just long enough.

That’s the thing about moments. They’re only that bright because they

go out.

Daron knew.

He must have.

Why else did he laugh the loudest with rot climbing his fingers? Why else did he crack jokes at corpses, and grin at funerals, and hoard every ridiculous, stupid, beautiful second like it was coin? Because he felt the

hourglass in his chest. Because he knew the sand was running, and so he spent every grain like it was gold.

Vale’s breath is slow against my hair, tingling so nicely at my scalp.

He’s terrified of the very loss he brings. Of standing at whatever small, unremarkable grave I will get, his whole heart intact, grieving my death for a hundred years, two hundred…an endless compounding of centuries.

I understand that in my marrow now. But outside these walls, children are eating pebbles. Mothers are laying their weighted little bodies to rest.

The rot doesn’t pause because Death is afraid. It doesn’t hold its breath while we lie here in the dark, warm and whole for one stolen night.

I have to die.

And he will have to let me.

I pull his arm tighter around me. Tuck my chin down. Not tonight.

Tonight, I let him have this. Let us both have it, this one ordinary night where we both fall asleep. Together.