Page 62 of 13 Nights

He turns me by the shoulders. His grip is steady.

His eyes carry the same clear, furious intensity I've been studying for thirteen nights. The face behind them belongs to a man who has spent centuries weaponizing his intelligence and has just discovered the one battle he can't strategize his way out of.

"You have a life, Ashley. A career. A friend who will tear this valley apart looking for you. Every reason to remain and no guarantee of what exists on the other side."

"All true." I touch his face. My palm against his jaw, my thumb at the corner of his mouth. He goes still the way he always does when I reach for him first. "You love me. It exists now, whether you cross that boundary or not. And the curse doesn't need your permission to break."

"Love does not require you to die for it."

"Death isn't the only possible outcome. We proved that. Eliza crossed and survived. My mother touched the Void and came back." I hold his gaze. "You don't get to turn uncertainty into a death sentence and call it protection."

His mouth closes over the argument. His jaw sets. For once, he understands that another command will not move me.

"I gave you my body and my trust," I tell him. "I never gave you my choices."

His jaw clenches. Every line of his body is rigid with the effort of restraining the command he wants to give.

He doesn't give it. He stands in the kitchen with his hands on my shoulders and his heart hammering hard enough that I can feel it through his chest.

He doesn’t tell me to stay. He knows I won't, and ordering compliance he can't enforce would break something between us that neither of us can afford to lose.

The Gate opens without ceremony.

One moment the kitchen is ordinary. The next, the eastern wall is gone. Dissolved. Where plaster and window frame stood a moment ago, there is light. Not warm, not cold. Something older than temperature.

The light has depth and texture and presence, and it presses into the room with the patient, enormous weight of a thing that has been waiting since the night Severin died and is finished waiting.

The air vibrates. The coffee mugs on the counter rattle against each other. The floor beneath my bare feet hums as though the foundation has become a tuning fork struck by something too large to see.

Severin's hand drops from my shoulder. His body turns toward the light with the involuntary precision of a compass finding north. I watch his face and see the moment he recognizes it: the Gate he refused at the moment of his death, offered again.

"It's the same," he says. His voice is barely audible over the hum. "The same offer. Rest. Crossing. An end."

The curse breaks. I feel it happen. A tension I didn't know the room was holding releases all at once, like a wire snapping, and the silence that follows is the loudest sound I've ever heard.

Severin staggers. His hand catches the counter. His fingers grip the edge, and for one terrible second I think the release will take him the way the sunrise pull used to.

It doesn't. He stays. The curse is broken, and he's still standing beside me with the Gate blazing where the eastern wall used to be.

His eyes are wet. His voice breaks on my name: "Ashley. Don't follow me."

He steps into the light. His body begins to dissolve at the edges, silvering, becoming less solid with every inch he moves.

I catch his hand before the Gate takes it.

His fingers close involuntarily around mine, and the dissolution slows but doesn't stop. His outline flickers, fighting to hold.

He feels it, too. I can see the recognition cross his face, the instant understanding that my hand is the only thing between him and coming apart.

"No." He pulls against me. "Let go. Ashley, let go."

"No. I may die. I may end up wherever Eliza went. This may be my end in this realm, but I am not letting go. Whatever happens beyond that Gate, you won't face it without me."

My fingers lock between his. "I'm not the debt, Severin. I'm the anchor."

He tries everything. He pulls. He commands. He gives me a direct order in the voice that has buckled my knees and made me gasp and bent me to his will in every room of this cottage: "Let go of my hand."

I hold on tighter.