Chapter 22
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Sidney found Virtue in his room.
Or rather, in what the library had decided his room should look like. Because she was pretty damn sure he wasn’t supposed to have a “room.”
It was all golden light and open windows, because of course it was.
A meadow stretched impossibly beyond the glass—rolling green hills under a sky so blue and cloudless it looked like it had been painted by someone who had never experienced weather.
A warm breeze carried the scent of cut grass and wildflowers.
It was the most aggressively heroic space she’d ever seen in her life.
Virtue was sitting on the edge of a wooden bed frame with a simple white sheet.
No silk. No velvet. No Golden Hero trappings.
Just clean linen and sunlight. He was sitting with his elbows on his knees, staring at his hands.
Somehow, he looked perfectly like he belonged there in his white suit, and yet he looked utterly out of place at the same time.
He looked up when she opened the door. Smiled. The smile did something horrible to her heart that she was going to process later, or never. Probably never.
“Hey.” She leaned against the doorframe because her legs had decided, traitorously, that now was a great time to stop working properly.
“Hey.”
She looked at the meadow beyond the window. “Does it go anywhere?”
“No.” He followed her gaze. “It’s just a view. Something the story thought I’d want to look at.”
“Is it wrong?”
He considered this. “No. It’s not wrong.”
She crossed the room and sat down beside him on the bed. Not close enough to touch. Close enough to feel the warmth of him, the way she always could—like sitting near a fire that had been banked for the night but hadn’t quite gone out.
They sat like that for a while. Two people in a room that smelled like summer in a place that had no seasons.
“Sasha’s going to use the spell,” Sidney said.
“I know.”
“She’s going to destroy the book.”
“I know.”
“And then we go home.”
Virtue didn’t say I know a third time. He just looked at his hands. They were big hands. Strong hands. A Hero’s hands. The kind of hands that caught falling people and held swords and cradled someone’s face in the dark when they were afraid.
She hated this.
She hated every single motherfucking second of this.
“Will I ever see you again?” The question came out raw and artless, with none of the strength she usually wrapped around the squishy bits of herself. No snark. No sass. No well, this is awkward or let’s not make this weird. Just the question, sitting between them like an open wound.
Virtue lifted his gaze to hers.
His eyes were gold. Not metaphorically—actually, genuinely gold, in a way that no human eyes had ever been. She’d gotten so used to it that she sometimes forgot how impossible it was. How impossible he was.
“You’ll survive,” he said. “You’ll go home. Back to your life. Your apartment. Your job. The world will keep turning the way it always has, and you’ll exist in it the way you always have.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“I know.” His voice was gentle. It was always gentle. That was the thing about Virtue that undid her every time—the relentless, infuriating, heartbreaking gentleness. “You asked if you’d see me again. And the answer is…yes. In a way.”
She waited.
“I’ll be the hero in every story you ever read.” He smiled, and it was the saddest thing she’d ever seen on a face that handsome. “Every book you open. Every movie you watch. Every tale where someone stands between the darkness and the people they love. That’s me. That’s always been me.”
“That’s not the same thing.” Her voice came out sharper than she intended.
“No. It isn’t.”
“Will you know me? Will I get to see you? This version of you? Will we ever—talk? Touch—will I—” She felt the crack forming in her voice and let it form, because what was the point of pretending anymore?
What was the goddamn point? “When you reform, and Vile reforms, and you find the next pair of idiots to drag into this mess. Will you remember any of this?”
The silence that followed was longer than any silence had a right to be in a room full of sunlight.
“No.”
One word. Delivered with the precision of someone who had spent eternity learning how to be honest, even when honesty was the cruelest option available.
“I won’t remember you, Sidney. I won’t remember your name, or your face, or the way you laugh, or the fact that you swear more than any person I’ve ever met across a hundred thousand lifetimes.
” Something in his expression shifted, and for a moment, the hero looked very human.
Very tired. “That’s how it works. Heroes fall in love in every story.
And we keep that love at the end of every story.
And we do it again the next time, without ever knowing we’ve done it before. ”
Sidney stared at him.
“That’s the cruelest thing I’ve ever heard.” She had to pause to swallow the thing in her throat that was threatening to turn into a sob. “And I’ve been murdered by a train.”
He let out a sound that might have been a laugh in a room where things were less broken. “It isn’t cruel. Not for me.”
“How can you possibly say that?”
“Because for me, it’s a happy thing. It’s better than losing what I’ve had.
” He turned to face her fully, and his expression was so open, so entirely undefended, that she had to look away for a second before she could look back.
“It’s never cruel to be in love, Sidney.
Not when you know you’ll always be loved.
That’s the gift of being the hero. Every story, someone will love me. Every time, it will feel just as real.”
He paused. “The tragedy isn’t mine.” His voice dropped.
“It’s the villain’s. Every person who ever looked at him with something other than fear—and he can count those on one hand.
He will carry the knowledge of what he’ll never have for the rest of forever.
Sometimes…I wonder if that isn’t what makes him what he is. ”
The words settled over Sidney like a cold sheet.
Because she understood, suddenly and completely, what Virtue was telling her.
He wasn’t just explaining the mechanics of his own amnesia.
He was telling her about his brother. About what Sasha was walking into.
About the real cost of loving something that existed on the wrong side of every story ever told.
“He’ll remember Sasha.” It wasn’t a question.
“Forever.”
“And she’ll go home and he’ll just…sit here. In this library. Knowing.”
“Yes.”
“Fuck. Just…fuck.” She pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes.
They were quiet for a long time.
The meadow beyond the window rippled in a breeze that carried no sound. The sunlight didn’t move. Nothing changed. It was a painting pretending to be a place, and they both knew it, and neither of them cared.
“I’m going to kiss you,” Sidney said. “And you’re going to let me. And we’re not going to talk about it afterward.”
“Sidney—”
“Shut up.”
She turned, took his face in both hands—his jaw rough under her palms, because the story apparently thought heroes needed stubble—and kissed him.
It was slow. Unhurried. There was no soundtrack swelling in the background, no rain falling in cinematic slow motion, no dramatic wind tugging at their clothes. Just her mouth against his, and the taste of something she couldn’t name but would spend the rest of her life trying to describe.
His arms circled her. Not desperately. Not with the urgency of a man who was afraid of losing something. With the steadiness of someone who had been holding people up their entire existence and knew exactly how to do it.
She pulled back. Just enough to see his face.
“You’re going to forget this,” she whispered.
“Yes.”
“I won’t.” Her voice cracked on the second word and she let it, because fuck it, they were past the part where she pretended to be tough. “I won’t ever forget this. Any of it. And I need you to know that even if you don’t remember me, I’ll remember you. I’ll remember all of it.”
His thumb traced the line of her jaw. The touch was feather-light. Reverent, in the way that heroes were reverent—with everything they had.
“Somewhere,” she said, and her voice was barely holding together at this point, “in some story, I hope there’s a version of you that gets to keep what he loves.”
Virtue looked at her for a long moment. His gold eyes were bright in a way that had nothing to do with the light.
“There is,” he said. “This one. Right here. Right now.”
Sidney closed her eyes.
She didn’t cry. She wanted to. God, she wanted to.
But some things were too big for tears, and this was one of them.
This was the kind of grief that lived underneath the surface and stayed there, quiet and permanent.
It was a grief that she’d carry like a rock in her pocket the rest of her life.
Just so she could touch it on bad days and remind herself it had been real.
She leaned her forehead against his.
They stayed like that until the light in the window started to dim, which made no sense because it was a fake sun in a fake meadow in a fake room, but the story understood what was happening, and it was kind enough to give them a sunset.
It’d be enough, she supposed.
Because it was all they were going to get.
Sasha was avoiding Vile.
This was, she recognized, approximately as effective as a fish trying to avoid water. He was the library. The library was him. At least this part of it, anyway.
Every shadow in every corner, every creak of every shelf, every breath of air that moved through the aisles that went on forever—it was all him, in some way she couldn’t fully articulate and didn’t want to.
But she was trying.