Chapter Seventeen
Elena
“How?” The word ripped out of me in a raw, shredded panic.
“Why did this happen? How? Max, how?” My questions tumbled over each other, spilling faster than I could breathe.
“What happened to you? Why…” My voice collapsed in on itself as tears blurred everything.
“You can’t be…not you. You just can’t be, please… ”
Strong arms wrapped around me, and for the first time I felt something impossible: two griefs inside one body.
Damian’s warmth, and Max’s cold tremor. Damian held me the way someone holds the only thing left in their world, tight enough to anchor me, gentle enough not to break me, but the voice that whispered against my hair was not his, that belonged to Max.
“I’m sorry, Elena.” His tone splintered. “I’m so damn sorry.”
I sobbed into Damian’s chest, but it was Max’s emotions pouring through him, Max’s choke, his guilt, his trembling confession pressing against my shoulder.
When I looked up, one of Damian’s eyes dripped tears, warm and human.
The other? Pitch dark, unblinking with sorrow.
Max exhaled shakily, as though speaking felt like dragging a chain through his lungs.
“I died in my room,” he said. “The night before I was going to call you. I was finally ready to tell you everything. That I…” His voice faltered, cracked open, and crawled into something too vulnerable.
“That I loved you, Elena, I loved you so much…more than a brother should. That I couldn’t pretend anymore, I just wanted to fix things between us. ”
My knees buckled, and Damian…Max, pulled me closer.
“When I woke up,” he continued. “I was…I had…” I knew what he meant, and I didn’t want him to even say those words.
“I was standing next to my own body, I could see myself unmoving, lifeless. Then, he was there too, death, or something wearing the idea of him.” His pitch-black eye twitched, like remembering the deal scraped him from the inside.
“He offered me a choice, where I could fade, or I could find you. Help you to not blame yourself, help you find peace, move on. So, I agreed.”
My breath hitched because the story wasn’t done. I could feel it crawling toward the darker part.
“But,” he whispered. “I didn’t understand the price, didn’t see what else came with the deal.
Something attached itself to me, feeding on all the things I tried to bury.
The desire I shouldn’t have felt for you, the fantasies I hated myself for.
It magnified it, twisted it, and turned it into hunger.
” He shuddered through Damian’s bones. “Your fear…God, El, your fear was like a drug. I didn’t want it, but I couldn’t stop it either.
That thing inside me…” His voice lowered into something ashamed and monstrous.
“It wanted to ruin you, break you, in all the ways I never let myself imagine when I was alive.”
I covered my mouth as a sob tore its way out of me, shaking my whole body, but he held me tighter, the eye that wasn’t completely black looked at me, and I knew Damian was here too, because I wanted him to be.
“I brought you to this house,” he confessed softly.
“Not to hurt you, I swear. I was trying to find Damian. Because I knew he was the only one who could anchor me long enough for you to hear me, and you did. But the spell…” His shoulders tightened.
“It went wrong when he looked into the mirror, and…you know.”
“I don’t understand,” I cried. “If you’re dead…if you’ve been dead…how come no one called me? No one told me anything. Max, are you still alone?”
A broken laugh escaped him, a painful, hollow sound. “No, El. I’m at the morgue. The calls will come.” He swallowed hard. “Being in this house now…it places you outside the loop of life. Out of the world’s reach, everything that was supposed to happen waits until I leave.”
My heart split, bleeding memories. “Max…why did you disappear after our parents died? Why didn’t you stay? Why…?”
“I couldn’t face you,” he said, his voice cracking, then he sighed. “I am sorry I did, I truly am.”
I cried harder, clutching Damian’s shirt like it was Max’s soul in my hands. “And the calls,” I whispered. “How did you call me? How did you reach me?”
He inhaled shakily, and when he spoke again, it was more intimate than anything he’d admitted.
“The dagger. The one I bought you? I felt it when you tried to end it all, it was two days after I had died, before someone even found me. Your blood… mixed with the metal…it somehow opened a pathway. Just a few seconds at a time, but enough for my voice to slip through. I didn’t want you to hurt yourself, El, but it was the only crack in the world big enough to reach you. ”
My tears were relentless, falling so hard they dampened Damian’s shoulder. “I’m sorry,” I cried. “For everything, for not calling more, for being distant, for shutting you out.”
Max’s voice rose. “This was never your fault, none of it. Not Mom and Dad, not Damian, not me. Don’t you dare carry any of it on your shoulders.”
I pressed my forehead to his, feeling Damian’s warmth, Max’s sorrow, and the oppressive shadow of the thing that bound us all.
My entire world had tilted, cracked, and I had no idea how to breathe in this new darkness.
But Max held me, through Damian, and I held him…
them back as if love alone could pull him out of the grave.
My throat felt like it was closing. “What happens now?” I whispered. “What do I do? What do we do, Max? What happens to me and Damian now?” My voice shook, thin and desperate, clinging to answers that didn’t want to come.
He exhaled softly, a sound full of endings.
“I have to go, El.” The words trembled through Damian’s chest. “I’m not meant to stay like this.
But I’ll be around you. Always. Just not like this, not…
trapped between worlds.” His darker eye softened, if such a thing was possible.
“And if you ever truly need me, Damian can summon me again. But next time, I’ll be resting.
No darkness, no hunger, it’ll be just me. ”
My breath wavered into a sob. “I don’t want you to go,” I swallowed, “For all the right and wrong reasons.”
He brushed his thumb over my cheek…Damian’s thumb, Max’s tenderness, and a chuckle escaped his lips, sounding both like Max’s and Damian’s. “I know, troublemaker. But I have to, and before I go…” His voice lowered to something fragile. “Happy Birthday, Elena, I love you.”
Tears slid down my face, hot and unstoppable, and a laugh escaped my lips. “I love you too,” I whispered, the confession cracking open something old and bruised in me.
He closed his eyes, like those words were the one thing he’d waited his entire life and death to hear.
Then he turned his head toward Damian’s reflection in the mirror, speaking to the man beneath his own possession.
“I’m sorry,” Max murmured. “For forgetting after the accident. For leaving you and Mom behind. For not being there.”
Damian’s other eye, his human one, shimmered with tears. “I know,” he said, his voice steady despite the break in it. “I’m glad you lived, Tim, I’m glad you grew up and you had a family. So you don’t owe me an apology. I love you, and I’ve always known you’d come back when the time came.”
A trembling silence held the air for a heartbeat, then Max whispered, “Can I?”
Damian inhaled, long and deep, like he understood without words. “Yes,” he said quietly.
And then the change began.
The eyes that had belonged to Damian the entire time, slowly drowned in black, swallowed by Max’s presence, and in seconds, both eyes were now pitch dark, staring at me.
He turned fully toward me, and in the dark eyes that looked at me, I saw my brother, just him, and every memory we shared, every secret laugh, every fragment of childhood, every unspoken goodbye.
“This is it,” Max whispered. “My real farewell.” He leaned closer, grief trembling through every borrowed muscle. “Thank you, El…for loving me. For being the only light I ever had.”
And he kissed me.
Not with hunger, or the twisted possession from before, but with the aching tenderness of someone who had been carrying a lifetime of unsaid words.
Tears slid down his face, Damian’s face, but they were Max’s tears.
And I kissed him back, sobbing into the goodbye I never got to give him when he was alive.
The kiss was everything: heartbreak, love, guilt, childhood memories, the shadow of forbidden longing, the weight of every missed call, every lost year.
Then, in the middle of the kiss, something shifted, the metallic taste of sadness and longing faded, and it became softer, like a final breath.
A warmth dissolving into air, a soul loosening its hold, and I felt it.
The exact second Max slipped away, the exact instant his presence lifted out of Damian’s body like smoke rising toward somewhere I couldn’t follow.
I felt the emptiness he left behind, a hollow so sharp it nearly buckled my knees.
Damian’s mouth softened into his own again, gentle and aching, kissing me through the grief we both felt, through the loss that had settled like dust on our skin.
His arms tightened around me, holding me as if he knew I was both breaking and being held together by him.
Our tears mingled, in a kiss, as we both wept.
For Max, for Tim, and for the life he lost. For the love he never got to live, for the relief of knowing he was free, and for the guilt we both carried.
We kissed each other in the dark warmth of grief, heartbreak, loss, and the fragile beginning of something neither of us knew how to name yet.
I pressed my forehead to his, my tears falling onto his cheeks like they belonged together.
“I’m so sorry you found out like this,” I whispered, unsure why I apologized, maybe because I knew the pain he was feeling, I knew the words I wanted to hear, I knew, I felt it too. “I’m so sorry it had to be me.”
He shook his head, before pulling me closer with a desperation that made my chest ache. “You and me, troublemaker, you and me.”
I held Damian’s arms because being anything other than held felt impossible, and Damian held me like he was holding together the last unbroken parts of himself, our grief merging, folding, twisting into something neither of us had words for.
He kissed me, held me, cried with me, and grieved with me. Our souls mourned the same ghost, a man from two different lives, tangled together by death and the horrors that came with it. I kissed him, loving the man who had walked with death, and the man who had chosen to stay with me as I lived.
THE END.