Epilogue
After everyone had retired for the evening, I found I couldn’t sit still. Every muscle in my body buzzed like I was stuck in fight-or-flight.
The flat felt wrong without him. Every corner held echoes of Kian.
His coffee mug still sat in the sink, his jacket draped over the chair.
The book he’d been reading was left on the side table.
I made myself busy. I folded blankets and sat on the floor while the dogs leaned against me, their warm bodies offering comfort as though they needed it as much as I did.
Duska whined, nudging my hand with her nose. Vex pressed her face into my lap, and Bran settled his massive head on my shoulder.
“He’s coming back,” I whispered to them, voice cracking. “He has to come back.”
The tether in my chest pulsed—still connected, but stretched thin. I pressed my hand over my heart, trying to feel him through it.
Hold on. Please hold on. I’m coming for you.
Eventually, exhaustion won. I curled up on the couch, and the dogs pressed against me. I let my eyes close.
I was running.
The hallways stretched endlessly before me, sterile white walls bleeding into shadow. Fluorescent lights flickered overhead. My bare feet slapped against cold linoleum.
“Melanie.”
Kian’s voice.
My heart lurched, and I ran faster, following the sound. I could feel him, that golden thread pulling taut with urgency and pain.
“Kian!” I screamed. “Where are you?”
“Here,” he called back, pain threading through every syllable. “I’m here—”
I rounded the corner and skidded to a stop. Another hallway. Doors lined both sides, each one closed, each marked with numbers that shifted and changed.
The realization hit me. Nineteen doors. Nineteen lifetimes. Years I’ve died.
“Kian!” I tried the first door. Locked. The second. Locked. My hands were shaking as I moved faster, yanking on handle after handle. “Talk to me!”
“Melanie, please—” His voice was weaker now, fading. “I can’t—”
“No!” I slammed my fist against a door, and it swung open.
The gallows glared at me, the noose hanging from the beam. Around my neck—Marion’s neck—the rope bit deep, choking. My feet dangled. I couldn’t breathe. I shrieked, flying back into the hall.
The door slammed shut.
“You’re getting warmer.”
I spun around. Cyrus stood at the end of the hallway, hands clasped behind his back, his expression pleasant.
“Where is he?” I snarled, power crackling beneath my skin. Vines began to crawl up the walls.
He smiled. “Close. Very close. Can’t you hear him?”
I strained, listening. And then I heard a wet, gasping breath. A moan of pain.
“Kian!” I lurched toward the sound, but Cyrus appeared in front of me.
“He’s been calling for you,” Cyrus said. “For hours. Days, perhaps. But you can’t seem to reach him, can you?”
“Get out of my way.” My voice shook with fury.
“Or what?” He stepped closer, and I realized I couldn’t move. My feet were rooted, vines wrapping around my ankles. My own power turned against me. “You can’t even find the right door.”
The hallway began to dissolve, and I heard Kian scream.
I jerked awake with a gasp.
The living room materialized around me. Duska lifted her head, whining softly. Vex sat up, alert. Bran remained still but tense.
The clock on the wall read 2:47 AM.
My face was wet with tears. My hands were clenched so tight my nails had drawn blood. My breath came in ragged gasps.
But the worst part was the tether.
Weak pulses in my chest, threaded through with real pain, not the phantom ache of a nightmare, but actual suffering bleeding through from wherever he was. He was hurting, right now, and I couldn’t reach him.
A sob tore from my throat. I pressed both hands over my mouth, but it came anyway.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered into the darkness. “I’m so sorry. I don’t know how to find you.”
Panic clawed at my chest.
What if I’m too late?
“I’m coming,” I pressed my hand to my chest. “I promise. Just hold on. Please, Kian, just hold on.”
I sat there for a long moment, willing my lungs to draw even breaths. I told myself panic wasn’t going to save him, and neither would blind desperation.
After a while, I finally stood on unsteady legs.
Sleep was impossible now. The restlessness returned, heightened by fear and fury.
The dogs followed me as I wandered. My feet carried me into his study almost on autopilot.
I’d been avoiding this room. It was too full of his presence, his scent, his organized chaos.
But tonight I needed to be close to something of his.
I told myself I was just going to straighten the stack of books on the desk. But my hands froze the second I saw it. An unmarked plain black leather journal sat in the center of his desk.
My breath caught.
The dogs settled around me; Duska at my feet, Vex pressed against my leg, and Bran’s massive head resting on the arm of the chair. I hesitated, fingers hovering over the leather.
Slowly, I picked it up. The leather was soft, worn smooth by his hands. I opened to the first page, and my breath left me in a rush.
For Melanie—
I promised I would tell you about all the lives we’ve lived, all the times I’ve found you and lost you and found you again. I’ve been putting this off, afraid the weight of it would be too much. Afraid you’d see all the ways I’ve failed you and decide I wasn’t worth the risk.
But you deserve to know. You deserve to understand who you were, who we were, across every lifetime. Not because the past defines you, but because it’s part of you. Part of us.
So here they are. Nineteen versions of you that I’ve loved. Nineteen times my heart has broken and been remade.
I hope, by the time you read this, I’ve found the courage to give it to you myself. But if you’re reading this alone, if something has happened to me, then please know this: every word is true. Every memory is precious. And in every single lifetime, loving you was the only thing that mattered.
I chose you anyway. Every time. I always will.
Yours across eternity,
Kian
The page blurred through my tears. My chest ached with love and grief tangled too tightly together.
He’d been writing this for me, planning to give it to me.
And now he was gone, and all I had were these words, these memories, this proof that I’d been loved across millennia. I turned the page with shaking hands.
Persephone, c. 1200 BCE (Ancient Greece)
She did not enter the Underworld like a prisoner, though I thought she would. She walked as if she had always belonged, as if the shadows bent for her, not me. And perhaps they did. Because the moment she smiled, the air changed.
I was the King of the Dead, the Judge of Shades, the silence in the dark. But she was spring-made flesh. She met my gaze and claimed me without a word, as though I had been hers since the beginning of time.
The shades adored her. Even the fiercest demons softened when she passed. The hounds rolled onto their backs like pups beneath her touch.
She brought sunlight where there had been only flame and starlight. She made gardens bloom in stone. She spoke to the dead with such kindness that they wept with joy.
She made me ache with a hunger I had thought belonged only to mortals. I had ruled for eons in silence, convinced love was for other gods. But Persephone laughed, and I understood devotion. She touched my hand, and I knew worship.
She was not my prisoner—she was my undoing. And in being undone, I found my salvation.
She ate the pomegranate seeds six months after her arrival. Not because I forced her, not because she was tricked, but because she wanted to. The seeds bound her soul to the Underworld, to me. We were tethered; two halves of one whole.
We had over a millennium. More than a thousand years of perfect, impossible happiness.
She transformed everything she touched—not just the realm, but me.
She became the Dread Queen in truth. Learned to command the dead, to wield the power of endings, to rule alongside me with grace and strength. We were partners. Equals.
And then Cyrus came.
She died in my arms. Her body turned to ash and scattered light, her soul ripped away to be reborn mortal. Powerless and doomed.
And I’ve spent three thousand years waiting. Three thousand years of watching her be reborn, finding her, loving her, and watching her die. Again. And again. And again.
More than a millennium together, and I’ve never stopped mourning it.
I couldn’t breathe. The weight of not just his loss, but the enormity of what they’d had, crashed over me.
More than a millennium together.
And Cyrus had destroyed it all in a single strike.
I pressed the journal to my chest, clutching it as if I could somehow reach through time and hold him. A fresh wave of tears came, but underneath it was something else.
Determination.
If he could endure three thousand years of watching me die, of finding me and losing me again, of never giving up hope, then I could do this. I could become what I needed to be and break this curse. I could save him.
I wiped my face and looked down at the journal still pressed against my heart.
There were more entries; so many more lives documented in these pages.
But I couldn’t read them all tonight. Not with the weight of what needed to be done pressing down on me.
I closed the journal and held it against my chest.
“I’ll read the rest,” I swore into the empty study. “I promise I’ll read every word.”
I moved back into Kian’s room, the dogs following. They jumped into bed with me. I hugged the journal close to my chest and curled up against Duska. Vex snuggled in the crook of my legs, and Bran was warm against my back.
I let exhaustion take me again. This time, I didn’t dream of hallways or blood or Cyrus’s mocking voice. I dreamed of the Underworld as it must have been three thousand years ago; alive with gardens and shadows and light, with a dark-haired god and a spring goddess who ruled together as equals.
I dreamed of what we’d been, and what we’d be again once I brought him home.