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“Where?” I demanded.

He hesitated for a moment, then, “The thistle patch in the garden.”

I sobbed then, realizing he’d been bringing me the flowers that grew from his grave. I tore out of Kilmorran, shouldering open the door and rushing to the overrun herb garden by the side of the house. A few feet away there were a cluster of thistles pushing up from a patch of waist-high grass.

I sank to my knees, tearing through the weeds.

“You don’t need to do this,” he said quietly. “It’s okay.”

It wasn’t okay. It wasn’t. He’d died saving someone and his family couldn’t even be bothered—

I sobbed through my teeth as I brushed the dirt away, fingers scraped raw when I finally hit stone. The first rain drop fell against my cheek but I didn’t stop. Not until the weeds were clear and the slab of his grave came to the light.

I traced the letters in his name, heart shattering in my chest.

ROYAN JAMES WOLFE

DEPARTED THIS LIFE

THE TENTH OF MARCH, 1820.

AGED THIRTY YEARS.

MAY GOD KEEP HIM.

“Oh, my god,” I wheezed, eyes flooding with tears. “Oh, god.”

“I’ve accepted my death, Avery,” he repeated, “but you have not. It’s why—it’s why you can’t stay here with me. There is nothing to stay with.”

They were horrific, brutal words. I wanted to rage against him, tell him he was wrong, but the proof was right there, carved into the stone beneath my knees.

He was dead.

Royan was dead.

And it seemed too impossible to be true—that someone so charming, so charismatic, who made every room feel warmer by simply stepping inside it, was gone. The worst of it was I hadn’t known him then. I missed all those years, all those moments, because fate decided to separate us, to keep us so very far apart from each other.

I pressed my head to the stone and wept, trying to feel for him below the ground. I cried for the years I spent aching. The darkness and loneliness I lived inside of. For the hopelessness I felt, the loss of direction. The…aimlessness. The fear and exhaustion. For the light he’d walked me back to. The joy he brought. The friendship and laughter and warmth.

And the love.

Oh, god.

The love he gave me, that he brought me—it was enough to take my breath away. The rain fell harder, the agony of the storm mixing with my own.

I cried for what I was missing, what I would always be missing. No matter who I begged or pleaded with, no matter how many candles I lit or calls of his name I let spill from my mouth, I could never bridge this.

We were born in the wrong places, the wrong times.

I wanted to scream, to slam my fists against the stone until it broke.

Wolfe knelt before me, rain plinking right through him.

“I would keep you forever if I could,” he murmured. “I would build a life with you. Give you anything and everything you ever wanted. My name, my home, my love, my heart. Whatever you asked of me.”

I cried harder, forehead falling to his shoulder.

“But you needed to know, grá,” he whispered, lips right by my ear. “All we’ll have is these few days together. If you want to walk away—if you want to go—now is the time because once the sun sets tomorrow, I will come for you. Nothing on this earth could keep me away from you.”