I hold my hands up to him.

“I earned this. I did this. I deserve to be marked.”

“No.” He takes my hands in his. “You don’t.”

It’s useless to argue. I know what I’ve become inside. If he can’t see it now, it won’t take long before he does.

I don’t protest as he takes off my cloak and insists I strip down to my undertunic. He pulls off all but his pants, and I wince at the ugly purple and black bruises spreading like decaying blossoms across his chest. Then he lifts the leather pouch containing the dirt from my father’s grave over my head, sets it aside, and leads me into the lake.

I don’t want to let him wash my hands, but he pulls them beneath the water and carefully scrubs away the blood, the dirt, and the evidence of all that’s been.

The crimson has seeped beneath my skin, entered my veins, and become a part of what’s left of me. No amount of scrubbing can erase that.

“Yesterday, when the Cursed One came out of the ground, I said I loved you.”

“I’m not ready to talk about it.”

“Oh.”

He sounds hurt. I don’t want to hurt him. I just don’t know how to obliterate the silence consuming me and find anything that feels like hope.

He clears his throat. “I didn’t mean to … I guess I thought—”

“It’s fine.” From the corner of my eye, I see Quinn dive off a rock, slicing through the water with the barest hint of a splash.

“No, it’s not fine.”

I squint against the tiny pricks of light dancing over the surface of the water.

He sounds wounded. “I thought you’d at least be a little bit receptive.”

I can’t look at him. “I would’ve been. I was. Before.”

“Before? Before what?”

I whip my head back to face him. “Before everything! Before I saw Oliver get murdered right in front of me. Before I knew Dad was … gone. Before Melkin. Before I became this.” I gesture toward myself, wondering how he can think washing the blood off my hands makes it any less real.

He steps closer, his eyes glowing with fierce conviction. “You’re still the same beautiful, stubborn, strong, fascinating Rachel you were before any of that happened.”

My laugh sounds more like a sob, and I clamp my lips shut.

“Listen to me. I know it’s bad for you. I see that. But shutting yourself off from something good because of all the bad is unfair. To both of us.” His cheeks darken, and his eyes slide away from mine. “Unless you don’t feel the same, and this is your way of trying to let me down easy, and I’ve just made a spectacular fool of myself.”

He lets go of my hands, cramming damp fingers through his dark blond hair, and doesn’t look at me. “I’ve just made a fool of myself, haven’t I?”

“No.”

“Yes, I have.” He steps back. “What is it about you that makes rational behavior so difficult for me? Never mind. Forget I asked that. You’re right. It’s fine.”

Hurt and embarrassment are written all over his face, and I realize the only one being a fool is me. He’s offering me the one thing of beauty I can still claim as my own. I have to cling to it if I ever want to find my way back to the girl I used to be. And it isn’t fair of me to deny him the truth just because I worry it means less coming from someone as broken as me.

“No, it isn’t. It isn’t fine at all,” I say.

“We can stop this conversation right now.”

“I don’t want to.”

His laugh is weary. “That makes one of us. At least now I know how you felt two years ago.”

“I can do it again.” The words are out before I give myself time to lose my nerve. I don’t know how to do this. Love is a piercing ache that refuses to slide into the silence. I’m grateful to hold on to something real, but I don’t know how to make him see it.

He stops backing away and looks at me. “Do what again?”

I mean to say something heartfelt and sincere like “give you my heart.” Something that will erase his fears and leave us with one perfect moment in the midst of everything.

Instead, I step toward him, catch my foot against a rock on the lake bottom, and trip. Crashing into his chest, I plunge us both beneath the surface.

The water is crisp on top and murky below, where our feet kick up eddies of sand and rock. He catches me, his hands wrapped around my arms, as we plummet toward the bottom. My hair floats out to surround him, and he stares at me while above us the sun pierces the surface with golden darts.

Maybe this is better than words. Maybe this is all I need to show him he didn’t offer his heart to me in vain.

He lets go, and I reach for him. Twining my fingers through his, I feel something soft warm the silence within me a little as he tangles his legs with mine until I can’t tell where one of us ends and the other begins.

But it isn’t enough. The ache within me pushes against my chest, tingles down my arms, and hurts the tips of my fingers. I need more. I need to disappear into what we are together.

I need him.

I pull him against me as we start floating back toward the surface, and he smiles.

We break the surface together, and the air feels alive in a way it didn’t before. He smoothes my hair out of my eyes, and I impatiently shove his hands out of my way so I can reach him.

“Kiss me,” I say, and I don’t even have time to blush at the audacity of my words before he slides a hand into the hair at the nape of my neck and tugs me toward him.