PERSEFONE POV
I shouldn’t have eaten.
My stomach turned upside down the second Aiden showed us the vial. One moment I was still in the aftershock of Keres’s mouth on mine, of his tattoo beneath my lips, of the strange impossible warmth of the four of us in my winter garden like we were not all disasters pretending to be people. The next, there was glass in Aiden’s hand, damp soil under his nails, and that look in his eyes.
Bile rose so fast I had to swallow twice to keep it down.
But then I saw him.
Aiden was slipping away from me, not in the loud, obvious way Keres might have, not with a snarl or a curse or a room full of broken things. Aiden disappeared quietly. His face went still, his breathing changed, and something behind his eyes moved somewhere I could not reach unless I forc
