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It is just another day. That is what Addie tells herself. It is just a day—like all the others—but of course, it is not. It is three hundred years since she was meant to be married—a future given against her will.
Three hundred years since she knelt in the woods, and summoned the darkness, and lost everything but freedom.
Wonders if they are like magnets, she and Luc. If they have circled each other for so long that now they share an orbit.
“You want me as a prize,” she says. “You want me as a meal, or a glass of wine. Just another thing to be consumed.”
“You are not capable of love because you cannot understand what it is to care for someone else more than yourself. If you loved me, you would have let me go by now.”
“You see only flaws and faults, weaknesses to be exploited. But humans are messy, Luc. That is the wonder of them. They live and love and make mistakes, and they feel so much. And maybe—maybe I am no longer one of them.”
Am I the devil or the darkness? he asked her once. Am I a monster or a god?
“Nothing is all good or all bad,” she says. “Life is so much messier than that.”
Were the instants of joy worth the stretches of sorrow? Were the moments of beauty worth the years of pain? And she turns her head, and looks at him, and says, “Always.”
That time always ends a second before you’re ready. That life is the minutes you want minus one.
“Do you know how you live three hundred years?” she says. And when he asks how, she smiles. “The same way you live one. A second at a time.”
It was messy. It was hard. It was wonderful, and strange, and frightening, and fragile—so fragile it hurt—and it was worth every single moment. She does not tell him any of that.
“Life can feel very long sometimes, but in the end, it goes so fast.”
She simply wants to live before she dies.
