Where the Light No Longer Follows (Blue Fairytales, #3)

by Wendy Heiss

To everyone whose mind is like a sea that has tried to drown them.

Death spared nothing. Everything had an expiration date as long as he exited.

“How can you always make me feel like the bad guy?”

“You’ve never been the good guy, Gabriel.”

So let's give the bad guy a good ending?

After so long in her duty as a Reaper, Silene knew for certain that if love was all it took to save someone, they’d all be eternal.

It was since then she knew men were not beyond desecrating graves, that they were not even trusted with the dead. For in their hands, she’d always been a corpse, and they still had violated her.

Fuck, I'm disgusted

“What can I say? I like sad, pretty girls who look at me like they wish nothing more but to bury my existence six feet under.”

A curse she had lived through the past five hundred years for she had taken what was not hers to take—two lives.

“He won’t harm you,” Azriel assured. “Never. And you know that, too, Silene.”

Gabriel wondered—he wondered if she’d always sensed him, if she knew he’d always been watching her for years, for hundreds of them.

Gabriel was afraid—he was afraid to love his brother properly.

“To keep living is a burden when you find no meaning in it, to keep watching years go by as you rot away body and soul with the only thing that could hurt you intact all the way through. If I’d lost my mind, it might have been easier. It would have been a kindness, you know, for you to have granted me that at least.”

Gabriel had not once kneeled before anything or anyone, king nor queen, God or Goddess, but for whatever he’d done to deserve her hate, he wanted to kneel before her and beg.

“I don’t hate you, Gabriel. I just don’t like you.”

He wanted to remember her. Everything about her. He wanted everything about her engraved on his skin, for the ink to take root on his bones, for them to feed into his marrow.

“I wonder,” he said, watching her chest rise and fall faster and faster the longer he remained there so closely to her. “I wonder how long you have known that I watch you, too.”

“Sweet dreams, my ruin,” he murmured to the wind.

“You have a cat?” “He’s more of a deity, really, considering he makes me clean his shit and fan him and feed him.”

“Someone has to still have faith in them.” A long sigh left her lips. “Can’t even begin to fathom such a terrible burden,” she said quietly.

“Can I go with him?” He looked the most taken aback she’d ever seen him be. “Why are you asking me?”

Another day where he would get the chance to finally confess the truth. He had to. It was bound to come out at some point anyway.

What truth??? What do you mean Gabriel???

“You have a perfect back,” she said with an unusual skip in her words, “to stick a knife in it.” “Don’t flirt with me, Silene.”

“What am I to do with a heart I cannot use to love her, Silene?”

“Any other request, my great misfortune, my beautiful demise?” he asked, no longer holding back his grin. “Or can I have you for another day?”

“Deny me, my ruination,” he called as she stepped into the boat over Lethe. “It makes begging all the more enjoyable.”

“I hate that I have to look up at you every time I do so,” she lied. He stepped close to her, almost making her drop from her chair again when he got down to his knees right there at her feet. “Now talk to me.”

“Resorting to weaponry. Very unfair of you, my pretty ruin.” Frustrated breaths entered Silene’s lungs. “Don’t call me that.” “As you wish, my beautiful damnation.”

“You’re so beautiful, Silene. I wanted someone to think you’re mine. Anyone. Even if only briefly.”

“You’re the only thing that doesn’t die by my touch,” she said. He lifted a hand, letting the cast of its shadow graze hers, the tips of their fingers meeting on the stone. “And you’re the only thing that dies by mine.”

He only raised his head when she carefully and very gently brushed her fingers against his hair. It was a brief, tentative touch, but he looked at her as if he’d found salvation.

“If I could steal anything—anything at all,” he breathed, “I’d steal just a kiss from your lips.” Harsh wind swept across the hill as she sucked in a breath before saying, “I would have given it to you.”

“You’re perfect. How can you fit so perfectly in my hold yet be the only thing I can’t hold onto forever? How can you be made for me so perfectly yet be the one thing I cannot have?

“Please,” she begged between kisses, as pressure built up down her spine and at her core. “Don’t beg me, my ruin. Order me. Tell me what you need.” “You.”

That their love also bore fruit. A child so loved by the both of them.

But tales are kind. So kind. And Fates were not.