EMBER’S POV

I hate how close I am to him—close enough to taste his breath, close enough to count his eyelashes—yet how far away he seems. How far away we’d always be.

I want to scream in his face that I don’t care if he destroys me alongside himself. That I’d rather be infected with whatever madness runs in his veins than not have him at all.

But I also know how close that comes to losing myself to another man—right after Gale. Right after escaping the curse of loving the wrong person.

So despite the rupturing of my heart and my lungs and the very thing that attaches me...