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He couldn’t bring himself to kneel to hug her. He just curled his arms around the top of her head. Choked, “You’re gonna be fine. You’re going to be fine.”

If he got one wish in his life, he wanted it to be this.

Her head shook where her face was buried in his stomach. “Not without you. You’re supposed to be with us. Forever.”

Grief clogged his lungs, his heart barely beating.

“You need to go,” he forced himself to say, and he watched as Elena climbed into the van.

“Trevan, you lazy piece of shit. Get in this house.” His mother’s disgust soaked the air.

Exhaust puffed from the tailpipe of the van as it pulled from the curb.

His heart accelerating away from him.

He couldn’t stop his feet from moving. From running after it. Tears blurred his face as he pushed himself as hard as he could.

Begging with every ounce of his soul.

But they turned the corner and were gone.

TREVAN

SEVENTEEN YEARS OLD

Loneliness.

He’d never experienced anything like it. He hadn’t known just how much the Mercers had become his home.

His heart and the little hope that he possessed.

But he’d wrecked it.

He had gone to Christina and told her what Silas was doing. And she’d gone that night. Followed him and found her death.

It was his fault.

His fault.

Rationally, he knew it was Silas’s, too. Mostly his father’s and the bastards who had mowed both Christina and Silas down. Both left for dead, though Silas had somehow survived.

But Trevan had made the choice.

Had broken his oath.

Now he moaned with the consequences of it. Pain lancinating as if it were physical.

In the middle of the night, he stumbled into the kitchen.

Who knew there could be so much agony in the numbness.

In the void.

He pulled open the refrigerator. Bright light cut into the vapid darkness of the kitchen. The emptiness inside him howled, and he ached to fill it with something.

He pulled out the gallon of milk with a quarter of an inch floating at the bottom.

Lifted it and gulped it down. Fought the nausea. The dizziness. The pain.