The Crown of Gilded Bones (Blood and..

My brows knitted. “All of that sounds incredibly sad and
also hopeful. I mean, that if your mother did love Malec, she
was still able to find love again. To open herself like that
once more. I don’t know…” I held the journal close to my
chest. “I don’t know if I could do that.”
“I would never give you a reason to, Poppy.”
My heart melted in my chest and then froze. But what if
I was immortal? It seemed utterly incomprehensible to think
that I would outlive Casteel, but we really had no idea what I
had Ascended into. And while it would take several lifetimes
for Casteel to begin even showing signs of aging, he would.
And I…I didn’t want to think about spending my future
without him, no matter how much of one we shared
together. There were the heartmate trials, but the gods
slept. There was also the Joining, but I had no idea if that
worked in the opposite direction, linking his lifespan to
mine.
And I didn’t even know why I was thinking about any of
this when we had no idea what I was or what kind of
lifespan I would even have. What had Casteel told me once
before?
Don’t borrow from tomorrow’s problems?
I needed to start living that way.
“But when Malik and I went to the caverns,” he
continued, thankfully unaware of where my thoughts had
gone, “we were able to pretend as if none of the
conversations happened. The heaviness and sadness didn’t
follow us there. Nothing outside of that place existed.”
“But you were young boys then.”
“That doesn’t matter. The feeling still remains, some
hundred years later,” he said, and my stomach dipped at
the reminder of how old he was—how old I would one day
become. “This bed—this room—can become our version of
the caverns. When we’re in here, nothing outside it matters.
This will be our peace. We deserve that, don’t we?”
My breath caught, and I nodded. “We do.”