Page 50 of Ghoul Me, Maybe
I bite my lip. “Elias?—”
“But he didn’t,” he says, barely louder than a breath. “He kept me alive. Even when it meant lying to you. To everyone. Because he couldn’t kill me. Because I wasn’t justa relic.I washis friend.”
The words hit me like a wave. Gentle. Crushing.
He swallows hard. “I never got to say goodbye.”
“You weren’t supposed to,” I whisper. “He didn’t want to lose you.”
“And he did it anyway. To protect you. Me.Bothof us.”
His jaw clenches. His hand trembles once, then stills.
I reach for it. He lets me take it.
“You matter, Elias,” I say. “You always did. And heknewthat.”
He looks at me then, raw and open and a little bit broken.
But there’s something else in his eyes, too.
Resolve.
A promise stitched from grief and fire and something that feels a lot like love.
He grips my hand tighter.
“Then we finish what he started.”
CHAPTER 19
ELIAS
Istart pulling away the next morning.
Not because I want to.
Because Ihaveto.
The letter changed everything. Jonas's final confession cracked something open inside me—something ugly and sharp and unrelenting. I’d spent decades thinking he abandoned me in that shipwreck like I was some cursed footnote in his adventure log.
But he didn’t. He protected me. At the cost of his life, his reputation, and the truth he owed his daughter.
And now I’m the thing dragging her through hell.
Sienna.
Too bright and stubborn. Tooaliveto be tethered to a ghost with a fading pulse and a shadow stitched out of fae experiments.
She deservesfreedom—not me.
So I stop showing up when she calls.
I disappear for hours, sometimes a full night.
When she wakes up screaming, I’m not there.
When Mira catches my arm and hisses “What the hell are you doing?”, I don’t answer.
