The air feels heavy in my lungs. It always does whenever I'm standing here, reading those words.

'The love of my life. My husband. My savior. My friend. The brightest star in the sky that ever was and ever will be.'

The anonymous tombstone looks as good as new. Its white marble shows signs of having been recently polished and the words repainted in gold. At the horizon, the setting sun fills the sky with hues of purple, orange, and red against the bright blue backdrop and the thick, white clouds overhead. It spills onto the tombstone, rendering it slightly pink, like the color of his wings when he'd stretched them out in the sun just before it set. Marcus loved those hours. He used to fly out to places where he could be alone, to watch the day bleed into nightfall, painting the sky blood-red as it did.

Where we could be alone, I correct myself. I was the only one he'd ever brought along with him. I'd always been the only one he'd confided with during those hours when he needed to. He would tell me his dreams, his fears, his ambitions, the girls he had his eyes on, the boys who'd gotten on his nerves. All the while I would sit there listening to him talk about these things I knew he would never tell anyone else. Marcus was a warm, friendly person to those who knew him, but he'd never let anyone see his weakness or his scars but me.

'You're the one person he treasured the most, perhaps even more than me.'

There was a hint of bitterness in those words, and I have a feeling there were things he'd told me but not Amelia. I suppose any man would keep some of his weaknesses from his wife, to make sure she feels safe and protected. With me, however, Marcus had always laid his heart bare, and by the time I'd left the Southwood, we were beyond keeping secrets from each other. I suppose when you've spent every hour of your hundred-year childhood growing up with someone, there's not much left for you to hide. Marcus knew my every dirty little secret and all the shameful things in my life, and I knew all of his.

I was the one thing he'd treasured the most. I know it as well as Amelia, without needing to be told. They say it's a mother's job to treasure her child above all else - a mother I didn't have. It's an absence in my life that Marcus had occupied for almost three hundred years. An occupation that has now disappeared into thin air all at once, leaving a hole so large in my existence that I have no idea how to fill again.

"You fucking bastard," I swear as I cover my eyes and the tears that begin to pool in them. I want him to hear it. I want to grab his collar and shake him and yell at him for having taken up space in every inch, every corner of my life and then leaving me here.

"You are the only one I know who swears at a dead person."

I suck in a breath at that voice and blink away the wetness in my eyes before I turn to look. There, ten discreet steps from me, Veronica stands in her black leather pants and jacket, holding what looks like dried up flowers and some torn, dirty ribbons in her hand. I curse myself inwardly at how far I'd let my guard down for her to sneak up on me unaware, but then I also remember who she is. She's been trained for this and has succeeded in capturing too many vampires than a single human should have been able to.

"What are you doing here?" I frown openly at her. She's the last person I expect to see anywhere near Marcus' grave, and also the last person I want to see given my mood right now.

"That's my question," she snaps angrily at me. "What's a vampire doing in the middle of a human's cemetery?"

If she thinks I'm going to explain myself to her, she has another thing coming. "It's none of your business," I tell her, turning away as I speak, getting ready to teleport out of there before she tugs on the bond and ruins my mood even further. I don't have the patience to play her games today. Definitely not right now.

And she does tug on it, but with something else I didn't expect. Something close to regret, perhaps even an apology.

"You're not the only one who's lost somebody, you know," she says, looking out into the horizon where the sun is about to disappear behind the hill. "Today is the tenth anniversary of my family's death. If you feel I've intruded, it wasn't intentional." A gush of wind blows towards us from behind, and she reaches a hand to tug back a loose strand of her golden brown hair behind her ear. I wonder sometimes if she likes having her ponytail a bit loose, or if she simply can't bother to tie it up neatly.

"There's a bunch of kids heading this way," she says. "I thought you might appreciate the warning."

I turn to the direction of the sound I've just heard - the sound I should have heard a long time ago but didn't. They would have surprised me if she hadn't interrupted my thoughts. Have I been so out of my elements just now that I didn't hear a single thing in my surroundings?

The grimace on my face must have been pretty forward because Veronica stops tugging on my bond immediately and makes a move to turn away. "You don't have to go," she says, more politely than meaning to spite. "I'm leaving anyway."

I realize then that she's been meaning to save me from being exposed to those kids, as opposed to trying to taunt me with whatever she's seen of my vulnerability just now. Through the bond, I can sense the melancholy in her mood today, mixed with an unnerving amount of anger, pain, and most of all, regrets.

The way I'm feeling now.

It suddenly occurs to me, that perhaps it's not only my emotions that I've been feeling. Maybe a lot of what made me dream about Marcus, what made me so angry at the meeting, and what made me decide to come here was because I felt her emotions through the bond. I look at her, and the way she answers my gaze with her direct, unwavering brown eyes makes something crystal clear to me.

We share an understanding in this, if nothing else, with or without my blood running in her veins. We share a loss that takes away all the possibilities of moving on or of letting go, which is why I'm doing this, why she's standing here, talking to me when we should have never met at all.

I draw a breath to the tightness in my chest, to the invisible hand that's closing forcefully around my heart, as an awareness hits me and hits me hard it nearly knocks me off my feet.

An awareness, that if there is a person alive who might come close to understanding how I feel, it's Veronica.