Page 169 of Requiem
Emotion tightens visibly in his throat before he continues.
“And you’ve changed too,” he says gently, reaching up to brush strands of dark hair behind my ear. “You’re stronger now. Calmer in some ways, and sadder in others.” His fingers linger against my cheekbone. “ButEmma…I swear to god, I’ve never loved you more than I do right now. And I…I have to say I really enjoy the version of you that openly says,'fuck.'”
I have to bite the inside of my cheek to keep from crying.
He exhales shakily before continuing, quieter now. “I think we’re always going to carry parts of this with us. Maybe there’ll always be nightmares. Maybe there’ll always be scars.” His gaze searches mine desperately. “But I will spend the rest of my life loving every version of you that exists after this. Every future part I haven’t even met yet.”
A tear slips down my cheek.
Jude’s expression breaks the moment he sees it. “I’ll protect you until my last breath,” he whispers fiercely. “I’ll love you until the end of my fucking days, Emma. Nothing that happened to us will ever change that.”
My heart feels too large for my chest.
And then his hand slips carefully into the pocket of his hoodie. For a moment, my brain doesn’t even process what’s happening. Not until I see the small black velvet box in his hands.
My breath catches embarrassingly loud.
Jude lets out a nervous laugh. “Okay, now I’m terrified.”
I stare at him in complete shock while the ocean wind whips softly through both of our hair. “You’re joking,” I whisper.
“No.” His voice cracks slightly. “No, baby. I’m serious.” He shifts beneath me carefully.
My jaw drops as I stare at that little box.
“I had this whole speech planned,” he says with another breathless laugh, rubbing nervously at the back of his neck. “But now I’m looking at you and I can barely fucking think.”
I’m crying openly now.
Jude opens the ring box with trembling fingers. And inside it rests the most beautiful ring I’ve ever seen. Delicate gold branches wrap around the band like twisting pieces of nature, cradling a large, pale oval diamond that catches moonlight like captured starlight. Tiny dark stones are embedded along the sides like fragments of the night sky itself. It almost reminds me of the night we first met.
It looks ethereal and precious and wild.
Like us.
“I had this made for you,” Jude says softly. “I stared up at the night sky so many times when I was in a bad place. I’d think of you, and how you were out there somewhere, existing beneath the same moon. The same sky.”
I laugh through tears, wiping them frantically from my cheeks.
His own eyes are glassy now too as he looks up at me.
“You saved my life long before Moscow,” he whispers. “You loved me when I hated myself. You stayed when I gave you every reason not to.” His voice shakes harder now. “The memory of how it felt to love you…it kept me here.”
I swallow hard, pain flickering through his expression and my own.
“And even after seeing the worst parts of me,” he continues. “The ugliest fucking parts…you still look at me like I’mworthloving.”
“You are,” I choke out immediately.
Emotion wrecks him completely for a second. Then he smiles. “Emma Easton,” he says softly, “will you marry me and let me love you for the rest of our lives?”
For a moment, I can only stare at him.
Memory after memory floods through me so quickly that I can barely separate one from the next. The first time he told me he loved me. The nights we spent tangled together talking about the future as if it was just guaranteed. The devastation of watching everything fall apart. The unbearable grief of losing him. The endless wondering. The endlesssearching.
The desperate hope that refused to die even when every logical part of me begged it to.
I remember Moscow, blood, andrealfear. I remember hospital lights and the sound of Jude’s voice breaking as he begged me to wake up, as though sheer force of will could keep me from slipping away from him forever.
