“Promise me we'll stay together, okay?" His eyes are once again the clear blue of a perfectly transparent pool. They are eyes to swim in, to float in, forever. "You and me.""I promise," I say.Behind us the door creaks open, and I turn around, expecting Raven, just as a voice cuts through the air: "Don't believe her.”

“Behind us the door creaks open, and I turn around, expecting Raven, just as a voice cuts through the air: “Don’t believe her.”The whole world closes around me, like an eyelid: For a moment, everything goes dark.I am falling. My ears are full of rushing; I have been sucked into a tunnel, a place of pressure and chaos. My head is about to explode.He looks different. He is much thinner, and a scar runs from his eyebrow all the way down to his jaw. On his neck, just behind his left ear, a smalltattooed number curves around the three-pronged scar that fooled me, for so long, into believing he was cured. His eyes—once a sweet, melted brown,like syrup—have hardened. Now they are stony, impenetrable.Only his hair is the same: that auburn crown, like leaves in autumn.Impossible. I close my eyes and reopen them: the boy from a dream, from a different lifetime. A boy brought back from the dead.Alex.”

“Don't stay away from me anymore."I stop myself, just barely, from telling him I won't. I can't promise that. Can't lie. He opens his eyes. Stares starkly, bleakly. "I need you.”

“Now for my pains, promise me-“And she hesitated.“What?” asked Marius.“Promise me!”“I promise you.”“Promise to kiss me on the forehead when I’m dead. I’ll feel it.”She let her head fall back on Marius’s knees and her eyelids closed. He thought the poor soul had gone. Eponine lay motionless, but just when Marius supposed her forever asleep, she slowly opened her eyes, revealing the somber depths of death, and said to him in an accent whose sweetness already seemed to come from another world, “And then, do you know, Monsieur Marius, I believe I was a little in love with you.”She tried to smile again and died.”

“Don't leave," I whispered, tightening my hold. "Never leave me again. Stay with me. Forever." The winter prince smiled, a small, easy smile, and lowered his lips to mine. "I promise.”

“I promise you forever," I vowed to him, staring into his green eyes. "Whatever that is. Whatever I can give you. You have all of it. All of me.""I promise you forever," he replied. "Whatever that is. Whatever I can give you. You have all of it. All of me.”