A/N: The final installment to the angsty Larten/Arra sequence comprised of Love Like Yours, Hushed Murmurations and Carry Me, Marry Me, Bury Me. Also, thank you to SweetLittleOldLady and blood red youth for your lovely comments and support.

In late mornings after long nights – when he finally gets to retire to his coffin – he sometimes feels her pressed against him as she was at the end. Her body heavy in his arms, head to his chest. It has been two years and he can still smell the sweat and the blood, feel her forehead under his lips.

Even as her breath stalled in her throat he could not help the glimmer of hope that she had held on this long. (No way was she letting herself slip away without a fight. She was never that type of person.)

He closes his eyes and sees hers, shining with pain and involuntary tears, pleading with him not to loosen his grip on her though she would never speak such words.

Arra. Dear Arra. He did wrong by her while they were mates, being too devoted to a fruitless vengeance mission to love her as he should. Later, after everything with Wester, when he had re-evaluated himself in the monastery, it struck him that while he still loved Alicia – and always would – he loved Arra too. He was simply not ready to find her again, and did not feel worthy of mating with her once more.

(He wishes now, sometimes, in these hours when the sun is high outside, that he had returned to the clan sooner, and made amends with her while there was still time for them.)

Sometimes, after lying awake for what feels like hours, heart heavy with memories of her, he dozes off into sleep and troubled dreams, and seems to feel her arms around him, soothing and gentle, as he was holding her.

(She held him like that, once, as his body burned with fever after the vampaneze whose nails cut deep enough to almost slash his stomach open. She held him, and talked until her voice cracked, though if he ever asked she would have denied it. His flesh remembers what his brain has forgotten.)

When he awakes on nights after that type of sleep, his face is raw and stiff, burning with an itch from the now-dried tears that he cried into his pillow, jaw aching from biting down to stifle his screams.

(Darren seems oblivious to it, for which he is grateful, though he suspects that Seba has guessed and simply never mentioned it. His former mentor may be well on in years, but that does not mean he has lost any of his sharpness.)

There is one simple question with a complex answer that pulls at him on those evenings, and which he supposes always will, for however long he can still remember her dying body in his arms.

Why could we not have had another chance?