“Every gentleman should wear one,” Giuseppe Salvatore had said, grasping his younger son’s shoulder affectionately. “Not for aggression or fighting in the streets like a peasant—” Damon had felt his father’s sidelong gaze light upon him, and hadn’t that been as pointed as the dagger itself? “—but in case you need it. This blade is forged of the finest steel. It’s served me well.”
Stefan’s green eyes had shone as he looked up at their father. “Thank you, Father,” he’d said. “I’ll treasure it.”
Lounging elegantly beside them, left out of the moment between his father and little brother, Damon had touched his own quite beautiful bone-handled dagger, and his mouth had suddenly filled with bitterness.
He blinked the memory away. He’d wasted a lot of time resenting Stefan, his sweet-faced tagalong of a baby brother.
He was wasting time now. Damon’s slow heart thumped hard, the hollow ache in his chest increasing. His earnest, loving, irritating little brother was gone. Murdered. And Damon was cowering in the shadows? His face twisted in disgust. He could imagine what their father would have said about that.
In one smooth motion, he scooped up the dagger and headed for the door. He would keep his promise to Elena; he would be careful. But he wasn’t going to hide, not anymore. Damon was a Salvatore—the last of the Salvatores, now—and that meant he wasn’t afraid of anything.
It was time to take control of the fight. And the first thing he needed to do was to figure out where Jack might be hiding.
#TVD12TheLastSalvatore
The river lapped gently against the small stones on its bank, sunlight glinting off its ripples. Elena instinctively moved deeper into the shade of one of the moss-covered trees by the riverside.
The rectangle of earth that marked Stefan’s grave still stood out clearly. There hadn’t been time yet for the soil to harden, for the grass to grow over it and erase where they’d blanketed Stefan with dirt.
It hadn’t been long at all since Stefan had been alive.
A wave of anguish washed over Elena, and she dropped to her knees by the graveside. Reaching out, she placed a gentle hand on the recently turned earth.
She wanted to say something, to tell him how much she missed him, but when she opened her mouth, all that came out was his name. “Stefan,” she said miserably, her voice catching in her throat. “Oh, Stefan.”
Just a couple of weeks ago, they’d been together. Not long before that, he had surprised her with the key to her old home—he’d bought the house that she’d grown up in from her Aunt Judith. “We’re going to go everywhere,” he’d told her, his hands strong and steady around hers. “But we’ll always have this to come home to.”
It turned out always lasted less than a week after that. They hadn’t even had time to visit the house together. Elena dug her fingers deep into the dirt, trying not to think about Stefan’s body six feet below.
“Elena?”
Bonnie came forward from the trees. Elena pulled her hands away from Stefan’s grave. It seemed too intimate a gesture to let anyone see it, even Bonnie. “Thank you for coming,” she said quietly, rising to her feet.
“Of course.” Bonnie’s brown eyes were huge and anxious. She stepped forward and pulled Elena into a hug. “How are you doing? We’ve been—Zander and I wanted to know if there was any way we could help you.”
“Actually, I think there is,” Elena told her. She took Bonnie’s hand in her own and led her over to Stefan’s grave.
“I keep expecting him to show up,” Bonnie admitted, her eyes fixed on the grave. “It’s hard to believe he’s gone, y’know?”
No, Elena didn’t know. From the moment she woke up in the morning until she finally tossed and turned her way into a restless sleep, she couldn’t forget that Stefan was gone. His absence even followed her into her dreams. She didn’t say that, though, just moved a little closer to Bonnie, as if she could shelter in her friend’s warmth.
“Remember how you talked to me after I died?” Elena asked, squeezing Bonnie’s hand in hers.
Tearing her eyes away from the ground, Bonnie looked back up at Elena. “Oh, Elena, I don’t think—”
“You managed to bring Stefan to see me,” Elena went on doggedly, holding tight to her friend’s arm.
Bonnie tried to pull away. “But you weren’t supposed to be dead! Klaus had you in some kind of halfway place—you were a prisoner, not dead-dead.” She hesitated, and then asked in a low voice, “And do you remember how the Guardians said vampires just… end?”