It's been one long year for The Walking Dead stars who have had to keep the secret to the big season six cliffhanger death. But the cat is out of the bag finally; viewers now know whom Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) murdered. This is your spoiler warning!

Negan murdered not one, but two of your favorite zombie apocalypse survivors, sending Glenn (Steven Yeun) and Abraham (Michael Cudlitz) packing.  And they kept the secret about their exits for much longer than viewers realized, Cudlitz told us.

"It's been a long process," Cudlitz admitted to E! News. And he even had to keep the secret of his character's death from his costars because producers were unsure of when the deaths would actually be shown since they were figuring out how they could keep the big secret and tell the story of Negan's introduction. Keeping the secret wasn't difficult, Cudlitz said, but its impact on the rest of his life was a little more challenging.

"It's sort of like, what's the next step going to be so far as work? The next step going to be so far as moving on from the show? Is it going to happen come January of that year or are you going to have to wait another year before. It was a big deal," he said.

But he and Yeun were in it together. Cudlitz admitted he eventually told his wife…even if he wasn't technically allowed to do so.

"Probably, theoretically, like on paper, legally, no. There's no way. Like, ‘Honey, why are you home?' ‘Can't tell you.' There's no logic to that. People in the immediate circle knew," he said.

The Walking Dead


However, he kept the secret from his college-age kids until a few months ago when they came home for the summer. "I didn't want them to have to process it when they weren't home and then maybe slip up and tell their friends at school," he said. "I wanted them to be at home and be able to look them in the eye and explain what was going to happen and how important it was to keep the secret—like really important…"

But he didn't even get to tell him. A parting gift from the prop department, including boxes of cigars and Abraham's knife, did the job for him. "I showed my wife…and my son looks over and was like, ‘Going away present?'…He knew. He was like, ‘They don't do that, that's a bunch of money. That's a cool gift, they wouldn't do that unless you're going,'" Cudlitz said.

Watch the video above for more.

The Walking Dead airs Sundays, 9 p.m. on AMC.

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