Page 18 of The Little Shop of Grand Curiosities

I dug my nails into the soft, lace-trimmed cotton of my chemise, trying not to think too much that the Prince of Thaloria had just seen and touched my undergarments, and waited patiently for him to hand me the rest.

“Come on, I’m freezing here,” I grumbled, shifting my weight from my heels to my toes to produce some heat. Oh, how I missed my lovely, clean,warmShop now, with its tireless fire and cozy armchairs. I needed socks and a steaming cup of tea. And a fuzzy blanket. And a good book that preferably had nothing to do with handsome, albeit insufferable princes. “Apollo, where is the rest?”

“I gave you your chemise. How many more clothes do you need for sleep?”

Well, nothing else, obviously, but it was already enough that I was sharing a roomanda bed with this horrible man. I wasn’t about to do it wearing only a semi-diaphanous undergarment too.

I chewed at the corner of my lip. “It’s not… proper.”

“Darling,” he said, his voice frothing with sarcasm, “someone got stabbed in the kneecap downstairs, there is a couple fucking in the hall outside our door, and that creaking sound you keep hearing is probably the guy next door rubbing one out on his bed. You couldn’t make things moreimpropereven if you slept butt naked.”

“Rubbing… what out?” I stammered through a wave of confusion.

“Gods, help me,” groaned Apollo.

“Never mind,” I seethed as I slipped into my chemise before folding the towel on the footstool next to the tub.

Now that the sun had taken its rest, the room wallowed in comforting semi-darkness, the only source of light being the yellow-hued sconces on the walls, and so my garment didn’t appear too insubstantial to be considered scandalous. I just had to wake up before Apollo in the morning and get myself properly dressed.

Gods, I was being ridiculous, wasn’t I? But to my defense, even that one night I had spent with Ryker before he left for the East, we had made love late at night in his warm, lightless bedroom, and after we were done, we had fumbled clumsily for our clothes in the dark. So I wasn’t exactly used to anyone seeing me like this, let alone a complete stranger.

I sucked in a breath, balled my fingers into fists, and walked away from the partition.

Apollo was sitting on the bed with his neck stretched all the way back and a bloodied cloth pressed to his nose.

All my silly consternation dissipated, and a genuine sense of worry drilled through my bones as I reeled across the room. “For the love of Estia, what happened to you?”

I crouched over him, trying to check the state of his face behind the cloth, but he wasn’t feeling particularly cooperative.

“I fell,” he rasped.

“You fell?”

“On the stairs.”

I eyed in suspicion his black eye, broken nose, and the two ceramic bowls of food resting on the nightstand. “Yet the bowls didn’t break and the soup didn’t spill?” I deadpanned, my gaze trailing to the red and torn skin of his knuckles. “And let me guess, you fell knuckles first.”

Apollo sighed, straightened his head, and crumbled the dirty cloth in his fist. It was an infinitesimal movement, but I was actually able toseethe bone at the bridge of his nose as it snapped back into place.

Gods, he really was unbreakable.

“What do you want me to say, Nepheli? That I got into a stupid fight with the stupid wanker from earlier?” he gritted out, his eyes averted from me. I debated whether he was simply uncomfortable admitting this, or if he was being courteous for once, considering my half-undressed state.

My brows shot up to my hairline. “You did?”

His throat bobbed. “It wasn’t right. What he said to you. How he looked at you. It wasn’t right.”

“I didn’t know heartless people could tell right from wrong.” This I didn’t say with any spite or resentment but with sincere curiosity. It was impossible not to be curious while standing in front of a corporeal marvel of magic. He washealingright before my eyes, and not the way a normal person would heal—a tender bruise shifting from mean reds to cold purples and sickly greens. No. Apollo was healing in reverse, his very existence transcending the restraints of time.

“My moral compass works perfectly fine,” he deadpanned. “I just forget to look at it sometimes.”

“Is it hard for you?” I asked a bit more gently, trying to show him some understanding. “To be without your heart?”

His eyes snapped at mine, cold and inscrutable like the night sky. “The heart is an unwilling lover of the body, darling. It never wants what it’s supposed to want. It never sits and listens. It never asks you for permission. It just breaks and craves until you go mad trying to appease it. I’m better off without it,” he claimed as he raised his now-healed hand to me. “And being indestructible also has its benefits, don’t you think?”

I gaped at him, astonished at this pessimistic take on being human. What was a human without their heart, anyway? Without their ability to love and be loved? Oftentimes—usually after reading something particularly romantic—I asked myself this one question:Are we human because we fall in love or do we fall in love because we are human?Because that was how inseparable love and humanity were in my mind; one could not exist without the other. My only dilemma was whether love was our nature or our purpose.

And now here Apollo was—heartless, loveless, and perfectly human.

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