Page 65 of The Little Shop of Grand Curiosities

“My ex-fiancee,” he wryly offered.

Everything tugged on my face. My eyes, my mouth, my brows were all twisted in a mask of pure shock. “You wereengaged?”

“Are you seriously so surprised that someone wanted to marry me?” he threw back the exact words I’d said to him in the cave last night. The recollection brought complicit smiles to our faces, and a hint of surprise, as if we couldn’t believe that in the briefness of our adventure, we had become two people with mutual memories to smile about.

He half-laughed, half-sighed. “Our relationship was protected from the public. That’s why you never read about it in your little gossip columns.”

“I do not read gossip columns!” I protested.

He playfully pinched my arm, his smoldering eyes falling on my lips. “You little liar.”

I prayed to the gods I didn’t blush like a lovestruck idiot, but I was beginning to fear that even the Celestials couldn’t do anything against this man’s charm.

“Verena and I were supposed to announce our engagement after I returned from university. Like every other Zayra before me, I was supposed to study political science in the East, finish my martial training, and tour the kingdom before getting Crowned at the age of twenty… then get married. My whole life was planned out. A perfect, shiny, fairytale life. So you can understand my shock when I returned home to find Verena in the arms of someone else. Finn. My oldest, dearest friend Finn.”

“What?”

Apollo laughed mirthlessly at my scandalized reaction, as cold and insouciant as ever. “Gods, I’m boring myself just telling you the story. I mean, the guy was writing me heartfelt letters while he was fucking the girl I loved under my own roof. It’s such a terrible cliche, isn’t it?”

“I don’t think it’s a cliche. I think it’s just terrible,” was all I managed to say around the boulder in my throat. I could not even begin to fathom what this kind of betrayal could do to a person. I imagined that the disillusionment alone had been horrific, but the heartbreak… the heartbreak must have been absolutely devastating.

“I thought it was terrible too,” he said dryly. “In fact, I thought I was heartbroken. In reality, I was just stupid. Stupid and young. And, I swear, time felt eternal back then. Time paused at that exact moment, and I wasn’t strong enough to endure its stillness.” His head lolled back, and his eyes drifted upward to the stone-beamed ceiling. “You know, people always talk about grief when someone dies, but no one ever talks about the grief you go through when adreamdies. I lost a lot of things that day. I lost my first love. I lost my best friend. I lost my dignity, my faith in people, my boyish innocence. But most of all, I lost the dream of the life I was supposed to have. This fairytale life in which I was someone good and honorable. Someone loved. I lost myself too, which, in the grand scheme of things, turned out to be the greatest loss of them all. And I wanted it to stop. The pain. The memories. The whispers of the court about my suddenmisbehavior.”

“The papers wrote about it too,” I muttered hoarsely. “How the Prince of Thaloria returned a new man from the East. They said you fell in with the wrong crowd.”

Apollo shrugged. “It’s probably true. But I hardly remember any of them. They weren’t my friends,” he scoffed. “After Verena, all I wanted was a distraction, so I surrounded myself with people who could offer me exactly that. And like I said, I was young and stupid.” His gaze turned bleary with remembrance. “One night, in a drunken spell, I ventured out into the city alone. Before I even realized what I was doing, I knocked on a Witch Shop’s door. It was closed, of course, but I knocked and knocked, and eventually, someone came downstairs and opened the shop. She must have been a hundred years old—the witch, I mean. I told her everything. I told her that I couldn’t stand my own damned self anymore and that I needed a spell, something,anythingto help me heal.” He turned to me, and his eyes hardened at the cruel, sharp blade of regret. “She told me to wait. Time would heal me, she said. But I didn’t listen. I told her that I would pay any price she would name if she made the pain stop, stop forever because I certainly didn’t want to feel like that ever again. She said the only way to avoid heartbreak is to no longer have a heart to break.”

“Oh, Apollo,” I whispered, finally beginning to understand. “You were willing. That’s why she was able to curse you.”

“She didn’t trick me. She warned me that it would be a curse. A very old one.” Apollo put a hand over his vacant chest, wrinkling his shirt in his fist. “She bound me with some spell, a chant in a strange, ancient language, and my chest ripped open, right before my eyes. She clawed the heart out of my body, and for the first time, I learned what it is to be animated but not alive. My heart—it was this tiny, tender thing, but aflame, with a strange opal light enveloping it. It was the curse—the spell she chanted was what encompassed it with that glowing shield. The very curse that made me undead was the one that kept my heart beating, keptmealive. I told you that the curse made me invincible, but that’s not the whole truth. Although my body is immune to death, my heart isn’t. If something happens to it in this vulnerable state, I will be able to feel it. And I will die, instantly.”

“So she put your heart in a box. To be safe,” I understood. “That’s what you’re looking for.”

Apollo nodded. “She said that if I changed my mind, I could always return to the shop where my heart would be safe, and she would put it back in my chest and I would be restored. For a fee, of course. And I agreed. In fact, Ibeggedfor it. I remember there was a voice inside my head screaming that I was about to make the worst mistake of my life. I didn’t listen then. But I understand now. There is no shortcut to healing. There is no magic spell that can rid you of all the ugly bits and leave you clean and whole and untouched. You have to feel it all. You have to feel until you’re raw. Until you break apart completely. Until you’re ready to start piecing yourself together again. The shape of you won’t be the same. Perhaps it will be sharper, more unrefined, but it will still be you. A different you, but you.”

As he said all this, I pictured everything in excruciating detail. Not only his terrible misfortune but beyond that, our separate lives, mine and his, converging on the same obscure point: destiny. The star we had in common, his mistake with the witch, my mistake with the stardust, the stray chance that he would walk into my Shop, that I would be here now listening to this impossible story. Life was so unbelievably strange sometimes. One moment you could find points of connection everywhere, then suddenly, all turned to chance, random decisions and random disasters, with you hovering over the edge of a vast uncertainty.

For the first time, I saw Apollo as he truly was, without the charm and aloofness and clever remarks. Just a person like I was, looking at all the great probabilities of life and not knowing what to do with them.

Under a surge of compassion, I slipped my hand over his. It was a simple touch. Friendly and consoling. But it seemed to break his defense somehow. Because instead of pulling back, he snapped his dark eyes on mine, turning my hand over to brush his thumb along my palm. Then, slowly, without looking away, he raised my palm to his mouth and left a kiss on it, right in the middle. His lips were soft and hot, like the sun. They burned my skin. My hand would never forget the imprint of his mouth. And he would never know it, but this would forever be the first kiss that made me understand why people use their lips to show affection.

I unfolded like a love letter read in secret. I trembled through my bones. I tried not to show it.

“I’m so sorry for so many things,” he rasped against my skin.

“I’m sorry too,” I whispered.

“Don’t be, darling,” he said, letting my hand drop. “I deserve this. I was selfish. I didn’t think about anyone else but myself, and now I’m paying the price for it.”

“What happened to your heart? Can’t you take it back?”

“After a month of… let’s just say horrendous behavior, I began to realize that I wasn’t only hurting myself, but the people around me too. I thought the curse would stop the pain. But, in a way, it only misplaced it. I should have known. Unfelt pain always finds its way back to you.”

“That’s where the title came from,” I realized. “The Prince of Broken Hearts.”

“Gods, Nepheli, you’ve no idea. I was horrible. Not only to my court but to my family too. I was cruel and self-indulgent and disrespectful—” He sucked in a breath, shaking his head. “I got what I wanted. I became heartless and unbreakable. But I was not oblivious to my cruelty. Deep in my soul, I was still able to understand how wrong my behavior was. So I went back to the shop to reclaim my heart. But it was boarded up. I went next door and asked the merchant about the witch—I’d been so drunk that night that I didn’t even get her name. He told me she died of old age and that all of her merchandise had been sold and shipped away.”

“To Curiosity Shops,” I gasped.

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