Page 96 of The Little Shop of Grand Curiosities

“What is it, darling?” Isa laughed at the burning-hot tears that rolled down my cheeks. “You thought it was real love? You thought the stars brought you together? You were literally wearing his heart around your pretty neck,Little Butterfly.Of course, he couldn’t stay away from you.”

“Don’t listen to her!” Apollo groaned, struggling to push himself up on his palms.

“By all means, don’t listen tome,” Isa derided. “Delude yourself all you want. It doesn’t make it any less true. There was an invisible string connecting you with him all along. And that string wasn’t fate or destiny, and it certainly wasn’t love. It was just bad fucking luck,” she seethed as she clenched her fist, dragging another gut-wrenching groan of pain out of him. “He was never supposed to find the necklace because there weren’t supposed to be any Curiosity Shops left in the South, much less a girl so infatuated with magic that she would be compelled to wear a thing like that around her neck.”

Her words fell through me like a rock, the realization hitting hard and fast. “You,” I choked. “You’re the Dreadful Mundane.”

Isa’s too-white grin was the stuff of nightmares, wide and hypnotic—the whole room shrank to it. “I thought he would eventually stop, but he never did. He kept looking for his heart, traveling closer and closer to the South. He wouldn’t recognize the necklace even if he found it, of course, but I didn’t want to risk it. Magic is too unpredictable. It betrays you so easily. I mean, how many times have you heard about curses being broken by something as ridiculous as love? I’d worked too hard to leave it all to chance. I had to take action one last time. If Curiosity Shops closed down, he’d have no choice but to abandon his search and return to Thaloria to finally forfeit his crown. It only took me a month in Elora to spread some rumors about magic potions gone wrong, mystery boxes with vengeful ghosts inside, evil oracle cards that conspired for the reader’s destruction. A handful of people started fearing magic. And the wonderful thing about fear is that it is the most infectious disease in the world. It spreads and festers and rots. It leaves nothing behind.” She sighed dramatically. “It was a perfect plan, really. The only plan that could never be tracked back to me. And then he brings you here, and he starts fuckingfeelingagain because his heart is literally beating five breaths away from him. I knew you were trouble the moment I laid my eyes on you. I tried to scare you away, but you’re like an enamored pest, aren’t you? Because even after everything, here you show up to the Palace, withmyspell dangling around your neck, and the entire court starts talking about the way he looks at you and how the Prince of Broken Hearts is finally cured, and I can’t have that now, can I?” She snapped her eyes at mine. Her face was all burning embers and sharp edges. Her rage was a dagger she was about to wield. “All this hard work, so Little Miss Curiosity from Elora to turn me into a murderer.”

With a raucous upsurge of magic, the vanity mirror cracked into countless intricate cobweb patterns. Uneven knife-sharp fragments flew off the purple frame, their silvery glare falling into stillness as they paused in midair to point straight at me.

In a sick panic, I pushed against the vines, and the thorns poked into the balls of my shoulders, my clavicle, the base of my throat. I gritted my teeth, trying not to make a sound even as I felt the warm, viscid blood trickle down my arms. I tried to keep quiet because I didn’t want him to break. I didn’t want him to utter the exact words that escaped him just then, “Please,” Apollo choked, writhing in pain at her feet. “Isa, please. You want to kill me? Kill me. Torture me. You want the throne? Take it. Take everything. Butplease, I beg of you, please don’t—” His words died with a wring of her hand.

“Don’t… what?” she mocked, putting a finger behind her ear. “Come on, dear cousin, don’t slur your words.”

Apollo grunted incoherently, thick beads of sweat gliding off his face like tears.

“Oh, you mean kill her?” Isa cooed. “You want to save the girl, princeling, is that it?”

The glass fragments fluttered impatiently in the air, the rustle so alarming that I began shaking uncontrollably. Although at a great distance, I knew that it would only take a surge of her magic and a few seconds for them to pierce my chest. I sucked in a breath, readying myself for pain, for death, and for seeing Apollo’s face for the very last time—his beautiful face that was twisted in a mask of agony now as he managed a nod to her question, choking on a desperate, “I’ll do anything.”

Isa bent over him, grabbed the collar of his shirt, and forced him up to his feet. “You’ll have to write a letter,” she said, relaxing the grip on his heart just enough to keep him upright.

“If I do what you ask, will you let her go?” he grunted, biting down on the pain.

“No! Apollo, don’t do it!” I pleaded with him. “She’ll kill us both!”

Apollo met my eyes, ravaged by guilt and despair. He tried to tell me something through the struggle, but failed. Isa tightened her hold on his heart again, and he collapsed forward on the vanity’s little seat. “Nepheli, I’m sorry,” he gasped, his whole body trembling. “I don’t know what else to do.”

“Enough with the melodrama,” Isa sneered as she shoved a piece of paper on the table in front of him and forced a pen into his hand. “You ran away with our darling Nepheli,” she dictated, and Apollo wrote with a shaky hand. “You can’t come back to Thaloria because everybody knows that a heartless man cannot become the just and benevolent ruler the North deserves. You will try your best to start a new life somewhere else. You’ll miss them, but they’ll have to accept your decision because it is the best for everyone. You don’t want them to look for you. You want everyone to heal and move on.”

Apollo scribbled down the words, stealing glances between me and the glass fragments as though looking away was what would cause my demise in the end.

“Sign it with your blood,” Isa demanded.

Apollo clenched his jaw, stabbed the fountain pen into his pointer finger, and signed the letter in his blood.

“I did as you asked,” he breathed out. “Do as you want with me now. But you will let her go, Isadora. You will release her because we both know you are a lot of things, but not a murderer.”

“You don’t know what I am!” she snarled, her teeth bared and hungry.

Apollo didn’t retreat. “I understand you feel cheated. You’ve lost so much, and now it’s your time to take. I haven’t lost my own parents, so I won’t insult you by saying that I understand what that feels like, but I do relate to your pain, Isa. I don’t expect you to forgive me for not being there for you when you needed me the most. So take the crown and spare her life. Listen to me, Isadora. Do it for you. For your conscience. Don’t spend the rest of your life haunted by the things you’ve done.”

The air deadened. The flames lay flat on the cables, like we were trapped inside a dream, objects looking almost normal but too motionless and exaggerated to belong to reality.

Isa stared at him blankly, her nails on his heart. “You know, when I first devised this plan, I was just a young girl, barely eighteen years old. I didn’t want to get my hands too dirty. But now, I really want to see you bleed.”

A low chant left her mouth, and a booming outburst of magic shook the room. His whole body bent over a devastating crack. A crack so bright it was almost as if a theater’s spotlight had snapped over him. His chest split open like unwatered soil, and a wild stream of light poured out and stretched towards the pulsing organ in Isa’s hand. Her voice rose, the words dark and powerful, and with a jolt of her arm, she rammed Apollo’s heart back into his chest.

He screamed as a violent spasm went through him and he fell to his knees. I struggled to see past all the light. To call out to him over the clangor of magic. To beg him to look up and see that one of the glass pieces had flown back to Isa, and was now nestled inside her fist.

He was still screaming in agony at the tremendous pressure on his chest when the sharp fragment began descending to his throat.

“No!” I howled, wailing and thrashing against the vines until there was not a part of me that was not bleeding. “Don’t! Please! Don’t do this, please!”

Her head turned to me slowly. She looked almost inhuman in her magic. “You’re right,” she crooned. “He should see you die first. To remember one last time what it means to bear a broken heart.”

The fragments tore through the air—fast, so fast—but not as fast as he was. With his heart restored and his body finally his own, Apollo sprung across the room in a blur of desperate lunges and catapulted his body to mine. I was saved by a microsecond. The shards lanced right through him instead.

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