Page 99 of The Little Shop of Grand Curiosities

“Ryker,” I sighed, dumbfounded as to what had incentivized him to say all this to me. Ryker had never been prone to such displays of sentimentality, much less to heartening monologues. In fact, this was the longest I’d ever heard him speak for something other than his own ambitions.

He read the question in my eyes, and his face softened. “This is the fourth time this week you’ve passed me by at the hall without noticing. I just hate to see a friend so despondent.”

A smile rose to my lips. It was small and exhausted, but it was there, and there was hope in it. “Thank you,” I said. “For being my friend.”

“Always, Nepheli,” he promised. “Write me when he awakes and you feel a bit better, okay?”

I nodded. “Write me when you get home, too. Tell me all about the Festival.”

Ryker bowed his head in farewell and continued down the hall.

I watched his familiar figure shrink in the distance, smiling to myself and feeling heartened. Because, well, would you look at that? Life induced those moments of connection and friendship and beauty despite everything. Life continued to offer joydespite itself.

???

You could spend a lifetime looking for connections and never work it out. What were the chances? What were the chances that our lives, mine and his, would come together with such violent force only to be driven apart under the most excruciating of circumstances? What were the chances that a handful of stardust would spark the love for magic inside me, only for that love to lead me to his heart? As I looked at Apollo now, I saw it clearly: our lives, bound by that star—a celestial convergence of destinies that existed now and forever.

He was frighteningly pale today. For the life of me, I could not understand how someone as robust as Apollo could ever look so fragile, as though one wrong breath could kill him.

He was lying on his bed in an endless sleep, a fresh linen sheet wrapped around his hips and his chest moving slightly beneath his white shirt—the sole indication that he was still with us.

It should have been me,I thought for the millionth time.It should have been me lying motionless on that bed right now, not him. But, of course, Apollo had to be the most infuriatingly protective man in the Asteria Realm and get between me and death.What were you thinking?I wanted to scream at him until my voice was raw.What were you thinking using your body as my armor? How dare you make me suffer like this?

And then I reached his bed, and suddenly the only thought left in my head was that I needed more time. I needed more time to watch his eyes turn black in moments of desire. I needed more time to memorize the sensation of his hands on my body, his voice in the morning, his smile moving slowly across his face like a drowsy sunrise. I needed to live with him all the days and all the nights to that firstI love you. Not theI’m fallingbut theI fell.

You. I need you.

Eloise stood from the couch and came to greet me. She and Xander had placed a wide, upholstered couch—large enough to sleep on—right next to Apollo’s bed a week ago when he was first transferred from the infirmary to his bedchamber. Most nights they slept here, watching over their son, and when they didn’t, I was secretly, selfishly relieved, for those nights I could curl on his side and watch the tide of his breathing until exhaustion would win me over.

I stared at him over Eloise’s shoulder as she hugged me. “How is he?”

“The same,” she sighed.

“I thought he shifted earlier,” Xander muttered, looking almost as pale as his son. “I swear I saw his eyelashes flutter.”

Standing here in this room, gaunt and shaky, watching them be as devastated as two humans could ever be, I felt like my flesh and bones were made of clouds—massive, grey clouds—and I could not stop raining over them.

“Shouldn’t he be awake by now?” I rasped, fighting with the boulder in my throat. “It’s been two weeks. There must be a healer who can perform magic—”

“Nepheli, dear,” Eloise soothed, rubbing her palms over my arms, “the physician did have magical assistance. Otherwise, Apollo would have been—”Dead, she meant to say but couldn’t. She was struggling with tears of her own.

“Let’s give you some alone time with him,” Xander suggested before he came to wrap an arm around Eloise’s dainty waist to usher her towards the door. I’d hung three little bells around the gilded doorknob, for protection, as we Curiosities believed, and for some sense of normalcy. The jingle made me think of my Shop and the day Apollo walked into it. That first smile. That infuriating charm. That initialdarling, I’d hated so much. I would give anything to hear it again.

“Thank you,” I whispered to them belatedly.

After the door closed behind them, I slipped off my shoes and climbed onto the bed as carefully as I could.

Sometimes I would tell him about the Palace’s latest gossip. Sometimes I would read him the paper or one of his massive astronomy books. Sometimes I would unfold that letter I always kept in my pocket—the letter I’d found on his desk while tidying up his room one day—and ask him how dare he write something so beautifully messy and not tell me about it.

Today, I merely watched him, tracing with my fingertips the lines of his face until I knew them like my own and my fingers could recognize his texture even with my eyes closed. Then, I leaned over him and pressed my ear to his heart.

It was neither slow nor fast, just… steady. Unchanged.

For fourteen days I’d been listening to his heart, yet the sound was still novel to me. I craved a time when his beating heart would no longer be new. Because I would have heard it so many times and learned it so intimately that I would recognize it anywhere, in a different body, in different worlds, in a crowd of a million heartbeats.

“I’ve never told you this,” I whispered with my face pressed on his chest, “but I’ve always hated stories with unhappy endings. In fact, whenever I would get the sense that a book would end tragically, I put it aside and made up my own ending. If only I could do that now. We’re so powerless in real life. We can’t do much but endure the tragedies and hope that the next chapter will be a bit more bearable. But I don’t want to leave this chapter without you, Apollo. Don’t you understand? I cannot bear to know that after everything, I am your unhappy ending.” I was sobbing now, shaking and panting for breath. “You told me that I made you feel, but I never got the chance to tell you that you made me feel too. You made me feel things I didn’t know I could feel… Gods, I’m begging you. Please. Come back to me. Come back before I lose my heart too. I swear, Apollo, it’s going to leave my body. I don’t know what’s wrong with it. I don’t think it wants to belong to me anymore. It wants you. It belongs to you.”

“Darling, don’t cry. I have a heart now. You don’t want to break it already.”

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