Page 72 of House of Hearts
If her imagination hadn’t been spiraling previously, it most certainly was in the days that followed. For she could not produce a single explanation for finding Oleander down on one knee…and not for her.
The campus was alive with the thrum of students at the last bell, but despite the emerging crowd, Ana’s vision remained tunneled on the scene in front of her. Oleander held a ring and stared at Helen like shewas worth all the stars in the sky and then some. Ana couldn’t see the diamond, but she knew it was brilliant and would shine much brighter on Helen’s hand than hers. Everything seemed to. She was the sun the world orbited, the center of everything, and Ana was a new moon, overlooked, overshadowed.
And if their world was likened to the cosmos, then their father looked upon Oleander like an incoming meteorite, come to destroy everything it touched. He stormed across the quad with a rising fury, his fists trembling at his sides as he traveled to reach the two of them. “What on earth is the meaning of this?”
“I only thought it proper after the night we spent together that I do the honorable thing and wed you,” Oleander said much too loudly, his smile plastered across his face despite the shocked gasps in the crowd. His attention was trained squarely on Helen, but Ana knew he saw her. He saw; he just didn’t care.
“Lower your voice, son.”
Helen’s face blanched, and her mouth hung in clear disbelief, but none of that mattered as Ana stormed from the courtyard.
“How could you?” she asked him when Oleander found her in the center of the maze. He was her opposite in that moment: cool and collected, where she was full of a molten fury that threatened to devour her from the inside out. She shoved him in the chest and gritted her teeth as he failed to budge even an inch. How was it that he could ruin her and she failed to make even the slightest impact on him?
“How could I not?” he replied sweetly, and when she went to push him again, he stopped her fists where they were. “Two sisters can’t keep a secret, but one? A disgraced daughter can talk, but after the scandal of her public humiliation and her dead sister, who would believe her?”
“D-dead,” she hiccupped, and he responded with a kiss to her forehead.
“Now you’re getting it,” he whispered, and she felt the blade lodge in her chest then, piercing through her ribs and striking her heart.
She opened her mouth to respond, but her voice was robbed momentarily as the blood seeped from her parted lips.
He hushed her as a lover might and cradled her body as it dropped to the ground. She stared at him in wide-eyed disbelief, but his smile never faltered once. “For what it’s worth, my sweet, it was a lie. I never slept with Helen, but I suppose it doesn’t matter much in the end, does it? With you dead and her reputation in tatters, I’ll be forced to wed her after all.”
“Wh-why?” she managed, and the word tasted of iron.
He continued to smile as he freed a forged letter from his coat pocket and placed it gently over her body like a funeral bouquet. “I’ve wanted your world from the moment I first laid eyes on it. Every girl before you has simply been a rung on a ladder leading me to you. I grew up with nothing, so I feel it’s only fair to crave everything. My own happily ever after,” he whispered, spitting her fairy tales back at her. “But you should know, Ana, storybooks are often far bloodier than they appear.”
He left her behind with the blade and the forged farewell note and the blood, drip-drip-dripping beneath her into the lawn. She lay there, and as she died on the lawn, her disbelief turned to rage and her rage turned to sorrow. She hadn’t believed Helen’s warning, and now she was dooming her to the same miserable fate her sister had desperately tried to save her from. She’d been too stubborn, too short-sighted to see through to Oleander, and she wouldn’t be the only one paying for it now.
Shewouldn’tallow herself to die without taking him down with her. How many days had Ana spent cooped up in her room, pricking her finger and uttering words no churchgoing daughter should know? How long had she practiced in preparation for this moment?
Blood gushed from her chest like a tapped tree. There was a curious ripple in the air, one that only seemed to grow the longer she chanted. She was alone, and yet in that instant, every blade of grass stood upright, the wind stilled, the night sky watched with a thousand starry eyes.
She cursed him with her dying breath.
Lockwell would never get his happy ending; she’d make sure of it.
23
There’s no Disney Princess moment. A flock of magical singing birds doesn’t fly to my rescue in a musical montage. It’s a quiet progression as the thought hits me, a slow understanding striking after I feel the lockets in my left hand burn. The two halves gravitate toward one another like magnets, and I watch, stupefied, as they click into place. There’s an otherworldly sheen between them, an almost hypnotic glow as they merge into one. They’re a perfect fit, two sides forming to complete a heart.
It’s not just a useless hunk of metal. Could it be…?
Her heart?
The tears that spring from my eyes are from a miserable mess of emotions. An insatiable urge for revenge mingled with a confusing cloud of empathy. We’re not that different, the two of us. It’s funny, really, how similar we are. How grief has skewed us beyond recognition and made us heartless. If love and loss can turn you into the darker version of yourself, is there any chance of redemption?
Staring up at Anastasia, I can’t help but think there is. The fall has made her seem briefly human, the hope in her eyes short-lived but enough to tell me that the real her isn’t dead. Someone is buried in the beast she’s become. I might not be able to kill the queen, but maybe I was never meant to.
Perhaps I was only ever meant to save her.
My palms cup Calvin’s cheeks, relishing in the feel of his soft skin in my hands. He stares at me, his eyes unfocused and wavering, but watering the same as mine. Trapped in the prison of his own body as Anastasia takes the lead. I have no clue if this will work, but I’m not using my mind. It’s time to follow my heart after I’ve ignored it for so long. She thrashes and swipes above me, but I don’t let any of that deter me from what I’m about to do. Unclasping the locket and stringing it around Calvin’s waiting neck, I clear my throat, and the words ripple out of me one by one.
“Blood for blood, I do impart. I invite you, Ana, to take back your heart.”
I wait for the horrific inevitability. It could all end so horribly and so quickly, Calvin succumbing forever to the madness and killing me with one final blow. I could join Emoree with all the other dead.
There’s a shift in the air like the changing of a tide. Everything softens to an unnatural silence, the world pausing as if with bated breath.
