Page 13 of House of Hearts

Emoree.

Emoree!

Her name jolts me back to life. Every little hair lifts on my body. She’s here. She’s really, really here.

I tear myself from the fox boy without a word.

Maybe I’m shell shocked or maybe I’ve lost my mind, but either way I don’t stop to ponder the horrific impossibilities of it all.

Science be damned, it almost feels normal for her to be here.

This is where she’s meant to be, alive and dancing and not rotting six feet deep.

She’s perfectly intact now. Remade and glowing, and I am calling—no, I’m yelling—but she won’t hear me.

Why won’t she hear me? Her body floats against the dance floor, bobbing like a buoy in the waves.

I wait for someone else to notice her, to gasp or scream or call her name, but the world pays her no mind. Beyond me, she ceases to exist.

I weave gracelessly through the crowd, my shoulders knocking into dancers’ backs and my elbows meeting their ribs.

I’m met with huffs and groans and watch where you’re going s, but I don’t care.

None of this matters. She’s all I see, and I chase after her like a girl possessed.

I let Emoree lead me farther away from the ballroom and the music that was once beautiful but has since grown shrill.

She’s a stray gust of wind down the corridor, her body so paper thin that she breezes forward without the slightest sound. I’m hypnotized by the arch of her heels and the sway of her tiptoes inches off the floor.

We enter a deserted parlor room, and the candles flicker upon our arrival. Velvet curtains billow down from the ceiling and sensuously frame a matching set of oxblood leather armchairs.

Beyond them, a fireplace sits untouched, the logs blackened behind an iron grate.

Oleander Lockwell hangs like an omnipresent god above the mantel.

In this painting, the gray strands from Sutherland Hall have won the battle; they dominate his hair and the fringes of his beard.

He’s stern-faced and harsh in the low lighting, painted in the violent strokes of a hurried artist who couldn’t get away fast enough.

Emoree doesn’t spare the man a glance. Her attention is reserved for an object on an end table, her finger tracing a careful pattern in the air as she studies it.

She breaks away the moment I get close, and I can’t help it, my curiosity gets the best of me.

I pick up what turns out to be a wooden labyrinth, a perfect miniature of the hedge maze outside.

I brush my thumb across the careful ridges and chart the same path she did, from the clearing in the center to the exit, but I feel no residual warmth in her wake.

I don’t feel any warmth at all.

The body heat in the ballroom is a distant memory. What I’m left with is an icy pocket of strange gust of frigid wind. My breath clouds the late-summer air, and I marvel at the ghost of it leaving my lips. It shouldn’t be this cold in here, but then again, Emoree shouldn’t be here.

Instead of leading me to a cursed spindle, the room gives way to a balcony behind a set of French doors. Her body drifts straight through the glass, rippling like the tail of a flame cutting out.

I welcome the storm as I follow her out into the night.

It’s a sobering feeling, the rain pelting me out of a dream and back into the harshness of reality.

The first thing I notice is the quiet. Rain striking the ground without a sound, thunder tapering off in the distance, and wind softening to a gentle lull.

The second thing I notice—finally, really notice—is Emoree.

Those pretty locks of hers mat with blood, red seeping from the cracked corners of her skull. She transforms before my very eyes, a grim Cinderella decomposing at midnight. Her ivory skin sallows, and she opens her mouth, the black hollow of her lips like a burial plot in the earth.

“Emoree Hale sat on a wall,

Emoree Hale had a great fall.

All the king’s horses and all the king’s men

Couldn’t put Emoree together again!”

That morbid nursery rhyme is the last thing to leave her lips before she tips over the railing’s edge. I’m aware I’m screaming, scrambling over the side to catch her, but there’s no point.

She dies in front of me, a splatter of bones against the pavement.

No.

No.

No, she didn’t—she couldn’t—none of this could possibly—

Hands. There are hands gripping my waist, fingers digging into my skin.

Someone looming over me, their hot breath against the back of my neck.

Terror seizes me in a way I’ve never known.

I watched Em die, and now I’m next. Someone is going to throw me over and have my body join hers on the unforgiving earth.

They’re going to kill me just like Emoree. They—

“Stop struggling! Damn it, you’re going to make us both fall!”

We do fall, but not to our deaths. I tumble over the stranger, our bodies splaying out against the balcony floor. Muscles pulse under mine, and I feel the steady thrum of a stranger’s heartbeat traveling through their skin.

I watch, captivated, as the fox mask slips off the boy’s face.

Calvin Lockwell.

I don’t know how I didn’t sense it before. I feel like the hairs on the back of my neck should’ve tingled or I should’ve caught a whiff of his signature cologne, a spiced floral blend of ginger and lavender.

He’s drenched from the storm. My eyes rake down his body, the wet shirt clinging to his chest, the rain tracing a lover’s path from his temple down his cheek before dripping off his jaw.

All at once, the world comes back to full sounds. The torrential pour of rain slapping against the hard ground, the roar of the wind, the labored sound of Calvin’s ragged breathing as we lie there, staring at each other.

“This is becoming a bad habit,” he muses when he rediscovers his voice. It’s pitched higher in his throat. “How many times are we going to keep falling for each other?”

I don’t have it in me to summon a clever retort to that. “You don’t understand,” I insist instead, and maybe I don’t understand either. None of what happened is possible, and yet reason and logic don’t seem to matter.

“You’re right. I don’t,” he echoes tersely. His voice is wound taut in his throat, and his attention narrows to my collarbone—on the pendant swinging between us. Recognition flares hot. “But I think I’m starting to.”

He pulls me closer with a hook of his finger and a tug of the chain.

We’re a whisper apart, but his focus is solely on the cool metal in his fingertips.

If anyone saw us like this, they might think it romantic.

The two of us, rain drenched and pressed into each other on a hidden balcony, our breath clouded together in a shared fog, his lashes tickling my cheeks.

But there’s no misreading this situation. Especially not when his glare cuts sharply back up my face. “This doesn’t belong to you.”

“Doesn’t it?” I counter, ripping myself from his embrace and staggering to my feet. “It’s on my neck, isn’t it? Wouldn’t that constitute some form of ownership?”

He squints at me for a minute, his expression difficult to read, before he finally turns and grabs one of the kitten heels on the ground. He toys with my shoe in his hand, brushing a thumb against the sequins before holding the shoe out of reach.

“Give me my shoe, Lockwell.” I utter his surname like the curse it is and extend an impatient hand his way.

His gaze slants downward, his expression smug beneath the blond sweep of his lashes. “It’s in my hand, isn’t it? Wouldn’t that constitute some form of ownership?”

You’ve got to be kidding me.

“Hysterical.” I’ve got him against the French doors, my one hand holding a fistful of his tie and the other grappling while I’m on my tiptoes to reach. “I’m not playing this game with you. Give it back.”

“That’s what this night is about,” he reminds me. Rainwater sluices down the arch of his brow, and I watch a droplet disappear between his parted lips. “Or have you forgotten?”

I flex my toes against the cold tile, and I don’t miss how surreal this situation is. The horrors I witnessed minutes ago are eclipsed by this irritating human in front of me. “Whatever, keep my shoe. Maybe it’ll fit you.”

He scoffs down at me. “Games are only fun when two people are playing.”

I lift my chin to meet his eyes. “Have you considered I don’t want to play a game with you?”

Calvin swallows, his throat bobbing with the action. “You’ve been playing one from the very start,” he corrects. “I’ll give it back if you answer my question. Who gave you that necklace?”

I toy with the silver chain, looping it anxiously around my finger. “Why do you want to know?”

“Because I know it doesn’t belong to you.”

I grapple for the right answer to give him—whatever half truth I can offer that doesn’t get me immediately kicked out of this manor and expelled from Hart. “Emoree, when she insinuated your brother killed her” won’t get my shoe back.

“It was a gift.”

“From who?” he presses, but instead of answering him, I slip out of my left shoe and offer it up to him as a matching set.

“The same girl I followed out here,” I say, injecting the truth with enough syrupy sweetness that it rolls off smoother than any lie. “Or didn’t you see her? I swear she was just here. Weird, maybe she disappeared.”

He studies my expression, his brows set in a harsh line. “Has anyone told you how aggravating you are?”

“Once or twice,” I retort with a defiant jut of my chin. “Though they typically haven’t also chased me onto deserted balconies.”

His ears tickle a flustered shade of pink. “You’re lucky I did.”

“You still followed me.”

“I was curious,” he admits, masking his emotions behind a careful shrug. “I wanted to see if you were scared away by the game.”

It’s my turn to flush, and I’m thankful for the darkness as I twist my head into the shadows. “You knew it was me this whole time?”

“You’re hard to miss, Violet,” he answers, surrendering my heels to the floor. “I’ll see you inside.”

He abandons me without another word, giving me space to finally do the one thing I’m dreading.

Alone in the rain, I peer over the balcony, expecting to see Em’s body.

I imagine a whole host of horrible things—blood blackening the grass, bones set at all the wrong angles, the milky whites of her eyes aimed lifelessly upward—but she isn’t there.

And I have a horrible feeling that she never was in the first place.