Page 33 of House of Hearts

I have no idea where I’m going when I slip out of the girls’ dorms. My feet carry me on a path my brain doesn’t know.

Wet leaves crunch underfoot, and I dodge bare branches.

I’m lucky the rain has ceased, but the storm has left a nasty chill to the air and I shiver with it.

I cup my pink-knuckled hands to my mouth and shiver with the cold.

Floodlights burn a beacon forward; they’re attached to a shadowed building a couple of yards away.

Through the gloom, I recognize it as the school chapel.

I can’t imagine it’ll be open at this hour, but my body carries me toward the somber building regardless.

I’m shocked to find that the door swings open at my command.

Stepping into the shadows, I’m greeted by miraculous warmth.

And then I see a portrait I know all too well now.

Perhaps when this building was first constructed, there were portraits of saints adorning the walls and weeping statues of Mother Mary.

Now there’s a gallery of the dead. My dream hangs on the wall in the front entrance, featuring Helen’s solemn expression and her bouquet of violets.

Her husband stands tall beside her, his palm possessive on her shoulder.

Violets, please.

She was adamant in my dream, imploring me to paint over her bouquet.

“Flowers convey what words cannot,” that’s what my mom always told me.

That was how she felt about violets. They’re a symbol of loyalty, modesty, and humility.

All perfect traits for a wedding, and yet, I don’t understand why she was so insistent.

There’s rue for you, and here’s some for me…

Her words come spiraling back to me, and they’re no longer a nonsensical ramble but a quote.

I’ve heard it before in my Shakespearean Lit class, the teacher assigning a popcorn-style class reading of Hamlet .

A guy in the front of the class had squinted down at the book and recited a stilted, monotone passage.

There’s fennel for you, and columbines. There’s rue for you, and here’s some for me. We may call it herb-grace o’ Sundays. O, you must wear your rue with a difference. There’s a daisy. I would give you some violets, but they withered all when my father died…

Sure enough, I look back at the portrait, and the flowers are subtly painted beyond their prime, their stalks bowing in a limp bouquet.

This isn’t a picture of a happy couple.

This is a woman mad with grief.

I don’t know what to do with this information, but I don’t have long to dwell on it, either.

The chapel’s tranquil silence dies, and the atmosphere is reborn with the haunting rumble of an organ.

It’s a violent whirlwind of blaring pipes and slammed keys, a villainous concerto by Johann Sebastian Bach.

I follow the notes as if hypnotized. The arcade arches above me are enveloped in darkness, and the path forward is streamed silver with moonlight. The stars wink off the golden pipes and illuminate the arched spine of the player hunched over the keys as I approach.

Calvin is swept away in his playing, each note striking harder than the last. His profile paints a severe portrait. He’s split apart at the seams, no longer the paragon of perfection but untethered from the world as we know it. Like a monarch gone mad, the beautiful and dreadful King of Hearts.

“Calvin?” I try, but he can’t hear me.

The playing grows louder, more discordant and unrefined. It’s horrifically shrill and out of key, like the frenzied, wild strings at a bacchanal. That moment when one transcends their humanity and enters their most primal and unrestrained state.

I make the mistake of pressing my palm to his shoulder. The music stops all at once, breaking off in a violent clash of keys as he stiffens on the bench. He’s quiet beneath me, so perfectly frozen I wonder if he’s alive at all, before he whips around.

I hardly recognize him. “So, let me guess,” I say to diffuse the tension. My voice sounds funny in the air and not quite my own. “You’re a vampire, aren’t you? Handsome, perfect, doesn’t need to sleep. You sit here all night, playing the organ like some brooding, bloodsucking monster.”

He curls a lip to show me his teeth. “Not a vampire, just an insomniac. On really bad nights I can’t stand to be alone in my room, staring up at nothing, so I come here to play.” He sits with that answer before adding, “It feels like praying for me.”

“I didn’t think you’d be the religious type.”

“You think of me often?”

“Only that you strike me as some sort of heathen.”

In the light of the stained-glass window, he’s a fallen angel, his beauty a sin in itself. Some gorgeous abomination.

“You really shouldn’t be here.” His voice rumbles over me like the swell of a passing storm.

“Why shouldn’t I?” I challenge, but my voice shakes when it leaves my lips.

It happens too quickly for me to register. The tiniest fraction of a second where I’m hunched over him, my palm pressed to the broad plane of his shoulder, and the next where he’s got me pinned beneath him, my back crashing a melody of its own into the keys.

The weight of his body falls over mine, and I feel the cage of his arms on either end of the organ. He leans into my throat and shudders as he feels my rampant pulse.

Exhaustion has turned the whites of his eyes red. “B-because I…”

He cuts off abruptly. I stop breathing as his knuckle charts a path up my ribs to my throat and finally to my lips.

The groove of his finger curls longingly against my lower lip, and he swallows as I exhale.

“Because I can no longer trust myself around you. Every time I see you, all I can think about is kissing you, and I ca—”

I don’t hear the rest. He’s rigid as I lean all the way forward. He’s gone statuesque, Medusa-turned by my kiss.

“Violet?” he muffles against my lips. When I don’t respond, he shifts with a sigh and pulls me closer. It starts off gentle enough. A tentative brush of his mouth against mine. The careful conquest of my lips, delving deeper as his fingers comb through my hair.

When his teeth graze against my lower jaw, it’s like a bolt of lightning in my veins. He offers an approving noise as my hands find his hair, a low groan that dances along my skin. I hum against the kiss, and that propels him even further.

A dam bursts at that moment. He kisses like a man starving, like he might feast on this moment and last the winter off the memory.

I wonder if this is how all the other girls felt.

Diving in the deep end and quickly realizing you can’t swim, but it’s okay, you want to drown in him anyway.

Should we be doing this? I’d be a liar if I said I hadn’t thought about it again and again and again, in all the quiet moments staring at the ceiling and whenever my gaze lingered on him too long in class.

My name is a prayer. Violet, Violet, Violet , like I’m some great and terrible saint, a woman worth worshiping.

When we finally pull away, I gasp for air. His lips look good swollen, the type of mouth meant to be kissed. I marvel at the sight of him.

Except it isn’t longing I see on his face. “We shouldn’t have done that.”

“Why?”

Horror burns in his eyes, fathomless and deep. “Because I’ll kill you.”