Page 41 of House of Hearts

Unaware of what lay beneath, Ana was smitten.

She’d never had an actual suitor before.

Her sister was beautiful enough to sway the most courageous men on campus, though their father’s temper reached well beyond their family home.

As a headmaster, he was strict and short fused, which meant that the men daring enough to talk to Ana were few and far between.

If you asked her father about his distemper (which you would be very unwise to do), he openly blamed his anger on his lack of an heir.

Two daughters but no son to carry on the family name and the school alongside it.

He’d have to rely on a son-in-law to carry both the bloodline and the role as headmaster, which meant every boy who so much as approached his daughters was scrutinized not as a partner, but as a successor.

So yes, Ana wanted a prince, and her father wanted a capable, trustworthy replacement, but that’s not what Oleander was.

He was the blighted apple, the gravestone, the cold burial dirt.

He was hungry and ambitious and all consuming.

When she led him into the maze of her heart, she found he knew the path well, for he had traversed many girls’ hearts.

He’d learned their patterns so he could come and go as he pleased.

He knew how to set fire to a girl and leave only ash in his wake.

It was late one evening when Anastasia finally thought to ask the question.

The two of them had once again succeeded in sneaking past her father’s watchful eye. They lay together in the maze, Oleander’s arm hooked over her waist and Ana’s back to her own future grave.

He was typically so hasty to get dressed after their dalliances, lurching upright after the act was finished and checking his pocket watch as if the time was more important than her.

Today, however, he’d lingered beside her, brushing the hair behind her ear and peppering kisses along her jaw. “You seem thoughtful as of late.”

She was. Her mind was full of her sister’s worries, all the horrible, gruesome thoughts she painted her imagination with.

She had wanted to ask him about his past for days now, but Oleander didn’t like when she pried.

She could tell. His lip would curl, and he’d tell her that patience and trust were two traits he found most attractive in a woman.

She wanted to be beautiful for him, right?

Yes, she did, with every fiber of her being. And yet…

“There is something I would like to ask you.” The words were out too quickly to think better of them, and she could’ve cursed herself for her loose tongue.

This also wasn’t quite true. There were many things she wanted to ask: Did he really, truly love her? Did he ever look at Helen and wonder whether he chose the wrong sister? Would he marry her and take her away from this wretched, horrible place?

None of those questions left her lips. This time she asked what was really on her mind. “How did she die?”

He froze in her arms, his fingertips whitening against her waist. “Pardon?”

“Your…former fiancée,” she clarified, and he glowered openly at her.

His response was terse. “It was an accident, as you well know.”

“What sort?”

He gripped her chin, and the moment frightened her madly. His eyes were cold, compassionless, and for once she felt she saw through to the heart of him—or where his heart should have been. “You’d ask me to relive it?”

“I want to know,” she waged on. “It’s silly, but…I’d wondered if perhaps…”

“Perhaps what?”

She toyed with the hem on her skirt. “If perhaps you might’ve played a part. It’s nothing. Just mere speculation. My sister mentioned it.”

“Did she, now?” he growled, and his face was closer.

He lorded over her with a cruel twist of his mouth.

“I suppose she told you how Eliza died in a rather…unfortunate manner, mm? Right in the center of a hunting ground with a blade wedged deep in her chest. But who could possibly confuse poor Eliza with wild game? And if not an accident, then who could enjoy such a thing?”

He twisted her hair around his finger, three careful loops. “Oleander,” she mewled, eyes wet and splotchy. “You had nothing to do with it, right?”

The darkness receded from his gaze, and he rewarded her with a beaming smile. “Heavens, no. Your imagination is far too wild for your own good.”

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 she was 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.

She wouldn’t allow 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.