Page 56 of The Hundred Loves of Juliet
Now I could taste the dread on my tongue.
Then I heard a wail from within the house, like the keening of a broken animal.
No…please say I’m wrong. Please say I haven’t tainted her with my misery once again!
I broke one of the windows that flanked the front door and hurled myself through, glass tearing through my clothes and into my skin. I tore through the house, a bloodied madman, and up the stairs, following the howling.
Gerald, Helga, and the rest of the household staff stood pale and motionless in the hall. The door to Kitri’s room stood open. The keening sliced through the air again, coming from inside.
“Oh, Herr Montague…” Helga said through a sob. “Miss Wagner suffered a sudden brain hemorrhage in the night. The doctor said no one could have known it would happen, there was nothing we could have done…” She burst into more sobbing.
I pushed past Helga, into Kitri’s room. Frau Wagner—the source of the keening—wailed on the mattress, next to her daughter’s lifeless, gray body. Herr Wagner sat in a limp heap in the rosewood chair in the corner.
“How could this be?” Herr Wagner entreated me, his eyes red where he had exhausted his tears. “How could there have been no signs? Kitri looked the peak of health…”
He was not truly asking me, though. He hardly saw me.
But I knew the answer all too well. It had happened out of thin air because of me.
I collapsed onto my knees at the side of Kitri’s bed.
“Not yet, my love, not yet,” I pleaded, even though it was pointless. “We weren’t finished yet.” My hands fumbled inside my coat for the velvet box. “I—I was going to…”
I couldn’t say it. Not in the past tense. Trembling, I held her hand in mine. Cold. So cold, so unlike the sweet warmth of my Kitri, my Juliet. I took the emerald ring from the velvet box and tried to slip it onto her finger.
The ring wouldn’t slide on. Her fingers were too stiff. Too strangely swollen.
But I couldn’t let it be true, I couldn’t stop. “Kitri, marry me.” I kept pushing the ring.
“Marry me.” I shoved harder on the ring. It wouldn’t budge.
“Marry me, marry me, marry me!” I shouted, desperation cracking my voice.
Strong arms came up behind me and pulled me gently away. “Herr Montague,” Helga said. “Come away.”
“But I love her!”
“She’s gone.”
“We weren’t done…”
Helga simply held me for a moment. Only when I’d stopped flailing did she let me go.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered to Kitri, and left the ring on her bed. “A thousand times over, I’m sorry.”
Staggering to her father, I said, “Bury her with the ring. Please?”
He closed his eyes, pained, and managed only a small nod.
Then I let Helga lead me away. There was nothing in the house anymore for me.
It was not only a ring, however, that I left on Kitri’s bed, but also another shard of my long-shattered heart.
I wonder how many lives it will take before I have no heart at all.
—
Oh god. I press Reynier’sjournal to my chest. Oh god oh god oh god.
