Page 29 of House of Hearts
“True love’s kiss, then?”
Birdie smothers a giggle with a nervous palm to the mouth, but she’s the only one laughing. In fact, Calvin’s gone deathly silent.Almost like—
“Violet’s right.” Birdie swivels to Oliver and crosses her arms over her chest. “Can’t you tell us what’sactuallygoing on?”
Oliver winces and rubs a hand awkwardly on the back of his neck. “I know how it sounds. I reacted the same way when I was told.”
“Seconded,” Ash says with a lift of his fingers. “Though Mal and Emoree took the curse like champs. They believed it immediately.”
I can totally see how Em lapped this up. Her world was held together by flimsy dream logic. Mom always said I was a bloodhound in a past life, but I think what I really am is anxious and obsessive. When I get a whiff of something, I won’t rest until I’m dead. “You told me if I made it through that maze that you’d explain everything. Well? I’m waiting.”
Sadie whips around in her seat. “What did you tell her?”
He slouches under the weight of his sister’s glare. “Nothing!Nothing, okay? Calm down. She was asking me about her friend Emoree, and I told her I’d explain if—”
I wince at his wording, and if I had any hope under the sun that Birdie didn’t notice, it’s shot dead instantly when I hear her gasp. “What does he mean ‘your friend’ Emoree?” she blurts, her outburst overlapping with Calvin’s defense. “Last time I checked, she wasmyroommate. You never even met her.”
My cheeks burn hot. I don’t know why the truth feels like Pandora’s box; if I so much as pry the lid open, the world will devolve into Unspeakable Chaos. “I…lied.”
“Youlied?” she echoes. In the short time I’ve known her, I’ve only seen her frustrated once—flaring her nostrils and glaring out the dorm-room peephole as some girl burned popcorn in the shared kitchen and set off the fire alarm. “Why the hell would you lie to me? Who was she to you?”
“She was my best friend,” I confess. “And the whole reason I came here.”
“Don’t you think you could’ve mentioned that while I wascrying to you at the lunch table?” She scoffs, backing away from me like she’s never fully seen me until this moment and now that she has, she’s disgusted by the sight. “Were you only ever using me for information?”
I’m scrambling for an answer when Tripp’s voice bellows to life, his frat boy accent a grating vocal fry. “EVERYONE SHUT THE HELL UP.”
That successfully plunges the whole room into silence and gives Sadie the opportunity to regain control of the meeting. “Thank you, Tripp,” she praises before throwing Birdie and me a harsh look. “If you two want to duke it out, do it on your own time. Keep it up and you both will be kicked out, got it?”
I attempt to catch Birdie’s eye, but she’s already treating me like I’m invisible. In case I’m not, though, I nod for Sadie’s benefit.
Satisfied with our silence, Sadie beckons us over to the wall and gestures to the board behind her. “You all know the story of Anastasia Hart by now. Only it’s more than a simple ghost story we scare the freshmen with. It’s the start of something horrible that our family has endured for generations now. Ana was betrayed by her older sister, Helen, who stole Oleander from her. So, she cursed every eldest Lockwell in their family line to endure the same anguish she felt that day, to be completely and truly brokenhearted.” She nods at a daguerreotype photo behind her; the portrait is of a young woman with her gown clawing up her throat and her sleeves scaling to the ends of her wrists. Youthful despite her slicked-back hair and genuinely frumpy attire.
“It all began with a girl named Mabel Beckwith. She was the soulmate of Helen’s first son, Ezra Lockwell.” Sadie rests against the wall, her shoulders slumping like the weight of the world is too heavy for her to bear. “Even back then, the family influence was large enough to pay off our own set of coroners and authorities. Because of that, ‘official reports’ say she died of a heart attack. Unofficial reports confirm what we know now: that she, like all the others to follow, died after being stabbed by a possessed Lockwell. The blade pierced directly through her heart.”
My hands freeze at my sides, and I can hear Birdie breathing heavily next to me as Sadie continues. “The Cards were created with the sole purpose of breaking this curse to prevent passing it on to the next generation. They thought it’d be easy and that they’d be able to dissolve the organization immediately after ‘saving’ the Lockwell family…They’d soon realize what they were up against. This curse still stands.”
Beyond the girl’s photo is an image of her grave, the dates cutting her down to sixteen years old. “It happened again. This time, it was a boy named Clifford Wallace, the lover of Ezra’s firstborn daughter, Mary. Dead at seventeen. Again, a stab wound to the heart. Mary never married, so her younger brother, Edwin, carried the curse on with his eldest son, Charles.”
Thus begins the procession of the dead: young lovers throughout the decades in yearbook photos with gelled pompadours and mullets, middle parts and side parts, all of them Hart students, all of them dating Lockwells. And all of them stabbed through the heart.
“And then there was last year. We invited a group of new members in after Joker Night, and to all of our horror, Percy realized that the girl we let in was his soulmate. It was a race against the clock to break the curse before the curse broke him.”
Her finger glides across the board before landing on a face I know too well, a smiling, freckled Emoree Hale. Beneath it, a ripped-out newspaper article of the tower, the scene sectioned off with police tape and her mangled body covered with a black tarp.
Emoree Hale sat on a wall,
Emoree Hale had a great fall.
“I can see the pattern, thank you very much. So, you’re saying Em dated Percy, and he murdered her for it,” I snarl, stepping back from the corkboard graveyard.
Paranoia gurgles low in the pit of my stomach before raising the room several degrees hotter than it should be. A nauseous hot-and-cold wave ripples down my spine, and I don’t like this setup at all.
The group shares a look that has me cursing myself for coming in here defenseless. I’m already envisioning my own forged autopsy andall the countless ways they could shut me up for good and how I might look beneath the ground.
“I told you before, none of us ever wanted her dead,” Calvin insists, his voice hitching in his throat halfway through. Behind him, Mallory is blinking back tears and fanning her cheeks, and Ash’s cocky attitude has been swapped for a tense silence.
Calvin continues with a clench of his fists. “It was the curse, and her loss weighs on us every single day. Our club’s whole existence is centered around breaking the curse, not continuing it.”
