Page 42 of Break Her Heart
Maybe I still did.
How else could I explain why I never killed him? Why I stepped between him and Adar?
Because I did. I loved him too.
He stepped closer. “Ask me how I feel about you now.”
His voice had changed. Flat. Dead.
I could see it in his eyes. The warmth that had been there was gone.
“No,” I whispered, backing away.
He advanced, closing the distance between us in a single, quiet step. He leaned in, his breath cold at my ear.
“I feel nothing.”
He pulled back just enough to look into my eyes, his gaze sharp as glass.
“It’s crazy. In my three hundred years, I never felt anything close to love for someone other than my mother. And I knew you for what? A month? And you ripped that away in a night.”
My vision blurred.
“So do what you want here. I do not care. Fuck the whole lot of them if that’s what it takes to fill the empty void you have. But you will be at every dinner, every party, and everything else I must endure—because you chose my fate.” He stepped closer again, his eyes hard as obsidian. “And now you’ll live in it with me. Not because I love you. But because Idon’t.”
A tear slipped down my cheek.
“You’re mine, forever. And I’ll never touch you again. So keep hating me, and never stop.”
Jane and the seamstresses stepped in and August smiled as he looked down at me.
“Time to get ready, Winnie.” His tone was flat, almost mocking, before he turned on his heel and strode out the door.
* * *
I stood at the doors that I was escorted to, a veil covering me. I was too stunned by August to process how I felt.
My feet barely moved. My body floated, disconnected. I felt like a ghost in a gown. Like something already buried, now being paraded back to the surface to wed the thing that had killed it.
The doors swung open and my breath caught.
The cathedral hidden deep in the castle stretched upward like the inside of a stone throat, vast and cold. Soaring buttresses loomed overhead, ribs of blackened bone reaching toward a vaulted ceiling lost in shadow. Candlelight flickered along massive stone columns carved with grotesques—vampires feeding, witches burning, saints with hollow eyes.
A guard nudged me forward, and my legs obeyed before my mind did, carrying me slowly down the aisle. The aisle was lined with blood-red roses, petals dark and wilting. The scent of them mingled with wax and incense, hanging like fog in the air.
At the far end stood August, savoring every eye upon him. He wore black from throat to boots. His coat was tailored close, sharp at the shoulders and adorned with thin silver thread that curled like ash down his sleeves. A high collar framed his pale throat, and around his neck hung a single onyx pendant. Atop his head sat a dark iron crown, thorned and cruel.
He looked like something out of a nightmare—beautiful in the way wildfires are beautiful. Devastating. Consuming. This spectacle was crafted for him, and he basked in it—relishing the attention, savoring the power—as if to prove every fear I had ever tried to bury was true.
He didn’t want me.
Heneededme.
Halston stood next to him, cloaked in black, a leather-bound tome resting in his hands. The siblings stood on either side. Lavina’s gaze flicked to me like a blade. If she remembered the last time I nearly burned her alive—and I knew she did—shegave no sign of it. But her posture was too rigid, too poised. She was ready for a show. Simon, as always, looked amused. His lips curved into the faintest smirk, eyes dancing as if he’d been waiting for this moment just to see how much I would unravel. And Benedict’s hands were folded neatly in front of him, his gaze fixed somewhere in the distance, jaw tight.
Candles burned in rusted sconces along the walls, casting trembling shadows that made it feel more like a crypt than a chapel. The light barely reflected off the faces surrounding me, but the glowing red eyes didn’t need much to see. Vampires filled the pews that lined both sides of the aisle. Some I’d seen in the great room, others I hadn’t seen before.
Each step was harder to take.
