Page 88 of Break Her Heart
The snow began to fall again, thin flakes spiraling down over the fresh-turned earth like some twisted kind of blessing. The ground, still soft from the first thaw, clung to my boots in damp clumps.
There were no markers. No headstones. Just two patches of uneven dirt, sunken slightly and dark with moisture. Graves, but only in the most technical sense. Anyone walking by might think it was just a patch of land that hadn’t yet recovered from the winter.
They were tucked just outside of town, past the place where everyone leaves their wagons for Market. Secluded. Hidden.
I didn’t speak.
Didn’t move.
August stood a few paces behind me, silent. I could feel his eyes on my back like a weight. The cold pressed in around me, but I barely noticed. My hands were clenched at my sides, fingers stiff from the cold and the tension that refused to ease.The kind of tension that didn’t go away. That settled in my bones and stayed there.
“I will have them marked. So you can come back. Mourn them properly.”
My eyes stayed fixed on the dirt. “How thoughtful.”
He let out a long breath. “They’re buried now. And the stage is gone. It’s done.”
“Done?” I laughed. The sound was brittle. “Nothing about this is done.”
I turned toward him, not bothering to hide the venom in my voice. “You think this erases what happened?”
“No.”
I had no one else to lash out at. No one to take the brunt of my anger. All I had was him.
“But it makes you feel better, doesn’t it? Like cleaning up the blood absolves you.”
He flinched, just barely. “That’s not why I did it.”
“No?” I took a step toward him. “Then why now? Why not then? When it mattered?” I shoved him, expecting him not to move. But he stumbled back a step, eyes still trained on the ground. It caught me off guard—how easily he let me push him. How he didn’t even try to resist. For a second, I thought I saw guilt flicker in the downward tilt of his head, the way his shoulders sagged, like my words had landed exactly where I wanted them to. But instead of satisfaction, all I felt was more rage. “Why didn’t you try to stop him? You should have stopped him, August!”
Now he looked at me, and I forgot how to breathe. Tears shimmered in his eyes, and it caught me off guard. I had never seen him unravel like this before. He took a step closer, and I didn’t move, too stunned by the sight of him.
“He sent some of his men to my home that day. They tortured me. Cut along my arms to drain me of my strength, drove stakesthrough my body, and left me barely alive on the floor. He knew that I would have tried to stop him if I had sensed what was happening.” The next words came quieter. “He didn’t give me a chance, Winnie.”
The words struck like a blow.
Tortured. Drained. Left for dead.
I’d been so consumed by my pain, my rage, I’d never thought to ask what he’d suffered. It had been easier to blame him than to admit the truth: that he hadn’t abandoned me. He’d been broken, too.
The day it happened, he was fighting his way through the crowd to get to me, pushing and clawing, desperation in every step. But his movements were sluggish, strained. His strength had been drained, his body still broken from what they’d done to him. I remembered the flash of white hair in the sea of people, the way he stumbled more than once. And now I understood why.
I looked away, the grave swimming slightly in my vision as the first real crack formed in the wall I’d built to keep him out. He hadn’t known. He hadn’tletit happen. He’d been a casualty too.
Not the same kind. Not nearly. But it twisted something in me to realize I hadn’t known the whole story either.
I turned to him. “I didn’t know,” I whispered.
“I tried to tell you, but your mind was far away.”
I hesitated. The truth hovered just behind my teeth, sharp and dangerous. If I said it, there would be no taking it back. Would he hate me for it? Would he see me differently? My heart pounded as I weighed the silence between us.
But he deserved the truth.
“The night I came to you… my plan was to kill you.”
His lips parted just slightly as if the words had struck him. “What?”
