three

Poppy

She was kneeling on seeds again.

Poppy Wyatt loved seeds and flowers, everything that had to do with nature, really. She had a lovely garden at home, and all the neighbors told her that she had a green thumb, and sent over their gardeners to beg her for advice. They called her ‘aptly named', but it just came naturally to her. Animals loved her too, and seemed to always follow her around, no matter how little she did to encourage them.

It had gotten annoying, honestly, but she would never say that out loud.

She loved everything to do with nature; except now.

The seeds, mingled with white uncooked rice, were digging into the skin of her knees and calves, causing so much pain that she wanted to scream. But she didn't. More punishment would come if she did; she knew that from past experience.

She suffered in silence, letting her mind wander to green fields drowned in flowers.

She tried to forget the sharp seeds and grains of rice embedded in her knees, or how much her back and neck hurt as she knelt, absolutely still, in the chilled chapel, to atone for her disobedience.

Two hours later, her brother came to tell her that her penance was done.

"I have been lenient with you, Poppy," he said, wrapping his long fingers fondly around the curls in his own hair. It was his pride and joy. "It should have been hours for what you did, but I just love you so much. I spoil you terribly."

She tried to stand up and immediately fell over.

"You never learn, do you?" her brother sounded disgusted.

He was standing by the door, all the way across a row of pews. He didn't take a single step to approach or help her, which just went to show her how deeply she had wounded him with her actions. She hung her head, ashamed of herself.

"You always fall at the end of your penance," he went on. "You need to wait for the blood to flow back into your limbs again. You are not a child, Poppy. I won't help you anymore. I have done too much for you. Far too much. It's time for you to grow up."

Poppy knew this to be true.

She was twenty-one and no longer a child.

Once upon a time, she hadn't felt quite so stupid and ashamed of herself. Which was strange, because she had been younger back then. Only sixteen years old and full of confidence. Her father used to say that she was like the sun, smiling constantly, even behind the clouds.

But she couldn't remember the last time she had smiled in the last couple of years.

Her father had died, and her brother had been widowed. He was a vicar in London by that time, and had a good living, so he had kindly invited her to live with him and keep house for him, in the absence of a wife. A pious and respected man, her brother had vowed celibacy once his wife had died, and everyone in the parish worshipped him like a saint.

Poppy had been so happy to no longer be alone; her father's sudden death had left her with crippling debts and the prospect of hiring herself out as a servant, just to survive. But her brother had swooped in and saved her from all that.

He was a good twelve years her senior, and she hadn't really gotten to know him well when she was a child. He was almost a stranger, but they were both extremely moved at the idea of finally getting to know each other and living in the same household, like the family that they were.

But then, she had started disappointing him.

And he had explained to her that their poor, gambling, debt-ridden papa had spoiled her most sinfully. Not so her brother. He cared about her immortal soul, and he would not let it burn in hell.

She would have to do penance for every sin.

She had fought against the very idea at first; she had told him that it was preposterous, and she had refused to kneel on the rice for hours, repenting. She had laughed at the thought.

She wasn't laughing now.

She couldn't remember very well what had happened between the laughter and the kneeling. She remembered feeling hungry a lot, and then nothing for a few months. Maybe she had been sick? She had been starving for a while, but then she had been given food, and her entire outlook on life had changed. She knew what she must do now, with absolute certainty. She must be quiet and obedient, or suffer.

The choice was easy; it was barely a choice, in fact.

Poppy tried once more to rise to her feet and discovered that she still couldn't. Her brother was long gone, leaving her alone in the cold church. He had blown out the candles, and darkness was quickly descending through the tall windows. Poppy looked down at her legs. She could barely make out the whiteness of her skin, and the seeds embedded in it. She picked at them with her fingers, but they were stuck too deep inside her skin.

Poppy sighed. She would have to go in with a knife again.

She braced herself against the pain she had felt when she had had to do this once before. She braced herself against the pain she was feeling now, and the pain she would feel as soon as she started walking.

Pain was just pain—it wasn't like starving to death again. That must be avoided at all costs. The pain, although it felt as if it would kill her, wouldn't. It would pass soon, as it always did.

Besides, she deserved it.

…

In another life, she could have been pretty. Not beautiful, but pretty perhaps; that was what her brother said.

Once upon a time, her father had called her his beauty, but she might have imagined that. Her life before coming to her brother's vicarage was a distant blur.

It was her brother who was right, she knew that. For one thing, she was lame, and that was what everyone tended to notice after her heart-shaped face, pink cheeks, soft brown curls and brilliant green eyes. People opened their mouths to voice their admiration, but then they saw her lame arm and the way she hobbled about on her bad leg, and closed it again.

Poppy didn't mind.

She knew she would never be the heroine of a story, and was content to be the second character instead, or the last one, ignored by everyone and disappearing into the wallpaper of life. She could be satisfied simply to exist in her small, quiet life. No, she did not mind.

Not anymore, that is. She had shed so many tears about her lameness as a child, but now that she was nearing the mature, not to mention unmarried, age of twenty-two, she had decided to accept it.

Her father had the brilliant idea to study the Greeks in his youth, which was not the worst thing he had done in his past—a passion for gambling and subsequently destroying himself was much more of a disaster—but it was pretty close. She was therefore plagued with a silly name like Persephone, but now that she was officially off the marriage mart, it made little difference.

When she began to grow up, she started introducing herself to her father's parishioners as ‘Poppy', because the poor people had enough problems already without her giving them a tongue-twister on top of everything. And that was that.

She was Poppy from then on.

Her father had been a vicar as well, a reformed rake and a gambler who had turned himself into a good man. They were poor as church mice, but they had been happy. At least she now thought they had been. Her brother had shown her the error of her ways, and had explained to her how their poor, misguided father had let her wander into sin thoughtlessly. Her freedom had been a form of disobedience most displeasing to the Almighty.

Sadly, she had been blissfully unaware of her own corruption for the first sixteen years of her life, and had been content with her simple, small life: tending to her garden, her animals, and her father.

Occasionally, she tended to the poor, especially the small children, but here in London it was harder to do so. For one thing, there seemed to be an endless supply of gangs lurking behind every corner, in every street, and, even more shockingly, these gangs were made up entirely of children driven to crime and cruelty by starvation. She felt for them, she really did, but there was no way to help or even approach them without getting severely murdered.

On the other hand, the one time she had dared to bring up the subject of helping the poor, her brother had absolutely forbidden it. She had been ordered to do five hours of penance kneeling on the rice, just for suggesting that her place as little more than a servant in his household was not enough for her to lead a full and content life. She had tried to explain that that was not what she had meant at all, but that only earned her two additional hours.

That was back when he only made her kneel on rice.

Later, when he discovered how much sharper seeds were—flower seeds, fruit pips, pumpkin seeds, and so on—she was constantly struggling to walk, her limp growing much worse with every passing day. But penance was more important than being able to move without pain.

Soon, she would not be able to walk at all, Poppy mused as she crawled on her hands and knees out of the church.

"What took you so long?" her brother asked her when she hobbled home, nearly an hour later.

The walk from the chapel to the vicarage was barely twenty steps. It had taken her one hour to try to stand up and limp to the door.

"I'm sorry," Poppy replied, keeping her head down. She should have known better than to reply. She could feel her brother's rage in the air.

"You still have enough stubbornness in you to answer back, I see," he said immediately. "I shouldn't have been so lenient. The gates of hell are filled with people who were not loved as much as I love you. Your eternal soul is a serious matter, Persephone."

There might have been a time, years ago, when Poppy might have felt the urge to scream at his words. But if there ever was such a time, she had long forgotten it.

She knew now that she deserved every single word he said.

And she might feel too numb inside to care for her immortal soul; she might indeed feel that there could not possibly be that much of a difference between eternal hell and this earthly hell she lived through every day, but this she knew beyond doubt: she deserved everything she endured, and more. She did not deserve his love or his forgiveness, for what she had done had been despicable.

Even if she did not, at the moment, remember exactly what it had been.

"Forgive me, brother," she said, as he had instructed her. Her brother was quiet, waiting. Yes, this was what he wanted her to do. "Forgive my sins against you, which are many. I regret what I did, with all my soul."

Her brother made a point of sighing deeply and rubbing the space between his eyebrows. His hair was thinning at the temples, but he had been considered quite handsome when he was younger. That was why he had managed to make so advantageous a match, and move to a parish in London. But now, he looked thin and tired all the time—a result of his very limited diet, which was done on purpose, as he believed it made him look ‘saintlier'.

"Poppy," he said in tortured, long-suffering tones, "eavesdropping is a sin. You know that, yes?"

"Yes."

Oh, right. That was what she had done.

Eavesdropping was a sin.

She knew that now.

It was a sin worthy of a few hours of kneeling on seeds, and having them ingrained in her skin. It was a sin worthy of unbearable pain, and of not being able to walk. It was a horrible, horrible thing.

"Good girl." Her brother smiled. It was more of a wince, but Poppy's heart fluttered. Sudden tears threatened, she didn't know why. "Come here, you poor girl," her brother's voice was all kindness suddenly, as he opened up an arm for her to crawl into his embrace. "Oh, how you suffer against the temptations of your flesh."

Poppy fought the tears, but it was hard to resist, because every single bone in her body hurt, and she was so cold that her brother's reluctant touch was warm enough to reduce her to a blubbering mess.

"There there," he said, and the warmth in his voice was such a huge contrast to the coldness of it before, that she suddenly was consumed by the fierce want, no, need, to keep that warmth there.

Longing overwhelmed her until she could barely breathe.

"I would do anything for you," she said, and meant it. Anything to keep that frosted tone away, anything to stop the hurt. "Anything."

"I know, my dear," her brother said gently. "It is to God you have sinned, not to me."

"Of course," she replied, because that was what he would like her to say.

"Good girl," he passed a hand lightly over her long hair. She hadn't even had a chance to braid it. "You won't ever eavesdrop again, will you?" She shook her head fiercely. "I know you won't. Not after seeing the consequences today. It's not worth it."

She had overheard—and then proceeded to eavesdrop on—a conversation in the library between her brother and one of his parishioners.

That is what she had done.

"He…" she hesitated, then stopped altogether.

Her brother's hand stilled on her hair and she froze, absolutely froze, bracing herself against another bout of frostiness. Surprisingly, it didn't come.

"Tell me," her brother said gently, resuming the motion.

Relief made her so weak she could barely think.

"The man you were speaking to," she said, hardly knowing what she was saying, "in the library, he was shouting. I hadn't meant to overhear, I really hadn't. But he was shouting that he was about to kill himself."

"He was," her brother sighed again. "Sin pushes people to destruction. This was nothing more than the fruit of his own depraved actions. I don't know where the surprise lays."

"I wanted you to save him," Poppy said.

"I wanted that too," her brother said. "Or rather, for God to save him. I am but a mere mortal."

"Yet it was to you that he came to ask for help and guidance."

"Indeed." She heard a smile in his voice. Her words had pleased him. She felt as if she had won a prize. "And he did find it, praise be to the Almighty."

"Indeed," Poppy replied, although secretly she wasn't so sure that the man had found help.

The man had ruined himself at a gaming hell, and had come to her brother desperate, begging for a solution other than suicide. But in lieu of help, the ruined man had found a lecture which had lasted more than two hours, a diatribe on the vices of gambling and sin, and then had been sent merrily on his way in the small hours of the morning, whereupon Poppy had been discovered listening at the door.

The rest of her brother's night, or rather his early morning, up until now, had been taken up by disciplining Poppy.

But the question in her head remained.

And, at the risk of being sent back to the freezing chapel and the seeds, she asked:

"What will happen to the man now, brother?"

Once more his hand on her head stilled, and she felt her brother stiffen.

"Have I not made it clear, my dear," he said with frosty calm, "that this is none of your concern?"

"You have, forgive me," she replied. Silence for a bit. The clock was ticking on, deafening in the silence. She licked her dry lips. "I shall go downstairs to inform the servants that you are ready for your breakfast."

"You must," her brother pronounced sadly, "mustn't you? It was because of your insubordination and sin that our routine was interrupted, after all. They, as well as I, must suffer the consequences. Your own sin is something everyone else will have to pay for, Persephone. Do not forget it."

Poppy didn't.

She struggled to climb the stairs down to the kitchens, crying in pain the whole time, but she didn't care. All she could think about was that man and his heart wrenching cries:

‘I am ruined, I have lost everything. I lost everything at the card table. Help me, please, I have no one to turn to.' The man had stopped for breath, and Poppy could hear his sobs all the way from across the hall. ‘For God's sake, what is to become of me? What of my wife and children?'

It's not right, she had thought then, and she thought it again now.

It's not right.

And then.

Her first act of rebellion, real rebellion, in five years.

She didn't know why it was now that the need seized her to rebel, to be disobedient, to sin.

She didn't know why now, when she was in so much agony and pain from her recent discipline session.

But, for some unfathomable reason, it was now.

Maybe because for once, in spite of the threat of pain and cruelty, this was important.

Maybe for once, it was more important to be disobedient.

And that was how it started, her descent into hell.

Because that cold morning in February, when she was weeping from pain, her spirit completely broken, her memories of herself and her father almost entirely erased, Poppy Wyatt had one singular, rebellious, sinful thought.

And this was the thought:

I have to do something.

And she did.

…

The man who had come to consult her brother the night before had been a middle-aged man, a baron with a wife and six children. He had ruined himself inside the walls of an establishment of sin, the gaming club everyone called ‘Hell Club'.

Its real name was The Hellion Club, and it was housed in a set of buildings situated beneath London's tangled streets, appropriately named ‘The Underworld'.

From what Poppy could tell, the place was aptly nicknamed the Hell Club, because every night it attracted desperate men of low or no morals, who would then proceed to fleece the meager fortunes of poor unsuspecting men who happened to have a gambling addiction, like this baron.

Poppy's brother had taken hours to finish his diatribe on the vices of gambling and the like, and after that, he had bestowed one of his long-winded prayers on the poor, ruined man. But Poppy had known that praying would not bring back the money the man had lost on the gaming table, nor would it feed or house his six children, since he had lost his ancestral seat to the satan-like owner of the Hell Club, a man so deeply deprived and immoral, he was nicknamed ‘Lord Hades'.

The day wore on, excruciatingly slowly, and soon it would be nighttime again.

Her brother spent the whole day enclosed in his study, and she was free to soak her wounded legs in warm water and think.

When was the last time she had thought, actually thought for herself?

She couldn't remember.

What was there to think about, besides her many and repeated sins and offenses; her constant companion, pain; and the enduring, hollow ache at the absence of her father?

She was better off not thinking much.

But now, here was something worth the pain of remembering.

Of finding herself.

That night, she lay awake until four in the morning, when she was sure her brother was snoring in his bed. Then, she got up in a trance, as if some other, brave and horrible creature had taken over her body, proceeded to put on some old clothes of her father's, and went alone out into the night, dressed like a man.

She took one of her brother's horses and rode all the way to Mayfair, and to the Hell Club. She spent the greatest part of the night standing outside the exclusive gentleman's club, waiting. Waiting for a man like the one who had come to the vicarage for help.

This was no impulse: she had thought it through.

She was looking for some desperate soul who would stumble out of the club drunkenly, desperately, straight out of the card room and into the night, having lost his entire fortune and mad enough with grief to do something foolish.

When one such man came out, in the small hours of the morning, Poppy followed him and stopped him from doing something desperate.

The next night, she did the same.

The next as well.

She carried on in this way for a week.

And then, one night, it was so miserably cold outside that she couldn't help herself: she looked like a young man anyway, dressed in her father's clothes, and the cold was so vicious it made breathing hard. So Poppy, hardly knowing how she found the courage to do so, stepped up to the Hell Club's gilded doors and somehow managed to get in.

She was shocked, disgusted and angered—and not only by her own behavior.

By the things she saw there.

She did however manage to pass undetected, for her father had taught her how to play cards like the most cunning knave of them all.

She returned home hours later, shaking like a leaf with fear and excitement, but her brother hadn't suspected a thing.

The next night, she was back at the Hell Club.

She was a bit calmer this time, and was able to think clearly and remember how to play well. She very nearly enjoyed herself. That was not hard; she and her father had played so often it was like second nature to her.

But it was hard to concentrate on the game when so much was going on around her.

Her senses were assaulted by the opulence and the vibrant colors on the tapestries and the murals on the walls and ceiling. Every surface of the club was covered either in glittering, spilling candelabras, or thick Persian carpets thrown over rich, mahogany wood. Grecian statues were randomly strewn about in a casual display of wealth, and gilded armchairs sat in front of several roaring fires, the mantelpieces decorated with a distinguished array of rare and beautiful books. Everything was garish and ostentatious, but it was done in surprisingly good taste.

But here the good taste ended.

Poppy could smell the opium from two rooms away; the sensual coming together of men with common women smelled even closer, maybe coming from one of the rooms adjoining to the card table, judging by how near the sounds of pleasure and seduction sounded. Poppy shivered uncontrollably at the thought of two human bodies being in such proximity to each other. How did people endure it? Once upon a time she herself had sat close to her father by the fire, had embraced children and danced with gentlemen at the Yuletide Ball. But now, the only living things she could touch without getting torturous, quick flashes of her brother's slaps, or even worse, his hateful stares or the rice she knelt on, were the petals of flowers and the stems of herbs.

The idea of being touched and finding pleasure in it was as foreign to her now as a smile.

She tried not to let her nose wrinkle in distaste; it would not fit the character she was disguised as, after all. She was supposed to be a young man with no taste in clothing but with great expectations of a fortune, and had been asked to mention the names of not one but two prominent patrons of the establishment before she could be allowed to get in. The man at the door, a black gentleman of the name of Wilder, with beautiful, intelligent eyes and muscles hard as marble, looked her up and down several times and pondered over the names she had given him for a few seconds. Then his eyes widened as he no doubt realized, as Poppy had meant him to, that she had somehow gotten a hold of those gentlemen's secrets, and was wont to spill them unless she was allowed entrance.

He had then told her to enter, looking severely displeased.

Now, hours later, in one of the several card rooms of the Hell Club, Poppy was nestled between a gentleman who belonged to the House of Lords—an important member of Parliament, as he missed no chance to remind everyone, who was currently being fleeced out of his vast fortune—and an attractive-looking young viscount who looked bored out of his mind.

They were playing vingt-et-un—and not well.

"Pass," the viscount said.

"And you said you had us," the boisterous gentleman laughed.

"I do have you," the viscount insisted stubbornly. "This is not hazard."

Poppy was about to play her hand. Her father would be proud of her maneuvers, especially since she had walked into the card room with not a farthing to fly with, and had already won several rounds.

Yes, so far she was winning, which gave rise to a strange, exhilarating feeling she hadn't felt in years. She looked up, feeling something akin to a smile begin to stretch her lips. But as she looked up, she realized: her luck was about to change.

Because she saw him.

Him him.

The man of several names: he was called ‘the Slav', ‘His Highness', ‘Mikailoff', ‘the Dark Prince', or, more commonly, ‘Lord Hades'. No one knew who he really was, what his real name was, or what exactly his place in society was. But everyone knew that he was the owner of the Hell Club. And that was enough.

He stood there, across from her, one shoulder pressed into the wall, scowling directly at her. Poppy looked behind her, around her, then back at him. No, she wasn't mistaken. The man was looking straight at her, his steely gaze unwavering, and had been doing so for the past half hour.

Dammit.

Don't swear. Swearing once equals to two hours kneeling on the rice. Or else an eternity of damnation. Don't swear.

Dammit.

She glanced at him and quickly averted her gaze.

Hades looked nothing like she had imagined him.

His face was drawn and pale, his porcelain-white skin a complete contrast to hair so ebony black that it turned into silver where the candlelight hit it. It was combed to utter smoothness and falling in soft waves down to his shoulders, a perfect frame for his electric blue eyes, which were brewing with icy fire as they stared at her with open hostility. His body was long and lithe, his clothes all black, his face all angles. He looked like a fallen angel, his chiseled, almost feminine—but too angular for that—features and his marble-white skin barely indistinguishable from the Greek statues that littered the walls.

"What is that bloody animal doing here?" the gentleman next to Poppy swore.

Poppy looked down, distracted from her study of Hade's perplexingly beautiful face.

There was a cat on her lap.

"It's me, gentlemen," she said, in her deep, boyish voice. "I apologize. The damn things seem to take a liking to me wherever I go. Cats, dogs, rats, what have you."

Don't swear.

Swearing once equals to two hours kneeling on the rice.

Or else an eternity of damnation.

"Well, shake him off, will you?" the viscount said impatiently. His cheeks were scarlet; he was deep in his cups, and spending money as if it was water. "I can't abide the closeness of felines; I shall be seized by sneezing."

Poppy tried to wrestle the cat out of her arms, but this was easier said than done. She blew out an exasperated sigh. Why did these things always happen to her? It was true that animals and plants—even seeds, although that wasn't funny—had a natural tendency to follow her around, no matter the circumstances, but of all the places…

She patted the cat on the head and shooed it away.

It didn't move, but Poppy did.

A sudden thought made her entire body jerk as if it had been flung into a fiery pit.

You're like that cat, she thought.

You have been reduced to nothing more than an animal.

Isn't this how your brother pets your head when he wants to subdue you?

You're nothing more than a docile pet to him.

This is who you are.

"Shut up!" she yelled at the voice inside her head.

"I beg your pardon," the viscount said, offended, and then belched loudly.

"I am sorry, I wasn't talking to Your Lordship," Poppy said quickly. "Let us move ahead with the game. Whose turn is it?"

They did go on, and presently the viscount started sneezing so violently that he had to cut his losses—and they were many—and get up and leave.

Poppy was at once alert; she intended to follow him as quickly as possible. She had come back for him, after all. But she didn't want to go now, she was intrigued. For one thing, Hades had not stopped staring at her—he was so absolutely still, it appeared as if he was hardly breathing.

And for another, she had seen it at a first glance last night, on her first visit here. The one thing that had made the hair stand up on her arms and her heart thud. Something was definitely, deeply wrong here at the Hell Club:

The place was crawling with cats.

….

Poppy left shortly after the young viscount.

She had won close to a thousand pounds and then promptly lost it. She never went on to gamble larger sums unless she had won them first. It had seemed like a good idea last night, but now that she thought about it, it might have been a dead giveaway, had anyone been watching her.

And, for some reason, someone had.

Damn that fallen angel and his wide shoulders.

It was rumored that Hades, the owner of Hell Club, was a prince in his country—which, to her sheltered, English ears, sounded like such an exotic and European thing to be. He certainly seemed to fancy himself some sort of dark and dangerous overlord of London's dark nightly scene. But what he really was, was a nuisance.

Poppy took off after the young viscount.

She had seen something in his eyes, as he left the table in a drunken stupor, having lost the greatest part of his father's fortune to a scoundrel masquerading as a gentleman—as most men were. And that something had disturbed her greatly. That, after all, was the reason she was risking damnation, not to mention her brother's wrath, by sneaking out like this.

The cold air hit her in the face as she surfaced from the Hell Club, and it was only then that she realized that it had been hot as a furnace in there. She hadn't taken two steps into the black night, when she discovered that her unwelcome companion was following her blithely, threading between her boots as it pranced loftily along, and nearly getting trampled over.

"Go back, cat," Poppy said to the animal. "Hades will have my head if he thinks I've stolen you."

The cat proceeded to lick its paw.

Poppy groaned and walked on as briskly as her limp would allow her, and the cat immediately abandoned all pretense at licking anything and followed, its paws scratching Poppy's shoes.

"Oi there! Look, it's a cat!"

"And a scrawny youth with it! I smell great game."

A whistle. Boyish laughter.

Dammit.

Don't swear.

"What luck! Quick, let's go after them both, move your legs now. To the river!"

Poppy recognized the voices at once; not the specific voices, of course, but after living in London for the better part of the past five years, it wasn't hard to guess. These boys belonged to one of the gangs of hungry boys that were roaming the streets, and contrary to the opinion those who were bent on romanticizing poverty and crime, they were deadly.

And now they were after her.

She took great care never to attract their attention, and she usually succeeded. And even on the occasions when she hadn't, they quickly realized that there was nothing on her to steal, and had abandoned her after torturing her for a few minutes. To them, she usually looked like a thin and lame young man: in short, nothing special. It would be a completely different story if she had looked like a woman, which was why she took care to never look the part.

But today, she had the cat with her.

Which made her a target.

These boys were tall and strong, much stronger than her, and they were vicious. And now, apparently, they had been delighted by the cat, seeing in it potential for a few minutes of fun. The cat, meanwhile, oblivious to its impending doom, was struggling to run alongside of Poppy, but couldn't quite catch up.

With an oath that would make even her father blush to hear it, Poppy knelt down and scooped up the cat, then tried to run even faster. But her bad leg was already strained beyond its powers, and now she had wasted precious time collecting the blasted animal.

The gang was gaining on her.

"This way!" the leader called, his face twisted in feral glee. "Don't let ‘im get away now."

The next second, Poppy felt his breath hot on her collar and something hard hit her on the back of the head with so much force that her heart stopped beating.

Well, not quite literally.

Oh, wait—