20

Iwas so overwhelmed with questions, questions, questions, and at the same time, so high on adrenaline that it was a miracle I didn't pass out the minute we entered the manor's candlelit kitchen.

Breathing hard, I leaned against the marble edge of the counter as I waited for Apollo to say something. Anything. I had no idea how to read his silence. I also had no idea how it was possible for someone to feel so conflicted. A part of me wanted to forget this journey ever happened and go home, where I was safe and in control of my surroundings. But another, brand new part of me wanted more time, more days, more adventure. To get to know him. To get to know myself next to him. I wanted to hate him. I wanted to trust him. I was such a mess.

Apollo began rummaging through the many drawers and cabinets of the kitchen for what ended up being a heap of bandages and an opaque bottle of rubbing alcohol.

"What are these for?" I asked, frowning as he handed them to me.

"You fell on your knees earlier. You should disinfect the scrapes if there're any." His eyes raked over my body, cold and unaffected, but the hoarse quality of his voice betrayed him. "I'd help you, but I don't want you to think I'm taking advantage—"

"I don't," I blurted out.

Apollo crouched over the counter next to me, grabbing the edges with white-knuckled hands. He shut his eyes for a few long, torturous seconds. The silence became as thick as treacle, the only lively sounds coming from the crackling fireplace and the long, pendulum clock in the corner across the room. Tick-tock. Tick-tock. Tick-tock.

I left the bottle and bandages on the countertop and tilted my head to the side, searching for his eyes. "Apollo?"

"Fuck, Nepheli," he snapped with a ragged breath. "This is all my fault. You could have been really hurt today, and it's all my fault." He scrubbed a hand down his face, suffering from something fiercer than regret and more darting than shame.

Guilt.

But how? How was it possible that he felt anything at all?

"I ran," I argued, moving a little closer. "You told me it was dangerous in the forest at night. You warned me. I didn't listen. I heard what Isa said and panicked. I should've let you explain first. I don't know why it's so hard for me to trust you."

"The longer you spend life on your own, the harder it becomes to trust anyone other than yourself. Believe me, I understand," Apollo said. "But, Nepheli, you have shown me trust. More trust than I deserve."

"I ran," I repeated shamefully.

"You ran because of me. You ran because I dragged you here in this beast of a place without explaining—" he choked on the words, cursed again, and turned around with a long, weary exhale.

We stood there, right next to each other, and for a few throbbing heartbeats, I could only register the brush of his elbow against mine and the warmth of his body radiating in waves.

I cleared my throat and refocused. "You said you were looking for your heart."

Apollo merely nodded, his eyes pinned straight ahead on the pendulum.

"Why would your heart be in Elora?"

"Because of Verena," was all he said.

"Verena?"

"My ex-fiancee," he wryly offered.

Everything tugged on my face. My eyes, my mouth, my brows were all twisted in a mask of pure shock. "You were engaged?"

"Are you seriously so surprised that someone wanted to marry me?" he threw back the exact words I'd said to him in the cave last night. The recollection brought complicit smiles to our faces, and a hint of surprise, as if we couldn't believe that in the briefness of our adventure, we had become two people with mutual memories to smile about.

He half-laughed, half-sighed. "Our relationship was protected from the public. That's why you never read about it in your little gossip columns."

"I do not read gossip columns!" I protested.

He playfully pinched my arm, his smoldering eyes falling on my lips. "You little liar."

I prayed to the gods I didn't blush like a lovestruck idiot, but I was beginning to fear that even the Celestials couldn't do anything against this man's charm.

"Verena and I were supposed to announce our engagement after I returned from university. Like every other Zayra before me, I was supposed to study political science in the East, finish my martial training, and tour the kingdom before getting Crowned at the age of twenty… then get married. My whole life was planned out. A perfect, shiny, fairytale life. So you can understand my shock when I returned home to find Verena in the arms of someone else. Finn. My oldest, dearest friend Finn."

"What?"

Apollo laughed mirthlessly at my scandalized reaction, as cold and insouciant as ever. "Gods, I'm boring myself just telling you the story. I mean, the guy was writing me heartfelt letters while he was fucking the girl I loved under my own roof. It's such a terrible cliche, isn't it?"

"I don't think it's a cliche. I think it's just terrible," was all I managed to say around the boulder in my throat. I could not even begin to fathom what this kind of betrayal could do to a person. I imagined that the disillusionment alone had been horrific, but the heartbreak… the heartbreak must have been absolutely devastating.

"I thought it was terrible too," he said dryly. "In fact, I thought I was heartbroken. In reality, I was just stupid. Stupid and young. And, I swear, time felt eternal back then. Time paused at that exact moment, and I wasn't strong enough to endure its stillness." His head lolled back, and his eyes drifted upward to the stone-beamed ceiling. "You know, people always talk about grief when someone dies, but no one ever talks about the grief you go through when a dream dies. I lost a lot of things that day. I lost my first love. I lost my best friend. I lost my dignity, my faith in people, my boyish innocence. But most of all, I lost the dream of the life I was supposed to have. This fairytale life in which I was someone good and honorable. Someone loved. I lost myself too, which, in the grand scheme of things, turned out to be the greatest loss of them all. And I wanted it to stop. The pain. The memories. The whispers of the court about my sudden misbehavior."

"The papers wrote about it too," I muttered hoarsely. "How the Prince of Thaloria returned a new man from the East. They said you fell in with the wrong crowd."

Apollo shrugged. "It's probably true. But I hardly remember any of them. They weren't my friends," he scoffed. "After Verena, all I wanted was a distraction, so I surrounded myself with people who could offer me exactly that. And like I said, I was young and stupid." His gaze turned bleary with remembrance. "One night, in a drunken spell, I ventured out into the city alone. Before I even realized what I was doing, I knocked on a Witch Shop's door. It was closed, of course, but I knocked and knocked, and eventually, someone came downstairs and opened the shop. She must have been a hundred years old—the witch, I mean. I told her everything. I told her that I couldn't stand my own damned self anymore and that I needed a spell, something, anything to help me heal." He turned to me, and his eyes hardened at the cruel, sharp blade of regret. "She told me to wait. Time would heal me, she said. But I didn't listen. I told her that I would pay any price she would name if she made the pain stop, stop forever because I certainly didn't want to feel like that ever again. She said the only way to avoid heartbreak is to no longer have a heart to break."

"Oh, Apollo," I whispered, finally beginning to understand. "You were willing. That's why she was able to curse you."

"She didn't trick me. She warned me that it would be a curse. A very old one." Apollo put a hand over his vacant chest, wrinkling his shirt in his fist. "She bound me with some spell, a chant in a strange, ancient language, and my chest ripped open, right before my eyes. She clawed the heart out of my body, and for the first time, I learned what it is to be animated but not alive. My heart—it was this tiny, tender thing, but aflame, with a strange opal light enveloping it. It was the curse—the spell she chanted was what encompassed it with that glowing shield. The very curse that made me undead was the one that kept my heart beating, kept me alive. I told you that the curse made me invincible, but that's not the whole truth. Although my body is immune to death, my heart isn't. If something happens to it in this vulnerable state, I will be able to feel it. And I will die, instantly."

"So she put your heart in a box. To be safe," I understood. "That's what you're looking for."

Apollo nodded. "She said that if I changed my mind, I could always return to the shop where my heart would be safe, and she would put it back in my chest and I would be restored. For a fee, of course. And I agreed. In fact, I begged for it. I remember there was a voice inside my head screaming that I was about to make the worst mistake of my life. I didn't listen then. But I understand now. There is no shortcut to healing. There is no magic spell that can rid you of all the ugly bits and leave you clean and whole and untouched. You have to feel it all. You have to feel until you're raw. Until you break apart completely. Until you're ready to start piecing yourself together again. The shape of you won't be the same. Perhaps it will be sharper, more unrefined, but it will still be you. A different you, but you."

As he said all this, I pictured everything in excruciating detail. Not only his terrible misfortune but beyond that, our separate lives, mine and his, converging on the same obscure point: destiny. The star we had in common, his mistake with the witch, my mistake with the stardust, the stray chance that he would walk into my Shop, that I would be here now listening to this impossible story. Life was so unbelievably strange sometimes. One moment you could find points of connection everywhere, then suddenly, all turned to chance, random decisions and random disasters, with you hovering over the edge of a vast uncertainty.

For the first time, I saw Apollo as he truly was, without the charm and aloofness and clever remarks. Just a person like I was, looking at all the great probabilities of life and not knowing what to do with them.

Under a surge of compassion, I slipped my hand over his. It was a simple touch. Friendly and consoling. But it seemed to break his defense somehow. Because instead of pulling back, he snapped his dark eyes on mine, turning my hand over to brush his thumb along my palm. Then, slowly, without looking away, he raised my palm to his mouth and left a kiss on it, right in the middle. His lips were soft and hot, like the sun. They burned my skin. My hand would never forget the imprint of his mouth. And he would never know it, but this would forever be the first kiss that made me understand why people use their lips to show affection.

I unfolded like a love letter read in secret. I trembled through my bones. I tried not to show it.

"I'm so sorry for so many things," he rasped against my skin.

"I'm sorry too," I whispered.

"Don't be, darling," he said, letting my hand drop. "I deserve this. I was selfish. I didn't think about anyone else but myself, and now I'm paying the price for it."

"What happened to your heart? Can't you take it back?"

"After a month of… let's just say horrendous behavior, I began to realize that I wasn't only hurting myself, but the people around me too. I thought the curse would stop the pain. But, in a way, it only misplaced it. I should have known. Unfelt pain always finds its way back to you."

"That's where the title came from," I realized. "The Prince of Broken Hearts."

"Gods, Nepheli, you've no idea. I was horrible. Not only to my court but to my family too. I was cruel and self-indulgent and disrespectful—" He sucked in a breath, shaking his head. "I got what I wanted. I became heartless and unbreakable. But I was not oblivious to my cruelty. Deep in my soul, I was still able to understand how wrong my behavior was. So I went back to the shop to reclaim my heart. But it was boarded up. I went next door and asked the merchant about the witch—I'd been so drunk that night that I didn't even get her name. He told me she died of old age and that all of her merchandise had been sold and shipped away."

"To Curiosity Shops," I gasped.

"To Curiosity Shops," he echoed. "So I got myself together, learned to listen to my good sense when I couldn't trust my impulses, and started looking for it. I traveled day and night, East to West. Seven years. Occasionally, I returned home to see my family. But it was too hard. For all of us. My parents…" He closed his eyes for a moment, and every muscle on his face and neck tautened. "They are good and generous, and two of the proudest people I know. The proudest people, and I humiliated them."

"You didn't," I argued, stepping in front of him. I caged him between the counter and my body. I felt bold and assured, and a little overwhelmed, not having fully processed everything yet. But before I could talk myself out of it, I slid a hand across his broad, hard chest, and pressed my palm on that spot where his heart once pulsed. "You were young and in pain. You made a mistake."

He opened his eyes, and they were only pupils, wide and dark, as he straightened himself over me. I began retreating, but he curled an arm around my shoulders and nudged me closer, clamping me to his body. To anyone else, it would look as though we were preparing to dance when, in reality, we were just spellbound on each other. Every time we touched, it was like this—a drizzle of sensation, then a cataclysm.

"I was weak," he said. "And careless. I messed up. I keep messing up. I hurt you too, didn't I?"

"You didn't hurt me," I countered, breathless and flushed. "This journey has been good for me, Apollo."

"I destroyed your Shop."

"I'll fix the Shop."

"You fell from the sky."

"And learned that swallowing stardust makes you quite resilient."

"You got tormented by evil fairies."

"Now I know not to romanticize magic."

He scowled. "You caught dragonfly fever."

"It will make a good story one day."

"I bit you."

I pressed my lips together, trying not to laugh. "I kind of liked it."

I expected him to tease me about it, but his face turned jaded stone, and his arm around me tightened like a vise. "That bastard put his hands on you tonight."

"Good thing you owe me fighting lessons."

"Darling," he sighed.

"What? I'm a fast learner. Next time we go through the Dragonfly, you'll be hiding under my skirts, I'm telling you."

Finally, a roguish little smirk tugged up the corner of his mouth. "Next time?"

A rush of heat went through me, my body's visceral response to him. I was too exhausted to resist it this time. Instead, I pressed closer, aligning my hips with his. "Next time."

His hands settled on the curve of my waist. My hands slipped on the counter behind him. We stayed like this, teetering on the verge of… something. Something new and nameless and dangerously exciting. I didn't move closer. He didn't pull back. We simply let ourselves wallow in each other's tactility.

"What you heard Isa say," Apollo ventured, his voice quiet and rough, "it's only just a theory. I approached Walder a few years ago, hoping he'd have a cure for me or at least be able to point me in the right direction. But Walder said that there wasn't much he could do as long as I didn't have my heart. He tried to conjure it, but nothing came out of it. If I find my heart, though, he will be able to put it back."

"And what about the other thing?" I whispered, hating to repeat Isa's words about him using me to break the curse.

"Love has a long history of breaking curses, Nepheli. I'm sure you already know that."

My brows rose in understanding. "Walder believes the curse will break if someone falls in love with you."

Apollo met my eyes. "Walder believes the curse will break if someone makes me fall in love with them."