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And if she is too long and lean, too wild to be considered comely, the strangeness of her hair has made her something even better. Striking.
No, she smells like wet earth and wrought iron and raw sugar.
María groans and drapes an arm across her eyes, cursing the sun, and Andrés, and whoever designed a room with windows facing east.
That her beauty is something she is expected to pass on instead of keep.
She was raised on good books and bad TV, and she knows what this looks like, but she also knows that it’s not real.
And she feels a deep, simmering rage, because it does not seem fair that the only two choices she was given were to be alive and bound, or alone and dead.
“Some minds whisper. Others shout. Yours is loud. What amuses me, though, is that your name is louder still.”
It feeds, but does not fill her.
Renata melts into his side, and she wonders how long they have been together, to fit like that, wearing space into each other’s bodies.
She drinks, and drinks, sure that here at last she will finally feel glutted, finally feel full, finally find the limits of her hunger. But she doesn’t. Instead, it only opens wider, each bite like a stitch unpicked until the darkness is a chasm. And she is falling in.
Because that is the power of big sisters, the urge to take anything they offer.
anger strong enough to be called hate. Oh, she feels plenty of other emotions—worry, and panic, sadness, and fear—but they make her want to hold on to things as tight as she can, keep them together. She doesn’t understand the urge Catty has to break them instead.
Where is the beauty meant to offset the horror of what’s happening?
Love. As terrible and bottomless as hunger.
“Is it life,” he counters, “if there is never death to balance it? Or is its brevity what makes it beautiful?”
“Oh look.” Matteo leans back smugly, rests an elbow on the gondola’s edge. “You have survived.”
The daylight ushers in another kind of torment: children.
—and that makes Alice think of the time she and Catty got too stoned and she had the munchies so bad she kept forgetting the way food tasted as soon as she had swallowed, so kept going back for more.
What is the point, she thinks, of loving something you are doomed to lose? Of holding on to someone who cannot hold on to you?
“Perhaps one day you’ll find someone you want to keep for longer.” “I doubt it,” says Sabine. She does not tell him she has thought of it, a few times over the years, watching Alessandro and Matteo.
When Matteo boards his ship the following night, she knows she will never see him again. Watching it sail, she feels a shallow swell of grief. A ripple. But then it’s gone, he’s gone, and something shifts inside her, crumbles, falls, taking the wave of sadness with it.
She just shrugged and said, “He sees me.” As if he’s the only one, or even the first. As if Alice didn’t come into this world with both eyes focused on her sister.
“No, you don’t,” she says, cupping Alice’s face. “Don’t be me, Bones. Just be you.” The bonfire crackles. Alice swallows. “But I don’t know who that is.” “That’s okay.” Catty cracks a smile. “You’ve got all the time in the world to find out.”
You are the kind of bloom that thrives in any soil.
Husband. What an ugly word.
From that moment on, she insisted, she would read only romance. As if love and horror could not go hand in hand.
Charlotte has read enough romance to know the way she should feel in their presence, and yet, while more than once the heroes in those books stirred her, reality does not.
Tears slipped down her cheeks. “I’m sorry,” she said, trying to brush them away. But her mother caught her hands. “Never be sorry,” she said, “for who you are.” Charlotte understood then that burning the pages of her journal had done nothing. Her mother already knew. She looked back at her husband and son, standing on the steps. “Some people keep their heart tucked so deep, they hardly know it’s there. But you,” she went on, turning back toward Charlotte, “you have always worn it like a second skin.”
Each one tailored perfectly to fit, and each two shades darker than the sea of other girls. Honey when the rest are cream. Garnet when they are rose. Forest when they are mint.
“How dare you—I am here! I have just fled my own proposal to lay my heart bare at your feet.” “There are things you do not know.”
Charlotte shudders, the pleasure rolling through her first, and for an instant, she has two heartbeats, one at her throat, and one between her legs.
Perhaps that is what makes them monsters—the fact their love is marked by violence, and death, and yet. And yet. She would not change a thing.
“Well done,” she says. “Now let me in.” And Charlotte, so proud of her new skill, says, “No.” Just like that, the balance tips.
The way Sabine’s whole demeanor shifts, the smile dropping from her face as her amusement dies. Anger strikes like flint behind her eyes.
And Sabine laughs, a lovely, earnest sound that makes Charlotte feel like she is falling in love all over again. “We have to celebrate,” says Charlotte, and Sabine steals a kiss, and assures her that they will.
Regardless of their sex, their innocence or guilt, the last thing these men will ever feel is fear. And it will be her doing.
“I dream of you, you know,” says Jocelyn. And then, “I dream of us.”
To her surprise, Jocelyn reaches up one frail hand to catch the bloodred drop. “Did you find someone brave enough to love you?”
She climbs the stairs and finds Sabine where she always is, in the finest room, on the finest bed.
“Promise,” she says, soft and low, “that you will never hurt me.”
FUCKKL
She wakes to find her pillowcase stained red, from crying in her sleep, while Sabine grows impatient and annoyed.
she always comes back bright-eyed and happy, humming with life, and always with a gift in hand—a single sunflower, a silver comb, a first edition of Camilla, because she knows it was the book that swept Charlotte off her feet.
“To the next one hundred years,” murmurs Sabine, and Charlotte shivers as the necklace settles, cold and heavy, at her throat.
A hundred years without another confidante, or friend.
“Live long enough, and things begin to rot.” He draws a hand from his pocket, taps a fingertip against his chest. “Compassion, affection, humility, care.” One strike with every word. “They drop away like petals, till all that’s left is stem and thorn. Hunger, and the urge to hunt.”
“The fact is, whether death takes you all at once, or steals pieces over time, in the end there is no such thing as immortality. Some of us just die slower than the rest.”
“The point is, we find ways to hold on to who we were. In hopes it will keep us from becoming someone else.” She swallows. “Does it work?” “No. But sometimes it softens the blow.”
“She didn’t know it then, but it turns out a soul is what makes the sun feel warm against your skin, what gives food taste, what makes you feel full.
Because I like you, she almost says. Because I want you. Because there are too many kinds of hunger, and I can’t pick them apart. Because I’m afraid. Because— “Because I’m hungry.”
And even though the pulse has trailed off in Charlotte’s chest, for the first time in her life she can still hear it, because it is still there, beside her in the bed.
