The Ballad of Never After (Once Upon a Broken Heart, #2)

by Stephanie Garber

Jacks frowned. “I try not to think of you at all.”

“His first fox.”

She ran her fingers through his soft hair, just once. He leaned into her hand. “That feels good,” he mumbled. “You feel good, too.” He hooked an arm around her waist and drew her onto the bed. “Jacks—what are you doing?” “Just for tonight.” He tightened his arm, holding her even closer, until her chest was pressed against his bare skin. “You’re injured,” she breathed. “This makes me feel better.” He spoke against her throat and finished with a lick that made her head begin to spin.

“I mean … it’s just one night,” he said softly. “In the morning, you can forget it. You can go back to pretending you don’t like me, and I can pretend that I don’t care. But for tonight, let me pretend you’re mine.”

But he didn’t have to punish her. This was already torture because she wanted it so

much.

And it struck her how intimate words could be, how they could be spoken only once, for only one person, and they would never be heard again, they would disappear like a moment, gone almost as soon as you realized they were there.

and yet right now, she didn’t want to be smart. She just wanted to be his.

She meant to say, For tonight, I’m yours, but all that came out was “I’m yours.”

holding her to him as if touching were a form of breathing.

She held him as if he were hers and she were his, and there was nothing else between them.

That was the energy pouring off him now, as if he wanted to destroy her and make her his queen all at once.

It hurt to want him. It hurt to be rejected by him. It hurt to breathe. It hurt to cry. It hurt even more when she tried not to cry.

It would have been so easy to take the lid off. And really, what harm could it do? The stone took away pain, and she was in so much pain. Evangeline’s fingers hovered over the lid. Then she gently knocked it off.

But maybe she needed to feel this pain to get over it.

“Apollo—this isn’t safe.” He laughed, loud but brittle. “Nothing has been safe since the moment I laid eyes on you. And yet I don’t want to look away.”

He was always there to rescue her, and then he always left.

“I’m fine—I just—” I just need you to hold me.

He held her so tightly it hurt, but this pain she didn’t mind. She’d let him crush her, let him break her, just as long as he never let her

go.

He licked the center of her lips, soft and agonizingly slow. His tongue felt like heaven and hell. Like everything she wanted and all she couldn’t have.

Maybe they didn’t have to touch. She could live like this as long as she could live with him.

She hadn’t wanted that to be Jacks’s story—she wanted to be his story.

“Sorry to break your fairytale, Little Fox, but ballads don’t end happily, and neither do the two of us.”

“Since then, every girl I’ve kissed has died, except for one. And you are not that girl.”

The Fate was every tear that anyone had ever shed for lost love. He was pain given form.

“That is not a small mistake to fix. If you do this, Time will take something equally valuable from you.”

“There is nothing of equal value to me.”