“You will know her because she will be crowned in rose gold. She will be both peasant and princess.”
Evangeline didn’t believe the woman was mad. The words sounded almost prophetic.
“You cannot marry the prince! The Valory Arch can never be opened!” the matriarch cried. Something metallic flashed in her hands. And then she surged forward with an item that looked like a knife.
Evangeline grabbed for the closest object—a framed painting of a cat.
“What are you going to do with that?” Jacks muttered a curse, and then he took the emerald skull and cracked it over the matriarch’s head.
She crumpled to the ground in a heap of rumpled lavender.
Evangeline’s mouth fell open, though it took her several seconds to form words. “Did you—did you know this was going to happen?”
“You think I wanted her to try to kill you?” Jacks sounded more offended than she would have expected. He dropped the skull, letting it fall to the ground, where it landed beside the matriarch with a loud thud. The woman’s chest moved up and down with a slow, unsteady rhythm. She was still breathing, but barely.
“She’s not going to tell us anything now.” Jacks lowered onto his haunches and leaned closer, lips pressing together.
Something sick twisted in Evangeline’s stomach. He was going to kiss the woman—and kill her.
“Jacks, stop!” Evangeline grabbed his shoulders. Somehow, she managed to wrench him back, probably due to the livid tone of her voice rather than the force of her trembling hands. She didn’t fully understand what had just happened, but she wasn’t going to let Jacks make this worse.
“If you kiss her, we are done,” Evangeline said. “I’m not going to be involved in any murders.”
“We can’t leave her like this.” His voice was perfectly reasonable and completely unemotional. Killing this woman wouldn’t bother him at all. “As soon as she wakes, she’ll come after you.”
“Why is that, Jacks? What’s the Valory Arch? And who does she think I am?”
Jacks pressed his mouth shut and rocked back on his heels, which felt like answer enough. He believed this chant was about her. The room started to spin, all the baubles and uncanny items blurring around her as Evangeline tried to make sense of this latest turn.
You will know her because she will be crowned in rose gold.
She will be both peasant and princess.
Evangeline had the rose-gold hair, she was currently a peasant, and she would be a princess in two days if she married Prince Apollo.
This must have been why Jacks wanted her and Apollo to marry. Jacks had arranged all of this so she could become the girl in the Fortuna matriarch’s chant, who, according to the matriarch, would open up this Valory Arch.
“What’s the Valory Arch?” she asked again. “And why was she so afraid that I’ll open it? What’s inside?”
Jacks slowly brought himself back up to his full towering height, as he looked down on her and drawled, “You don’t need to worry about the Valory Arch. All you need to do is marry Prince Apollo.”
“I—”
Jacks cupped her cheek, silencing her with one icy touch. “If you wish to break the spell on Apollo, your only option is to marry him. Or do I need to remind you how desperate a broken heart makes you? How it hurts so much that it compelled you to make a deal with a devil like me? Do you really want to call off your wedding and leave Apollo like that—forever in love with someone who will never feel the same way?”
Jacks’s eyes took on the same disturbing, godforsaken look from the coach.
“It wasn’t that long ago that I saw you in my church, willing to promise me almost anything to make the pain stop. Was that a lie? Or have you already forgotten the way heartbreak rips apart the soul piece by piece, how it turns you into a masochist, making you long for the thing that just eviscerated you until there’s nothing left of you to be destroyed?”
His cold fingers dug into her cheek.
She squared her shoulders and pulled away. “Are you still talking about my heartbreak, or about yours?”
Jacks laughed and gave her a smile so sharp it could have sliced a diamond. “You’re getting better at the meanness, Little Fox. But you have to have a working heart for it to break. I do not. I can keep Apollo under this spell for eternity. So you can either marry him and save him from a life of misery, or you can try to prevent a dusty prophecy that you don’t even understand.”
29
Evangeline kept her head turned toward the window, watching the icy glass as the carriage rambled back to Wolf Hall. She acted as if Jacks weren’t there, even as she kept replaying his last words. A dusty prophecy you don’t understand.