The other changelings had gone briefly still. They watched the exchange with rapt, inhuman attention. Evangeline didn’t want to believe Luc was like them. His voice was pure human emotion. But when she searched beyond his eyes, he looked like the others, dried blood marring the warm brown of his throat and staining the white of his shirt. “I don’t want this, I swear.”
“He’s lying.” Jacks grabbed for Evangeline’s wrist and pulled.
She couldn’t blame him. This wasn’t the only room full of almost-vampires. But Luc wasn’t a vampire yet.
“Eva,” Luc pleaded. “I know you have every reason to hate me. I know I broke your heart. But I was under a curse.”
Jacks’s grip on Evangeline’s wrist slipped.
“Did you say curse?” she asked. And suddenly Luc no longer felt like the warped product of a wish. He felt like a truth that she was afraid to touch. Evangeline had felt half-mad for the last couple of months, wondering if Luc really was cursed or if she’d just conjured the idea of a curse as a way to survive his rejection.
Jacks’s cold hand tugged again on hers, another warning that it was time to go, but Evangeline ignored it.
“What kind of curse were you under?” she asked.
Luc let go of a bar to run a hand through his hair, a familiar and terribly human gesture that brought another pang to her heart. “I didn’t realize it until tonight, until the vampire venom was in me and suddenly my head cleared. I can’t describe what it was like before. All I know was that your stepsister was all that I could think about. She was the reason I came here—I needed to be perfect for her. After I got mauled by the wolf, my scars weren’t sexy scars—”
“He just said sexy scars,” Jacks drawled. “Are you really listening to this?”
“Shh,” Evangeline hissed.
“After I was attacked,” Luc said, “your stepsister took one look at me and ran from the house. I tried visiting her when my injuries had improved, but she wouldn’t even answer the door. I tried writing, but she wouldn’t reply to my letters.”
“She told me it was the other way around.”
A resentful shake of his head. “She’s a liar. If Marisol had written me, I couldn’t have ignored her letters even if I’d wanted to. She made me desperate to do anything to have her. I was obsessed. It started the same day that I proposed to her. I’d come to the house to see you, but Marisol was the one to greet me. She took my coat, and I remember her fingers brushing my neck. After that, she was all I could think of.” His tone turned disgusted.
It was just as Evangeline had believed. She hadn’t been delusional or desperate. Luc had only abandoned her and asked Marisol to marry him because he’d been cursed. The only thing she’d been wrong about was who had cast the spell. It wasn’t her stepmother, it was Marisol.
Evangeline felt as if she’d been punched in her stomach. She’d thought Marisol was another victim, an innocent, the one she’d needed to make amends to. All this time, Evangeline had been feeling so guilty over ruining Marisol’s life, but if this was true, then Marisol had upended Evangeline’s life first.
She didn’t want to jump too quickly to conclusions. But she’d seen her stepsister’s spell books, she’d been warned by Jacks, the papers, and now by Luc, who never even knew that Evangeline thought he was cursed.
“When I was bitten tonight, it felt like the first time in months I could freely think.” Luc’s eyes shone as he looked down on her. “I finally felt like myself again. But then I was being dragged into this cage, and now I’ll never leave it alive unless you help me. If you’re scared, you don’t have to unlock it. Just hand me one of the weapons from the wall and I can break the lock myself. Then I’ll prove to you that I don’t want to be a vampire. All I want is you, Eva.”
“Don’t even consider it,” Jacks said.
“But—” She stared at Luc once more through the bars. “I can’t leave him like this.”
“Evangeline, look at me.” Jacks cupped her cheeks with his cold hands and met her eyes with a brutal stare as if he could break the spell that Luc had put her under.
But she wasn’t under any vampire allure. She wasn’t sure if a part of her still loved Luc. Her feelings were such a jumbled and chaotic mess. Right now, she primarily felt the need to survive. Love felt like a distant luxury. But she couldn’t walk away from Luc and leave him here to die. He was a victim in all of this. He was the one put under a spell, then turned to stone, attacked by a wolf, and now put in a cage.