“All he did was tell you he liked you?” Jacks sounded disappointed. “That was his grand gesture? Haven’t any other boys been nice to you?”
“Plenty of young men have been nice to me, and Luc made other grand gestures.”
Jacks scowled. “Tell me about these grand gestures.”
Evangeline squirmed against the cold ground and tried to tuck her legs more comfortably beneath her. Jacks would think that every relationship needed some magnificent gesture to validate it. “Not every love needs to make a great story, Jacks. The start of my romance with Apollo had the makings of an epic love tale, but you saw how badly that ended.”
“So you’re saying you’d settle for a boring romance if it ends well?”
“Yes. I would gladly take an uneventful happily ever after.”
Jacks smirked. “No, you wouldn’t. You wouldn’t have been happy with Luc, and definitely not forever. The two of you aren’t well suited. He’s not half as strong as you—he didn’t even hesitate before he tried to bite you. And he wouldn’t have turned himself to stone to save you.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Yes, I do. There’s always a way to break a curse. As soon as you drank from Poison’s goblet, it refilled. I didn’t stay to explain the rules, but they would have appeared on the side of the cup. Luc could have saved you if he wanted.”
Evangeline’s hands started trembling. No one had told her this. “That doesn’t mean anything. Luc was under a love spell from Marisol.”
“He could have broken it,” Jacks said bluntly. “If he had really loved you, the spell could have been broken. I’ve seen it happen.”
“Stop it, Jacks!” Evangeline shoved up to her feet. It was bad enough to know that she’d done so much for love; she didn’t want to hear that Luc had never really loved her.
“I’m not trying to be cruel, Little Fox, I—”
“No, Jacks, that’s exactly what you’re doing. It’s what you always do.” It was also what she’d expected, but she was too tired to take it anymore. She might have made questionable choices for love, but Jacks hurt people on purpose, for fun. “You know, maybe the real reason Donatella stabbed you in the heart and chose to love someone else wasn’t just because of that almost-fatal first kiss you gave her. Maybe it was your inability to understand any emotions that are remotely human.”
Jacks flinched. He was quick to cover it up, and it was hard to fully see, even with all the torches, but Evangeline would have sworn his cheeks had filled with streaks of color.
She felt a stitch of guilt, but she couldn’t bring herself to stop. “I bet you never even apologized for kissing her. And that’s probably not even the worst thing you did. I mean, isn’t your idea of romance kissing a girl and then waiting to see whether or not she dies? I know the stories say that your kisses are worth dying for, but how can they say that if everyone dies? Who wrote those stories? Did you write them to make yourself feel better?”
Jacks wiped his face of all emotion, slid off the coffin, and stalked up to the bars. “You sound jealous.”
“If you think I’m jealous because someone else got to stab you, then you’re right.”
“Prove it.”
She heard the thump of his dagger as it fell at her feet. It was the jeweled one he carried everywhere. So many of the gems were missing, but the knife’s hilt still glittered in the torchlight, pulsing blue and purple, the color of blood before it was spilled.
“What am I supposed to do with this?”
“You might want to use it, Little Fox.” The corner of his mouth twitched as he slowly slid his pale hands through the bars of the gate and broke the lock in half. It could have been a twig, a piece of paper, or her.
45
Before Evangeline could suck in a breath, Jacks was directly in front of her. His lips curved into a devastating smile that on anyone else might have looked inviting or flirtatious, as if throwing a knife at her feet and daring her to stab him was the equivalent of asking her to dance.
“Jacks—” Evangeline tried not to sound as if her heart was racing.
“Don’t you want to hurt me anymore, Little Fox?” His finger reached out and lightly traced her exposed collarbone, setting every inch of her skin on fire. “You can pick up the dagger any time now.”
But Evangeline couldn’t pick up the dagger. She could barely manage to keep breathing. His hand was now at the hollow of her throat, careful and caressing. Jacks had touched her before—last night he’d held her while she’d slept, but he’d acted as if that had been torture. His touch hadn’t been warm or curious.