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

“What happened?” Evangeline gasped.

“I was just being myself.” Jacks staggered back, half collapsing on a bench in the entry.

Snowy air blew inside from the cracked-open door. She knew she should shut it, but she went to him first. She’d never seen him injured, and it was surprisingly terrifying.

“Jacks—” She shook his cold shoulders, gentle but firm. She didn’t know much about tending to injuries, but she recalled he hadn’t let her pass out when she’d been bleeding. “Please, stay with me. I don’t know what to do.”

The glittering blood was spreading across his doublet, turning the smoky gray to red. Her chest clenched at the sight of it; she wished she hadn’t just sat in the tavern, she wished she’d gone out looking for him. As a Fate, Jacks didn’t age, but he could die if injured badly enough.

She needed to mend him quickly. She needed to take off his doublet, clean the wound, then stitch it up.

“Is the weapon still in there?” She reached for his cloak to push it farther back.

“It’s fine.” Jacks grabbed her wrist, stopping her hand from exploring. “I just need a blanket … and some sleep.”

He tugged her toward him as if intending her for the blanket.

“Oh no—I’m not a quilt.” She braced her free hand against the wall, stomach tumbling as she looked down on his hazy blue eyes. “I need to stitch you up first.”

It took two pulls to free her wrist. Even injured, Jacks was incredibly strong. She could still feel the imprint of his cold fingers as she dashed into the tavern.

Behind the bar, she found liquor and then a number of cloths, which she desperately hoped would do for now. She could clean him first, then search for thread and needles.

“You’re wasting your time, Little Fox.” Jacks leaned against the doorway, clutching his side. “It’s just a knife to the ribs.”

“I suppose it’s going to heal on its own?”

“Yours did.”

“After you tended to them.”

His mouth twitched up at the corner. “Only because I wanted to take off your clothes.”

A vivid image of Jacks’s hands on her skin flashed before her eyes.

Of course, she was almost certain he was joking. He seemed delirious. His eyes were losing focus, and he was swaying on his feet.

Evangeline didn’t know how she got him up a flight of stairs. Fortunately, there were endless available rooms at the Hollow. She helped him into the closest one, a suite that smelled of fresh pine needles. The carpets were deep shades of green, the bed was made of thick cuts of wood, and the sheets were crisp and white. A fire kicked to life in the hearth as soon as he half fell onto the bed.

Jacks’s bleeding had thankfully stopped, but he seemed exhausted. Before he shut his eyes, she saw that they were webbed with red, and even the blue was tinged with it. She wondered if he’d slept at all the past couple of days.

It felt strange to worry about Jacks, but she doubted anyone else did, including himself. His chest barely rose and fell as he lay across a pile of snowy white quilts.

Evangeline hastened out to retrieve a basin of water.

When she returned, Jacks had kicked his boots onto the wood floor, but he still wore his cloak and bloody doublet.

“Are you going to tell me what you were doing?” she pressed.

“I already told you,” he muttered. “I was just being myself. Other people were being their horrible selves, and as you can see, it didn’t end well.”

“Where were you?”

“Stop asking such difficult questions.”

He groaned, eyes still closed, as she undid the cloak to get to the wound. She hung the garment on a chair near the roaring fire to dry. Snow had left it damp, and she imagined it was also wet with blood, though the fabric was too dark to see.

Jacks’s doublet was lighter, a soft dove gray, save for the parts near his ribs that were stained red. She cut the garment off.

His chest moved slowly up and down.

She peeled the doublet away, careful not to brush his bare skin with her fingers. Yet Evangeline felt as if she were holding her breath as she started to clean the ragged gash of blood across his ribs.

It would need to be stitched. Or it should have—

Evangeline paused her ministrations as she watched Jacks’s skin knit together before her eyes. It was still painfully red, and she imagined it could easily open again with friction, but the gash was healing; it would not kill him.

The relief she felt was enormous.

By the time she finished bandaging him, he appeared to be asleep, closed eyes half-covered in tousled waves of golden hair. She briefly debated staying with him as he rested.

She was relieved he was back and that he was safe. More relieved than she should have been. She kept reminding herself Jacks was dangerous. But he didn’t look that way now—he looked like a sleeping angel, which was probably why she needed to leave him.

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.

Now would have been a really good time to untangle herself.

His mouth closed over her pulse.

She tried to tell him this was a bad idea, but a soft sigh came out instead. If his lips felt like this on her neck, she wondered how they’d feel on her lips.

Her eyes closed, and her breath went shallow. She shouldn’t think about Jacks’s lips on hers. And yet she couldn’t help but wonder if maybe she could kiss Jacks here, in the Hollow, in the one place curses couldn’t touch them. The idea was painfully tempting. But even if Jacks’s kiss couldn’t kill her here, that didn’t mean it wouldn’t ruin her in other ways. “We shouldn’t do this,” she said.

“I’m just asking you to stay the night.” His lips left her neck as he murmured, “You won’t even remember.”

Evangeline tensed in his arms. “What do you mean, I won’t remember?”

“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.”

She melted at the word mine. For a dizzying second, she couldn’t think. She couldn’t bring herself to pull away, and yet she couldn’t tell him she would stay.

“If it’s easier, you can pretend, too,” he whispered. “You can pretend that I’m still Jacks of the Hollow and that you want to be mine.” His mouth pressed against her throat once more and slowly traced a blissful line up her neck, to her ear. Then his teeth nipped her earlobe.

She gasped. The bite was sharp and a little painful, as if he wanted to hold her and punish her, too. But he didn’t have to punish her. This was already torture because she wanted it so much. She wanted him to want her, even if he was half-delirious in his wanting.

“I’m not delirious.” His voice was husky with something like sleep, but when he looked down on her, his eyes were clear and lucid.

And Evangeline felt as if she were tumbling into them.

When she was a child, her mother had once told her a story about a young woman who’d been playing hide-and-seek in a forest with her love. The young woman had been running through the trees, searching for a place to hide, when she’d fallen through a crack in time. It was just a tiny crack, a hairline fissure that should have plopped the young woman a few seconds into the future—or perhaps into the past. But Time had seen the young woman and fallen instantly in love. And so, instead of landing in the future or finding herself in the past, the young woman continued to fall through time. She fell and fell and fell, trapped by Time until the end of Time.

Evangeline knew that feeling now. More than two weeks had passed since she’d jumped off that cliff with Jacks, and somehow she felt as if she were still falling, plummeting toward something uncontrollable with nothing but Jacks to hold on to.

She knew Jacks was far too dangerous a person to truly fall for. But she could no longer deny that it was happening. She couldn’t deny that she wanted him. Just enough to keep her from pulling away every time he touched her. Enough to keep his name near the tip of her tongue even when he wasn’t in the room. The physical attraction had always been there, but her pull toward him had been increasing ever since the night they’d jumped off that cliff together.

Because she’d never actually stopped falling.

Her blood rushed faster and her heart stuttered. She tried not to move, hoping he wouldn’t be able to tell as they lay in that bed, chests pressed close and legs tangled together. Everything between them felt as fragile as a raindrop that would cease to exist when it touched the ground. But the Hollow also felt like the sort of place where raindrops never touched the ground.

Jacks slowly ran a hand up and down her spine. “Have you decided to stay?”

“I thought you already heard what I was thinking,” she whispered.

“I want you to say it out loud.” His words were low and quiet; she wouldn’t have heard them if she hadn’t been so close. 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.

Evangeline’s heart was still racing, and she wondered now if it wasn’t scared or nervous but if it was just trying to catch up to all the moments before they disappeared—before he disappeared. She knew it would happen; it always did, Jacks always left, which made this even more foolish, 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.”