Once Upon a Broken Heart

To distract Jacks from wanting to bite her, Evangeline asks him what happened with Princess Donatella. Reluctantly, Jacks explains that he wanted something from Donatella and kissed her to get it. He slowed Donatella’s heart so she wouldn’t die immediately, but Donatella still should have died but didn’t because Jacks’s heart started beating as a result of the kiss. Rather than being Jacks’s true love, Donatella fell in love with someone else and stabbed Jacks with his own knife. Even so, the thought of Jacks kissing someone else makes “something painful wrench inside of Evangeline” (321).

Evangeline tries to comfort Jacks with the idea of a different true love. Jacks mockingly asks if she wants to be that love, and heat floods her body. Instead of answering, Evangeline tells him about Luc and how she grew to love him quietly. Jacks doesn’t believe Luc would be well-suited to Evangeline. After Evangeline drank the poison at Luc and Marisol’s wedding, instructions to break her stone curse would have appeared on the cup, and Luc didn’t save Evangeline then. To cover her hurt, Evangeline lashes out at Jacks for being purposefully cruel. Jacks tosses her his dagger, telling her that, if she’s not jealous, she should use it, and then he snaps the gate’s lock in half.

In a flash, Jacks is pressed against her, removing the cape she wears and stroking her skin with his hands and lips. Evangeline fights the growing attraction inside her while she tries to push him away before he bites her. She reminds him about the Valory Arch, and Jacks stops trying to bite her but doesn’t release the embrace. After a while, Evangeline notices Jacks isn’t burning hot anymore and looks up to see the sun has risen, breaking the vampire venom’s hold on him.

Jacks detangles from her and retrieves her cape. He affects an indifferent air as he refastens it around her shoulders, but Evangeline feels “the soft brush of his fingertips lingering against her neck” (335). He stalks out of the mausoleum, leaving his dagger behind. Evangeline takes the blade, not knowing why she wants it.

Evangeline suggests they return to Apollo’s palace to find out if Marisol killed the prince. Jacks tries to argue but is overcome by unnatural exhaustion. He sags against a tree that’s covered with new wanted posters accusing Evangeline of murdering Apollo. Desperate to find a safe place, Evangeline drags a drooping Jacks back to town and staggers around lost until she hears an insistent bell ringing. Hoping the bell is trying to help her, Evangeline uses her blood to open the door beneath it before dragging Jacks inside. She comments how lucky he is that she’s there, to which Jacks says luck had nothing to do with it and drunkenly asks who Evangeline thought convinced the empress and princess to send her north.