CHAPTER FOUR

Eating My Heart Out

The ring around my ankle was not the only thing intended to keep me captive. The castle itself had me bricked away as though I was already in my tomb. The stones of the castle moved the way Pricina ordered them to. Brick walls blocked my path and kept me in four rooms. If I wanted to leave, I had to move the stones en masse to create doorways the way Pricina did.

Pricina’s abilities were a level above mine. I could arrange the cells in my body, but that had limits. Like Christian, I couldn’t change the color of my hair or my eyes, though I could change the shape of my body in a limited way, I couldn’t use matter around me. Pricina could arrange her body and she could arrange the matter around her. Brandon was showing her to me as a goalpost I was supposed to aim for (even though he hadn’t made it to that level himself). He presented it as one way to leave the castle.

Looking out the window into the world of a winter deep in the mountains, the castle wasn’t the only thing that hemmed me in. There was a natural fortress surrounding me. In every direction I looked, even for hundreds of miles, I could see I was a prisoner. Even if I survived the fall out a window, if I survived the cold and the elements, I had no idea where to go, and no idea where I was. Pricina didn’t need to watch me because I couldn’t go anywhere unless I started breaking down barriers in my brain that dictated what I could or couldn’t do.

That was when I started thinking about the stones on Christian’s chest. If eating one of those stones gave me the ability to rearrange bone, what could devouring the others do?

I rubbed my head. I was uncomfortable with that line of thinking. She said Christian would give me everything. When I swallowed the stone inside the shrine of his heart, I took something that was not mine and absorbed it into myself. Did that mean that I had taken it from Christian or did we both have that ability now? I didn’t think Christian knew how to move bones. If he could do that, he could have made himself taller or shorter depending on his needs, but he didn’t.

I felt sick. The uneasiness of indecision weighed on me.

I didn’t want to make a mistake. I didn’t want to do something wrong within Christian’s heart and take something from him that I could not give back.

My only comfort when I was weighing my options was that the stone I had eaten had instructions on it for me to swallow it. That wasn’t something Brandon or Pricina could make happen. The stone said I was supposed to eat it and that was the only communication I’d had from Christian when I was inside his heart.

There were many stones carefully balanced on his body… knowledge like bits of brownie and now I knew what they tasted like.

If I had his permission, was there a point in resisting?

***

I took turns sitting in the different rooms of Christian’s heart. I rearranged the carpets in the first room to see if that would annoy the crowned version of him enough to wake him. I tried to sound out the words tattooed on his neck in the third room. I couldn’t figure out what the letters on his skin meant. I tried to untie the knot on his gag in the fourth room, but the knot was tied so tightly that I couldn’t get it to budge.

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Obviously, I avoided the room where I’d actually been able to do something that had an effect. Like each room was its own puzzle and I was afraid to finish the first puzzle I’d started.

Eventually, I went back to the second room and pushed my palms into the altar, which was becoming less sacred and more familiar by the minute.

“Christian,” I whispered into his ear. “Could you please wake up? I need to talk to you. I miss you and I feel like I’ve already waited for you for a hundred years. Open your eyes.”

It was hard to talk to him. He had stones over each of his eyes. Maybe that was what was stopping him from waking up. Automatically, I put out a hand and removed a stone.

His eyelashes fluttered.

He moved!

That was all I needed to confirm that I was supposed to remove the stones and eat them.

Once I came to that conclusion, I had never felt hungrier in my life. I flipped over the stone in my hand. It had the word movement inscribed on the back. This time I didn’t try to shake it off. I put it in my mouth and it tasted like a tart. Not just any tart, but the best strawberry tart I’d ever eaten.

If I learned something from the second bite, I didn’t know what it was. All I knew was that I felt energetic, so I left the heart and repaired the broken bone in my forehead by assembling the scattered pieces. It was a relief that Brandon and Pricina were not coming back, so I didn’t need to bother with reinserting the ring into my ankle. Besides, I thought Pricina would know by now that I’d entered Christian’s heart and made progress.

Correcting the hole in my head took hours. Bits of bones like puzzle pieces were floating away through the air and burying themselves in the ground.

When I was finished, I went back into the heart shrine and started counting the remaining stones on Christian’s body. There were a hundred and twenty-three. That meant that originally, there had been a hundred and twenty-five.

I put my hand on the bare place on his face where the rock I’d eaten had rested on his eye. His skin felt warm and the arch of his eyebrow was so beautiful that I thought I’d cry.

I picked up a stone resting on his wrist. I flipped the stone over and read the word hardness on the back. I ate it. I read the back of all the stones before I gobbled them down. They had words like flexibility, density, malleability, and weight. I had never been so greedy in my life.

Soon there was only one left. The last one was covering Christian’s mouth. I saved that stone for last. I hoped Christian would wake up when I removed the last stone, but he didn’t wake up. The last stone said bonded on the back. I slid it between my teeth. It tasted like salt… the best flavor of all. I gulped it down and looked at Christian, hoping he would open his eyes.

I leaned forward, resting my hands on the edge of the altar before me. Nothing happened. Christian had not woken up. I felt sick. I wished the whole thing had been less tempting. It got me on every level. Removing and eating the stones revealed more of his perfectly cut body. When I put the stone in my mouth, it tasted like whatever I was craving whether that be buttery popcorn, chocolate, or bacon. With every bite, I thought that I’d never tasted anything more delicious. The stones fell in my stomach like a warm drink on a cold day.

My head drooped. Was there something more I had to do? Or did it not matter what I did, I couldn’t wake him?

Without warning, the Christian on the altar opened his eyes. “Hello,” he said.