CHAPTER TWO

The Way Down to the Heart

All the screaming was about the bone in my ankle. Brandon told me repeatedly that the information they sought from Christian’s heart was specifically related to getting the ring around my ankle through the bone. If I would stop being so difficult and go to the heart, I would find the information, and then any chains placed around me now, or in the future, would be meaningless. According to Brandon, I’d learn how to escape from anywhere, even the castle that surrounded me.

Aside from escaping their awful castle, I had no idea why they wanted me to gain that ability. Brandon didn’t explain anything. He just sought to persuade me to go to the heart.

“Go to his heart.”

“Beat the door down.”

“Burrow inside.”

“Eat what’s there.”

“It’s your heart now.”

I felt sick.

As I mentioned, I celebrated my twenty-second birthday alone in the castle. At least, I guessed I’d had my birthday. I wasn’t overly interested in what day it was anymore. Brandon didn’t mention it and it didn’t matter much.

Even without going to Christian’s heart, I gained piles of knowledge from the Red Forest. Since I realized my power over my body, I changed anything about it I didn’t like. Moles disappeared, hair fell out or grew more plentifully, as I desired. Muscles grew and fat disappeared. While I made modifications, I found it was actually impossible to hit the nail on the head. I had been given perfect control over my body and I couldn’t decide what was actually perfect when I looked in the mirror. I fiddled with my appearance constantly, especially my upper arms. What looked good when I looked down at them was a lot different than what looked good when I looked at myself in a mirror.

Aside from fiddling in the Red Forest, there wasn’t much to do in the castle. There was a bathtub with a skylight over it, so I often filled the tub with hot soapy water, turned off the lights, and gazed into outer space.

Of all the rooms I could access in the castle without moving stone, the kitchen was the least thrilling. It wasn’t because it wasn’t beautiful. It was. It was just that it had been stocked with food that did not make anyone’s mouth water. There was powdered milk, condensed milk in cans, rice, flour, and other canned food. The canned food was as exciting as canned food got, meaning I ate olives out of the bottle, mandarin oranges, and pie filling. I supposed I had the ingredients to make a pie. If I had known how to make a pie, that probably would have been the best thing I could have made.

Except I didn’t know how to make anything with the ingredients they supplied with no recipe books, so I watched the snow fall and ate pickled beets from the jar.

I was very bored. I would have started writing on the walls in blood if the walls hadn’t been hewn out of rough stone. It wouldn’t have had any effect on Brandon or Pricina anyway. Pricina could change anything she wanted.

That morning I had cream of wheat, made with water and I really hated it. I ended up opening a can of pears that I had been saving because it depressed me so much.

When I was finished, I tugged my chain, dragging it noisily across the polished marble, and got back into bed. I wrapped the blankets around me cocoon-style and closed my eyes. I wasn’t going to sleep. I was going to try again with my ankle in the Red Forest.

I went there every day without fail. I closed my eyes and disappeared into the place behind my eyelids. It was a place where the sky was brown. The trees grew with slick red bark and no leaves. I wore a black dress that fell over my shape as comfortably as a nightgown. It was the place I went for a split second before I died, and because I was willing to make sense of what I saw, I was able to stop a bullet from killing me—the Red Forest.

At the spot where the ring pierced my ankle, I sat on the chrome ring. I swung on it like it was a circus swing and pounded my figurative fists against the ivory wall that was my ankle bone like it was a door that would not open. I asked blood insects that floated by what they knew, but they only knew what I knew: bones were not blood. Bones were blood factories.

That was the problem I had been contemplating when I went to sleep and dreamed of the dearest man in the world, Christian, asking me to undress for him. The dream had not been inspiring. That was not the way Christian ever treated me. My subconscious made him that way because I had been trapped for so long.

What was Christian like again? Could I remember? Sometimes he felt like something I had imagined because everything in the real world sucked.

When I tried to ask the Christian in my memory what he would do about Brandon, he didn’t say a word. He only looked at me levelly with that look in his eyes as if to ask me if there was anything he wouldn’t do.

That was the crux. Christian would do anything. Cut off his hand? Cut out his heart? He would do absolutely anything. He had no limits.

If I was going to be like him, would I have to give away my limits too?

I often thought about escaping the castle. It was probably possible… to a certain degree. I could break my ankle to get the ring off. Perhaps breaking the chain the ring was connected to was a better way, but I had every reason to believe that if a link was broken, it would bring Pricina down on me. Breaking my ankle would probably work better, but would I be able to heal it, escape the castle, and make it to safety before Pricina caught me? My chances were poor.

The terrain outside the castle was the harshest on the planet. A bullet to the head was one thing, but hundreds of miles of snow-capped mountains were something else. I couldn’t open a window and the outside temperature was a mystery. It could be the sort of weather wherein people lost fingers and ears.

Brandon and Pricina had orchestrated this scenario so that I had no other way forward, like a mouse in a tunnel instead of a maze.

If I continued to resist going to Christian’s heart, what end would there be?

This was damnation. As long as I was in the castle, I was damned.

When I looked at the remaining roads ahead of me, I saw three paths. Christian might try to rescue me. Without the secrets he hid in his heart, there was no part of him that was as powerful as Pricina. If he had once had power like that at his disposal, he wouldn’t have needed me to help him retrieve Brandon’s head from the compound. He would have been able to do that himself without losing a hand. He wasn’t strong enough to rescue me.

Secondly, Brandon might give up on me and let me go. I snorted. He wasn’t going to get tired. He wasn’t going to think it wasn’t worth his effort to keep working on me. He was immortal. He had time to spare and he’d steal all of my time if I let him keep me locked up.

Thirdly, there was chaos. Something unexpected might set me free.

When I thought that, I realized that I had reached the end of possibilities, except the one Brandon suggested.

I had to do what Brandon said without letting him know. I had to sneak into Christian’s heart and when I was free, I’d chop off Brandon’s head again. It turned out that I liked him better without it. Rolling my eyes, I amended my thought. Perhaps taking his whole head was overkill. I’d cut his tongue out at least. I wasn’t a barbarian.

I swung up and leaped off the ring. Gravity was like a dream in the Red Forest, and I floated until I landed on the pads of my unchained feet on the bone bridge. Swinging my steps like a little girl who wasn’t in a hurry, I walked the long way through the Red Forest, all the way from my ankle to Christian’s heart. The walk, though imaginary, did me good. It gave me time to think.

When I arrived at the place of Christian’s heart, the sky above was almost stormy. Clouds made from the hot air in my lungs also made this part of me darker than the rest. The first thing I felt was a hot wind. The world inside me was a humid forest where I was the queen of everything. I saw insects, sometimes small animals scurrying on business of their own, a perpetual crimson night with no moon and no stars. The black flounces of my skirt flapped around my legs like flags in the wind. I stood on the outskirts of the Red Forest, gazing into a clearing.

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

I stood outside Christian’s heart. Before I arrived, I imagined his heart appearing as a forest inside a forest, denser and darker. It was nothing of the sort. It was a building like a shrine or a temple. It had a sloped tile roof and no windows.

In front of me was a stone path of flat black stones. They seemed to be floating in a pool of blood surrounding the shrine. The blood stirred like it couldn’t stay still because it lived to form little peaks on the surface of the pool.

I placed my black ballerina slipper on the first stone and stepped forward onto the stepping stones that made me cross blood.

As I got closer, the wind came hotter and faster. I was feeling my blood pump, not a wind, but it felt hot as I breathed it. Again, I was in a place I should not have been. I had become a person who lived exclusively in places humans did not go. A normal person is not allowed to look inside the heart of their lover, as it is their core, and no place could be more sacred or holy.

It had to be mine now.

As I stood there, I felt a fresh wash of hatred toward Brandon. He was forcing something that never should have been forced. If Christian meant me to have access to all of this, he never got the chance to tell me.

I may have been justifying myself, but I told myself that if Christian loved me so much that he was willing to give up his heart so that I could have life, I knew he was willing to give up even more for my freedom. I had to put aside the imperfection of the situation and swallow or I’d be a prisoner forever. I knew, without a doubt, that living in the castle was not what Christian wanted for me.

I stepped over the threshold into the first chamber of his heart.

Black beams stretched across the ceiling. Heavy black posts held up the roof. The floor was carpeted with layer after layer of luxurious red carpets. Following the lengths of carpets, they led to a throne. Christian occupied it.

In my excitement, I called his name, but immediately I realized he couldn’t hear me. His eyes were closed. He was dressed completely in dark red: red shoes, red trousers, a red vest, and a slightly open red shirt. He wore a crown on his head, a single circlet of pewter that contrasted this blond hair. It hung loosely, tipping toward one eye.

I wanted to wake him and speak to him, but suddenly I felt it was better to understand every room before I disturbed him. I held my peace and proceeded further into the shrine.

In the second chamber, I was surprised to see Christian again. This time he was lying on a slab of black stone. He wasn’t dressed but had an incredibly long piece of black silk draped over his groin that fell to the floor on either side. He had round black stones arranged in patterns across his chest, arms, and face. Two stones rested on his eyes and another over his mouth.

The room had a mirror on the wall. I looked at myself in it. I was thrilled with what I saw. It wasn’t the way I saw myself when I looked into a mirror. Those mirrors always showed me what was wrong with me, what was incomplete. My reflection here must show the way Christian saw me. This mirror showed love. I swelled with emotion. The dream I had earlier was a distortion of the greatness of the man I loved.

I continued on.

By the third room, I expected to see a new version of Christian there. He was hanging from a rope from the ceiling. Not by his neck, but by his right arm. The rope wasn’t tied to him. He was not hanging there because he was trapped. His fingers were knotted tightly around the rope like he wouldn’t let go no matter what happened next. He was tattooed everywhere with words. I couldn’t read them and I couldn’t find a part of his body that was not written on. I had to circle him to find his face. It was marred by hundreds of words tattooed in black ink. I could make out a few of the letters, but I could not distinguish even one complete word. He wore trousers like a doctor’s scrubs, with a white cotton undershirt marked in the occasional bloodstain.

A pool of water was under him. If he let go of the rope, he would fall into the water. What was bad about the water? I got down on my knees and dipped my fingers in the dancing ripples. I understood less than I had before as I shook off the water. How deep was it? There didn’t appear to be a bottom. Thrusting my arm in the water up to my shoulder, I couldn’t find the bottom. I thought of jumping in but refrained. This was a sacred place, not a place where you splashed around for fun or curiosity.

In the last chamber, there was a pole in the center of the room. Christian was tied to it. His arms were wrapped around the mast and his wrists were heavily tethered. His ankles were tied too. There was a gag in his mouth and a blindfold over his eyes. He wore weathered jeans and a white dress shirt that was barely done up. With so many cords wrapped around his wrists, it was difficult to tell which ones were holding him captive and which were a fashion statement.

None of the versions of Christian moved. None of them fluttered an eyelash. I walked back through the chambers of his heart and wondered what each of the figures meant. If I were guessing, I would say that he had to be strapped down, silenced, blindfolded, and unconscious in order for him to live forever. He told me he had to forget who he was in order to bear the pain of immortality. Did these men represent lives he’d lived? Or something else entirely?

As I reflected on the problem, I found myself in the second chamber. I saw the version of Christian that lay on the altar with shining river rocks placed strategically over his eyes and down his body.

All at once, I thought that I ought to try to wake him.

“Christian,” I said.

Nothing happened.

I tried his real name, “Damon.”

I was about to yell when I realized that if my presence and my voice didn’t wake him, then my screaming certainly wouldn’t.

He had rocks all over him. What if I took them off?

I reached forward and plucked one of the stones off his abdomen. It uncovered the prettiest patch of tan skin and curved muscle beneath. I turned the rock over in my hand and saw there was a word etched in gold on the underside. It resembled one of those pretty inspirational stones I’d seen in gift shops that moms bought that had words like faith or love written on them. Christian’s stone bore the word control.

Instantly, I felt that I should not have picked it up.

I tried to put the stone back, but it would not go back. There was an invisible force preventing me from returning it. I turned the rock in my hand and tried to figure out what I ought to do with it. On the side that had been blank new words appeared. The words read swallow me.

That honestly seemed like the worst thing I could do or ought to do. I shouldn’t swallow a rock.

I tried to set the stone down in a different place on Christian’s skin, but each place repelled the rock even harder. I was starting to panic. I tried to drop it on the floor, but it stuck to my fingers like a magnet. It slipped all over my skin without letting go.

I pulled at it with both hands and when that failed, I tried to use my chin to push it free and was immediately more successful than my hands had been. Yet, not completely. It was coming free, but it hadn’t let go. In my frenzy to push it off, my mouth was a little open and the stone brushed my lips. Realizing my mistake, I dropped my hands and licked my lips as a reflex, only to taste something I’d never tasted before.

Impossible to describe, it was sweet, but also savory. I probably would not have been so interested in the taste of that stone if I had been given anything better to eat by Brandon and Pricina. They knew the trials I faced and they fed me lackluster food in order to make me crave something delicious. The emptiness in my stomach, which hadn’t bothered me much since I came to the castle, was suddenly unbearable.

I wouldn’t eat it. It was a rock. It was not food. I should not have picked it up, but I couldn’t put it back. I told myself that the rock would drop off me if I tried to leave the building with it in hand. I went to the door and flung it open. The rock went with me as I stepped onto the first stepping stone. Dropping to my knees, I put my hands in the pool of my own blood to break the bond the stone had with my skin.

It didn’t work.

I’d failed and the stone consumed my mind so that I could not concentrate enough to leave the Red Forest and wake up in bed.

I went back inside the shrine.

What I felt was all wrong. I shouldn’t want to eat it.

I don’t know how many hours passed as I sat alone in the second chamber of Christian’s heart before I caved. I didn’t want to, but I never felt so satisfied in my life as I was the moment I put that rock in my mouth and bit down on something soft and scrumptious. Control tasted better than anything else I’d ever tasted. I felt warmth slide down my throat and the moment it hit my stomach, something surprising happened.

I knew how to move bone.

I ran from the building and I didn’t stop running until I made it to my ankle where I saw the chrome ring exactly where I’d left it. Stepping up to the place in my bone, I took my finger and scored out the section that needed to move. When I finished I stepped back and snapped my fingers. The section of bone fell apart like lego blocks. I ordered my tendons to push the ring through like the strings of a suspension bridge moving in all the wrong ways.

Then I dropped to my knees and slowly, by hand, I rebuilt the bone bridge piece by piece. It was not like the other parts of the body that could bend and change. As a bone, its function was to stay still, not to move. I had been right. If you wanted bone to move, you had to break it, but not the clumsy way I had been thinking of going about it. You had to do it carefully.

There were two bones I needed to be rebuilt. It was not the quick fix it had been when my father shot me in the head. It was a careful rebuild that took hours, maybe even days.

When I slid the last piece of bone into place, I returned to my senses in the castle and found the ring that had kept me captive abandoned between the sheets of my bed.

I grabbed it triumphantly. Then I panicked. I shouldn’t have taken it off. Brandon would know I’d made progress. He knew I couldn’t figure it out on my own, and I hated to give him the satisfaction.

I grabbed a scrunchie from my bedside table and twisted it around the ring. Then I slipped the loop of the scrunchie around my ankle. Then, at least, the chain would move with me until I could put the ring back through my ankle. If I was lucky, Brandon wouldn’t notice my progress.

I was so excited. Brandon wouldn’t know if I repaired the bullet hole in my skull. Knowing it was there had made me quite uncomfortable. Sadly, I couldn’t do anything just then, I was too tired.

I fell asleep and as I slept there was a moon and stars in the Red Forest of my dreams.