Chapter 17 #2
“That isn’t romance,” Mallory blurts, and an uncomfortable silence follows. Saskia flings her a concerned look. Hendrix lifts a brow. But Ezra holds her stare, twirling a pencil between two fingers, silently challenging her to say more.
“They don’t get to be together,” she continues harshly. “They die.”
Ezra leans back in his chair, silent.
“Maybe,” Saskia pipes in, “the real romance is about the desperation. Their pure intentions. They choose each other, no matter the cost. I don’t know—I think that’s romantic.”
Mallory turns her focus to Saskia. Her eyes shift in a way that seems to ask, Don’t you agree?
“Ms. Garin makes a good point,” Hendrix says.
“She’s wrong, though,” Ezra says. “The romance is in the almost of it all.”
Mallory looks back to him, that queasy sensation mounting.
Hendrix crosses his arms. “What do you mean?”
“If one little thing had been changed, if one second had been altered,” Ezra says, “they would have been able to be together.” He drops the pencil he’s been twirling. “The question of what they might have had—that’s the romantic part.”
Ezra’s words scrape at her like little knives. A reminder that whatever they had, too, will forever be trapped in some kind of limbo.
She wonders if anyone will notice if she passes out on this fucking stage.
“This,” Hendrix says, pointing at Ezra and Saskia in turn, “is why we continue performing these old texts. To derive new meaning. Generations read these classic love stories over and over, and we understand our own lives a little better each time. Now, why don’t we take places for act—”
“But this play isn’t a love story,” Mallory insists, louder than she intended.
“Ms. Webb,” Hendrix says after a beat. “Is something the matter?”
She swallows, daring to look at Ezra again.
“Romeo and Juliet isn’t a love story,” she repeats. “It’s a tragedy.”
Ezra peers back, unflinching. When he finally speaks, he’s so quiet she’s not sure she hears him correctly.
“Sometimes,” he says, “those two things are the same.”
Mallory is the last one in the dressing room after rehearsal, meticulously removing every ounce of makeup, taking her time in hopes she won’t cross paths with Ezra on the way out.
She downs two painkillers for her headache, hangs her costume on the rack, and tugs on her clothes.
As she straightens, she freezes at what she sees in the mirror.
Her reflection is gone.
And Lily is staring back.
There’s no mistaking those milky opal eyes. Her reddened, chapped mouth. The stringy hair cascading toward the blood on her chest.
But this time, as Mallory gapes at Lily in terror, a sudden, sharp pain explodes between her ribs. As though her body is rehearsing for the day she looks exactly like her.
Mallory cries out, doubling over to grasp her chest. The lights start to flicker, but she hardly notices above the searing pain, imagining a fire-soaked blade pressed into her skin.
About to carve out her heart.
She clutches her sweater, pulse vibrating so fast it creates a humming sound in her ears. Like a growl. Like that voice again.
And if she listens hard enough, it almost sounds like words.
Offer yourself, that voice purrs from the darkened walls, and she inadvertently thinks of her mother. Did she once hear the same demand?
Mallory shakes her head vigorously, desperately trying to rid her mind of the sound.
“No,” she chokes out to the empty room.
Then, the air seems to hiss, you will learn to beg for death instead.
Breath heaving, Mallory catches sight of Lily in the mirror again, fully registering her expression now. Strangely, it’s not tinged with fury, but something bordering on concern. She blinks, trying to make it out, but Lily’s image slips away, leaving only herself.
Herself, with no brown in her eyes at all. Only black.
Like Ezra’s that day.
“Mal?”
Startled, Mallory blinks again. The chocolate brown returns to her irises and the pain in her chest dissolves as Saskia rushes toward her, still in costume.
“Are you okay?” Saskia demands.
“She was here,” Mallory says. “In the mirror.”
“Lily?” Saskia glances toward their dimly lit reflections. “What does she want?”
“I don’t know anymore.” Mallory shakes her head, pulse returning to its normal speed. “Sometimes it feels like Lily wants me to die. But just now—it was like she was watching to make sure I don’t.”
Saskia’s expression turns thoughtful as she reaches for the strings of her corset. “Maybe it’s like we said. She’s not in control at all.” She struggles with the laces and blows a frustrated exhale. “Can you undo this for me?”
Mallory nods, stepping behind her to unthread the corset. They both fall quiet as Mallory focuses on the strings, but she can feel Saskia studying her in the mirror.
“It must be hard to be around Ezra at rehearsals,” Saskia observes quietly, and Mallory’s face warms at her usual bluntness. But she nods anyway, Saskia’s careful stare drawing the truth from her like a syringe.
“It’s like there are two versions of him.
” Mallory continues to tug at the corset.
“Or maybe I just missed all the signs. Those iron injections in his drawer, the way he…” She trails off at the memory of him licking her fingers clean, his fangs tearing open her throat. “It felt like he needed my blood.”