Chapter Thirty-One #2
Anabelle sighed deeply. “Okay. Enough. You’re scaring the poor girl.” She shot Polly a reassuring look. “Nothing happened. It wasn’t dramatic. I told him it was never going to happen. End of story. Can we drop it?”
Joshua’s jaw clenched. “We’ll talk about that later.”
“No,” Anabelle said immediately. Firm. “We won’t. My love life is not up for discussion.”
Silence.
She leaned back, crossing her arms again. “Now...moving on. How do you not know who Snow White is?”
Rian furrowed his brows, genuinely confused. “Is she… like a famous person?”
She stared at him. Then groaned. “Oh gods,” she muttered. “I really am living in another world.”
Agatha let out a soft laugh, glancing between the four men and Anabelle. “I don’t think they know anything about human culture, Ani.”
Anabelle followed her gaze, Rian, Joshua, Cameron, and Dominik all looked equally lost, brows furrowed, expressions serious in a way that made it painfully obvious they were trying very hard to understand and failing spectacularly.
She sighed, rubbing a hand over her face. “Jesus.”
“Okay,” Cameron said patiently, leaning forward a little, elbows on the table. “Just… tell us.”
Agatha laughed again, shaking her head as if she couldn’t quite believe she was about to do this.
“It’s a children’s story. A very old one.
Basically, there’s a black-haired girl with skin as white as snow, hence the name Snow White.
Her stepmother is the queen of the land, and she’s… well, very evil.”
“Define evil,” Rian muttered darkly.
Agatha pressed on. “At some point, the queen poisons Snow White’s father, and Snow White runs away. The queen who’s obsessed with vanity, has this magic mirror she talks to, and she asks it daily who the fairest in all the land is. For years it tells her she is...but one day, it says Snow White.”
Polly jumped in eagerly. “Snow White is already gone by then, tired of living under her stepmother’s rule and heartbroken about her father. So the queen sends out a huntsman to capture her heart.”
Joshua stiffened. “Literally?”
“Yes,” Polly said. “Very literally.”
Anabelle watched the four of them go rigid, wide-eyed and utterly focused, as if Agatha and Polly were recounting an actual historical atrocity rather than a fairy tale. Gods, she thought, this is surreal.
Polly continued, undeterred. “Snow White runs through the forest and finds a little cottage. Inside, she sees seven small beds, seven plates, seven cups. The place is a mess, so she cleans it, eats a little, and falls asleep.”
Agatha picked up the thread. “When she wakes up, she’s surrounded by seven dwarves. Each one has a different personality, so she names them...Happy, Grumpy, Doc, Sleepy, Sneezy, Bashful, and...”
“Dopey,” Anabelle supplied automatically.
Agatha snapped her fingers. “That’s the one.”
Rian let out a sharp gasp. Anabelle almost snorted. She looked around the table, every single one of the men was staring, eyes wide, jaws slack, utterly captivated.
“She stays with them for a while,” Agatha went on, “they become friends. She helps around the house. They protect her. But one day, while she’s outside planting, the huntsman finally finds her.”
Rian made a low, instinctive snarling sound in his chest. Joshua’s hands curled slowly into fists.
Polly continued quickly, “He’s meant to kill her, but he can’t. He sees how kind she is, how gentle, and he decides not to. Instead, he brings a sheep’s heart back to the queen and pretends it’s Snow White’s.”
Anabelle watched Cameron’s expression darken. Dominik’s jaw tightened.
“The queen finds out,” Polly said, lowering her voice dramatically. “She kills the huntsman, then sends her most trusted servant to Snow White with an apple.”
“An apple?” Cameron asked, brows knitting together.
Agatha nodded. “A cursed apple. Snow White doesn’t know it’s cursed, but she eats it. It puts her into a deep sleep...so deep she can’t wake up.”
“That’s horrifying,” Dominik said flatly.
“When the dwarves find her,” Agatha said softly, “they’re devastated. They place her in a glass coffin and take care of her every day, making sure she’s safe.”
Polly brightened again. “Eventually, a prince comes along, kisses her, and she wakes up from true love’s kiss and they ride off into the sunset. Well in that version anyway.”
Anabelle snorted quietly into her hand.
Joshua blinked. “There are… other versions?”
“Oh yes,” Polly said enthusiastically. “In some, she lives forever with the dwarves and is never found again. In others, my favourites, the huntsman survives, kills the queen, and when he finds Snow White later, he is the one who kisses her awake.”
Agatha smiled. “That one makes more sense. How are you supposed to have a true love’s kiss with a stranger?”
Anabelle finally let out a full laugh, shaking her head. “Thank you. Exactly.”
Rian blinked. “He kissed her while she was… asleep?”
“Yes,” Anabelle said flatly. “Very asleep. Cursed-apple coma asleep.”
Joshua’s expression darkened immediately. “That’s...”
“Highly inappropriate,” Cameron finished, jaw tight.
Dominik growled low in his chest. “If that happened in our world...”
“He’d be dead,” Rian said without hesitation.
Polly laughed nervously. “Wow. You guys take fairy tales very seriously.”
“That,” Anabelle said dryly, “is because to them it doesn’t sound like a fairy tale. It sounds like a failure of protection.”
Agatha tilted her head, studying the four of them with new curiosity. “Okay, but now it makes sense why Tyson called you Snow White.”
Anabelle groaned. “I know. Black hair. Pale skin. Surrounded by...” she waved vaguely at the men, “...overprotective males with anger issues.”
Rian straightened. “We do not have anger issues.”
Ani raised a brow. “You snarled at a story character.”
Rian opened his mouth, then closed it. “…Context matters.”
Dominik exhaled through his nose, eyes flicking to Anabelle. “So the huntsman...he was meant to kill her, but didn’t.”
“Right,” Anabelle said. “He saw her as a person, not a task.”
Something in that seemed to land heavily with all four of them. She leaned back in her chair, eyeing the four men who still looked like they were processing a personal betrayal. “So now you know why being called Snow White is… deeply unfortunate.”
Rian swallowed. “I don’t like this story.”
Joshua nodded grimly. “At all.”
Cameron exhaled slowly, then glanced at Polly and Agatha. “Humans tell this to their children?”
“Yes,” Polly said cheerfully.
The table fell into stunned silence.
Anabelle shook her head again, smiling despite everything. Gods, she thought, welcome to human culture, boys.
“So…” Rian drawled, leaning back in his chair and eyeing her with far too much interest, “When Tyson called you Snow White last week, you told him you’d rather your four huntsmen than his grumpy dwarf. Is that actually true?”
Anabelle burst out laughing, the sound bright and unrestrained. “Gods, I told you not to let that get into your heads. It was a comeback. What else was I supposed to call him....Sir Personality of a Brick?”
Rian grinned, clearly filing that away for later mischief.
Before any of them could respond, a sharp, violent noise cut through the low hum of the cafeteria.
“Fuck!”
Every head turned.
At the far end of the room, a man had shoved back from his table so hard his chair scraped loudly across the floor. In the next heartbeat, he picked it up and hurled it against the wall. The crash echoed, silencing nearby conversations. His friends immediately stood, hands out.
“Man, calm down—”
“Don’t tell me to calm down, Alexis,” he snapped, breathing hard. “You didn’t fucking fail. I did.”
The words hit Anabelle like a physical blow. Her laughter died instantly. Oh gods. Her heart began to race, a sick, spiralling sensation blooming in her chest. For one terrible second, she forgot where she was, forgot the noise, the people, everything.
But now she remembered. The results. She hadn’t checked them yet.