11. CHAPTER ELEVEN
Hope dozed against her mountain of pillows.
Her room was shrouded in hues of violet as sunlight filtered through the curtains she had drawn.
She didn’t want Brayden trying to come in through the window.
Not again. His incessant text messages were bad enough.
Apparently, he’d never been ghosted before because he didn’t let up. Well, lucky him. She prayed it hurt.
Hope rolled onto her side to confront her open laptop. She moved the mouse, bringing the screen to life on the email she left up.
Hope!
Love the revisions; everything is coming together in this last installment of Web of Realms .
The publishers are a bit surprised by the ending, though, and so am I.
You may weave some sordid tales, but you always wind up at a happy ending.
We were rooting for Kiernan and Dominique.
I think your readership would want it too.
Try it out and send me an alt ending by next Friday.
Talk soon,
Heather
Hope thought they’d end up together too.
Maybe she could get away with telling her agent that sometimes the characters do what the characters want to do, and it’s out of her hands.
Pull from any number of authors who have admitted the same in interviews about different pairings or killings or seismic shifts in the plot that readers didn’t see coming.
It would work for Hope too, if, in fact, it were true .
But Kiernan and Dom wanted to end up together.
They needed it. It was written, well before she’d ever introduced them on the page, like they’d been drawn from her brain to find each other amidst the fictional realms that worshipped a spider goddess and were crumbling into the abyss.
She just hadn’t been able to write that ending.
Hadn’t wanted them to have what she couldn’t.
Heather was being nice, as always. Not outright demanding the alternate ending but rather insisting Hope play.
She knew Hope responded better to suggestions than demands, but it was clear.
She’d need the happy ending to get approval from the team that made her first two books bestsellers.
What was worse was she knew they were right.
It had been agonizing to write the ending without bringing those two characters together.
It had felt all wrong. But her wounds were too fresh when the deadline for the last three chapters had rolled around, and she couldn’t bear it.
She’d knocked them out in an afternoon after the whole Chloe debacle, just wanting it to be over .
Hope groaned as she drew the computer into her lap.
She opened a new document, gearing up to try the romantic ending she’d been avoiding.
It was an epic fantasy series after all.
The romance was a subplot that she introduced in book two.
It was supposed to add some levity and warmth to the otherwise dark and twisted nature of the horrors she’d fictionalized about a world falling into chaos as it disintegrated into the voids between stars.
But she knew, given the outpouring of love for the characters after the second book released, that she had to find a way to save them and give them their happy ending.
It was exciting when she started writing it six months ago. It felt right.
Now, it was torture.
Hope stared at the cursor blinking on the blank page.
The words got stuck somewhere in the mechanism of her mind.
The pressure built behind her ears. They screamed to be written to be expressed, but she’d tucked them away.
Back to the cell they’d been kept locked in before she met Brayden.
Where she and Effie had stuffed excitement and lust and love and waited until they could be shared safely.
A rap on the glass of her window startled her. Hope sucked in a breath, holding it tensely as though he could possibly hear her breathing within.
The window loomed before her and she couldn’t move. Brayden’s silhouette was cast against the thin linen of the lilac curtains, his head hung. She closed her eyes tight, tears squeaking through the dams she’d built.
“Hope, please. I don’t understand. What’s happened?”
Hope took a shuddering breath, her heart breaking all over again at the worry in his voice.
The tenderness. He had scaled the banister to her window twice before, each time asking the same question.
She refused to answer. She’d since taped a note to the metal flashing beneath her window so it wouldn’t be seen from the street and inquired over by her meddling family.
She had written three words. Three words she hoped would cut their ties and leave Brayden certain there was no future for them.
They were the words he’d read in her book series.
Words Kiernan had said to her first love, the one she left behind to find her true calling in the first book.
The kindest breakup she could offer without diving into the depths of her own heartache.
Let me go.
“Hope, I know you’re in there. I . . . I don’t think I can.”
She kept silent, her pain slipping into prickling rage.
How dare he sound so hurt, so baffled when he was the one living a lie.
He was the one who created this mess, who pursued her, made her feel seen and adored.
He, who so ardently expressed his love with his words and his touch, had been nothing but a rake.
A man bored with his wife and looking for other conquests.
Hope nearly choked on her ironic laugh. It turned out even the light, goofy, French bulldog-loving, flower-picking sweetheart—she had once called him that—could turn out as cruel and unfeeling as the obvious womanizing pricks.
Like the men she’d thought she’d loved in college.
The ones that sparked her turn toward celibacy before Brayden.
It pained her greatly that he joined their ranks.
Hope looked back to the window, but Brayden’s silhouette was gone. She scooted off her bed and peered outside. He was nowhere in sight, but her note fluttered in the breeze, now tucked into the trim of the window. She gently lifted the sash and plucked the notecard out before the wind took it .
He had written three words of his own. The only three, she guessed, that he could think to undo whatever had been done. Like the antidote in every fairy tale, the spell to break the curse.
I love you .
Hope ripped the paper to shreds into the wastebasket that sat by the writing desk she only used when in full drafting mode. She took a steadying breath, hand resting on the marred and marked wood of the antique desk, her grief threatening to topple her.
She jolted.
Her gaze danced around the room. Hope started again, looking down at her swollen belly. She let her hand rest on the offending side and felt, for the third time now, as her baby kicked her. Hope smiled. “What? You think I should have kept it?” Another kick.
Hope moved her hands in soothing circles over her womb. She sighed deeply, returned to her pile of pillows, and drew her computer to her lap.
She took another breath and let it all go.
For Kiernan and Dominque, she gave the love she had so desperately wanted for herself.
For her readers too, so they might believe in love just long enough to experience it before it withered and died.
Every wish and hope she had for her life with Brayden.
Every glance, every touch. Everything she saw for their future.
Everything she felt of their love, however brief, she poured onto the page—the only place it would ever live.