Hands Against Hearts

Prologue

I wish I could say that I had made it all up, that I had been struck by an unending dream and forced to spectate a fiction that one day I might leave and pursue a reality so different from this.

I wish that my own tongue had been more restrained, and yet part of me was proud that I had said it all. Still, I knew that talk would not change the facts.

Noel must have known that. How could Noel, a proper man, have hoped to reason with him, a liar, treacherous and haughty?

If he went not to kill, why go at all? I told him plainly how I felt, how Ophelia had been wronged to the fullest extent, that she had been ripped apart from the life she had chased. The cost of her life, her reputation, her future wellbeing was worth just as much as the life of the man who chose to rob her of everything.

Surely Noel understood that. There wasn't a doubt in my mind that he understood me; he had always met me halfway in wit, in intellect, sometimes even besting me. We had spoken a language all our own for as long as I had known him. Yes, he had understood me when I told him I wished Amos Houston were dead.

And yet he had bested me even then, surprising me, setting my worries aside for just a moment, like a patch of green springing from the crack of a sidewalk. There might be life somewhere in the midst of what felt like endless tragedy. There might be something to look forward to because he told me—

How exactly had he put it?

"There's not one thing in this whole world that I love as much as I love you."

But even that. Even his warm breath against my face and the notion that he would do anything I asked of him, I wish I had made it all up.