Rovina Cai

“And you’re the princess of fishes.”

Jude, Cardan thought, hating even the shape of her name. Jude.

The title was Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking Glass.

A heart of stone can still be broken.

Cardan had trusted Nicasia not to hurt him, which was ridiculous, since he well knew that everyone hurts one another and that the people you loved hurt you the most grievously. Since he was well aware that they both took delight in hurting everyone else that they could, how could he have thought himself safe?

“I am nothing,” Cardan said, “if not dramatic.”

But every night, Jude haunted him. The coils of her hair. The calluses on her fingers. An absent bite of her lip. It was too much, the way he thought about her. He knew it was too much, but he couldn’t stop.

It disgusted him that he couldn’t stop.

Oak gave up his room so they could sleep there, and although the bed is small, Cardan cannot mind when he takes Jude in his arms.

“Why didn’t you hate everyone?” he asks. “Everyone, all the time.”

“I hated you,” Jude reassures him, bringing her mouth to his.

They seem rattled when they realize who he is. And somehow he finds that to be the thing that annoys him most of all, that they thought he