by Laura Kenyon
“You can’t possibly mean that,” he practically whispered. “After everything we saw today? Rapunzel.” He stepped forward again, reaching for her hands. She moved aside. “Rapunzel, I love you. We just witnessed firsthand how fragile that can be. How it can be taken away at any moment without the slightest tick of a warning. Would you really toss that aside because I hid a secret that would have killed us?”
“Ha!” She crunched Beast’s bag of kibble closed and shoved it back into the cabinet. “Killed us?” Her tone was as excited as his was gentle. Beast immediately scampered behind Ethan and attempted to tunnel beneath his legs. “Don’t you think that’s a bit of an exaggeration?”
She was spinning around in circles now: scrubbing Beast’s bowl; slamming clean utensils into their drawers; picking up, then putting down, then picking up a half-empty handle of vodka. Then Ethan caught her in his arms and her fury came to a crashing halt. She looked away, trying not to see him, not to smell him. But it was too late.
“No, I don’t think that’s an exaggeration,” he said, as sure as if she’d asked whether it was raining outside. “I know Grethel means a lot more to you than you want people to think.”
“Don’t,” she warned, trying to squirm away.
“I know it,” he repeated, holding her in place. “And believe it or not, I understand it. She was the woman who raised you. You never got closure when she dumped you in Carpale and disappeared. But you seem to forget what she’s capable of.”
Rapunzel tried not to look at his face, but it didn’t matter. She knew where all of his scars were. She knew what Grethel had done to him.
He held her closer to his chest and reached out to twist a small swath of her hair between his fingers.
“Don’t get me wrong. I’m grateful to her for making things right in the end,” he said. “I don’t know how much longer I would have made it if I had to spend the rest of my life blind and alone, wondering whether you knew what happened to me but unable to tell you.”
“You could have told me.”
“No, I couldn’t,” he said, rolling his eyes toward the ceiling. “Hey, remember me? I’m blind and stitched together now, but you sorta swore to run away and marry me. That promise still stands, right?” He shook his head. “No. I couldn’t be a burden to you. So of course I said yes when Grethel offered to fix me so long as I kept her whereabouts a secret. I didn’t ask her why, and you have every right to be angry at me for it.” She felt his hands clench against her back, then loosen. “I’m angry too. I’m angry that she put me in that position. I’m angry that right now I have to make the choice I never wanted to make in the first place—losing you again or—” He swallowed, hard. His breath became suddenly slow and deep. “Or becoming that burden all over again.”
Dammit, she thought. How could she possibly stay angry after a confession like that? Almost reluctantly, she let a little of her weight lean into him, then looked up. She could see the red growing around his eyes.
“Do you really think she’d do that?” she asked. “Do you really think she’d undo whatever spell she used to fix you just because you told me how to find her?”
He unclasped his hands entirely and let the space between them grow. “Do you really think she wouldn’t?”
“Yes.” Rapunzel turned away and opened the liquor cabinet once again. “Yes. I mean no.” She shook her head, slammed the doors, and emerged empty-handed. “I mean I don’t think she would make you blind again. Half of my childhood was empty threats. Stay away from the window or I’ll board it shut. Clean up your mess or I’ll turn you into a chair. Finish your venison or it’s no dinner for a month.”
“That’s different. I know she wouldn’t hurt you. But I’m—”
“Exactly.” Rapunzel’s hand smacked against the counter as Beast raced out of the room. “Look. You told me that Grethel scoured the world looking for you, right? And that she restored your sight as a way to make amends to me. Right?”
Ethan sucked on the insides of his cheeks and nodded.
“So don’t you see? That means it doesn’t matter whether or not she cares about hurting you. It only matters that she cares about me, despite what the teenage version of me wanted to believe. And if she wants me to be happy, I find it extremely hard to believe she’d make me miserable just because you broke some asinine promise.”
Ethan’s lips rose into a small smile on one side. Then the other.
“What?” Rapunzel barked.
“You just said losing me would make you miserable.”
Rapunzel felt her breath catch in her throat. The floor became suddenly mesmerizing.
“Yeah,” she stammered. “Well.” She needed to shake this ooey gooey feeling away. She needed him to stop looking at her the way he was looking at her. She panned past his outline and stared out the window. The sun was almost up now. It was casting some sort of fuzzy halo over Carpale Castle. “Well, feeling responsible for someone else’s blindness would make anyone miserable.”
She struggled to swallow every emotion as he leaned back against the bar top and pinched the bridge of his nose. That had been a cheap shot—one that played on all his deepest fears. And she hadn’t even meant it.
“Do you want me to leave?”
Her stomach tightened at the question. She was angry, yes. Hurt, absolutely. But she didn’t want to lose the only person capable of hurting her to such a degree—the only person she’d let in deep enough to do so.
“If you want me to go, I will,” he said again. “Because whether you believe it or not, your happiness is the most important thing to me.” He waited, and then added, “I just always hoped I was a part of that.”
Rapunzel’s mouth opened, but she didn’t know what to say. They’d fought about a lot over the past month—about Grethel, about marriage, about the orientation of the forks in the dishwasher—but it always subsided after a few hours. In the end, nothing seemed important enough to cause a fracture. Even now, her heart was telling her that hadn’t changed. Her head was the one causing the problem.
“I’m going to bed,” she finally said. “We can talk about this later.” She saw him jolt all over. “I have a million things to do tomorrow—or, ugh, later today—and I’m about to topple over.”
“What can I do to help?” he asked.
“You can tell every P.I. you know in Ellada to look for Cindy and Aaron,” she said. “I told Belle I’d play my part in Ruby’s ridiculous triad plan, but I know what happens when all your eggs are in one basket.”
“No problem. I can—”
“And you can entertain Beast while I’m running errands later.”
“Sure. We’ll—”
“And you can start packing your stuff.” She watched carefully as the space beneath his nose instantly wrinkled and his face began to melt. Satisfied, she added, “I’m not confronting Grethel on my own.”
Ethan’s face lit back up. He cleared his throat, straightened up a little, and rolled up his sagging sleeves.
“When do you want to leave?” he asked, suddenly on a mission. “Just say the word. I’ll take care of everything.”
Rapunzel paused to draft a quick mental list. The insurance company wanted to meet with her that afternoon. She’d promised to bring Belle some decent clothes and a few comfort items. She had to return Nathan’s fifteen hysterical voicemails. She had to find somewhere else for Beast to stay while they were away.
“How long will it take?”
“Well,” Ethan said, rubbing the back of his neck. “The flight’s almost twenty-four hours, so—”
“Twenty-four hours!” Rapunzel shrieked as Beast sprinted out of the room again. “I figured she wasn’t in Marestam, but I was betting on a road trip over the Pastora border. A ferry to Eresyn at the worst. Where the heck are we going? The moon?”
“No,” he said, suddenly fingering a scratch in the counter. “But if you drilled a hole through the earth and came out on the other side … that’s pretty much where she is.”
>
Rapunzel’s brain shut down for a moment. The other side of the world? But that’s what Ethan always said about where he was from.
“Are you trying to tell me that Grethel is in Stularia?”
He sucked on one side of his lip. The desire to kill him came rushing back full force.
He nodded and pulled his sleeves back down.
“Was she always in Stularia?” Her mind was suddenly on overdrive. “Am I from Stularia?”
Ethan let out a long exhale. “I mean, I don’t know where you were actually born, but …”
“Wow,” she said, floored as to how he kept that from her. Even if Grethel had put a gag order on her own whereabouts, how could Ethan have withheld what he knew about Rapunzel’s past? About her identity. About all the questions she had and the holes she felt and the —
Oh, right. He hadn’t told her because she’d never asked. Nor had she ever confided a single thing about her childhood to him. The world already knew she’d been damaged; she never wanted to confess anything that might make her seem more so. That’s why she kept an impenetrable iron box in the back of her mind containing the parents who gave her away, the woman who raised her, the tower in which she spent eighteen years, and the people who used her when she first landed—alone and in total shock—in Carpale.
“Buy the tickets for Monday,” she decreed as Beast came lumbering back into the kitchen.
“Tomorrow? Will do,” Ethan chirped before sweeping her into a blitzkrieg kiss and apologizing for everything one more time. “Now what do you say we get that shuteye?”
“Sure thing,” she said, flicking his chest and then pushing him away. When her head stopped spinning, she saw him give Beast a hearty scratch on the head and bounce toward the stairs that led up to her bedroom.
“Not so fast,” she called after him, feeling like the coals in the center of a bonfire. He instantly twirled around and hung off the banister sporting an uncharacteristically juvenile grin. She flashed a similar one right back, then she pointed towards the hall and sent Beast up the stairs in his place. “The guest room is that way. Extra pillows are in the closet.”
* * *
After brushing her teeth, washing her face, shutting out the sun, and fluffing a makeshift dog bed in the corner, Rapunzel slid beneath the sheets with a sigh and took out her journal. She knew sleep would be impossible if she didn’t bleed some of her feelings out and sop them up with paper. But even after filling eight pages about Belle, Marestam, Angus, Cinderella, Donner’s curse, Ethan’s deceit, and Grethel, she still couldn’t get comfortable. She tried every position she could think of and every pillow she could find. She just wasn’t used to being alone.
Cursing, she sat straight up and switched on the light. Ethan was just a staircase away, but she couldn’t possibly give in this quickly. Allowing him to stay under the same roof already went against everything she stood for. He’d lied to her. Regardless of what he thought Grethel would do to him, that one fact remained.
True, he had been keeping his word. That was honorable. And if he truly believed Grethel’s threat, he was right now sacrificing his own happiness in order to save everyone else's—particularly Rapunzel’s future godchild.
Ugh. All the rationalizing just made her want to scream. This is exactly why the old Rapunzel didn’t compromise when relationships got too complicated. She just chucked them away like a dirty bandage. She never had to feel the mental and emotional anguish that went along with “gray areas” because she’d never allowed them in. It made her wonder whether it was possible to be carefree and independent without dying alone. Or were these things mutually exclusive?
She punched the pillow. Seconds later, Beast’s hind leg began to spasm against the floor. He followed this up with a series of sleep whimpers and a deep, quivering exhale. Rapunzel chuckled and watched his massive silver chest rise and fall for a few minutes. He looked so peaceful in his sleep. Adorable even, with his front paws in an almost dainty crisscross position and his bottom ear splayed out over the wood. She suddenly understood why Belle took so much comfort in him.
He whimpered again and she wondered what he was dreaming about. Hiking through the woods with Belle, probably. Or chasing a squirrel. Or maybe he was having a nightmare about what happened at the Phoenix the other night. Poor thing had no idea what was going on. Or maybe that was to his advantage.
“Hey,” she whispered, overcome by emotion. One eye popped open to look at her but the rest of his head stayed still. She was pretty sure his expression, in human terms, could be translated as, “What the hell are you waking me up for, lady?”
“Beast,” she said again. “Are you comfortable down there?”
This time his head lifted and both eyes opened wider.
“I’ve got lots of space here if you want to come up.”
He was on his feet immediately.
“Wow,” she laughed, moving the pillows around to give him room. “Guess I still got it, ha?”
Beast shook his entire body in agreement—head all the way down to his tail—and then placed his snout on the mattress. She was just about to wave him on up, when she recalled all the times she chastised Belle for doing the same thing.
“Now Beast,” she said, leaning down so that their noses practically touched. “If I let you up here, it’s a one-time thing, okay?” Nothing. “No one finds out about this, got it? Not Ethan, not Gray, and especially not Belle.”
The dog shuffled his paws, rearranged his snout, and sighed.
“Good enough,” she said, smacking the sheets with her left hand. “Come on up. Okay!”
Before the last syllable was entirely out, the massive pile of fur leapt up, circled a few times, and plopped down with his head on top of her knee.
Rapunzel smiled, rearranged him a bit, and then wrapped both arms over his silky fur. Ordinarily, she wholeheartedly disapproved of letting anything with four legs sleep on an adult human’s bed. But there was something reassuring about having him there with her—and she had a distinct feeling that he felt the same way. After all, Belle had cuddled with him almost every night since she rescued him. She would have wanted this. And who knew what other horrors were waiting for her in the coming days? Giving her dog this tiny bit of normalcy—albeit in a strange bed, in a different kingdom, when everyone was supposed to be waking up—was the least she could do.
Chapter Three
SNOW
To say she was excited went against everything Snow White stood for. She was the Zen queen, after all. She was the live-and-let-live guru, the advocate for both enormous hearts and tiny environmental footprints, the only one among her friends who believed in healing energy vortexes. She genuinely cared about strangers and wanted everyone to find deep, lasting inner happiness. So how in the world, after comforting Belle through the unthinkable for hours, did she feel her lips curling upwards as she rounded the bend towards home?
Snow forced them back down and unlatched the gate she’d built by hand out of reclaimed barn wood. She pushed it open, stepped onto the walkway, and stopped. Something was telling her to be still for a moment, to take note of where she was right now and pay her respects to everything that lay behind her.
She didn’t know how Griffin was going to take the news. After all they’d been through, the very word “baby” was not something to be tossed around lightly. In the White household, those four letters sat in the same box as “capitalism,” “authority,” and “taxes.”
Snow still remembered the first time she sat him down and broke the big news: “We’re going to be parents!” They were in the living room (the only real social space in their two-bedroom cottage) and he was in shock for a full minute. Then he leapt to his feet, did a sun salutation into downward dog split, and scooped her into his arms. Unfortunately, more news followed a few weeks later … and four more times after that: “Dr. Frolick said it’s non-viable.” “The heart stopped beating.” “They didn’t see a sac.” “It seems my mother’s poisoned apple did more da
mage than we thought.” And finally, just a quiet shake of the head and a hushed, “No.”
The day they decided to adopt was the day they decided to wipe the slate clean. They felt hope again. Then, even better: Three baby boys. Three! Three poor little triplets who’d been orphaned and needed a loving home. Within days, the second floor was cleared out and a trio of cribs sat in the corner, awaiting assembly. Griffin covered all the walls with a zero-VOC paint and found a white glider made entirely out of recyclable materials. Snow gathered two dozen stuffed animals—eight for each crib—and contributed the artwork. She spent days painting four different iterations of the same oak tree standing guard in summer, autumn, winter, and spring. It was based off the giant shade tree in the center of their yard.
But then came the rampion brownies gaffe, the public relations fiasco, the Monarch Morality Movement, the microscope on Snow and Griffin’s lifestyle, and those four little words from Home Adoptions: “Unfit to be parents.”
Being asked to take care of Belle’s son now was an honor—but it was also dangerous. It was like giving a paraplegic legs for one day and then taking them away again. It was like offering a beggar one day in the life of a billionaire, and expecting him to just walk away smiling when it was all over. But what choice did she have? A friend in need was a friend in need. And the way that baby had cuddled into her while they were waiting for his mama to wake up … well … Snow would just have to be careful. That’s all.
She gave the front of the cottage one last look before heading to the door. The style was quirky and cute on the outside, with a rounded front door and flared gables, but rugged and simplistic within. Most of the decor had been repurposed, and there were hardly any knick-knacks. Wherever they could have fit a portrait on the wall, they cut out a window instead so they could get a better view of the forest and the gardens they both loved to tend. To put it simply, the cottage was everything the residence of a king and queen wasn’t supposed to be—at least in the minds of everyone outside of Tantalise.