Once Upon a Broken Heart

After the wedding, Evangeline keeps waiting for Apollo to fall out of love with her, but he doesn’t. The party moves to a castle built of ice built specifically for the wedding. Evangeline dances with Apollo until his brother Tiberius, who left after Apollo and Evangeline got engaged, arrives. Apollo draws his sword, but Evangeline steps before him, offering to dance with Tiberius to smooth things over. Reluctantly, Apollo agrees.

Tiberius asks Evangeline if she loves Apollo, looking at her “like a puzzle he wanted to take apart instead of put together” (230). Evangeline can’t bring herself to say yes, so instead dances around the answer by saying she hopes she can love Apollo more than she’s ever loved anyone. Tiberius says he’ll tell her why he left after the engagement the next time he sees her and then leaves.

The party is supposed to last until dawn, but shortly into the festivities, Apollo tells Evangeline he’s ready to go to their wedding suite. Evangeline makes excuse after excuse about meeting him there shortly so she can track down Jacks and get him to remove the curse. She finds him in a throne room, looking uncomfortable as an adorable fox nuzzles his boots. Jacks presses another drop of his blood to her lips, giving her kiss the power to disenchant Apollo until sunrise. Unlike the last two times when Jacks’s blood tasted sweet, this time it is bitter, like “the taste of a mistake” (236).

Evangeline goes to the wedding suite, where she finds Apollo naked and rubbing oil on his chest. She kisses him, and the curse seems to break. Apollo flashes through a series of emotions from anger to regret to desperation before collapsing on the bed, dead. Evangeline tries and fails to revive him. She’s horrified by what she’s done and even more that “Jacks had tricked her into doing it” (241).

The soldiers outside the suite burst in, accusing Evangeline of murdering Apollo. They drag her to an empty room and tie her up to silence her, but Evangeline can’t stop crying. The guards threaten her, but Jacks arrives, bewitches them, and sends them away. Evangeline curses him for forcing her to murder Apollo, and Jacks reveals there’s never been any magic in her kisses—that Apollo fell in love with her because Jacks willed it to happen.

Evangeline’s tears continue to fall, forming a pool on the floor. Jacks tries to manipulate her emotions, but he can’t. He knows of another Fate who kills by poisoning the tears of those with a broken heart, and if that’s what happened, they need to cure Evangeline or else “you’ll cry yourself to death” (248).

Jacks smuggles Evangeline out of the palace and brings her to LaLa. As LaLa fixes the antidote, Jacks holds Evangeline, keeping her warm and alive. The antidote works, and LaLa tells Jacks that Evangeline will need close contact for a day to make sure she survives. Evangeline can’t imagine Jacks holding on to anyone for that long, but he doesn’t release her, holding on “as though he had no intention of ever letting her go” (253).