The Villain by L.J. Shen

“There’s a cloud in our backyard!” Dahlia, one of my students, gasped, pointing her chubby finger out the window behind me.

“Whoa!” Reid’s tar eyes rounded, his pupils dilating like two splashes of ink. “That is one giant, humongous cloud.”

“Now, friends,” I said from over the rim of the book I was reading. They sat around me on the colorful alphabet carpet. The fog outside distracted them. “Crisscross applesauce. Everybody sit down and pay attention to the story. We need to finish reading about Paddington attending the Busy Bee Adventure Trail before we can play outside.”

“Collecting B-words is b-o-r-r-i-n-g!” Noah spelled the word wrong, tossing his limbs about the carpet in frustration. “Mommy says teachers are not very smart, or they wouldn’t be teachers. I want to play with the giant cloud!”

Well, Noah, Mommy is a B for bitc…

“Please!” Dahlia cried.

“Oh, Ms. Persy!” Reid whined.

The kids swarmed me, crawling onto my lap while pressing their palms together pleadingly. “Please, please, please can we play with the cloud? The nice man wants us to join him so badly. Look at him playing all by himself.”

The nice man?

Playing with himself?

Thinking now was a great time to call the police and make use of my pepper spray, I whipped my head, my jaw slacking.

My husband—who according to Belle refused the divorce papers yesterday and kicked her out of his office—was standing in Little Genius’ backyard, sleeves rolled, hair tousled, one knee on the ground as he created a huge, white, solitary cloud that floated above his head. It was the size of a hot air balloon. Big and fluffy and white. My eyes darted to the ground. How did he make it?

I spotted a metal tray, a stirrer, a match, and a Mason jar scattered underneath him.

We stared at each other wordlessly through the glass wall.

The book slipped from my fingers. I felt the herd of kids as they ran past me, dashing to the window, pressing their sticky fingers and noses to the glass as they squealed excitedly.

Avoiding my husband was no longer an option.

He brought me a cloud.

He brought me Auntie Tilda.

My legs carried me to the glass wall. He walked over, meeting me behind the thin barrier.

I put my hand on the glass. Cillian mirrored the action, our fingertips touching through the wall.

“I told you not to come here.” I swallowed hard.

“I told you a lot of things I regret,” he answered. “I hope maybe what you said was one of yours.”

“I’ve already used my Cloud Wish, Kill. I can’t have another one.” My voice broke.

“The wish is not for you to make, Persephone.” He smiled. “It’s for me.”

The children poured into the backyard like hot lava, spreading fast, crackling with delight.

Their small arms reached for the cloud, trying to grasp the ungraspable, stretching their fingers in an attempt to capture its magic.

I was the last to get out to the yard, stopping a few good feet away from my husband. Seeing him after weeks felt like dropping a heavy camping bag at the doorstep of your home. I wanted to bury my nose in his neck and breathe him in.

I didn’t ask him what he was doing here. I was afraid to believe. To hope.

Descending from Olympus didn’t make my husband any less regal and beautiful, and the Greek gods had a history of making mortals play into their own hands.

“This one is Dahlia.” He pointed at one of the kids, who was punching the smoke, trying to bring it to submission. “You call her The Little Mouse. Sassy, sweet, stubborn. This is Teo,” he continued, jerking his chin to Teo, “shy and reserved but observant. And that’s Joe,” he continued, looking at Joel, one of my favorite pupils. A dreamer with a shock of bright red hair.

“How did you know?” I whispered.

“I’ve been listening during our dinners,” he admitted. “To every word you said. Even if I pretended otherwise.”

My heart soared.

“You’re claiming your Cloud Wish?” I wrung my fingers together in my lap, turning into the same girl he’d met years ago in the bridal suite. Innocent. Unsure.

“Yes.”

“Who said you have one?” A smile fluttered on my lips.

“Your aunt.” There was no hint of mockery in his voice, which I appreciated, considering he was fluent in sarcasm. “She said I have to be careful. That you only get one wish in a lifetime.”

Wait a minute…

It was the same thing Auntie Tilda told me. And I didn’t remember ever telling Kill about this particular part. It couldn’t be. It made no sense at all.

“What’s your wish?” I whispered.

The children were teeming around us, and I thought it was symbolic, that the reason we were brought together—heirs—engulfed us even though I hadn’t conceived.

“I want an hour with you. Sixty minutes of your time. That’s all I ask. When are you getting off work?”

“Four,” I answered. “Same as always.”

“I’ll wait.”

At least he hadn’t told me to ditch work this time.

“How did you make a cloud?” I pointed behind him.

“NASA has a manual. It’s nothing.”

“It’s amazing.”

“Third graders can do it.”

“I don’t care.” I shook my head. “Will you wait for me?” I motioned around us, to the school.

He smiled. “Persephone, my dear, I’ve been waiting for eight years. Four more hours won’t kill me.”

The drive to Cillian’s house was quiet. Before I got out of Little Genius, I put an alarm for exactly sixty minutes on my phone. Now, I fiddled with the strap of my shoulder bag, taking in the monotonous view outside, trying to regulate my breaths.

It was make or break time. A part of me always knew Cillian wasn’t going to simply accept the divorce. Maybe that was why I went ahead with the paperwork. Subconsciously, I knew it would be a call for him to come closer.

To seek me out.

To defy me.

“You stopped the drilling in the Arctic.” I cleared my throat, still looking out the window. It was twenty past. Damn Boston traffic. We had forty more minutes. Technically, anyway.

“Yes.”

“That was…nice.”

“Giving you flowers is nice. Losing approximately 1.4 billion dollars a year in revenue is, at the very least, a romantic gesture of Shakespearean proportions.”

He said it so incredulously—so seriously—I couldn’t help but snort out a laugh.

“I’m not even sure how many zeroes that entails.”

“Nine.” His fingers tapped his knee, and I knew he was itching for a cigar but trying to be on his best behavior. “Ten, including me, if my plan today doesn’t work and I find out I did this for nothing.”

When we got to his house, I noticed Petar was out. So was the rest of the staff. I’d never seen the place so empty. I had a feeling it was planned.

“Should we go to your study?” I asked politely. A part of me still considered him a complete stranger.

He shook his head. “I want to show you something.”

Motioning for me to follow him to the backyard, he opened the double doors in his living room, and we proceeded outside. I’d visited his garden religiously. Not only was it gorgeous but I was still on the lookout for the elusive demon fountain. For the mysterious part of Cillian’s property I’d yet to discover.

I followed him, holding my breath when he stopped by the ivy-laced door with the high walls. I’d tried opening it twice, but it was firmly locked. Kill produced a key and unlocked it, pushing it open.

We both stepped in, and there was the demon fountain. With water pouring out of the bat-like monster with pointy teeth.

It was a small space—maybe as big as Belle’s apartment—and I wondered what made him close this section and isolate it from the rest of the garden.

Kill crouched down, hands-on-thighs, squinting. There was something about his body language that jarred me. A certain stiffness that was gone. His composure was an inch less than perfect. I liked it.

“What are we looking at?” I came to stand beside him, leaning forward. He caught me by the waist, tugging softly at my dress to keep me from getting too close to the flowers.

To the sea of flowers.

I just realized this section of the house was jam-packed with wildflowers. And not just any flowers. The pink and white flowers were shaped as little sad hearts. I swallowed, taking a step back.

“How long have you had those?”

“Almost four years.” He turned to me with a slight frown. “About a month after Hunter and Sailor’s wedding, my landscaper called me outside, insisting I had to see this. He said it was peculiar. That he didn’t plant the bleeding heart, so he had no idea how the flower had gotten here. His best guess was seeds from a nearby garden blew in the wind and settled here. But I remembered that after I took the flowers from your hair, I put them in a napkin. Later that night, when I arrived home, I went out to the garden to smoke a cigar, found the napkin, and tossed it. It was just the one flower, and my landscaper asked if I wanted to keep it. I immediately thought about your curse—wish,” he amended, “and said no. He yanked the bleeding heart out from its root the same day. A month later, another bleeding heart grew in the same spot. I had him wrench it out again. This time he went as far as poisoning the soil. On the fourth time, I gave up. A part of me wanted to see how damn stubborn you were. And look at it now. My garden’s full of them.”

I pressed my lips together, fighting a smile.

He barricaded a part of his garden because it reminded him of me.

Caged it where no one could see it.

“So I lived with your bleeding heart. A poisonous reminder of how much I wanted you. Not much later, I found out you were getting married.”

“You never answered my wedding invitation.” I felt color rising on my skin.

“Everyone has their limits. I draw mine at celebrating my idiocy of pushing you into another man’s arms. Time went by. I’d forgotten about you, mostly. The wheels of life kept on spinning, and no matter how fast or slow they went, I barely even remembered I was on board. Then Paxton left, I’d been appointed CEO of Royal Pipelines, and you showed up at my office, looking for a favor. My initial reaction was to put as much space between us as possible.”

“You didn’t want to feel,” I said softly. He shook his head.

“At this point, I wasn’t even concerned about the possibility of feeling. I was mainly still annoyed about the damn flowers that kept showing up out of nowhere in my backyard. Like you snuck in at night and planted them there. But then the need for a bride arose…”

“Yes, and you had multiple candidates to choose from. You canceled the engagement to Minka Gomes. Why?”

He frowned at the bed of flowers.

“She wasn’t you.”

“She could’ve been pregnant by now.”

“It was never about having an heir,” he quipped. A gorgeous, irresistible king who was misjudged and misunderstood. “Deep down, I wasn’t altruistic enough to give a fuck about the lineage.”

I glanced at my phone. We had half an hour at most before his wish was over.

“Tell me about the Tourette’s,” I pleaded. “Everything, right from the beginning. I’ve only seen a few videos, but they were enough to show me what you’ve been through.”

“It started with simple tics, right after my father fired Andrew Senior, and moved to full-blown attacks by the time I’d gotten back to England after summer break. The lonelier I felt, the worse they became. I’d been in and out of clinics, and on top of Tourette’s, I also received comorbid diagnosis of having OCD and ASD. To me, it felt like the end of the world. People think of Tourette’s as crazy people who shout out obscenities against their own will in rags on the street, OCD as compulsively obsessive maniacs who wash their hands fifteen times an hour, and ASD means I’m on the autism spectrum. Which basically makes people think I’m some sort of Rain Man. Good with numbers, dumb at everything else.

“Quickly, I’d realized I needed to rein in this condition if I wanted to become all the things I was born to be. I learned that while I couldn’t control the tics, I could control what made them happen. And what made them happen was my being overwhelmed with emotion. Any type of emotion. Whether it was sadness, distress, anger, fear, or even joy. If I was excited—if my heart raced—the pressure of an attack usually followed. As long as I didn’t allow myself to feel, I kept the tics at bay. It was very simple and worked for everyone involved.”

This explained so much.

Why Cillian was so fond of his leather gloves—he didn’t like touching strange things, due to his OCD.

Why he managed to disconnect from his feelings so efficiently when they became a complication.

Why he always cracked his knuckles—to regulate his breaths, to self-soothe. It was a tic. A reminder of what he had to live with. He couldn’t switch off who he was. Not fully. No matter how hard he tried.

Why he always kept his guard up.

Why he ignored me for years instead of caving in to temptation.

“Everyone but you. You’re the one who couldn’t feel anything.”

“I survived fine.”

“Surviving is not enough.”

“I know that now.” His sultry eyes twinkled at me. “Thanks to you.”

The air between us became thick and charged. He took my hand in his. Such a simple gesture, yet it felt as though he plucked the stars from the sky for me. He pressed my hand against his heart. It raced beneath my palm, thudding violently, desperate to smash the barrier between us and jump into my fist.

The strongest hearts have the most scars.

“Keep it here until I’m done,” he instructed, drawing a deep breath.

“I want you.” He lifted one finger. “I’ve always wanted you with a hunger that made my chest ache and my mouth dry. That’s one emotion. I am jealous and possessive of you. In case you haven’t noticed.” He erected two more fingers in the air. “I worry and fear for you. When I discovered why you’d decided to work for Andrew, I wanted to skin you alive for putting yourself at risk for me. That’s two more.” He splayed his entire hand over an invisible screen between us, stretching all five fingers.

“Five emotions down, five more to go. You’ve made me the happiest I’ve ever been. Also the saddest.” He now lifted two fingers of his other hand. “And caused me an infinite amount of pain and pleasure.”

There was only one finger left curled now.

One emotion he still hadn’t unveiled.

The watch on his wrist said it was five to five. Only five more minutes before Auntie Tilda’s wish evaporated and we ran out of time to say all the things we wanted to say.

My breath hitched.

“I love you, Persephone,” he growled. “I love you so fucking hard. Somewhere along the way, I softened. I may have saved you from a bleeding heart, but your bleeding heart saved me. Ten emotions are not twenty-seven. There’s still more to go, but I want to take this journey with you.

“We are not Hades and Persephone, Flower Girl. Never were. I didn’t drag you down a dark path. You pulled me into the light. Helpless, I followed. Blindly, I got burned. I am Icarus.” The clock hit five. Our sixty minutes were up. The alarm on my phone beeped to tell me so, but I smacked the side button to silence it. “I love you as he loved the sun. Too close. Too hard. Too fast.”

He dipped his head, his mouth closing in on mine. I went limp in his arms. He gathered me to his chest, strong and resilient, steadfast. A cold king in his poisonous garden, finally letting the sunrays touch his skin.

We sank down to the ground on our knees, and I no longer feared the earth would open its jaw and swallow me into the underworld.

Kill’s mouth moved over mine. He pried my lips apart, rolling his tongue with mine teasingly, tasting me. I moaned, bracketing his cheekbones, deepening our kiss as I climbed onto his lap, the only place that had ever felt like home.

We kissed for hours. By the time our lips broke, my mouth was dry, my lips cracked, and a velvet blue shadow colored the sky.

My husband slid his nose down the bridge of mine.

“The contract still stands. My soul is yours.”

“I never wanted your soul.” I smiled into his lips, my eyes meeting his. “I tore it to shreds the minute I got it in the mail. I’ve only ever wanted your heart. Now that I have it, I have a secret to tell you.”

He arched an eyebrow.

I put my lips to his ears.

“I didn’t believe in souls, either, before.”

“Before?”

“Before I met you.”