“When?” she murmured as Raven tromped loudly through the orchard. He was doing it on purpose. Raven could sneak up on you in the dead of night, and Raven could walk through a pile of leaves without making noise.

He wanted them to hear him.

“I don’t have all the details yet,” Belle said, pulling Jack to her feet. “But we need to keep him distracted, playing dead instead of actually hurting himself. All right?”

Jack nodded, and then Raven had joined them by the creek. Just like it always did, the moonlight found him. Cut a pathway to his face. His skin was pale brown, his hair as black as midnight. Lips as red as a rose—at least, they were after Belle was done planting a kiss on him.

“I figured someone should do it,” she said with a laugh, and Jack slunk away from them. Into the shadows where she belonged. Once Belle had Raven all to herself, she wrapped her arms around his waist, standing behind him.

He is mine, her stance seemed to say. Try to take him, and I’ll drop a poisonous blossom into your tea.

Jack shuddered, turning away from them. The night had been unseasonably warm, but seeing her closest friends entangled was making her feel cold. Lonely. At Jack’s prompting, the three of them made their way back to the great stone manor, where Raven lived with his father and stepmother. His wicked stepmother, Jack thought, and she wasn’t playing a game anymore. Ever since Evelyn Holloway had moved onto Raven’s estate, he’d grown pale. Gaunt. People blamed it on the death of his real mother, but the truth was, months after his mother’s funeral, the color started returning to Raven’s cheeks. Light had sparkled in his eyes again. Then that woman had moved into his house, and Raven had started to whisper about joining his mother in the dirt.

A few weeks later, he’d snuck into his father’s bedroom and stolen a bottle of sleeping pills from the bedside table. When Belle had discovered the pills under Raven’s pillow, she’d simply shrugged, tossing three into her mouth. “Let’s sleep together,” she’d challenged. Then she’d held the pills under her tongue until Raven flushed the contents of the bottle down the toilet.

And earlier that night, when Raven had found a massive aquarium at a yard sale, Belle had helped him carry it into the orchard in front of his house. Together they’d adorned it with roses from his mother’s garden, and then Raven had climbed inside, his dark eyes closing. Jack had watched from the edge of the clearing as Belle leaned over him, cackling the way she had when they were scrawny sixth graders playing make-believe in this same orchard.