When Kiki pulls her hand back, it’s as though she takes a part of me with her, a little piece of my heart suspended on a string.

“We cannot.” Her words are quiet but firm enough to crush me under their weight.

I wait for her to say something else, but she doesn’t.

She blurs as I look at her. I blink, and the blurring only gets worse.

I’m crying. I don’t know when I started, but I’m afraid that now that I have, I won’t ever be able to stop.

Without another word, I push myself away from her. It’s too much. It is all too goddamn much.

I stumble to my feet, trying not to see the way she peers up at me. She looks so lost. So confused. So hurt.

She has no right to look that way. Not when she was the one who pushed me away.

I try not to run as I escape the grove. Branches whip at my face, but the pain is nothing to me. I welcome it. I crave it. I deserve it.

I like to think of myself as brave, but in this moment, I run from her like a coward.

Kiki is not mine to have.

And now, she never will be.

CHAPTER 5

Kiki

I don’t know how long I sit there beneath the orange tree. Hours, certainly. The sun continued its trek along the sky, slow, inexorable. It peeked through the leaves, growing in strength with every silent minute. By the time I stand, brushing moist dirt off my soiled skirts, it is high, beating down on the villa’s grounds as if to scourge the earth off all impurity.

My lips still burn. I wonder, briefly, illogically, if that was what hell feels like. Good and bad all at the same time. I am a soul haunted by pleasures I know I cannot have. Not now. Not in this life. The rest of my body is woefully numb as I force one foot in front of the other and make my way out of the grove.

The wind picks up once I am no longer protected by lines of trees, whipping my hair around my face and my skirts around my legs. A small, feral part of me wants to rip the heavy fabric off my body and throw it to the ground and stomp on it like a child throwing a tantrum. I don’t, of course, but the thought is there. I feel something I rarely—nay, never—do: powerless. Like I am a fallen leaf being carried away by a tempestuous river, my fate determined by forces beyond my control. That is what marriage—specifically, mine—will be. A fate determined by people who are not me. By men who never thought to ask my opinion on the subject.