Traded My Heart, Now They Beg

My parents spent years looking straight through me.

My brother couldn't stand to be in the same room as me.

The boy I'd been promised to since we were children chose someone else, and barely bothered to hide it.

I stopped caring about every last bit of it.

So somebody explain this to me.

Why is my whole family wrapped around me right now, sobbing like the world is ending, begging me not to go?

There's a shop you can only find if it decides to let you.

It takes something real, something that costs you, and it hands back a single chance at the life you already lost.

My price was the part of me that knew how to love.

I paid it without blinking.

And I woke up twelve years old again, at the top of the same staircase, watching my parents lead the same little orphan girl through the same front door.

Last time, that girl took everything I had.

This time, I felt nothing at all.

Chapter 1

The hand around my arm was twelve years old. Clean. Soft. Still careful with me, the way it had always been.

In the life I'd already lived, that same hand split my cheek open.

"Sera. What are you spacing out for?"

My twin brother tugged my sleeve, bright-eyed, already leaning toward the stairs. "The new sister's almost here. Come down and meet her."

Hearing it still knocked something loose in me. Sera. No one had called me Sera in six, seven years. Not where I'd just come from.

I turned and looked at him. Theo, twelve again, swallowed up in a tailored little suit, beaming at the landing like Christmas had come early.

I looked at the hand on my sleeve. Long fingers. Spotless. Nothing on them yet.

I shook it off.

His face stalled. "Sera? What's wrong with you?"

Down below, the front doors swung open. My parents' voices floated up, warm and bright.

"Theo, Sera, come down. We've brought your sister home."

Theo's whole face lit. He let go of me and took the stairs two at a time, gone before I'd moved an inch.

I stayed at the top and watched the four of them in the entryway. A cozy, glowing little family of four.

I pressed a hand flat over my heart.

Strange.

A faint pins-and-needles hum under my palm.

And nothing else. None of the old pain, the kind that used to saw clean through the bone.

Theo and I were twins, born two hours apart. For twelve years the Lockwood house held exactly two children, and both of us were spoiled past saving.

Someone joked to my father once that with a temper like mine, thank God they'd promised me off to Cassius Vance early, or grown up I'd never find anyone brave enough to take me.

My father's face went flat as a slab.

"My daughter wasn't born to be taken anywhere," he said. "If no one's good enough, she stays home her whole life. I can afford it."

The emerald bracelet was six figures, the kind of thing people keep behind glass. It was the most ordinary birthday present I got that year.

It was also the last birthday present I would ever get.

The year I turned twelve, one of my father's oldest friends, a man he'd served with, died of an illness. On his deathbed he handed my father his only daughter.

Her name was Celeste. On paper, she became my sister.

And from that day, the love in that house, the trust, the attention, all of it began sliding away from me an inch at a time.

I'll admit it. I hated her.

I was jealous. Wildly, helplessly jealous.

Jealous that two tears down her face could send the whole family scrambling like the house was on fire.

Jealous of the way she peeled my life off me, piece by piece, and everyone thanked her for it.

I got sharper. Angrier. Stranger.

And then, at my own coming-of-age party, the night I turned eighteen, I walked out into the garden and found her kissing Cassius. My Cassius. The boy I'd been promised to since before I understood what a promise was.

Something in me came apart.

I turned on my parents, on my brother, on the boy I'd loved.

"Why would you do this to me?"

They looked back at me with the exact same expression. Every one of them. The same tired, disappointed face.

"Do you have any idea what you look like right now? You're insane."

I laughed until it turned into crying.

The pain in my chest had me shaking from head to foot.

I grabbed the nearest thing off the table and lunged at Celeste, and my brother's foot caught me square in the stomach and put me down in the rosebushes, into every thorn at once.

They folded around her in a knot, all of them, smoothing her hair, begging her not to cry.

Not one of them looked at what was actually in my hand.

A plastic knife. The little disposable kind. The one you use to cut the cake.

Chapter 2

They told everyone I was sick.

Not heartbroken. Not grieving. Sick in the head.

They signed the papers, and they put me somewhere with locked doors and a key that was never mine.

Something in me was already broken by the time they took me there. I won't dress it up for you.

I asked the staff to call my parents. Every single day. I lost count of how many times I asked.

They never picked up. Not once. The call I kept waiting on never came.

And then one day I simply ran out. Quietly. No hand in mine, no voice I knew, no one who'd come when I asked. Just the quiet, and then not even that.

That was when I found the shop people only ever whisper about.

I gave it everything I had left. Every feeling I owned. The whole worn-down ability to love. I traded all of it for one chance to walk back into this life and do it over.

"Sera, come on. Haven't you been dying for a little sister?"

My mother stood in the doorway with Celeste's hand in hers, waving me down, smiling.

Celeste tipped her clean little face up at me and called me big sister, sweet as sugar.

I didn't react.

I turned around and went back into my room.

Behind me the entryway went quiet, the four of them trading looks.

"What's gotten into her now?" My father, lost.

My mother, smoothing it over. "She's probably just not used to having a little sister yet. It's nothing. I'll go cheer her up in a bit."

Then Celeste, the catch already in her voice. "Mom, Dad. Does big sister not like me?"

Before either of them could answer, Theo jumped in, fast and eager.

"No, no, Sera's just got a bit of a temper, her heart's good, I swear. Don't cry, don't be sad. I'll go talk to her for you."

My parents practically glowed.

"That's our Theo. You take good care of your sister now."

Their laughter kept drifting up through the wall, easy and warm.

This house really did have terrible soundproofing.

I hated it. Loud as anything.

So I stood up and started taking inventory.

It had been so long I'd half forgotten what twelve-year-old me even owned. Looking at it now, the sheer amount was almost obscene.

No wonder Celeste loved helping herself to my things.

Standing here, grown, I was a little envious of the girl I used to be.

I swept the jewelry off the vanity and pushed it into my schoolbag. If I didn't take it now, Celeste would have it talked out of my hands by the end of the week, one reasonable little excuse at a time.

Then my fingers closed around the emerald bracelet.

And I remembered the last time. The way she'd brought it down against the floor until it broke.

That was the first time I ever slapped her.

I can still see her, red-eyed, tucked behind the door, her voice shaking like I was the one who'd shattered something of hers.

"Sis, I'm sorry, I really didn't mean to. I've never had anything like this in my life. I only wanted to hold it. I I lost my grip."

Then the crying started, loud enough to bring my parents and Theo running.

That was the first time I "lost my mind" and hit someone. The first time my father locked me in my room.

Celeste sobbed into my mother's leg until she was nearly sick with it. And still, somehow, she found half a second to lift her head and pull a face at me.

I pointed at her. I tried to get the words out. Theo shoved me through my bedroom door before a single one could land.

"Sera! Would it kill you to have a little sympathy? Look how pitiful Cel is. How can you stand there and bully her? It's one bracelet. You've got more than you can count. What does it cost you to let her keep it?"

I bit down hard and swallowed the sound trying to climb out of my throat.

One bracelet?

No.

That was the birthday present he bought me with the prize money from his very first design competition. His own money. His own hands.

And he'd forgotten.

Chapter 3