The Broken Lily: A Prologue

You never know when you’ll be seeing someone for the last time. I thought I had seen Aiden for the last time, the last night he made me cry. When he took my hands in his and stared into my eyes. “Oh, my sweet, sweet Lily,” he whispered, rubbing his fingers over my scars, “you are so horribly broken.”

I snatched my hands back and wrung them together in my lap. “No, I’m not,” I whispered back, staring at the nothing in front of me. Shaking my head now, I repeated myself. “I’m not.” Was I trying to convince him? Or was it me I hoped would understand? “But what if I can’t wake up from the nightmares?” I asked, daring to peek out at him through stringy strands of black bangs, hoping for something to hold onto.

Pushing those strands back, he smiled an empty smile as he tucked them behind my ear. “Well, darling,” he mused, as he sighed and sat back, ” that just means that you were never asleep.” I had often wondered when I would learn: that sometimes, just sometimes, the one person you’d take a bullet for is sometimes the very one behind the trigger. “You see, that’s what happens,” he went on quietly, “when you let someone get close enough to destroy you.”

I wondered then if someday, someone would think to ask me, “Who were you before he broke your heart?” But what would I say? What was I, really, before that?

Aiden spoke again, this time as if having read my thoughts. “Some people, Lily, can go through their whole life never having need of a weapon.” As our eyes met, he drove his point home. “They were simply born to be one.”

As my tears fell, I still refused to let it be someone else who took the blame. “But, it wasn’t him that destroyed me,” I murmured, “because I’ve destroyed myself.”

He watched me for a moment, and I wondered what he must see. It wasn’t like him to withhold the truth, even if it hurt. At least he was honest. “It must be a horrible place there inside your mind,” he said finally, as more tears dropped and landed with a splatter on my scarred hands and arms. “You are far too young to hate the world as much as you do.”

Did I? Or was I just a little girl waiting for the happy ending I’d always heard about? The Princess, waiting to be saved? “Will it ever stop?” I asked, wondering if he would dare to lie or tell the truth.

His sudden laugh seemed out of place and I furrowed my brow, waiting for the words that would follow it. He leaned closer and caught my gaze, still smiling. “My darling, have you not heard the storms? The thunder, the lightning, the howl of the wind?”

“Yes.”

He nodded and blinked slowly. “Don’t you see? Even the sky screams sometimes.”