Once Upon a Broken Heart

Jacks insists Evangeline run and leave him, but she refuses to abandon him like this. They run through the night until they find a mausoleum covered in angel’s tears flowers, which should protect Evangeline from Jacks and the other hunting changelings. Inside, Jacks tells Evangeline to use her blood to open a locked gate, which works, surprising her. Jacks passes through and closes the gate, which relocks with a tiny click. Evangeline is painfully aware how flimsy the lock seems compared to Jacks’s strength, and Jacks stares at the lock like a thief who’s “contemplating all the ways he could break it” (318).

To distract Jacks from wanting to bite her, Evangeline asks him what happened with Princess Donatella. Reluctantly, Jacks explains that he wanted something from Donatella and kissed her to get it. He slowed Donatella’s heart so she wouldn’t die immediately, but Donatella still should have died but didn’t because Jacks’s heart started beating as a result of the kiss. Rather than being Jacks’s true love, Donatella fell in love with someone else and stabbed Jacks with his own knife. Even so, the thought of Jacks kissing someone else makes “something painful wrench inside of Evangeline” (321).