But I don’t want this ending. I don’t want it so much that I feel like that wanting is trying to push itself out of my skin. I don’t want a reason to have been right about knowing I’d fuck it all up; Iwant the ending where I fixed things and it worked out exactly as I planned.
But who decides where the end is?
So I’ll keep going. And going. And I’ll learn and do better and sometimes I’ll hate myself for not giving up and I’ll rage at the shit around me but I remember what it’s like to look at the world with uncomplicated hope and I can’t stop until I get that back. What’s the alternative?
It just takes one joyful moment. One by one by one.
I’m relying on that. I’m counting on joy to be stronger than whatever’s waiting for me.
It’s what a Christmas Prince would do. At least, it’s whatthisChristmas Prince will do.
HEX
please don’t respond to this. i shouldn’t even be texting you. kris will kill me. i just wanted you to know that you were right. and i’m sorry. but i was right too. and through whatever’s going to happen with my holiday and my dad, one of my goals now is to fully become who you helped me see i can be. because i have to believe there is a future where the heir of halloween and the heir of christmas can be together and you deserve the best version of me. we made too much joy for this to not last. and i know you didn’t say it back, but i love you, i love you, i love—
[DELETE WITHOUT SENDING?]
[YES]
Chapter Twenty
Dad summons me the night before Christmas Eve.
It’d been too much to hope that he’d take my word for it, that I wrote the letters and was going to send them and that Iris and I are happily going along with the scramble of wedding plans. But no, of course he’d want to at least read the letters first, and while I’d hoped to milk as much time out of this as possible, stall and stall and scrape us closer to the winter Holidays coming on Christmas Eve, I finally trudge to his office before ten.
“Hey.” Kris prods me. “It’s going to be fine.”
“It’s going be a repeat of what happened in my room.”
“No. It won’t.” Kris loops his arm around my shoulders. “You decided it won’t be. Remember?Youdecided. So it’ll be better.”
I don’t know how I’d get through this without him. This certainty that Dad’s bluffing is so newly formed, and I’m clinging to it with everything I have, but so many factors are out of my control. And not just out ofmycontrol, but fully in mydad’scontrol, and it’s the most harrowing terror I’ve ever felt, to know that something as simple as whether the next few days will be hopeful or disastrous is based on the whims of someone else.
My lungs are permanently filled with ash at this point. Each breath is a strain.
I miss Hex.
That’s the root of why this is all so deep: love. Love is the most petrifying collision I’ve ever experienced. Loving Hex, loving Christmas, it’s destroying me and I think this is why I resisted my role in Christmas for so long, because I always knew that when I fell, I’d fall with my whole being. Not a gentle slip like falling asleep, but a hurtling, momentum-gaining plummet like a bomb whistling down out of a plane.
The palace is in absolute chaos. Decorationseverywhere—fresh holly and ivy; garlands on every door; twinkling lights; Christmas trees all over; ornaments and bows and ribbons. There are things here from all our Houses now, Luminaria, Jacobs, Frost, Caroler and all the little bits that have come together to create them over the years, touches that weave together a subtle yet impactful display of who we are. Staff flurry around in wedding prep and I haven’t seen Iris with how swarmed she is. Under other circumstances I’d be pissed, it’s my wedding too, isn’t it? I have no say? Antiquated bullshit.
But Kris and I get to Dad’s office. The door is open.
I push in first. He’s at his desk, looking through something on a tablet.
He taps an empty space in front of him without looking up. “Letters.”
“I—” My throat is scabbed over. I clear it, wince. “I don’t have them.”
Dad slowly raises his head to look at me. “You don’t have them.” He leans back in his chair, arms folding over his chest. His voice is neutral the way a gray sky is neutral. “Why, exactly?”
Kris steps up beside me. “I was helping him write them.”
“And—” I eye him, pleading. He can come here, support me, butdo not draw attention to yourself.“And I’ve been finishing up a few last—”
Wren comes stampeding into the office behind us. “Sir! My apologies.”
I’m used to her being a swirl of energy on tasks for Dad, but she seems extra out of breath now, like she’d sprinted across the palace.
