Page 103 of Heart Over Heels

Maybe he’d forgive me.

No one spoke as I walked toward the Dollhouse’s front doors.

When I grasped the warm, brass handles, my vision tunneled. The glossy black and red swallowed me up and carried me away, and suddenly I was back in the desert, rattling across a sandy landscape in a bare bones Humvee.

Grit in my teeth.

Sun scalding overhead.

Diesel engine humming under my boots.

Then an explosion.

The shockwave roared up through the chassis and into my bones, and the floor became the sky as gravity cut loose.

A weightless second ended with the crunch of metal.

The pop of shattering glass.

The seatbelt snapping against my ribs.

I was upside down, legs pinned, and all I heard was screaming.

Awareness returned as I regripped the door handles.

I couldn’t breathe, then or now, and I was still trapped, only this time it was by eight pairs of watchful eyes instead of a twisted pile of fiery steel.

I expected another explosion, another bomb—whether literal or figurative—going off in my face, and I steeled myself against the rush of force that would assault my body.

But the doors didn’t explode, they only groaned on their hinges as I pulled them outward.

Daylight poured into the dark club, illuminating the emptiness we’d left behind and the devastation the angels had put in its place.

“Property damage” didn’t begin to cover it.

The lighting rig had come down, a steel cage of wiring and spotlights lying atop shattered tables and splintered chairs. The floor was littered with enough glass from broken chandeliers that it looked like the whole place had been dusted with glitter.

Curtains had been reduced to ribbons, loungers were upended, and the air reeked so badly of booze that every bottle in the bar must have been broken open and left to soak into the floorboards.

The dolls crowded in behind me, filling the entry with a silence so deep I thought I might drown in it.

Shock.

Horror.

Loss.

I felt it all because it was mine too.

Then the quiet broke.

Darby gasped—sharp and ragged—like something inside him had hit the floor the same way the lights had.

Questions tumbled out after.

“Who could’ve… How?Why?”

I’d asked Antonella the same thing.