His Black Heart, My Eternity

My blind date used to be a murderer. The matchmaker said he doesn't do that anymore. He sat with his head down, silent, ashamed of himself.

I took his hand anyway, and with his timid eyes on me I said, "Don't be afraid. I'll always be with you." In the end, he fell in love with me. Perfect. Now he can die in my place.

Chapter 1 The girls in my family can live forever. All it takes is this.

On the day a girl comes of age, she has to find a man who is truly, viciously evil and who is deeply in love with her.

Then she cuts out his black heart with her own hands and completes the ritual. Eternity is hers.

If she can't manage it, or if no such man ever shows up, she won't live to see the next day.

That's why so many of the girls in my family die the day after they come of age, in every kind of "accident" you can imagine, and almost none of them can dodge it.

It's always the same reason. They never found anyone who qualified to die in their place.

And then, of course, there are the fools who let their hearts get involved somewhere in the middle of it all, who would rather give up their own lives than hurt the man.

My own sister, for one. She had already found him, a man so evil he was willing to die in her place, and at the last possible moment she backed out and handed him his life instead.

The next day she was killed in a car crash. Before she died, she was still holding my hand. "Mila," she said, "I don't regret it." And me. Mila Marchand.

Three months from turning eighteen. Forever, or dead? It all comes down to whether I can find a black heart beating for me in the next three months.

Which is why I set my sights on a matchmaking service. I live in Kettleridge, a midsize city down in the hills, where it rains all year long.

Drive past the city limits and there's nothing but slopes, and small towns tucked into the hollows between them, each one named after the family that settled it. "Miss Marchand, that's a … a fairly unusual set of requirements you've got there." The matchmaker was a woman who could sweettalk anybody into anything, and after she heard me out, even she was tripping over her words.

And there was something in the way she looked at me, sizing me up, that she wasn't about to say out loud. My requirements were nothing complicated.

The man had to have a criminal record, and ideally he'd just walked out of prison. The bigger the crime, the better he suited me.

People who come to a matchmaker want the best man she can find. I doubt anybody had ever sat down across from her and opened with a demand for a rap sheet.

She was still hesitating, so I pulled a stack of cash out of my bag and put it straight into her hands. "You don't need to worry about the rest of it.

You just need to find him for me." She looked down at the thickness of it and her whole face lit up. The money went into her purse right then.

Then she patted her chest and gave me her word. "Relax. Satisfaction guaranteed!" I looked at her, and then at the office behind her. Money gets things done.

The girls in my family who live past eighteen can't be killed, which means they can spend their lives in every dangerous trade there is, and the family has done very well out of it.

Money is the one thing I have never been short of. Rather than go to all the trouble of hunting down a substitute myself, I'd hand a professional job to a professional.

As long as the money is right, how hard could it be to turn up the black heart I needed? "This one's a good, steady guy.

He's never going to run around on you." The matchmaker pointed at the man sitting across from me and said it without batting an eye. I looked down at him.

He was in a wheelchair, both legs amputated high above the knee. He wasn't going to run anywhere. The matchmaker handed me the file she had put together herself.

Chapter 2 Dalton Brill, twentyseven. Two years ago he decided to climb twelve stories to watch a woman shower, lost his footing on the way up, and fell the whole way down.

He was lucky. He only broke both legs, and he kept his life. Blinded by lust.

The same way he was leering at me right then, his eyes drifting toward places they had no business going. One look was all I needed to know he was nowhere near my standard.

A man with a black heart is set on evil all the way through. He doesn't even count his own life as a life.

A man ruled by nothing but his appetites was never going to get me through that ritual. The matchmaker didn't so much as blink.

She pointed at his shriveled calves. "You'd never know to look at him.

When he's in a hurry he can still push himself up on that chair and hop a couple of steps." Then she turned to the man. "Go on, let's give Miss Marchand a demonstration." I didn't even have an answer for that. "I asked for a criminal record.

I didn't ask you to dig me up some shameless lech." Number one, rejected.

The matchmaker nodded like she was working something out. "Sounds like what you want is a family man." She had the second one lined up before I could take a breath. "This one is a real family man.

He can put a whole dinner together singlehanded." In case I didn't believe her, she drove me straight to his house and had him show off on the spot. The food was good.

Nothing wrong with how it looked, nothing wrong with how it tasted. The only issue was that the man had one arm, which made the phrase a little abstract.

I smiled with everything except my eyes. "He really did put it together 'singlehanded.'" The matchmaker laughed that off and went straight into her pitch. "Joshua Kilbride got into a fight once.

Other guy came at him hard and had a knife on him, and that's how Joshua lost the arm. But he's a good man.

He only got into it to save a girl who was about to get hurt, and by the end of it that knife ended up in the other guy's stomach, so he did a few years." By the end of it she sounded genuinely sorry about the whole thing.

Playing the hero. It cost him an arm, and on top of that it cost him years in prison for hurting a man he never meant to hurt. Helping people. I shook my head. "No.

Next one." She ran four or five more past me. Every single one the same. They all had records, but most of the records came out of accidents.

Some of them had been reckless kids who had since straightened themselves out. Not one of them met my requirements. And I was down to two months.

I pushed a thicker stack of cash into her hands and put it plainly. "Preferably someone with blood on his hands. Someone who's taken a life." Her eyes went wide.

But there was the money in her hands, so she nodded, hard, and gave me her word. "This time, satisfaction guaranteed!" The seventh man she brought me actually had all four limbs.

She came to take credit for it, thrilled with herself. "Now this is quality goods I dug up for you.

If you turn this one down too, your standards are just plain unreasonable." I looked the man over. His limbs were all there and he could speak. He looked normal.

Normal enough that it struck me as deeply abnormal.

The matchmaker rattled off a long string of good things about him, then stopped short, took my hand, and dropped her voice like she was telling me this for my own good. "Ryder is a genuinely good kid.

He used to be a murderer, sure, but he's turned himself around now." A murderer? I held down the delight rising in me and worked at looking calm. My silence made her frantic.

Chapter 3 "He killed somebody before, sure, but he doesn't do that anymore.

Don't you worry, the two of you will grow old together." Like she was worried I'd be scared off, she started right in on Ryder's history.

His parents divorced when he was small and he stayed with his father. He was a straightA kid from the beginning, bright enough that people reached for the word genius.

Then, in high school, he killed the stepmother who had been abusing him. He hadn't meant to, and a neighbor happened to see it. It was an accident.

He wasn't even of age yet, but manslaughter is still manslaughter, and the juvenile court sent him away for three years. He'd just been released this past July.

Seventeen is no age to be rushing into marriage, but a stint in juvenile detention makes finding a wife harder than it would otherwise be.

So from the day he walked out, his father had been lining up matches for him, afraid his son would end up alone for the rest of his life.

I listened to all of it, and then I looked at the Ryder sitting in front of me.

From the moment he sat down at that table he had kept his head lowered, and other than a short introduction of himself he hadn't spoken again.

He came across as sensitive and ashamed of himself. Add that deeply deceptive face of his, the lowered head, the silence, and it was very easy to feel protective of him.

Nothing about him looked like a man who would kill on purpose. A thread of regret had just started up in me.

The black heart I needed had to belong to a man who was vicious to the core. A man who was good at heart and had killed only by accident didn't meet my standard.

It didn't matter, though. A girl in my family only has to take a man's hand to know whether his heart is black. A black heart means evil, absolute and unqualified.

So I walked over to him, bent down, and took his hand. The lightest brush of contact, and I could already feel that his heart was nearly as black as ink. Vicious.

Sinister and warped. Exactly what I so badly needed, a man without a trace of goodness anywhere in him. I glanced up at Ryder. His eyes trembled.

My touch had let every bit of that sensitivity and shame leak out of them, and he looked so much like an innocent man.

No one could tell he was a monster, warped all the way down to the bone.

Well, this was getting more interesting. "You—you're not afraid of me?" Ryder spoke first, his voice a little distant and a little curious, because I still hadn't let go of his hand.

I had, after all, only just found out he was a killer. There were reasons behind it, and it was only manslaughter. But most people who hear a history like that step back.

Someone who took his hand instead was probably the first.

So underneath the timidity and the distance, there was a thread of confusion in the way he looked at me. "It was an accident, and you spent three years paying for it.

So there's no reason to feel small. You did something wrong and you were punished for it.

Now you should hold your head up and go meet your new life." I deliberately tightened my grip on his hand and brought out every bit of the tender manner I had rehearsed a thousand times over. "Don't be afraid.

I'll always be with you." The instant the words landed. I caught the thing that flashed through his eyes and was gone … madness.

I told the matchmaker I liked Ryder very much. "Miss Marchand, you don't look like a girl who's short on money, and you're pretty.

Are you sure you want him?" Greedy as she was for the money, she still couldn't stop herself from saying it. "If you were willing to give me more time, I really could find you somebody good." Chapter 4 I shook my head and glanced back at Ryder, still sitting silently in the restaurant. "A good face is enough." Once the matchmaker was gone, Ryder and I stayed on at the restaurant and kept talking, just the two of us.

He kept his head down the whole time. Especially when someone walked past. Then he couldn't help ducking it lower. Well, he was good at the act.

I got up and moved into the seat beside him.

Ryder looked uneasy about it and glanced at me sideways. "Do you really want to try this with me?" His eyes were black as a spill of ink, and it was very hard to make out what was going on behind them.

I smiled and took his hand again. "Ryder, let's date and see where it goes." Word that Ryder and I were together reached his father in less than half a day.

I was on my way home when the man called, saying he and Ryder wanted to take me to dinner. "I can't imagine what Miss Marchand sees in this boy of mine." At the table, Ryder's father looked me over several times without seeming to.

I looked at Ryder across from me. He had changed into a clean white shirt. He wasn't even eighteen yet. He should have been a bright, easy kid.

Cleaned up with a little care, with that harmless face on him, he was the kind of boy who could walk through a school and have the girls talking about him afterward. "Mr.

Roark, just call me Mila. These things come down to whether you like the look of someone, and Ryder is so goodlooking. I'm probably shallow that way.

I liked him." I laid out my reason for wanting Ryder, plain and simple. Here was a boy who had killed someone, and I had decided to be with him the first time we met.

That was going to need a reason. So I gave them the reason they wanted. The face. I was a girl who cared about nothing in this world except a face.

I liked Ryder's, so it made no difference to me whether he had killed anyone, and I was willing to try holding his hand.

In any ordinary match, a reason like that would have gotten me called shallow. Not from Ryder's father, though.

If anything, he relaxed when he heard it. "This son of mine has been a looker since he was little. Miss Marcha—Mila, you've got a good eye.

You two get along, get married one day and have a kid, that kid is going to be even better looking!" Ryder's father sounded like a man moving a product.

By the end of it he picked up his glass and stood, nodding to me first, then turning to Ryder. "Whatever else, you and I have been father and son. I never remarried all these years.

I waited for you to come out, and now I've found you a girlfriend. Whatever I owed you, I've paid it back. Next month I'm moving overseas.

Someone has been waiting two years for me, and I can't let her down any longer." Ryder, who hadn't said a word all evening, finally lifted his head. "So we won't be seeing each other anymore?" His voice came out rough.

Not low on purpose. More like a voice that hadn't been used in a long time and wasn't quite familiar with itself yet.

Ryder's father turned his face away. "Mm … She's waited two years for me, and now she's carrying a child. You're of age.

From here on I don't expect anything from you, and you shouldn't expect anything from me. I'm settling overseas.

If we don't have to see each other … then let's not." Then he drained his glass in one swallow, took out his wallet to settle the check, and got ready to leave.

He was almost at the door when Ryder shot to his feet and asked it again. "Really? We're never seeing each other again?" Chapter 5