Prologue to Heartless

Cara Hart had survived ordeals in her life, but nothing like this.

She slipped down the door of her childhood bedroom as though she had just been run through and left there to die. And yet for all of that, there were no tears

It had been six years since she had last stormed up to this room, and yet nothing had changed. Her bed was still unmade beneath a crisp sheet of duck egg blue. There was a patch on her rug more faded than the rest of the carpet because the sun hit the spot at its most intense. One of her drawers was still open in a manner that should have earned her a telling off. The door of the wardrobe was ajar to reveal clouds of white silk wedding dress.

All of this was identical, frozen, even, in a small moment of history. So it seemed all the more implausible that nothing could ever be the same again.

She could hear her father’s footsteps outside now, climbing the stairs in a kind of reluctance, as though he still hadn’t learned what it was to have a daughter who needed somebody to hold her. He stopped outside her door, turning the handle so that it rattled menacingly just to the side of her head.

He gave half a sigh, as was his way and she swore that she could see him roll his eyes before he spoke.

“Open the door, Cara.”

It was an order, and as though she were still fifteen years old and utterly under his control, Cara slid a few inches to her left, every slight movement of her limbs like treason as the new seconds, new breaths only recalled the new memories that were still blazing across her eyes.

A simple walk in the forest where she used to play to mark her homecoming. Seeing the old tyre swing still hanging on the end of a frayed length of rope for dear life. Little threads moss reclaiming the tree branch from which it hung. The stream where they used to race paper boats babbling and weaving back towards the village, looking less wide, less deep, less of an adventure.

And stumbling across her mother’s gravestone in a clearing.

Here lies Lucy Hart (it had read, in barely weathered, immaculately kept engraved letters, stiff and upright, as she too had been). Who was a mother and a soldier and a wife and a friend. And who will be forever missed.

Lies.

“Look at me.”

Cara obeyed, for as those moments had replayed, he had come to tower over her. She turned her eyes, now finally bloodshot, tear filled, upon her father’s face, the face that had previously frequented the majority of her nightmares. Again, the new lines around his eyes and across his brow, the greying of his hair, all signs that time had not, as she had thought, stood still here. Cara drew breath slowly, her throat rasping between futile sobs. She looked straight into his cold, hazel eyes and shook her head slowly, involuntarily.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

Andreas Hart only laughed, the cold sound of a man who had come to terms long ago with a loss he barely mourned to begin with. For so heartless a man, even losing a wife was a shallow wound to endure. “You were a thousand miles away, Cara,” he scorned, looking straight down at her as she cowered in the new corner between the open door and the wall. “For all I knew, you were dead already.”

“You knew where I was,” she argued, still looking up at him. Sending word would have been no challenge, not for a man like him who had money to spare, resources to burn and friends in high places all across the ruined land. Cara had run away from home on the eve of her forced marriage six years ago but her final destination had been no secret. After all, he had been part of the same army, the same hideous war fifteen years ago. She had run to this force which was barely held together against a common hatred, until disillusioned, recently injured and wanting to see her life come to more that that of a cold mercenary, she had returned home in the faith that there would be people here wiling to forgive her.

“Listen to yourself,” Andreas continued, with a sneer and a shadow of the cobra demeanour that had terrified his daughter into submission for as long as she could remember. “Do you even remember how you left us? The middle of the night, the middle of winter, not even a note to rub it in your mother’s face. You should have heard me trying to explain to Arisaig that morning, in the back room of the church on your wedding day.”

“I don’t care!” she snapped, now staring again at the clean floorboards. She didn’t quite trust herself to look at him. “You knew all along that I hated him. I still don’t understand why my leaving was a shock to you.”

“It was for your own good.”

Another falsehood, another nightmare. All that he had ever wanted from her, aside from meticulous cleaning of his house and backbreaking effort to maintain his gardens, was to see her dragged along on the arm of the only man in the region with more power than he. Cara, furious and devastated at once, merely continued to shake her head.

“When did she die?” she breathed, her eyes tight shut.

“Last autumn.”

What had Cara been doing then? Some fruitless mission at the borders, enjoying the slight freedom and peace that came from being distant from the front lines. She had been enjoying herself, still believing that her cause was just. It was before her friends and colleagues had started to be cleaned away one by one like simple specks of dried on mud from kitchen tiles. It was before she herself had been so grievously injured as to see death’s door.

Cara stood, ready to escape. Her limbs were aching, weighed down by regret and sadness at least. Her eyes burned as though dried by a ruthless gale. She needed air, needed to force herself back out to the grave and find some way to take it in. The grief was debilitating. She had spent years of her life hating her father, resenting her mother because she refused to do the same thing. In the last months of Cara’s life at home, she had torn them all apart. Perhaps then, her sorrow was over the fact that she would never be able to do what she had come here to do. She would never be able to fix the rift that, though self inflicted, had ripped brutal chunks from her heart.

Andreas followed her, actually grabbing hold of the top of Cara’s arm to hold her back. He crushed the bullet wound, still painfully fresh beneath her sleeve.

“Where are you going?”

Cara’s mind kept turning, completely separate from his question. She realised then how bizarre it was that he didn’t even know that she had been shot. Presumably he wouldn’t care. It was that moment which sparked, mapped and allotted every subsequent day of her life.

Without breaking eye contact, Andreas groped at the top of her bedside cabinet. He found what he was looking for without much effort, the wedding ring that would have kept Cara anchored to this place if she had been a shade weaker. But though he pressed it into her fist, it wasn’t meant as a parting gift. Once again, he wanted to use her past weaknesses to keep her in his sight, in his hand, her necklace his hangman’s noose. This was a reminder after all, of everything she could have been, a contract finalised but not yet signed. And it was proof that he still, after all these years saw her as a commodity and not a daughter.

“I’m your only child,” Cara whispered, her voice dripping something worse than bottled hatred. “You ruined my childhood. I’m not about to let you do the same to the rest of my life.”

With the full force of fresh remorse and years of brooding, she threw ring at him. It rolled into a corner and lay harmless, catching the sunlight and reflecting the room with a lustre like that of a bird’s feather. Cara shook herself free and ran out of the house for the last time.

As her hand was on the front door, he called down to her from high above, like a judge. His verdict was final.

“You are no child of mine.”

With that Cara ran, turning her back permanently on this false home because she didn’t have the strength needed summon sarcasm in retort. She had never been able to answer back.

With that, the prodigal daughter left.