You weren’t so cold when we were younger, I said to you, and you laughed that musical tche-he-he of yours. You hadn’t changed at all, you replied, and I believed you. How could I not? You still weren’t fooling me because you weren’t trying to. The way you dragged the sides of your mouth upwards was more of a generous courtesy than an attempt to express the delight that you, of course, never felt around me. The skin around your lips stretched the same way bread dough did when you tried to pull it apart. As always, you were right.

I hated your eyes more than anything. I hated the way they seemed to laserbeam straight through my skull like you could see everything I thought before I even thought it (which, in fairness, you could and did). I hated the fact that you always knew that I hated your eyes even though I made a point not to cross you. I hated the fact that nobody seemed to notice that your dream-like irises, the colour of the moon's reflection in the water, weren't what they seemed to be. They were the colour of a sharpened dagger and masked a nightmarish mind.

They disturbed father, but mother loved them. She called them rings of stardust and she admired them as she cooed at you, tickling you under your chin while father watched over me in my cradle. Mother used to have dreams of her own, even after she became queen. She’d wanted to write stories that moved mountains with emotions and broke the sturdiest of hearts. But then you came along, and she deserted her dreams for yours. She was overjoyed when you wrote her a story that moved her with emotions that never existed, and it splintered father’s heart.

Both you and I had mother’s face, but you never settled for just ‘handsome’. No, you were beautiful, like some kind of celestial being, a blessing from heaven bestowed on the kingdom. Maybe it was the way your golden hair wrapped around your head like a halo, or the way your teeth were so white that they seemed to throw off bits of dazzle when you pulled your lips apart in that painted-clown grimace of yours. You were always the angel to my demon, the one who walked in the light above my dark.

You were clever, too. Maybe more clever than a human ought to be, because your cleverness took up a part of you that should have been put aside for something else.

I started learning to play long before you even touched a cello, but within a matter of months you’d surpassed me in skill. You told mother that a stable boy stole your instrument and the next day, she went down to the servant’s quarters and screamed at him until he burst into confused tears. You didn’t even flinch. You’d gotten bored of music anyway, you said. I found your cello in the trash pile behind the gardener’s shed a few weeks later, half-buried under decomposing fruit peels and guarded by a cloud of black flies.

So when I saw the way you looked at her across the dining room table that night, I knew she was the next thing you’d devour. You were always hungry for more. You demanded and you took. You didn’t look at her as a lover gazing at his soulmate, or as an artist admiring something beautiful, or even as a man thirsting for a woman. You looked at her with the half-attentive slant of a child weighing their interest in a new toy offered to him by his parents. Later, you told me she was just a distraction to remove you from the boredom of life. She meant the world to me, but she was no more than a mild break from monotony to you.

But of course, she couldn’t have known that. It was those demonic eyes of yours again. I knew when she asked me about you as we held hands in the dimly illuminated circle beneath the lamp outside the stables. You ripped out another piece of me then, and the rest of me cracked, fracturing from the inside out like spidery fingers reaching through my heart to strangle me. I was a burning snowflake, falling to the ground and breaking into a thousand frozen fragments. And then thirteen long months later, you closed your door on her and she returned, crying, to the stables. She asked what she’d done wrong. I told her you didn’t have a heart, and it was true. You didn’t.

Ella came along not long after that. It all seemed so inevitable, somehow. The prince who had a cavity in his chest in the place of his heart married the pauper who convinced the world that hers was still intact.

Then father fell sick, and it was soon to be my turn to take the throne. I thought I had a chance to step out from the shadow of the second son. A kingdom cannot have a king without a heart.

Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised when I found you lying in the middle of my bedroom, with burning snowflakes falling down all around you. You’d been perfect all along, so maybe it was long overdue that you made your first mistake.

They never believed me when I told them I didn’t set the fire. After all, you were the godsend, and I was the accident. They never saw you crushing daddy-long-legs beneath your boot or the dozens of notches in your bedpost, the same way they never saw the holes Ella ripped in Anastasia’s dresses or the welts on her arm from where candle wax dripped onto her skin late at night.

So we ran away together, the forgotten crown prince and Cinderella’s sister.

We never turned back.