Snow White scrubbed the same stone step for the third time, but her stepmother would still call it filthy. She had learned the pattern years ago. If the work looked perfect, the Queen invented a flaw. If Snow White smiled, the Queen found that suspicious too. So she kept her head down and her hands moving, and she told herself the same soft lie she had believed since childhood: her stepmother loved her, in her cold way, and one day it would show. The palace loomed above her, all dark spires and severe stone. Snow White carried her bucket into the courtyard garden. Manicured hedges lined the path. Red and white roses grew in tidy beds, each one clipped to the same height. She was told to weed them before noon. She knelt in the dirt and worked, glad to be outside, away from the cold halls. A voice drifted through an open window above the garden. Her stepmother's voice. Snow White froze with a weed in her fist. "You understand the task," the Queen said. "Take the girl into the woods tomorrow. Bring me her heart, so I know it is done." Snow White did not breathe. She waited for a name. She prayed for another name. "She trusts you," the Queen went on. "She will follow you anywhere. That is why I chose you." The man's answer was too low to hear. But Snow White knew. There was no other girl in this palace. There was only her. The roses blurred. Her hands had gone numb. Every day she had scrubbed and weeded and hoped for one kind word, and this was the word waiting for her. Not love. A knife in the trees. She stayed still until the window went quiet. Then she stood, slow, so the movement would not draw an eye. She left the bucket in the dirt. She walked, not ran, past the hedges and the clipped roses, toward the old stone well near the garden wall. At the well she stopped and gripped the cold stones. Her whole life sat behind her in that dark castle. She had nowhere to go and no one who wanted her alive. The rope creaked in the wind above the black water. She could wish here, the way she had as a small girl, but wishes had never fed her or freed her. Inside, footsteps crossed the courtyard. Someone called her name. Snow White let go of the well. She slipped back through a side door, into the kitchen, and pulled a small knife from the block. She hid it in her apron. Her hands finally stopped shaking. They wanted her heart. She meant to keep it. She stepped out the servants' gate and into the trees, alone, with a knife and nothing else. Somewhere ahead, past the last clipped hedge, the wild woods began. She did not look back at the palace. She only wanted, more than anything, to find one person who would love her.