L'as de Coeur

Mirabelle Fiore crawled silently through the hole in the barn’s wall. After that mysterious note on her doorstep, and an ace of hearts where the signature should’ve been, Mira was certain the killer blaming Ace would be here. She crawled by memory through the dark, weathered old barn until she reached the center. Cautiously, she stood up.
“Come out, some out, wherever you are,” she mumbled.
Hearing a board creak, she spun around, only to be blinded with a light that contrasted majorly in such a dark space. Her vision temporarily blackened.
“Hello, Mira,” A familiar voice cooed.
Mira gasped as her vision returned. She was staring into the dazzling blue eyes of her best friend, Nicholas Yap.
“Nick?” she choked out. “You’re the Ace of Hearts, the mass murderer?”
Nick smirked, and set his lantern upon a nearby wooden crate.
“Ah, Mira, still clueless as ever.” He chuckled sadly. “Yes, I am the Ace of Hearts.”
Mira was finding breathing to be difficult. “Why would you ever kill anyone? You’re the star of the football team, you get perfect grades, every girl in school wants to date you-“
“Really, Mira? Every girl?“
“Well, no, not every, but-“
“Exactly. The only girl I’d ever truly loved had completely rejected me.” He paused a moment before continuing. “You never thought of me as anything more than a friend…”
Mira was shocked.
“I tried to make it clear how I felt about you. Every morning, I’d leave a crimson rose on your doorstep. Yet, every morning, you’d come to school with a white rose in your hair. I didn’t make the connection, until I remembered a conversation you had with Ace Bunker about the meaning of roses. Since to you, a red rose mean lust, I began placing pink roses, your symbol for gentleness of heart. Still, you would wear a white rose to school each morning. I began wondering shy, but then I made the connection; you wanted someone who showed off your innocence.
“Ace’s family reputation did that nicely for you. With his ancestors’ reputations for murder, he made you look like an angel. So, I decided to amplify that by killing a few people, ruining his reputation. All I needed was a deck of cards and a roll of pennies, copying his family’s method of placing a penny over each eye of their victims. Yet, you ruined my whole plan by being with Ace as each murder was committed.“
Nick pulled a long, curved knife from his belt loop. Suddenly, Mira knew what she had to do.
“Nick, you were my best friend. Yet, you betrayed me by murdering innocent people. None of this would’ve happened if I had stopped it, so I’m stopping it now.”
Before Nick had time to react, Mira had impaled herself on his knife. He watched as the life drained out of her hazel eyes, and her body went limp. Without thinking, he dropped the knife and ran out of the barn, just as Ace ran in.
Ace felt tears form in his eyes as he saw the lifeless form of Mira sprawled across the wooden boards of the barn. Gently, he knelt beside her and let his tears spill over onto her raven hair. With utmost care, he rolled her onto her back, closing her eyes. Taking the items Nick dropped, Ace placed a penny over each of her eyes, and the ace of hearts beside her. On top he laid his own gift to her, a single white rose with pale pink tips, Mira’s sign for the innocence of eternal love.