Until Death Betrayed Us

The cell was always cold, but tonight it felt like the inside of a grave. Diana Vale sat with her back against the concrete wall, her knees drawn to her chest, and watched her breath turn to fog in the air. Six years ago, she had been a bride. Tonight, she was Inmate 4471, and in four hours, according to the guard who'd stopped pretending to be kind to her, the heating in this wing would be shut off for maintenance until morning. She would not see morning. She had known for three days that something in her chest had gone wrong — a cough that wouldn't clear, a tightness that made climbing off her cot feel like climbing a mountain. She had asked for a doctor. She had asked twice. The request forms were still sitting on some administrator's desk, she imagined, gathering dust between denials. It was almost funny. The Vale name had once opened every door in the city. Now it couldn't open the door to the infirmary. She let her head fall back against the wall and closed her eyes, and there he was, the way he always was when she let her guard down. Adrian. Not Adrian at the altar, golden and smiling, the version she'd married. The other one. The version from three weeks ago, glimpsed through a television bolted to the ceiling of the common room, the sound turned too low to hear but the image unmistakable — Adrian Cross in a charcoal suit, laughing at some gala, his hand resting with unmistakable familiarity at the small of Vivienne Hart's back. Both of them lit up gold under chandeliers, champagne in hand, while eleven miles away Diana had been eating cold rice off a metal tray with a name that wasn't a name, only a number. She had told herself for years that it wasn't what it looked like. That Vivienne was only ever Adrian's secretary, his shadow, his convenient scapegoat when the marriage cracked. She had told herself that even after the trial, even after the verdict, even after the last visit, Adrian never paid her — eight months into her sentence, standing on the other side of Plexiglas in a coat that cost more than the guards' yearly salary. "I did everything I could, Diana," he'd said. "You have to believe that." She had believed it. That was the tragedy. She had always believed him. But watching that broadcast, watching him laugh with his head thrown back while she wore prison canvas and coughed blood into a folded tissue — something in her had finally, quietly, died before the rest of her caught up. He let this happen. Not, maybe. Almost certainly not. He let it happen, and then he built a new golden life from the ashes of the one he'd burned down, and somewhere in that gilded new life, Vivienne Hart was smiling exactly the way a woman smiles when she has won. Diana coughed again, and this time when she looked at her palm, the fog of her breath was pink. "Diana Vale." She startled. A voice, low, at the small barred window in the door. Not a guard. Guards didn't come to check on 4471 anymore; they'd stopped bothering the week the appeal was denied for the last time. She dragged herself upright, one hand against the wall, and looked toward the door. There was no one there. Only the corridor light flickering, the way it always did, and her own reflection ghosting faintly in the small pane of reinforced glass — pale, hollow-eyed, her once-glossy dark hair hacked short and unevenly by her own hand eleven months ago, in a fit of grief she barely remembered now. She must have imagined the voice. Fever did that. She'd read once that the dying sometimes heard things. Am I dying? She almost laughed. Six years ago, she had been Diana Vale, heiress to one of the great fortunes of the country, dressed in French lace with fifteen thousand dollars of flowers arranged around her like she was something to be worshiped. Six years later, she was dying of pneumonia on a concrete floor because no one had bothered to sign a form. This is what loyalty gets you, she thought, and the thought had no anger left in it. Only exhaustion. This is what happens to the woman who does everything right. She thought of her father, gone four years now, his last words to her lost behind a hospital door she hadn't been allowed to enter because Adrian's lawyers had insisted her presence at the trial that week was non-negotiable. She thought of the wedding day — not the vows, she barely remembered the vows — but the moment just before, standing in the vestry in her mother's veil, her hands shaking, and a voice behind her, quiet, urgent, the only voice in that entire church that had asked her a real question instead of telling her what to do. "Are you certain, Diana?" he'd asked. "Because once you say yes, I will not interfere. But if you have even one doubt — look at me now, and I promise you, I will get you out of this church before anyone can stop us." Damien Blackwood. Adrian's rival. The man her father had called dangerous, the man society called a wolf in a five-thousand-dollar suit, the man who had stood in the shadow of a side chapel at a wedding he hadn't been invited to and given her, of all people, a way out. She hadn't taken it. She had smoothed her veil, thanked him for his concern with the practiced politeness of a girl who had never once in her life said the true thing out loud, and walked down the aisle toward Adrian Cross like the good daughter she had been raised to be. Six years. A husband who let her rot. A best friend — she had trusted Vivienne, once, before everything — who had perhaps taken everything Diana had ever had. A family destroyed. A name disgraced. A body failing in a cold room nobody would enter until morning. And the one man who had offered her a door out, she had never seen again. Her legs gave first. She slid down the wall until she was sitting again, and then, slower, until she was lying on the concrete, her cheek against the cold floor, watching the light under the door flicker gold, then dim, then gold again like a candle guttering. I should have taken his hand, she thought, and the thought arrived without bitterness now, only a strange, floating clarity, the kind that comes right before the end of something. I should have looked at him instead of my own vows. I should have chosen for myself, just once, instead of choosing what I was told to choose. Her breath was coming in shallow scrapes now. The pink fog had gone red at the edges. Somewhere far away, a door clanged, footsteps, someone shouting for a medic, too late, always too late for people like her. The last thing Diana Vale thought, as the cold finally stopped feeling cold at all, was not of Adrian's face, laughing under those chandeliers. It was of dark eyes in a side chapel, six years ago, and a voice that had asked her — the only person who ever had: "What do you want, Diana? Not what they want for you. What do you want?" I want, she thought, as the light went out, a different life. Then there was nothing. And then, impossibly, there was organ music. She opened her eyes to sunlight pouring through stained-glass, to the smell of white lilies and candle wax, to the rustle of French lace against her own skin — and to her own hands, young and unscarred, clutching a bouquet of blood-red roses she did not remember choosing. Diana Vale was twenty-one years old. And she was standing at the back of a church, on her wedding day, six years in the past.