The Villain Died and Her Rival Broke

I knew the exact moment Cassian Vale decided to kill me. It was 9:47 on a Friday night, and he was standing by the deep end of the Vale House pool with a glass of bourbon in one hand and his phone in the other. The underwater lights made his face look blue and hollow, like a corpse already. I was holding the transfer documents that proved his mother had signed over the foundation to me, not to him. He had thirty minutes to get those papers back before the board vote went through. "You're not supposed to be here," I said. He didn't look up. "Neither are you." The party was still going on inside the main house, all that old money music and the clink of glasses and the smell of my stepmother's gardenias choking the air. Everyone was there. The board chair, the foundation trustees, Cassian's wife. I had waited three years for this night, ever since I found out what he did to my father's estate, and now I had the documents in my hand and the votes lined up and there was nothing he could do to stop me. I let myself think that. That was my first mistake. "The documents are already filed," I said. "You can't change that." He finally looked at me then, and I saw something in his eyes that I had missed for years. Not anger. Not even contempt. Recognition. Like he had been waiting for me to catch up. "You think this is about the foundation," he said. "It's about my father." "It's always about your father." He set his glass down on the stone edge and walked toward me. Slow, unhurried, the way he always moved when he knew he had already won. "You never asked why he left you the foundation instead of me. You never asked what he owed me." "He didn't owe you anything." "Everybody owes me something." He stopped a foot away. I could smell the bourbon on his breath and the expensive soap he used and underneath it something sharper, like sweat. "Your father owed me his silence. I owed him nothing." I should have walked away then. I should have gone inside, called the trustees, done anything but stand there while he told me the truth. But I had spent three years believing my father was a saint, and I needed to hear what Cassian would say next. "He sold your mother's trust to cover his debts," Cassian said. "I bought it. I bought everything he owned, piece by piece, until there was nothing left but you and the foundation. And then I waited." "For what?" "For you to find out and come after me." He smiled. It was the first real smile I had ever seen on his face, and it was worse than the cold ones. "I wanted to see what you would do." "You wanted to destroy me." "I wanted to see if you were like him." He reached out and took the documents from my hand. I let him. I don't know why. Maybe because I wanted to prove I wasn't afraid, maybe because some part of me still thought he wouldn't dare, maybe because I had been playing this game so long I forgot that he had been playing it longer. "You're not. You're worse. He was a coward. You're a martyr." "I'm not going to let you keep what's mine." "It was never yours." He pointed at the water. "Look at it. That's the only thing in this house that never belonged to anyone. It's just water. People drown in it every year. The police call it an accident. The insurance companies pay out. Nobody asks questions." My second mistake was not running. He didn't push me. That's what I told myself for the first thirty seconds, even as the water closed over my head and the cold knifed through my chest. He didn't push me. He stepped back and watched me fall. His hands were in his pockets. His face was calm. He waited until the bubbles stopped coming up before he walked to the house and called for help. I heard him through the water. The pool had a speaker system underwater, some old money luxury, and I could hear the party music and the voices and then Cassian's voice, broken and desperate in a way I had never heard from him. He was crying. He was shouting my name. He was telling everyone he had tried to save me, that I had slipped, that it was an accident, that he had jumped in and couldn't find me in the dark. I was still conscious. I was still breathing. I was standing on the bottom of the pool with my hand pressed against the drain grate, feeling the current pull at my legs, and I was thinking about the exact moment he had stepped back instead of forward. That's when I made the deal. I don't remember the voice clearly. It wasn't out loud. It was like thinking in someone else's head, or hearing a song through a wall. It offered me another chance. Not a resurrection, not a miracle. Just a chance to finish what I had started, with everything I had learned. It asked for something in return. I said yes before I finished reading the terms. The last thing I saw was Cassian's shadow on the water, standing at the edge, looking down at me like he was checking his reflection. ***** I woke up three days later in a motel room across the river with a recorder in my pocket and a name I didn't recognize on the motel room's registration. The recorder was the old kind, the kind that took microcassettes, and there was a single tape inside it. I pressed play. It was the last five minutes of my life. My voice, Cassian's voice, the exact words he said before I went into the water. I didn't know who had recorded it. I didn't know if it was real. But I knew it was enough.