The Night They Burned Me, I Was Reborn

The smoke reached Elena Hartwell's lungs before the screaming did. She woke on the floor of the east wing study, cheek pressed to a rug already curling at its edges with orange. For one merciful second she thought: electrical fault. Get up. Get out. Then she saw the gasoline can. Empty. Tipped on its side by the door like something discarded. And she saw the two people standing in the doorway, untouched by the heat, watching her burn. "Sebastian." Her voice came out cracked. "Sebastian, the door—" "It's locked, darling." Her husband of three years didn't move. He had one hand in his pocket. With the other, he was holding someone's fingers. "From the outside." Someone stepped into the firelight. "Delia." Elena's whole body went cold despite the heat. "Delia, help me—" Cordelia Hartwell tilted her head. Her engagement-gala dress was the same pale gold she'd worn the night this all began, three years ago. She looked sorry. That was the part Elena would remember in the dark places after — that her sister looked sorry, the way you look at a dog that has to be put down. "You should have just signed the shares over," Delia said gently. "We asked you so many times. You made it hard, Lena. You made us do it the messy way." "The will," Elena whispered. Understanding arrived all at once, too late, the way it always does. "Father's thirty percent. If I die before the transfer clears, it goes to—" "To his next of kin." Sebastian smiled. Even now, even here, it was a beautiful smile; it was the smile she'd married. "Which is your loving sister. And your loving sister and I are getting married in the spring. Funny how grief brings people together." The rug was alight now. Heat closed around Elena's legs like a hand. She did not scream. She would think about that later, in the place between lives — that at the very end she didn't give them a scream. She only looked at the two faces she had loved most in the world and understood, finally and completely, what she had been to them. A signature. A key. A door to be walked through and then closed. "I hope it was worth it," she said. Delia blew her a kiss. "It always is." The ceiling came down. Elena Hartwell opened her eyes. Her first thought was that hell had a very convincing imitation of her own bedroom ceiling. The crystal chandelier. The water stain shaped like a rabbit she'd stared at as a girl. The morning light — morning light, soft and grey and ordinary — coming through curtains that had burned to ash a lifetime ago. She sat up so fast the room tilted. Her hands. She held them in front of her face and they were whole. Unblistered. The small scar on her left thumb from a childhood bicycle, pink and healed and years old. On her wrist, the thin gold watch her father had given her for her twenty-first birthday — the watch that had melted to her skin in the fire. It was ticking. "No," she said to the empty room. "No, no, no." She lunged for the phone on the nightstand. The lock screen lit up. June 14. She knew this date. She knew it the way you know the date of a funeral. It was the morning of her engagement gala — the night she'd let Sebastian Cole slip a ring onto her finger in front of four hundred people. The night Delia had toasted them with tears in her eyes. The first domino. The beginning of the three years that had ended with gasoline. Three years. She was three years in the past. A knock at the door. Elena's heart slammed into her ribs. "Miss Elena?" A maid's voice, light and unbothered, a voice that did not know it was speaking to a dead woman. "Miss Cordelia is asking if you'll come down for breakfast. She says she has the most exciting news about tonight." Elena's hand closed around the gold watch until the band bit into her skin. Exciting news. She knew exactly what news. She knew everything that was going to happen tonight, and next month, and three years from now, down to the empty gasoline can by the door. She had walked into that fire blind once. She would not do it twice. "Tell my sister," Elena said, and was surprised by how steady her own voice came out, how cold, "that I'll be right down." She stood. She looked at herself in the mirror — twenty-four years old, unburned, alive, holding a future like a loaded gun. And Elena Hartwell, who had died begging, smiled at her reflection for the first time in three years. The maid was almost down the hall when Elena spoke again, quietly, to no one. "Let's do it the messy way."