Cinderella will have her Revenge

1

Ella

The dress was wrong. I knew it the moment I put it on, but I told myself I was being paranoid, that three years with a man was long enough to know when a silky blue thing draped over my shoulders was too much or not enough. Adrian liked me polished. Not overdone. I had gone with the blue because it was the color he'd said I looked good in the night he proposed.

He'd cancelled dinner at six that evening. A text, not a call.

*Something came up. Big client. I'll make it up to you, I promise. Love you.*

Three years engaged, and he still ended most texts with the word love like it cost him nothing to type. I used to find that sweet. Tonight, standing in front of the mirror in a dress meant for our anniversary, I found it unremarkable. Automatic. The kind of thing you say to a person out of habit, not feeling.

I told myself I was imagining things.

I took the elevator up to his penthouse anyway. I had a key. I had a bottle of the wine we drank the night he asked me to marry him, and I had this idea, foolish and hopeful, that I could surprise him. Bring dinner to him instead. Prove that whatever big client meeting had eaten our anniversary couldn't eat all of it.

The apartment was dim when I let myself in. No lights in the front room, but a thin gold line under the bedroom door, and music low enough that I almost didn't hear it. Almost didn't hear anything else either, except that I did. A laugh. Her laugh.

I would know Vanessa's laugh anywhere. I grew up next to it. It used to be the sound of comfort, two girls raised under one roof after our parents remarried, sharing bathrooms and secrets and clothes we weren't supposed to borrow. Now it came through a closed door in my fiancé's apartment, low and warm in a way it had never been warm with me.

I should have opened the door right then. I have asked myself many times since why I didn't. I think some small, cowardly part of me wanted to be wrong. Wanted five more seconds of not knowing, because not knowing still let me hope.

I set the wine down on the console table without a sound and walked toward the door instead of through it.

"—divorce her the second the estate clears." Adrian's voice, unmistakable, low and satisfied in a way I had never once heard him sound with me. "That's all it takes, Vanessa. One signature. Once I'm named executor, once the trust transfers, none of it matters anymore. Ella can have the tears. You get the ring."

The floor tilted. I put my palm flat against the wall to keep from making a sound I would regret.

"You make it sound so easy," Vanessa said, and I heard the smile in it. "Three years of pretending to love her."

"Three years is nothing." A rustle of sheets. His voice dropped, almost tender, the same tone he used to use on me in the dark. "You think I enjoyed it? Listening to her talk about her dead parents like they were saints. Playing the devoted fiancé at every charity gala her father's board still runs. I did the math the week I met her, Vanessa. Four point two billion dollars sitting in a trust with her name on it and no one smart enough to manage it but me. I was never going to let that walk away because I got bored."

"And if she'd said no? If she never fell for it?"

"She was never going to say no." I could hear him smiling, could picture the exact curl of his mouth I used to think was charming. "Girls who grew up with everything and then lost their parents at nineteen aren't hard to read. She wanted someone to tell her everything would be fine. I told her. That's the whole trick."

The wine bottle I'd left on the console must have shifted, or my hand did, because glass met marble with a small clean sound that felt enormous in the silence that followed.

Everything stopped. The music. The murmuring. My own breath, caught somewhere behind my ribs where it did me no good at all.

"Adrian?" Vanessa's voice, suddenly less certain.

I did not move. I told myself if I stayed perfectly still, none of the last two minutes would be real, that I could rewind the whole evening back to the moment I'd stepped off the elevator with a bottle of wine and a stupid, hopeful heart.

Footsteps crossed the bedroom floor. Slow, then slower, the particular quiet of someone who already suspects what they'll find and is delaying the moment they have to see it confirmed.

The door opened by inches. Gold light spilled into the hallway, catching the wine now pooling dark across the marble like something already grieving.

Adrian stood in the doorway in nothing but the sheet he'd pulled around his waist, and behind him, sitting up against pillows I recognized because I had picked them out myself, was my stepsister, holding the blanket to her chest with an expression that flickered, just for a second, between shame and something that looked a great deal like triumph.

Adrian's eyes found mine. Whatever he saw on my face made the color drop out of his.

"Ella," he said, and even now, even after everything I had just heard him say, some small broken part of me registered that it was the softest he had ever said my name.