Cinderella will have her Revenge

2

Ella

"It's not what it looked like." Adrian said it fast, the sheet already discarded, sweatpants pulled on halfway before I'd even backed out of the doorway. "Ella, wait, just let me explain."

"Explain what?" My voice came out steadier than I felt. "The four point two billion, or the part where you called my dead parents saints like it disgusted you?"

His face went white in a way that told me everything I needed to know. He hadn't realized I'd heard that much.

"You're twisting it." Vanessa had wrapped the sheet around herself and stepped past him into the hallway, and I almost laughed at the audacity of her, standing there righteous, like I was the one who'd done something wrong. "We were talking. People say things in bed that don't mean anything, Ella, you know that."

"I know exactly what it meant." I already had my phone out, already scrolling to the keypad. "I'm calling the police. Then I'm calling my lawyer, and then every person on that wedding list is going to hear exactly what kind of man I almost married."

"Ella, stop." Adrian's hand closed around my wrist, hard enough to hurt, and the phone went skidding across the marble before I understood he'd knocked it out of my grip on purpose. "You don't get to blow up my life over a misunderstanding."

"Get off me." I wrenched my arm back, and for one second I saw something in his face I'd never seen before, not in three years, not once. Fear, yes. But under the fear, calculation. The same calculation I imagined had been sitting behind his eyes every single day we'd been together, quietly totaling up what I was worth to him.

I lunged for the phone. Vanessa got there first, snatching it up, and when I reached for it she shoved me back with both hands, harder than I thought her capable of.

"Just let him talk," she said, and there was nothing sisterly left in her voice, nothing of the girl who used to sneak into my room when we were fourteen to cry about boys who didn't call. "You always do this. Overreact first, think later."

"Overreact." I was backing away from both of them now, toward the sliding door that led out to the balcony, some animal part of my brain choosing open air over the two people closing in on me in that narrow hallway. "I walked in on my fiancé in bed with my sister discussing my murdered parents' money like a business deal, and you think I'm overreacting."

"They weren't murdered, they died in a car accident, don't be dramatic," Vanessa snapped, and something about the casual cruelty of it, tossed off so easily, broke the last thread holding my composure together.

I don't remember deciding to go outside. I remember cold air hitting my bare arms, the city spread out forty floors below in a smear of light, the river a black ribbon cutting through the middle of it. Adrian followed me out, still talking, still building sentences meant to make this my fault somehow, and Vanessa came after him, and the three of us ended up in a knot near the railing, all of us shouting over each other.

"Give me my phone." I grabbed for it again. Adrian caught my hand this time, twisted it, and I cried out before I could stop myself.

"You're not calling anyone." His voice had lost every trace of tenderness I'd ever heard in it. "You're going to calm down, and we're going to figure out how to handle this like adults."

"Handle it." I laughed, and it came out ragged, close to tears I refused to let fall in front of either of them. "There's no handling this, Adrian. I'm done. The wedding is done. You are done."

I don't know which of us moved first. I remember pulling against his grip, trying to twist free, and I remember Vanessa's hands on my shoulders, and I remember thinking, absurdly, that this dress was really going to be ruined now. What I remember most clearly, the part that comes back to me even now in the quiet moments right before sleep, is the exact sensation of the railing pressing into the small of my back, and then not pressing into anything at all.

Vanessa's face in the half second before I went over was the last true thing I saw. Not regret. Something closer to relief.

The fall itself is mostly darkness in my memory, wind tearing at me, my own scream lost somewhere above me, and then the river hit like concrete, driving every ounce of air from my lungs in one violent shock. Cold closed over my head. I remember trying to fight upward and not knowing anymore which direction upward was, current pulling at my dress, my shoes, dragging me down into black water that didn't care who my parents had been or how much money sat waiting in a trust with my name on it.

Somewhere above the surface, in an apartment forty floors up, I would learn later exactly what happened next. Adrian gripping the railing, staring down at the water where I'd disappeared, saying nothing for a long moment. Vanessa's hands shaking as she pulled her sheet tighter around herself.

"She's gone," Vanessa said. "Adrian, she's gone, we have to call someone."

"We call the police," Adrian said slowly, and I imagine even then his mind was already working, already building the story he needed, because Adrian Cross never once in his life failed to see an angle. "We tell them she's been struggling. Depressed since her parents died. Drinking too much lately, unstable, you and I both noticed it, we tried to help her. She came up here upset, she went out on the balcony to get some air, and she fell."

"They'll believe that?"

"They'll believe whatever we tell them to believe." His voice was already calm again, already smooth, the voice I used to trust with my whole heart. "Ella's gone, Vanessa. No one is going to think otherwise."

Below them, in water black and endless and closing in from every side, I was already sinking past the point where I could tell anymore whether my eyes were open or shut, whether the pounding in my ears was my heart or the river itself. The last thought I had, before the darkness swallowed everything, was strange in its clarity: that no one was coming.

And then, impossibly, arms closed around me. Strong, sure, pulling me up through water that had already claimed me, hauling me toward air I no longer believed I would breathe again.