Cinderella will have her Revenge

3

Kylian

The dinner had run long, the way business dinners with men who liked the sound of their own voices always did, and I was glad to finally be back on the water, glad for the cold air off the river and the quiet hum of the yacht's engine instead of another hour of forced laughter over cigars I didn't want.

I was standing at the rail with a glass of scotch I hadn't touched when I saw her.

For a moment I thought I'd imagined it, a trick of the dark and the running lights reflecting off the water. Then I saw the shape of her falling, arms out, a scream swallowed almost instantly by the wind, and the white splash where she hit the surface forty floors below some penthouse balcony lit up gold against the night.

I didn't think. I was already moving before I'd fully processed what I'd seen, jacket gone, shoes gone, over the rail and into water cold enough to steal the breath straight out of my chest.

The current near the bridge pilings was strong, and the dark made it nearly impossible to see more than a few feet in any direction. I dove twice, came up empty, felt the particular panic of running out of places to look. On the third dive my hand closed around fabric, then an arm, and I hauled her up against me and kicked hard for the surface with everything I had left.

She wasn't breathing when I got her to the swim platform. My security team was already there, Marcus shouting orders into his radio, someone wrapping a blanket around my shoulders that I shrugged off because it didn't matter, nothing mattered except the woman lying still and blue-lipped on the deck in front of me.

"Come on." I don't know why I said it out loud, why I felt the need to speak to a stranger like she could hear me. I tilted her head back, checked her airway the way I'd learned in a survival course a decade ago and never once thought I'd use, and started compressions.

Water came up on the fourth breath. She convulsed, coughing, gasping in a way that sounded like the most violent, most beautiful sound I'd ever heard, and I turned her onto her side and held her there while her body fought its way back from wherever it had almost gone.

"She's breathing," Marcus said, unnecessary, since I could feel it under my hands. "Chopper's two minutes out."

I rode with her to my private hospital, my hand wrapped around hers the entire way, though she was unconscious and couldn't have known it. I told myself it was only because I was the one who'd pulled her out, that some sense of responsibility demanded I see this through. I told myself several other reasonable things over the following three days, none of which explained why I sat in a chair outside her room instead of my own bed, why I read every hour of the hospital's updates on her vitals like scripture, why the sight of her ID-less, nameless in a hospital gown with dark hair fanned out against white pillows kept pulling my attention away from every meeting I was supposed to be in.

The doctors said it was a miracle she'd survived at all. Cold water and shock should have killed her within minutes, and the internal bleeding from what looked like a hard fall or a struggle before she went in had nearly finished what the river started. Twice in the first two days her heart stopped. Twice my head of security burst into my office to tell me, and twice I dropped whatever I was holding and ran.

I didn't know her name. I didn't know anything about her, not where she came from or why she'd been on that balcony or whether the fall had been an accident at all, and yet some part of me, the part that didn't believe in fate or providence or any of the things my grandmother used to swear by, kept circling back to the same impossible thought. That I had been on that water, at that exact moment, in the one place in the city where I could reach her in time, for a reason.

On the third night, I was in the chair beside her bed when her fingers moved against the sheet.

I was on my feet before I'd finished registering it, at her side as her eyes opened, unfocused at first, then slowly finding my face in the dim light. She looked at me the way you look at something you don't trust is real.

Her lips parted. It took her a long moment to find enough breath to speak, and when she did, her voice came out cracked and raw, barely more than air.

"Why didn't you let me die?"

I sat back down slowly, keeping my eyes on hers, and I thought of the two sets of footprints Marcus's men had found on that balcony railing, of the torn hem of her dress, of the bruise already blooming dark across her wrist in a shape too deliberate to be an accident.

"Because," I said, "someone tried very hard to make sure you did."