4
933 Words
Ella
I told him everything.
It came out of me in pieces at first, and Kylian didn't push, just sat across from me at the small table by the window of the private room he'd had me moved to, patient in a way I didn't understand yet and didn't trust. But once I started I couldn't stop, and the whole ugly shape of my life poured out of me. My parents, gone in a car accident when I was nineteen, the trust they'd left behind with my name on it and no one to guide me through what that kind of money actually meant. Adrian, three years of a relationship I'd believed in with my whole broken heart, right up until the moment I heard him call it a trick. Vanessa, who I'd grown up sharing a bathroom with, who'd looked at me over that balcony railing with something that wasn't regret.
"They pushed me," I said, and saying it out loud for the first time made my hands start shaking again. "Adrian grabbed my phone, Vanessa blocked the door, and then we were fighting near the railing and I just remember falling."
Kylian didn't say anything for a long moment. When he did, his voice was quiet, controlled in a way that told me he was working hard to keep it that way.
"I had my head of security pull everything public since the fall." He turned his tablet toward me. "The police report is already closed. Accidental death, contributing factor listed as emotional distress following the loss of your parents. There's a statement from your fiancé about how worried he'd been about you the last few months."
I made a sound that wasn't quite a laugh. "Of course there is."
"The news ran it two days ago. Local heiress, presumed drowned, body swept downriver, search called off after forty-eight hours." He set the tablet down. "As far as the world is concerned, Ella Hart is dead."
I stared at the water glass in front of me and thought about how strange it was to hear my own obituary summarized like a business update, and how much stranger it was that some small, exhausted part of me felt relief hearing it.
"They'll inherit everything," I said slowly, working it through as I said it. "The trust reverts to next of kin if I'm declared dead. Vanessa's my only family left. She gets it all, and Adrian gets her."
"That was always the plan." Kylian's jaw tightened. "Whether you went off that balcony alive or dead, they walk away with four billion dollars either way. You just weren't supposed to survive to know that."
"So what happens now?" I looked up at him, and for the first time since I'd woken up in that hospital bed, some of the fog in my head cleared enough to let me think past the fear. "I go to the police. I tell them what happened, I tell them I'm alive, and Adrian and Vanessa go to prison."
"Maybe." Kylian leaned forward, elbows on his knees, watching me with an intensity I was starting to recognize as simply how he looked at everything, like a man used to weighing every angle before he moved. "Or maybe you walk into a police station, and within a week there's an accident. A car, a fire, a fall down a flight of stairs. People with that much money and that little conscience don't stop trying just because the first attempt failed. You'd be putting yourself back in front of them with nothing but a police report between you and whatever they try next."
"So I just let them win. I let them keep thinking I'm dead, and they keep the money, and Vanessa gets to marry him in some obscene ceremony while I hide."
"No." Something shifted in his expression, quiet and certain. "You disappear completely. New name, new life, somewhere they'll never think to look. You give yourself time to heal, and time to get strong, and when you're ready, you come back and take apart everything they built on the assumption you were gone. Not as a grieving fiancée the world already forgot. As someone they never saw coming."
I searched his face for whatever angle he was working, because in my experience by now everyone had one. I didn't find it. What I found instead was a kind of quiet resolve that made something in my chest, some part of me I'd thought had drowned in that river along with Ella Hart, start to come back to life.
"Why are you helping me?" I asked. "You don't know me. You could hand me over to the police and be done with this."
"I pulled you out of that water because I couldn't not." He held my gaze, steady, unflinching. "I'm keeping you alive because I've seen exactly what people like Adrian Cross do to the world when nobody stops them. And because some part of me doesn't believe I found you by accident."
I didn't have an answer for that, not one I trusted myself to say out loud, so I said nothing, and after a moment he reached into the jacket folded over the back of his chair and drew out a small leather case. He set it on the table between us and slid it across.
I opened it slowly. Inside was a passport, navy blue, the eagle stamped gold on the cover, my photograph inside taken from the hospital security footage the day I'd woken up.
The name printed beneath it wasn't Ella Hart.
- Writer
