Chapter 4: ELLA'S POV

The wind filled my ears.

I watched the windowsill rush away, watched Vivian's face shrink to a point in the window above. The tree canopy lunged toward me, branches thrashing wildly across my face and arms. One of them drove itself into my forearm — the pain jolted my mind sharp for just a moment.

That branch absorbed some of the impact.

But a heartbeat later, my back slammed into the ground.

Every last bit of air was crushed from my lungs. My bones made a sound I had never heard before. When the back of my skull struck the hard earth, my vision exploded into white — then contracted rapidly, narrowing to black.

Pain.

From the crown of my head to my toes, there wasn't an inch of me that didn't hurt.

But I didn't lose consciousness right away. I didn't know whether that counted as luck — maybe it was the tree, maybe the lawn — but either way, I was still breathing.

Leo.

Leo was still at the hospital.

I opened my mouth. Sound scraped out of my throat, so hoarse I could barely hear it myself.

"Help… someone please help me…"

No one answered.

The villa's grounds were enormous. Beyond the outer wall lay a private drive — no one would pass by at this hour.

Footsteps at the entrance.

I forced my neck to turn. Two silhouettes emerged through the front door.

Justin walked ahead. Vivian followed, wrapped in that silk robe, her hair still loose.

They stood beside me and looked down.

"Justin…" I summoned what little strength I had left. "Take me to the hospital… please…"

Vivian crouched down and tilted her head, studying me.

"Ella. You really are something."

Her tone held genuine surprise — and just a trace of disappointment.

"Fell from the third floor and you can still talk."

My fingers clawed at the grass. The sensation in my fingertips was already going dull.

"Justin, I don't want to die here… Leo is waiting for me at the hospital… take me there, and I swear I'll never appear in front of you again…"

He stood there without moving, both hands in the pockets of his sleep trousers, his expression the kind a person wears when they pass a cat flattened on the road.

He said nothing.

Vivian spoke for him. "Do you wonder why he hasn't called anyone?"

She let out a short laugh, stood, and brushed the grass clippings from her knees.

"Because there's no need."

Urgent footsteps came from the far side of the courtyard.

"Oh God—!"

Mary's voice.

Mary was the only domestic worker in this house — she had been here since the first day I was brought into it as a wife. A woman in her early forties, widowed young, raising her teenage son Daniel alone. This job was all she had.

She must have heard the noise and come running through the kitchen door.

"Ella! Ella, what happened—"

She rushed to my side and dropped to her knees in the grass, her hands trembling over me, not knowing where to touch.

"I'm calling an ambulance right now—"

"Mary."

Justin's voice was quiet. Mary went still as though someone had pressed pause.

"If you dial that number, you'll be out of this house by morning."

Mary froze.

"And Daniel," he continued. "That place at Saint Philip's — I can have it pulled with one phone call. You know that."

Mary's hand hung suspended in the air. I could see her fingers shaking violently.

She looked at me. Then she looked at Justin.

"Sir… she needs—"

"Do you not understand what I'm saying?"

Mary closed her mouth.

She looked down at me one last time. That look held too many things at once — fear, guilt, and a deep, bottomless helplessness.

Then she stood, and walked back toward the house one slow step at a time.

I didn't blame her.

She kept her head down as she went, her shoulders trembling. She was only a single mother working to put her son through school. She had no choices left. Justin held every thread of her life in his hands.

My last hope disappeared with her retreating silhouette.

Justin looked down at me one final time, then turned and walked away.

Vivian fell into step beside him, tucking her arm through his. Their figures dissolved into the shadow of the portico.

The courtyard went silent.

I lay in the grass and stared at the sky above me.

I don't know how long passed. Perhaps twenty minutes. Perhaps an hour. The pain in my body shifted — from sharp to dense, from dense to numb, finally settling into a heavy, grinding ache pressed into every bone.

My thoughts began to slow. My eyelids pulled downward against my will.

Don't sleep.

Leo is waiting.

He was four years old, lying alone in a hospital room, tubes running through him, no one beside him. When he woke, he would look for his mother. He would look for me.

A light came on in the second-floor window.

Music drifted down.

An old-fashioned ballroom piece — bright tempo, the violin melody light and lilting.

I turned my head with effort. In the window, two silhouettes revolved together, their steps easy and perfectly matched.

Vivian's laughter floated down from the window and scattered across the courtyard on the wind.

They were dancing.

I lay on the ground where I had fallen from the third floor, the wound at the back of my head still seeping blood, while they danced in front of the second-floor window.

Four years.

Four years of swallowing every sharp edge of myself, of being the wife he found satisfactory, the presentable ornament for his family, of carving myself into whatever shape he required.

I had been so foolish.

If I hadn't insisted on staying beside him, Leo would never have suffered any of this. He was only four years old — he understood nothing — and yet he had paid the price for his mother's stupidity.

Tears slid from the corners of my eyes into my ears.

Not from pain. Not from grief.

From hatred.

Hatred for Justin. Hatred for Vivian. But the deepest hatred was for myself.

The music played on.

I pressed my right hand into the ground and tried to roll over. A sharp pain fired through my wrist — I must have hurt it in the fall. My left shoulder was a previous injury, not yet healed, and now it was useless entirely.

First attempt: I got halfway up before I collapsed back down.

Second attempt: the same.

Third attempt: my arms were shaking so hard they nearly seized. My teeth were clenched around my lower lip — the skin had already split. My mouth filled with the taste of blood.

Fourth attempt: I finally rolled onto my stomach, then lay in the grass and gasped for several minutes.

Then I began to crawl.

My knees ground against the earth. Every movement sent something shifting and grinding inside my bones. I crawled to the edge of the flower bed and gripped the low stone border, and with that I pushed myself, inch by inch, upright.

My legs were shaking.

Everything was shaking.

But I was standing.

Hold on, Ella.

If you fall, Leo has no one.

I kept one hand on the wall and moved toward the gate, one step at a time.

A car passed on the road.

I stepped under a streetlight and raised my right hand.

The first car didn't stop.

The second slowed — then accelerated away.

I had no idea what I looked like. Blood on my dress, probably. Blood on my face. My hair in knots. I must have looked like something dragged out of a rubbish heap. No wonder no one stopped.

The third was a taxi.

It actually stopped.

I pulled open the back door and more or less fell inside.

"Saint Anthony's Hospital."

The driver glanced at me in the rearview mirror and startled.

"Miss, are you all right? Should I take you straight to the emergency—"

"Saint Anthony's Hospital. The pediatric inpatient building." I repeated it. "Quickly."

The car pulled away.

Soft jazz played on the radio. A late-night host was reading out listeners' messages in a low, unhurried voice. I leaned back against the seat, my vision blurring, a low roar building in my ears.

Don't sleep.

I dug my fingers into the bruised skin of my thigh, using the pain to keep myself conscious.

But the body is more honest than the will.

Somewhere at a red light, my consciousness finally gave out. The darkness dropped over me all at once.

The last image that passed through my mind was Leo in his hospital room — waking, turning his head toward the empty space beside his bed, and calling out in a small voice for his mother.

No one answered him.

The sharp smell of disinfectant.

When I came back to myself, I stared at the fluorescent light in the ceiling for a long time before I understood where I was.

A cannula was taped to the back of my hand; the IV line ran up to a drip stand, the clear fluid falling one drop at a time. My right wrist had been splinted. Gauze was wrapped around the back of my head. My body was covered in scrapes of varying depth, all treated with antiseptic, all darkening to dull red.

The taxi driver must have brought me to a hospital after all.

I pulled out the IV needle.

A nurse hurried over to stop me.

"You can't — your injuries still need—"

"My son is in the pediatric ward." I got out of the bed. When my feet met the floor my knees buckled; I caught the bed rail and steadied myself. "Help me remove it properly, or I'll do it myself."

She looked at my face. In the end, she didn't argue.

After she finished dressing the needle site, she told me it was five seventeen in the morning.

I had been gone too long.

By the time I reached the corridor of the inpatient building, I was close to running. My legs had almost nothing left in them and every step went crooked, but I didn't care anymore.

I rounded the last corner. Leo's room was visible in the distance —

The door was open.

My heart clenched.

I pushed through the door at a run — and found two men in black suits standing at Leo's bedside.

One had already begun removing the cannula from Leo's hand. The other was disconnecting the monitors at the head of the bed.

Leo was still asleep, his cheeks flushed with an unnatural heat, his breathing faintly labored.

"What are you doing?!"

Both men turned at once.

I recognized them.

More precisely — I had seen them before. They were part of Justin's personal security detail. Last month, when Justin had taken Vivian to a dinner at the Italian consulate, these were the two men who had driven them.

"Mrs. Brennan," one of them said, his voice flat and professional. "Mr. Brennan has asked us to bring Leo home."

"Home?" I stepped to the bedside and put myself between them and Leo. "He had surgery less than twenty-four hours ago. He's still in his monitoring window. Where exactly are you proposing to take him?"

"Leo is still being observed for cardiac stress. If you remove him now and something happens, who is going to answer for that?"

"Mr. Brennan's instructions—"

"I don't care what his instructions were!"

My voice was loud enough to wake the room next door. The light came on through the wall.

Leo stirred. He opened his eyes, blurred with sleep, and when he saw me, his small hand reached toward me.

"Mama…"

His voice was still so small — weak from the surgery — but it reached inside me and held me upright like a fist around my spine.

I took his hand and folded his fingers inside my palm.

"I'm here. Mama's here."

Then I turned to face the two men.

"If you want to take him, you'll have to go through me first."

The two bodyguards exchanged a glance.

In the silence of that standoff, a soft laugh came from the doorway.

"Ella. Standing there like that — what kind of melodrama are you performing, and for whose benefit?"