Chapter Twenty
CINDER
The waterfall is deafening as we descend the cliff and shuffle around the cliff’s edge.
I press through the curtain of it behind daddy.
The cold spray hits my face and then we are inside where the roar becomes a wall of sound that seals everything else out completely.
Brother lights the first torch and I watch the cave emerge from the dark—fur rugs, a firepit, books stacked against one wall in uneven towers, a desk covered in maps and papers, shelves carved into the rock stocked with food and folded clothes.
I take it in with the particular attention of someone who has spent a month cataloguing what people don't want found.
They built this.
They built this place. Quietly. Patiently. They have brought me here, the woman they hate, the woman they say has lied. I don't know what to do with the fact that it feels like the most intimate thing any of them have done.
Boyfriend moves the flat rock into place across the entrance and the sound of the island disappears entirely.
I turn to face them.
Three men in glass masks. The moonlight is gone in here, only torchlight, and it catches the glass differently—warmer, fractured, less like ice and more like something that has been through fire and survived it.
I have been learning the language of those masks for a month.
Every micro expression that the glass can't hide.
Every tell in the set of a jaw or the line of a shoulder.
I know these men.
I don't know their faces.
The distinction has never felt so unbearable as it does right now in this sealed cave that they built with their own hands while they waited for a way to escape this hell.
“Take them off,” I say.
The cave goes very still.
Boyfriend's head turns slightly. Brother doesn't move. Daddy's eyes find mine through the glass and hold them with the particular weight of a man deciding whether the thing he has been protecting himself from is still something he needs protecting from.
“You don't get to ask that,” brother says.
“I know.” I hold his gaze. “I'm asking anyway.”
The silence stretches. I hear the waterfall on the other side of the rock. I hear my own heartbeat.
Then daddy steps forward.
He reaches up and I stop breathing.
His hand finds his mask and he removes it. The face beneath it is one I know.
The recognition hits me like the shock from the collar, full body, impossible to brace for, and the sound I make is not dignified.
“Your Highness.” His name comes out barely a sound. Gus Octavious is one of the crown princes.
He looks at me with those blue eyes, the ones I saw on TV and pictures hanging throughout the castle.
The ones that used to offer me a strange sense of comfort as I cleaned and hid from Ava and her monster children.
Now they look at me like I am the thing that broke everything.
The two versions of that gaze collide inside my chest and I can't tell which one is destroying me more.
“You know me,” he says. Flat. Surgical.
“Of course.” My voice is shaking. “You vanished. Two years ago you just—” I stop. Their words come back to haunt me and reply through my mind on a loop. “You think I did something.” It isn't a question.
“Two years ago a lie sent all three of us to this island.” His voice doesn't waver.
“Our lives taken from us. Everything we had. Gone.” He takes a step toward me.
“Fucking you was supposed to be our revenge.” I flinch like I've been struck and he keeps going because stopping now means feeling it.
“Did you really believe you meant something to us? Did you think any of this was real?”
I look at him for a long moment.
Then my hand moves so fast I don't see it coming.
The slap connects with enough force that the sound of it fills the cave entirely. He stumbles back one step and catches himself, and when he looks at me again there is nothing between us.
No glass.
No mask.
No distance.
Just his face. Just his eyes finding mine and going completely, utterly still.
I look over at brother with my heart hammering. He holds himself rigid beside me and I see the guilt rimming his eyes before I reach for his mask. His hand snaps around my wrist.
“The truth is a luxury you won't get.” His tone is cold and void of all feeling. “Your wicked tongue wove a tale so vile that it destroyed our lives—”
“What are you talking about?” My voice cracks. “What am I supposed to have done?”
Boyfriend's boots connect with the stone floor as he crosses the cave and when he speaks, his voice fills every inch of it.
“Don't play dumb.”
I look up at him, the glass mask still in place, his brown eyes burning down at me with something so old and so furious it has its own weight.
This is the first time I have felt genuine terror around these men.
Not the thrilling dark kind that has been unravelling me for a month.
The real kind. The kind that comes when you realize someone you have been falling toward believes something about you that isn't true and has been building a world on top of it.
“Fuck you,” I say, and my voice doesn't shake.
“All three of you. I don't know what lie you were told or who told it, but it wasn't me. I will not stand here and confess to something I didn't do just because it would be convenient for your revenge.” Even if I escape this island, I’m dead.
I just struck one of the princes and there is no way that indiscretion will go unpunished.
The cave is silent except for the waterfall.
Gus's face does something complicated.
And I realize, with devastating clarity, that somewhere underneath all of it—the hatred, the fury and the blame—he is looking at me like he used to in the portraits that adorn the walls of the castle.
Like he sees I’m worth something.