Midnight Falls: A Thrilling Retelling of Cinderella (33 page)

Ella gauged her surroundings and could not see Gabriel. All she could distinguish was her cousin Aislinn, a sparkling yellow diamond amidst a sea of regality and decorum. It only then occurred to Ella that she had not seen Bethany all night. Wasn’t Bethany the one who would be donning the bright yellow gown? Ella’s thoughts were sidetracked by a tall, lanky man in a holy vestment complete with a flawless white cincture who took the elevated platform where once Leopold stood. A ghostly hush arose from the madness.

“Good evening, good citizens of Gwent,” the clergyman proclaimed, the low murkiness of his voice not impeding the air from sucking up his soberness and scattering it over the audience like wet sand sifted through a sieve. “Forgive the interruption of this blessed event, but these halls must be vacated promptly.”

A dull groan loomed the crowd. The tall priest went on, his voice quaking and causing his loose, wrinkled skin to tremor as he cried. “It is my grave and somber duty to declare that our beloved king and supreme Lord and our benevolent patriarch, King William, is dead.”

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Ella could scarcely hear herself think in the pandemonium that fulminated the once-cheery ballroom. The droves of guests were being shepherded toward the exits by castle guards and both Leopold and his mother were swallowed up in a sea of uniformed bodies and hustled in the opposite direction. Many of the women were crying and the men stayed busy by calming their hysterical wives or by asking questions of other gentlemen that too had no inkling of what was going on. King William was dead; that was all anyone knew. Ella moved fluidly with the pack, all the while trying to spot Gabriel. She was not entirely certain how she was supposed to feel about the king’s passing. She never knew the man; only knew that his life was vitally intertwined with Gabriel’s.

By the time the mass of ornately clad guests were outside and descending the massive courtyard staircase, Ella had managed to disentangle herself from the group and navigate her way toward the outer rim of the balcony, where none of the guards were posted. It seemed almost too convenient that guards were not manning such a wide area, but Ella chalked it up to her good luck and the fact that the guards were flocking toward the chaos. As far as Ella knew, she was alone. All she had to do then was find Gabriel.

She felt a tug at her elbow and turned to behold Gabriel. She was relieved though quite fed up with his habit of startling her from behind.

“There you are!” she said, as he pulled her behind a large, obelisk column that jutted out from the far corner of the terrace.

“Keep your voice down,” Gabriel commanded, taking in their surroundings heedfully. “We don’t want to attract any attention.”

“Gabriel, listen to me,” Ella said, unconcerned with Gabriel’s request for clandestineness, “I spoke to Leopold. I told him the truth about Thurlow and he wants to see you. I was just about to come find you when we were interrupted by the news of King William.”

“Ella, wait. Stop right there. You told Leopold about me; about Thurlow?”

“Yes, well I started to. I never gave him your name, I—“

“Are you insane? Why did you do that? That was not part of the plan, Ella!”

“The plan, Gabriel, is that I slowly get into the prince’s good graces and then
slowly
convince him that Thurlow is a bad apple and then ever
so slowly
introduce you to His Highness and the rest is history. Wasn’t that the specifics of your gospel plan? Well, I saw the opportunity to speed up the process, so I did.”

“That was careless of you Ella. Careless and stupid. You were with him for all of five minutes. How could you have been certain he was not in league with Thurlow and just waiting for you to hang yourself?”

“Because he wasn’t! I felt it.”

“You felt it? Well, I’m sorry if that does not invoke great confidence from me. You were supposed to lure Leopold to you, get him to trust you and then, when I felt it the right time, facilitate my telling him all about Thurlow.”

Ella was stunned and her temper so blistered with anger that she wanted to strike Gabriel again, harder than she had before. “Stop yelling at me like I am a child, you grunt!” Ella exclaimed, loud enough to possibly draw attention and, by that point, she hardly cared. “And then maybe I will explain to you why I felt it wise to act as I did when I did. Or perhaps I should just scream at the top of my lungs that Gabriel Solange, the traitor, is alive and well and accosting me to boot! How about that?!”

Gabriel’s chest still rose and fell in rancor, but he remained unspoken and waited for Ella to expound upon why she’d taken so huge a risk to her own safety.

“I was not getting into Leopold’s ‘good graces’ all right,” Ella said, somewhat bruised. “It was all he could do not to fall asleep in my presence. I don’t know why he singled me out as he did, but he was not taken with me. Not at all, Gabriel. Whether you planned it or not, my time with the prince was limited. I didn’t know when I would get another chance so I told him there was someone who needed to speak to him about Thurlow. I never told him your name. That was when we were interrupted. He wanted to know more but was not angry, or at least it didn’t seem like he was. My intuition may not mean much to you but it means a great deal to me. I have trusted it my whole life. You should try trusting me too, you know. If it were not for my gut feeling, you and I wouldn’t even be standing here.”

Gabriel’s staunchness relinquished a bit and he took a deep breath. The night air quelled his calescent blood. “I’m sorry for how I spoke to you, Ella,” he said, his head down. “Forgive me.”

Ella took a brief moment to bask in his apology and his wish for her forgiveness. She’d never been spoken to like that before. “Gabriel,” she eventually said, taking his left hand in her own, “why can’t we just go to Leopold together. Let us tell him the truth. All of it. Then Thurlow will be stopped, we will save our friends and we can… we can…”

Gabriel looked up. Ella’s bravery was disappearing. Her eyes, gleaming in starlight only seconds earlier, dropped tiredly. He saw her struggle to say the words out loud that she’d been saying with her spirit, her eyes and her smile since the day they’d kissed in the glen. And like that day, he could not resist her—not her spirit, her eyes,
or
her smile. He gently tucked the index finger of his free hand under her chin and nudged it upward. A single, glistening tear descended her cheekbone as she raised her eyes toward him. Gabriel slid his hand along her jawbone until his fingertips touched the lobe of her ear and his thumb grazed her lips. He gazed down at her, intrigued by how perfectly the shape of her face fit into the palm of his hand. Ella leaned into him, and he could almost sense her heartbeat pounding against his own chest. He wanted to kiss her again; so much it was painful. But he did not dare break the balance they had created in the perfect fusion of their touch. It was, to Gabriel, like the moment was being blown like molten glass into the most fragile, precious memorial to love.

Ella closed her eyes and begged her mind to preserve the sensation of having one of Gabriel’s hands hold her face and the other take her firmly behind the neck and pull her to his lips insatiably. Ella’s body plunged into his arms. He released her neck and scooped her from the waist until she was snugly against his torso. Ella had no choice but to crane her neck back as far as she could to meet his kiss even halfway. She took an odd pleasure in the strain of having to contort her body to fit with his. Did Gabriel see that she’d always been willing to sacrifice peace, comfort, even freedom to be his companion for life?

As deliberate and careful Gabriel had been to instigate their kiss, he was contrarily blunt in ending it. He took her cheeks in both hands for one last blissful second and then pushed her away from him. They both were out of breath and Ella fell back against the large stone column. Gabriel looked away from her, angry at himself for allowing it to go further than he’d wanted. It was only supposed to a kiss. A short, sweet kiss in parting.

“Ella,” Gabriel said, drawing breath with great effort, “I cannot do what it is you want from me.”

Ella stood erect, her heart penetrated with invisible blades. She did not speak.

“I am sorry,” he went on. “I would tell you that I love you, but you already know that I do.”

“Then let that be enough Gabriel,” she pled, now taking his face in her palms. “Can’t you just take this chance at happiness right now with me? It doesn’t have to be perfect; you don’t have to be rid of all your demons for me to love you. Can’t you see that wholeness is not a requirement of love? The only requirement is that you and I are together.”

“Ella, you forgive me too easily. I do not deserve it. I deserve only what is coming to me: the consequences of my actions. Even those actions that I have yet to do.”

“Gabriel!”

“I’ve been lying to you this whole time, Ella.”

She felt a lump in her throat, her eyes wide in astonishment.

“What are you talking about?” she demanded.

“I lied to you. I’ve lied to you about many things. I made you believe that bringing Thurlow to justice would be the conclusion to our expedition. It won’t be the end, Ella. It was never going to be. Benjamin and my name will be cleared and Thurlow will be exposed. That is recompense for me. But it is not enough for my brother.”

“Don’t do this, Gabriel. You don’t have to do this.”

“Yes I do.”

“You will become a fugitive again. You will lose the freedom you have fought so hard to reclaim.”

“What good is freedom if I can’t live with myself; if I have not taken Thurlow’s life in exchange for my brother’s?”

“But it won’t be an exchange for Benjamin. He and Thurlow were not the same man. Benjamin was not a murderer. Even though it would have given him some sense of purpose, he did not truly want to kill anyone. You were the one that convinced him of that. If you kill Thurlow, then you are more like him and
less
like your brother. You honor nobody.”

“I’ve never had honor, Ella.”

“Stop this! That is not true. You are and have always been honorable, Gabriel. But if you do this, you are worse than just being without honor. You are a coward!”

Gabriel’s mouth compressed in rage.

“You don’t care about Benjamin and your good name,” Ella exclaimed. “You care only about protecting yourself from what you truly fear!”

“Please tell me, dear Ella!” Gabriel snapped back at her. “Tell me what it is I am supposed to be afraid of.”

“Daylight!”

Gabriel was speechless.

“You are still in prison,” she declared. “You are in exile, even now as we speak, and you are too afraid to venture into the life outside of it.”

“What are you talking about? You are not making a lick of sense.”

“Maybe I am not, Gabriel. But until you are willing to face the light with someone who loves you enough to wait for your stubborn eyes to conform to it, then you will always been in exile. You will always be in that dark prison. Thurlow may have tortured your body, Gabriel. But you have been doing it to your soul ever since.”

Gabriel stepped away from her sharply, turning his body so that he was facing the vast landscape that was Gwent at night. How could Ella presume to know so much? She hardly even knew him. He had half a mind to turn and demand she mind her own business.

But then, she is twice the person I am,
Gabriel reminded himself
. It would only be natural that she knew more about me than I do about myself?

“Gabriel,” Ella said to his back, “I can simply bear no more of this. Tomorrow morning, I will wake and the excruciating echo of what I am about to say to you will pain me to my very bones. But at this point, save your coming to your senses and taking this happiness that I am offering you, there is no way out of this for me that will not result in my severest anguish. So I will say it now just to get it over with. Go! Just go and wreak your havoc, assuage your pride, murder Thurlow and return to the underground tunnel from whence you came. All I ask in return is that you stay away from me from this day forward.”

Ella did not even notice that tears were streaming down her cheeks and neck. Gabriel could not bear to look at her. For all his preparations, the sting of their imminent separation would still cripple him.

“I am sorry, Ella,” he said, his fractured voice being carried away in the breeze along with her most stubborn of hopes. “I do not deserve you.”

I am the one to decide what I do and do not deserve
! Ella thought with daggers of rage infusing each syllable. But as mere thoughts was how the declaration remained.

“Godspeed, Gabriel,” she murmured lowly.

He stood like a statue, his back to her, until he lost track of the seconds. Then, without forethought, he turned around like a flash of lightening and saw that Ella was gone. The only thing left in her wake was the withered resolve to finish what he’d started. It was funny to Gabriel how something as trivial as a kiss was enough the rupture the best laid plans and most fervent of ambitions. But then, his mad humor vanishing, perhaps it was the other way around. Perhaps the kiss he’d shared with Ella was not trivial but a manifestation of the best rendition of himself and his best-laid plans and most fervent ambitions were but hobbies of his childlike mind.

No,
Gabriel halted his rambling thoughts. His ambition was all he had left. And even if he could will himself into stacking his most righteous desires at their place at the head of the hierarchy, it was too late.

She was gone.

But there was one other person who was
not
gone, though she was concealed in the shadows, out of sight. Isolda gritted her teeth when she witnessed Ella and Peter (or whoever he hell he was; some man named Gabriel) devouring each other like it was the last time they’d ever get a chance. Isolda had only been able to make out snippets of what they were saying too each other, but that was all she really needed. The rest was in the body language—and some language it was! Isolda burned when she recalled that such a kiss was what she had intended to share with him that night and every other night thereafter. She wanted to shriek but instead bit her tongue and with predatory fervor watched her niece and the man posing as the Duke of Ebersol. Isolda could observe that Ella was angry; more than angry, battered by whatever it was the man was saying to her.