Midnight Falls: A Thrilling Retelling of Cinderella (4 page)

“You are being childish, dear Ella. You know as well as I do that our union will be one of mutual satisfaction and an alliance that all of Gwent can be proud of,” said Thurow.

She was still walking. His strides were much longer. He was always just a few inches ahead of her, and his face was always frontwards. He did not truly see her and was selective of which of her protests he chose to address. Thurlow was not a man accustomed to rejection. Of course he could have any woman he wanted. But he had been as a priest in rigor while waiting for her. She was all he wanted. He had no time for cheap, instantaneous bouts of pleasure. It was not his style to sell himself for less than was rightfully his.

“You are nothing to me,” Ella said, finally stopping just so she could catch her breath and compose herself. “You never will be anything more to me than an incubus tree that is good for nothing except obstructing view and giving a false sense of security for everyone around you. Do you understand me?” She didn’t wait for a response but turned to retreat from his presence, yet again. Swiftly, his arm shot up and gripped the wall that Ella hadn’t even realized she’d backed into. She could not pass. He leaned toward her, hovering so close she could smell his breath in her nostrils.

“I understand more than you know,” he whispered lowly. “You can fight it as long as you’d like Ella Delaquix. I am a very patient man.”

Ella made no sound.

“Do you see how gentle I am with you?” Thurlow said softly, rotating his face with hers as if trying to hypnotize her into following his eyes. “I never touch you. I never force myself on you. I would inflict the worst kind of pain on any man that would even dream of harming you. I am not what you think me to be. You can believe me to be a beast, but ask yourself how often you’ve felt my arms around you. Never. And it would be so easy for me. I want it of course, but I will wait. That is all I do. Wait. There is no ‘in the meantime.’ Do you understand
me
?”

Ella was too paralyzed to budge. He did it to her every time. Even the hope that it would desist was an illusion. Thurlow smiled confidently and dropped his arm to his side. He then turned and walked back toward the crowds.

It took only minutes for Ella to locate Marion and insist they go home. Marion could see something had upset Ella, but knew to wait until Ella disclosed it on her own. She always did. Hours later as Ella sat reading, Marion approached her calmly.

“You know, you’ve been reading that same page for over an hour now, love,” she said.

Ella looked up from the book and felt the warmth that only Marion’s smile could evoke. Ella described to her friend what had transpired that morning. Marion sat and stroked Ella’s hair for the next hour, bestowing all the love, wisdom, and reassurance that Ella had grown to treasure in her life. It almost always worked. Ella could go months between encounters with Thurlow and each time, the long reprieve between meetings and Marion’s encouragement were enough to sustain Ella and even cause her to forget the man; the source of her dread.

But not this time. Even the hope …was an illusion.

As the night descended on the Delaquix manor, Ella’s mind roiled with fretfulness and uncertainty. She had to leave Gwent. She wasn’t sure how she would do it, but it seemed her only feasible option. Marion did not comprehend how dangerous Thurlow was. While Gwent’s army boasted thousands of men, Thurlow had chosen his favorite hundred men to form a posse that, in name, was responsible for guarding the royal family but in reputation was responsible for instilling terror and complete servitude by anyone they desired.

Like the Gypsies, for example. To Gonla these men were ‘
bastards’
.

As Ella entered her bedchamber that night, the fire was low, mostly embers, and she was wrestling feverishly with the idea that had come to her earlier in the evening. Should she leave with Gonla and her family? Was it possible? As Ella stood and inspected the low fire frolicking with the black and red embers, she waited for the tranquility that would always come over her when they cracked and popped like a childish game. Instead, she felt a powerful hand cup her mouth from behind and pull her back into what felt like a brick wall. But it had to be a man’s chest, because no sooner did she feel the inflexible brattice when another hand wrapped her torso and grasped her right arm tightly and mercilessly. The intensity of his strength, and his grip, sent her heart into panic and she struggled to breathe through her nostrils. The first face that flashed in her mind was Thurlow’s, but in another flash she knew it was not he. Whoever it was who held her, his voice was so soft her heart tempered itself immediately upon hearing it.

“Don’t make a sound,” he whispered into her ear with warm breath, “I’m not going to hurt you.”

Chapter Three

Isabella heard the crying from the end of the hall. It was a light, weightless sound with no sobbing. Whoever it was didn’t want anyone to hear. And had it not been her daughter, the Isabella might not have heard it at all. But a mother always knew the cry of her child, from the moment she was born to her first skinned knee or broken heart.

“What is it, daughter?” Isabella asked, close enough to feel the emotive essence in the air though the little girl had stopped weeping abruptly, wiping her eyes clumsily with the back of her hand. Ella ran to her unmade bed and wrapped her face up in the covers.

“Nothing, Mama,” Ella answered, cross with herself for not being more discreet in her weeping. Isabella took a seat beside her child and rested her hand on the girl’s soft blond head, cushioned with fragile curls that poked out from the blankets.

“Very well,” Isabella said, “I will just send Marion in, then, to get it out of you!” She grinned when she felt the small girl shift from beneath the covers. Marion had such a way with Ella. Her love for the child was rooted deeply by loyalty to the family to which she’d been ingratiated but it also existed as its own identity. If Marion and Ella were to have met, randomly on some summer day at the market, it was conceded by all that Marion would have been the only adult to know the young child had stolen an apple and indeed the only person who could have compelled her to not only return it, but pay the vendor a small pittance for the inconvenience.

In fact, that was not too far from how they actually had met.

Ella knew Marion would get the truth her mother was requesting. But she would do it in such a way as to oblige Ella to find some poor soul who had a better reason to cry and offer some service like carrying their satchel or bringing them a basket of herbs. That was Marion’s way. But Mother was special. She would hold Ella and insist she cry until the moment that the sadness, whatever it was or for whatever reason, ran its course. At that moment, Ella was sure it was her mother’s method for which she longed. The little curly haired girl rolled over and gazed with spent, swollen eyes at her beautiful mother.

“Mama,” she said with a whimper, “I hate my face.”

Though his voice was somehow deeply serene, Ella still trembled in his arms. Who was he? He’d said he wouldn’t hurt her if she made no sound, but then what did he want? She questioned her first contention that it was not Thurlow, tired of waiting around for Ella’s acquiescence and coming to seize what he thought was already his. But as swiftly as before, the truth befell Ella that the two men were not one and the same. For one, the man in her bedchamber was taller, his shoulders and chest hard and intimidatingly rigid. But even more convincing, he held Ella firmly where Thurlow prided himself on maintaining control of his strength. Ironically, Ella felt safer in the tough arms of her captor.

Still, this man could be dangerous too.

“I am going to let you go,” the intruder breathed into her ear. “Like I told you, don’t make a sound.”

Ella sensed his grip loosening and felt new breath enter her mouth. When she was almost completely free from his clutches, she lunged forward, fighting her way toward her nightstand, a mere five paces away. She did not speak, per his “wishes,” but that was not to say she didn’t travel across her furniture as riotously as she could so as to wake the entire castle staff and most of the farm animals. The intruder perceived the threat to his covertness and he began to engage Ella a second time. But she had made it to her nightstand and retrieved a small but sharp dagger she’d been given by her father many years before. She pulled it from its sheath and turned back, the dagger in her right hand, pointing up. He was already there, as swiftly as a spell, gaping down at her. She made a jab for the man’s rib cage but he caught her hand in his and held it in place as she struggled.

“Just because I said I wouldn’t hurt you,” he uttered staidly, a slight anger entering the timbre of his voice for the first time, “did not mean I would let you hurt me.”

Though the glow of the fireplace was weak, Ella could see the stranger enough to confirm her suspicions (and hope) that it was not Thurlow. The man was nothing like Thurlow. His hair was dark and long, almost past his shoulders. It was unkempt and his beard followed suit, looking as though it hadn’t seen a blade in years. She could not make out much of his face but this: there was no trace of indecision. He stared down at Ella with such calculated intensity that it was clear
she
was the one he’d intended to see that night.

“Who are you?” she asked, trying to temper her still rapid heartbeat. He briskly put his fingers to his lips and turned his face to the chamber door.

“
Shhh
,” he whispered. She obeyed. He listened for several seconds and when he was confident no one was coming to check on Ella he looked back. He lowered his finger and his other hand released Ella’s, still clinging to the dagger.

“I need your assistance,” he said, slightly louder.

“My assistance?”

He didn’t nod and said nothing.

“My assistance with what?” Ella prodded, her composure returning. The stranger’s eyes never deviated and she felt drawn to them in a way she’d never experienced. She cursed the lack of light coming from the fireplace.

Would this be any easier if I could see his face? Ella asked herself.

“My name is Gabriel Solange,” the stranger began. “I am a former member of the high military command that was temporarily posted in the Northern Territory of Gwent, what was once Golderleer. Almost fifteen years ago, an attempt was made on King William’s life during a coup at Golderleer. I, along with my older brother, a sergeant, was falsely accused by a comrade of having started the insurgency and carrying out the assassination attempt. I was imprisoned for my alleged crime but escaped before my sentence of execution could be carried out. My name was disgraced and numerous hunting parties were deployed to kill me. Six years ago, I led one such party to believe they had succeeded. I have been in hiding since, waiting for an opportunity to restore my brother’s name and bring severe justice to the man who betrayed him.”

“Betrayed him?”

The stranger, Gabriel Solange, had been a wall of soberness for the short time that Ella had known him. But in that briefest of moments, it changed. His eyes broke their stare and drifted down to some mysterious intangible well of pain of uninvited memories that poisoned all that was pure and life-giving. Ella knew of such a well, but was moved to believe that this man had drunk from it more than he might have had to.

“My brother was murdered by the man he thought to be his best friend; the same man who had planned the coup and tried to murder King William. This man told everyone that he’d seen my brother preparing to assassinate the king and stopped him in the act, resulting in a skirmish where he ‘felt’ he had no choice but to end my brother’s life.”

Ella watched as Gabriel turned from her and walked slowly in the opposite direction.

“I am sorry,” she muttered, hoping that he believed her. If he did, it was not enough to perpetuate his calmness or his vulnerability. He turned back to her sharply, his eyes glazed over with conviction.

“I don’t want pity,” he said, starkly. “I want your help.”

“I don’t see how I—“

“I have been waiting fifteen years,” he almost shouted, startling her, “biding my time and soaking in hostility that both frightened and intoxicated me. I was barely twenty when my brother was betrayed and wouldn’t have known what to do with the opportunity to avenge him even if I’d had it. But when the power finally came to me, I spent every moment I had watching for that opportunity to reveal itself to me. And, finally, it has: you.”

“I don’t understand.”

He stepped toward her. “Do you
want
to understand?”

The question baffled Ella. Why did he suddenly care whether she
wanted
to know any of it? Had she been offered a choice at the start? Why did he think that she wouldn’t want the mystery of this dynamic stranger revealed to her when he had already pulled her, unwittingly or not, into the abyss that was his heart? But then she knew. She saw in his eyes why he’d posed such a query. It hadn’t been a question. It was an oath. To answer yes would be to concede that her life would thenceforth be intertwined with his ambitions and passions—his demons.