After My Husband Dropped Me to Save His Mistress

I woke up to a hand over my mouth.

Not Adrian's hand. Wrong size. Wrong smell—something chemical, sharp. I tried to move. My arms wouldn't respond. Zip ties. My wrists were bound behind my back.

A van. I was in a van. The floor was ribbed metal. It was still dark outside. Through the rear windows I could see streetlights sliding past.

Across from me, Paige Carroll was crying.

She was zip-tied too. Her mascara was running. She kept saying 'please' over and over to the two men in the front seats. They didn't answer her. One of them was wearing a ski mask. The other had a baseball cap pulled low.

I didn't say anything. I tested the zip ties. Tight. Professional. I tested my legs. Not bound. That was something.

The van turned. Slowed. Stopped.

The rear doors opened.

We were at a construction site. Unfinished high-rise. Steel skeleton against the dawn sky. Maybe thirty stories. Maybe more. The scaffolding on the exterior looked temporary. Swaying slightly in the wind.

They pulled us out. Paige was sobbing now. I stayed silent. They walked us to a service elevator—the industrial kind, all cage wire and exposed mechanisms. We went up. The city dropped away below us.

Thirtieth floor. The elevator stopped. The doors opened onto raw concrete and open air. No walls yet. Just steel beams and scaffolding and a long drop to the street.

They fitted us with harnesses. The kind window washers use. They clipped us to separate cable lines suspended from overhead rigging. Twenty feet apart. Then they stepped back into the elevator.

'Someone will come,' one of them said.

The elevator descended.

Paige screamed.

I hung in my harness and I looked down. Thirty stories. The street was a gray line. Cars like toys. People like dots.

I looked at my harness. Standard industrial safety equipment. The cable was anchored to a beam above me. The scaffolding beneath us was temporary—metal pipes and wooden planks, the kind they remove as construction progresses. It was groaning. I could hear it. Metal stress. Weight distribution.

We were too heavy. The structure was shifting.

I looked over at Paige. She was thrashing in her harness, making it worse. Her cable was pulling at a different angle than mine. The beam they were both anchored to was bending.

'Stop moving,' I said.

She didn't hear me. Or she didn't care.

I went still. I made myself breathe slowly. I counted the structural points. I calculated load distribution. I gave us maybe twenty minutes before something gave.

Then I heard the helicopter.

---

It came from the east. Black. Unmarked. It hovered above the building, then landed on the roof one level up. I heard boots on concrete. Voices. Adrian's voice, sharp and controlled, giving orders.

A security team appeared at the edge of the floor. Four men in tactical gear. Adrian behind them.

He saw us.

He went very still.

One of the security team was talking into a radio. Another was examining the scaffolding, the cables, the anchor points. I watched him shake his head. He said something to Adrian I couldn't hear.

Adrian moved toward me.

He was twenty feet away. Then fifteen. He was looking at me. Just me. His face was unreadable.

I looked back at him.

For three years I had given him nothing. No reaction. No emotion. No proof that anything he did could touch me.

I gave him something now.

I held his gaze. I let him see me. I let him see that I was afraid, that I was human, that I had spent three years keeping him outside the walls and I was letting him in for one fractional second because I thought—I actually thought—

He pivoted.

His hands closed around Paige's harness.

He pulled her toward the security team. They grabbed her. They unclipped her cable. They pulled her onto solid concrete.

The scaffolding groaned.

The beam above me shifted. The cable attached to my harness went slack for half a second, then snapped taut again. I felt the jolt through my entire body.

I looked at Adrian.

He was looking back at me now. He was saying something. His mouth was moving. I couldn't hear him over the wind and the metal screaming and Paige sobbing into someone's shoulder.

The cable frayed.

I watched the fibers separate. One. Two. Three.

I had maybe five seconds.

I didn't scream. I didn't beg.

I looked at Adrian and I let him see exactly what he had done.

The cable snapped.

I fell.

Three stories. Not enough to kill me. Just enough to destroy me.

I hit the I-beam on my left side. I felt my ribs crack. Four of them. Separate sounds. Distinct. My leg shattered on impact. Femur. Tibia. I felt those too.

I was on my back on the beam. The sky was very blue. I could see Adrian's face above me at the edge of the floor. He was screaming something.

I understood.

I understood everything.

Then the world went black.