I Faked My Death to Ruin My Unfaithful Fiancé

The East River at 2 a.m. smells like cold metal and old rain.

I stood on the dock in a wetsuit, my hair already damp from the mist coming off the water, and watched Dominic run the team through their positions one more time. Six divers. Two boats, dark-hulled, no running lights. A decompression kit I hoped we wouldn't need.

Cassian stood beside me with a stopwatch and said nothing.

That was the thing about him. He never filled silence with noise.

'Again,' I said.

Dominic looked at me. 'That's the third run, Seraphina.'

'Ninety-one seconds is not ninety seconds.'

'It's one second off.'

'One second is one second.' I pulled my goggles down. 'Again.'

He didn't argue. That was why I trusted him.

I walked to the edge of the dock. The water below was black and moving, catching the distant glow of the bridge in long, broken strips. I thought about Tuesday. The rain. The guardrail. The specific angle of impact Cassian's engineer had calculated three times and I had checked myself twice.

I thought about Kendrick's voice on that voicemail. The way it had shifted — soft to hard, grief to threat — in the space of a single breath. I had listened to it four times. Not because it frightened me. Because I wanted to know exactly what I was working with.

I stepped off the dock.

The cold hit me like a wall. The river closed over my head and the world went dark and muffled and immediate. I counted. One. Two. The current pulled at my legs, stronger than the rehearsal notes had suggested. I let it. Three. Four. Above me, the surface was a pale, shifting ceiling. Five.

The divers reached me at thirty-eight seconds. Hands on my arms, practiced and firm. We moved through the water in a tight formation, angled toward the extraction point. I kept counting.

Eighty-seven seconds from submersion, I broke the surface.

I pulled the goggles up. Dominic was already at the edge of the second boat, hand extended. I grabbed it and he hauled me over the gunwale in one clean motion.

I sat on the deck and breathed.

Cassian's voice came from the dock, calm and carrying. 'Eighty-seven.'

I looked up at him across the water. Even from here, in the dark, I could read his face. The particular stillness that meant he was satisfied but would not say so.

'Good,' I said.

Dominic handed me a towel. 'You want to run it a third time?'

'No.' I stood. 'Eighty-seven is enough.'

I wanted ninety seconds to be the ceiling, not the floor. Now it was the ceiling. We were done.

On the drive back, Cassian sat beside me in the back of the car and reviewed the dive team's position logs on his tablet. I watched the city move past the window. The bridges lit up against the dark sky. The river below them, indifferent and cold.

'The car,' I said.

'Delivered to the staging point tomorrow night. Plates are clean. The airbags have been disabled on the driver's side.'

'And the guardrail?'

'Structurally compromised at the third post. Enough to give on impact. Not enough to look deliberate.'

I nodded. I had asked him all of this before. I was asking again not because I doubted the answers but because I needed to hear them in sequence, the way you run a checklist before a flight. Not fear. Precision.

'He'll follow me,' I said.

'He's already planning to.'

I turned to look at him. 'How do you know?'

Cassian set the tablet down. 'Because Marcus called him this afternoon.'

Marcus. The third planted contact. The one who was supposed to land tonight.

'And?'

'He asked about the clause twice. Then he asked what route you usually take home from the Midtown office.'

I looked back out the window.

So it was done. The third source had delivered, and Kendrick had done exactly what Cassian said he would do — used it to give himself permission. He wasn't grieving anymore. He was calculating. He had moved from the voicemail's soft desperation to something harder and quieter, and that shift was the most dangerous thing about him.

Not because he was capable.

Because he thought he was.

'He rented a car,' Cassian said. 'Gray Nissan. Borrowed credit card. He picked it up this afternoon from a lot in Astoria.'

I almost smiled. 'He's been planning it since the second source.'

'Yes.'

'And he waited for the third to confirm.'

'He needed the permission,' Cassian said. 'Same as I told you.'

I thought about Kendrick on a friend's couch somewhere, selling the Patek to a pawnshop on Canal Street, rehearsing the story he would tell afterward. The grieving boyfriend. The tragic accident. The inheritance that would finally, finally make the math work.

He had spent five years watching me and learning nothing.

The car turned onto the bridge approach and I looked down at the river below, black and wide and patient.

Tuesday. Rain at nine. We go at ten.

Eighty-seven seconds.

I pressed my fingers against the cold glass of the window and felt, underneath the stillness, something that was almost like anticipation.

Not for the fall.

For what came after.