After leaving the Whitmore estate, Vivienne hailed a taxi and gave the driver her apartment address, then slumped against the back seat.
Exhaustion hit her like a tide, dragging her under. Her eyelids were impossibly heavy.
Her consciousness blurred with each bump in the road, dimming bit by bit, until it gave out entirely and she plunged into darkness.
She didn't know how long she'd been out when a bone-deep cold yanked her awake.
Her eyes opened slowly. Her vision swam for a few seconds before it sharpened, and what she saw above her wasn't the ceiling of a taxi. It was the exposed rafters of an abandoned factory.
She tried to move on instinct, but her wrists were bound tight with coarse rope and hoisted overhead.
She jerked her head down to look, and her pupils contracted.
She was dangling at least twelve feet off the ground. Her heart slammed against her ribs. The acrophobia hit instantly, her legs shaking beyond her control, cold sweat breaking out across her forehead and down her spine, soaking through her thin dress.
“Someone! Help!”
The cry tore out of her before she could think. It echoed through the cavernous space and died unanswered.
She gulped air in ragged breaths, forcing herself to stay calm, her panicked gaze sweeping the factory floor.
That was when she saw Noelle, tied to a support column.
The unconscious woman's eyelids fluttered at the sound of Vivienne's voice, and she began to stir.
Vivienne realized they must have both been kidnapped.
But Noelle had been taken to the hospital by Tristram and Leslie. With both of them watching over her, how had she ended up here?
Before Vivienne could work it out, Noelle moved.
Thrashing in apparent panic, she struggled against her bindings. Within moments, the ropes came loose.
Spotting Vivienne suspended in the air, she looked around frantically for a way to get her down：
“Hold on, sis! I'll get you down!”
Vivienne stared at the rope holding her up. It looped through a pulley on the ceiling and disappeared somewhere out of sight. Every instinct told her this wasn't what it seemed.
“Stay back!”
Her voice was taut, urgent, but the words had barely left her mouth when Noelle stepped onto something on the factory floor, a mechanism half-hidden in the grime.
“Click.” A small, precise sound. The unmistakable trigger of a mechanism.
The next second, the rope gave way. Weightlessness seized her and Vivienne dropped straight down.
Her heart lurched into her throat. The memory of falling off that cliff in her last life crashed over her all at once, and she couldn't even scream before her body slammed into a foam mat with a dull, sickening thud.
She wasn't dead.
But the thin padding wasn't nearly enough to absorb a twelve-foot fall.
Agony exploded from her shin. She heard the bone snap from inside her own body, and her vision went black. She nearly passed out on the spot.
Then she heard laughter.
Noelle stood a few feet away, hands on her hips, doubled over with it.
“Oh my God, sis, the look on your face just now! Did you actually think we'd been kidnapped?”
“Relax. I was just messing with you. A little scare, that's all. You shouldn't have pushed me back at the house.”
Vivienne lay on the filthy mat, shaking from the pain, unable to move.
She lifted her head with effort. Under the dim yellow light, a figure stepped out of the shadows. Tristram.
“There was a mat to catch you. Quit the act.”
“Noelle's young. She likes to play around. It was just a prank, nothing serious. She only wanted to teach you a lesson for pushing her at the estate.”
“I've always been frail, so I can't exactly carry you. Pull yourself together and get up on your own.”
Frail.
The word hit her, and Vivienne actually laughed.
Right. He'd always been frail. So frail he sometimes needed a wheelchair to get around. So frail he couldn't stand for long. So frail that every unmarried woman in Ridgeport avoided him like the plague.
Funny, then, how he'd sprinted across the room to catch Noelle at the Whitmore estate. How he'd hauled Vivienne out of her own apartment and dragged her to the hospital to make Noelle feel better. No sign of frailty then.
He'd been performing for her since the last life. It was nothing but the same tired lie he'd never bothered to retire.
Blood kept pooling from the wound. Vivienne's vision blurred, and her consciousness ebbed like a retreating tide, pulling away inch by inch.
In the last second before everything went dark, she thought she heard a voice：
“Vivienne! Don't you dare die!”
It sounded like Tristram.
But that was impossible.
Tristram Simmons would never care whether she lived or died.
It had to be her mind playing tricks.
