Chapter 5 Saltwater Lullabies
The Alps had left frost in Elizabeth's bones that even Edward's Swiss fortress couldn't thaw. She counted his footsteps through limestone corridors—twelve paces each midnight to her chamber door, never entering, always lingering where moonglow sliced through iron bars.
"Open." His command echoed on the seventh night, gloved hands clutching a music box playing Christabel's wedding march. "We're hunting stags."
Elizabeth pressed against the four-poster bed's cannonball frame. "I'm not your—"
"Our child needs fresh air." Edward's palm hovered over her abdomen, where his delusions still sculpted phantom curves. The bullet scar on his shoulder peeked through silk pajamas—a souvenir from last month's "assassination attempt" he blamed on her.
The cliffside path smelled of betrayal and brine. Elizabeth's borrowed fur coat swallowed Atlantic gales whole as Edward gripped her elbow with calculated tenderness. Below them, waves smashed against rocks in time with her racing pulse.
"Beautiful, isn't it?" He pressed a dagger to her spine, blade catching moonlight. "Christabel's favorite suicide spot."
Anne's laugh slithered from storm clouds. "Darling! Did you bring my birthday present?"
Elizabeth turned into a nightmare—Anne aiming a pearl-handled revolver with William's fingers guiding her grip. The doctor's smile glinted with surgical steel. "Time to choose, Your Grace. The whore's life or your heir's?"
Edward stepped between them, the wind stealing his confession: "I've always hated roses."
The gunshot cracked winter's spine.
Elizabeth's scream tangled with Anne's as Edward plummeted, his blood weaving crimson lace through moonlit swells. The music box shattered against rocks, gears spinning out Christabel's distorted laugh.
"Whoops." Anne blew smoke from the barrel. "Now, about that hospital bill..."
Needles bred lies beneath Elizabeth's skin. White-clad shadows whispered through fever dreams—William's syringe glinting, Anne slipping rubies into nurses' pockets, Edward's drowned corpse dancing with Christabel in the kelp forests.
"Sedative overdose," someone declared.
"Retrograde amnesia," another corrected.
Elizabeth's fingernails clawed at leather restraints. "Edward's alive! I saw—"
"Shhh." Nurse Greta's smile stretched like a scalpel wound. "You're safe from the Duke now."
The heart monitor sang a funeral dirge as amber liquid flooded Elizabeth's veins. Somewhere beyond the chemical haze, a leather-bound contract drowned in bloodstained seawater.
Salt crusted Elizabeth's wedding gown as she knelt before Christabel's shrine. Anne's tiara cut into her scalp, surveillance footage playing on loop behind stained glass—Edward's fall, her own hands shoving him, the gun mysteriously materializing in her grip.
"Confess." William pressed a dagger to her palm, his breath reeking of Edward's favorite bourbon. "End the nightmare."
Storm surge roared through shattered rose windows. Elizabeth stared at the doctored footage—her face twisted in murderous rage, Edward's trusting back exposed.
"Guilty," she rasped.
Anne emerged from the confessional trailing bridal lace. "Don't look so grim! We'll name the twins after you—Elizabeth for the stillborn, Grey for the miscarriage."
The chapel doors exploded inward.
Edward's seawater-ravaged form blocked the storm, his scarred hands dripping with urchin spines and vengeance. "You didn't think I'd miss my own funeral?"
Anne's scream harmonized with tearing silk as Elizabeth staggered backward. The forged contract pages fluttered from her bodice—Clause 15 now visible in lightning strikes: All offspring shall be legitimized upon paternal acknowledgment.
"Lies!" William lunged with the dagger. "She killed—"
Edward's bullet between the doctor's eyes sang truer than any vow. Anne's pearls scattered as she fled into tempest-tossed pines, her pregnancy bump deflating with each panicked stride.
"Come home." Edward extended a barnacle-encrusted hand.
Elizabeth stepped into the gale, shredded contract pages swirling around them like dying moths. "You first."
Their kiss tasted of gunpowder and extinction. As they fell toward jagged teeth of waves, Elizabeth's final coherent thought looped—The music box gears were still turning when he hit the water.
Saltwater burned Elizabeth's lungs awake. Edward's arms vised around her waist as riptides dragged them toward a coral-encrusted crypt. Christabel's skeleton grinned through the porthole of a sunken yacht, pearl necklace still choking her vertebrae.
Air bubbles escaped Edward's lips as he pressed Elizabeth's palm to the ship's nameplate: S.S. Worthington.
The final puzzle piece snapped into place—Anne's family crest etched beneath Christabel's wedding date, Edward's fingerprints on the rigged fuel line, William's investment in maritime insurance fraud.
They breached the surface into a world where only sharks heard Elizabeth's scream: "You killed her!"
Edward's teeth found her jugular in a mockery of passion. "We all drown together here."
Somewhere beyond the squall, a coast guard helicopter spotlight exposed Anne's plastic pregnancy belly washing ashore. Somewhere beneath the waves, William's corpse fed coral polyps. Somewhere between vengeance and absolution, Elizabeth chose to sink.