Chapter 5 - THE STEPMOTHER’S TESTIMONY
Lady Tremaine arrived at the palace before Adrian could question Ella again. She claimed Ella was her missing stepdaughter, a gentle girl forced to work after her father’s death.
Her daughters, Drisella and Anastasia, confirmed every detail. The kitchen cinders. The locked attic. The ruined gown. The mysterious godmother who transformed rags into silk.
Their testimony should have ended all doubt.
Instead, Ella recoiled when Lady Tremaine tried to embrace her.
“You locked me away,” Ella said.
Lady Tremaine wept convincingly. “Magic has confused you. I came to bring you home.”
Adrian ordered separate interviews. Drisella remembered Cinderella’s scar on her left wrist. Anastasia insisted it was on the right. Lady Tremaine said there had never been a scar.
Ella had none.
Mara searched the palace laundry and found blood on the sleeve of Ella’s first cottage dress. The royal physician identified it as human, but not Ella’s blood.
Lady Tremaine attempted to leave before sunset. Captain Rowan found a black crystal sewn into her carriage cushion. It contained a single moving image: the true girl from the ball, asleep inside a chamber of roots.
When Adrian showed Ella, she collapsed.
“That’s me,” she whispered.
Then she looked closer at the sleeping woman’s wrist. A crescent-shaped scar lay beneath the skin.
May you like
Ella’s voice changed.
“No,” she said. “That is the woman I remember killing.”
