The night I married Damien Cross, he looked at me across the altar and said, "You're not her. You'll never be her." I smiled and said, "I know." He thought I married him for his money. The whole city thought so. The poor orphan girl who clawed her way into the Cross empire by stealing her dead sister's wedding. But I didn't marry Damien for his billions. I married him because I had exactly ninety days left to live, and there was one thing in his vault I needed before I died. My twin sister, Elena, drowned eighteen months ago. Damien loved her the way storms love the sea—violently, completely. When she died, something in him died too. Then he found out I existed. The identical face. The same voice. So he married me. Not to love me. To punish me. To keep a living ghost of Elena in his house and torture us both with what he could never have back. "Lyra," he said, gripping my chin hard enough to bruise. "Don't ever forget. You're a stand-in. A replacement. The day I stop needing your face, I'll throw you out like garbage." I let him. Because here's what Damien Cross didn't know. I wasn't the replacement. Elena was. And the truth was locked inside his vault, behind a door he swore I'd never open. He pressed a cold kiss to my forehead—the kind you give a corpse—and whispered, "Welcome home, little liar." I closed my eyes. Ninety days, Damien. Ninety days, and then you'll know what you've done. I moved into the east wing that night. Elena's old room. He had kept it exactly as she left it. Her perfume still hung in the air—jasmine and rain. The housekeeper, an old woman named Marta, wouldn't look at me. "You shouldn't have come," she muttered, setting down my single suitcase. "You'll only break what's left of him." I almost laughed. What was left of him had already broken me first. I walked to the mirror and pulled off the wig. My real hair spilled out—not the silken black they all knew, but ash-pale, thinning. The medication did that. I touched the hollow of my cheek, the bruise blooming where Damien had held me. For ordinary people, a bruise is nothing. For me, it could be the beginning of the end. The door slammed open. Damien stood there, tie loose, eyes burning with whiskey and grief. "Take it off," he ordered. "Take what off?" "That dress. It was hers." I hadn't chosen it. His assistant had. But I didn't argue. I never argued. I reached for the zipper, slow, calm, and his face twisted. "You don't even fight," he hissed. "Elena would have screamed at me. She would have thrown something. Why are you so—" His voice cracked. "Why are you so quiet?" Because screaming costs energy I don't have, Damien. I looked at him steadily. "Do you want me to be her?" I asked softly. "Or do you want me to disappear?" He stared at me like I'd struck him. Then he turned and walked out, and I heard glass shatter against the hallway wall. I sat down on Elena's bed, pressed my hand to my chest, and counted my heartbeats until they slowed. Eighty-nine days.
