My husband signed my death certificate with the same hand he used to hold mine at the altar. I watched him do it through the gap in the morgue drawer—still breathing, still alive, paralyzed by the drug his mistress slipped into my wine. "Cause of death: cardiac arrest," the doctor read aloud. Adrian didn't even flinch. He just slid his pen across the paper and said, "Make it quick. My fiancée is waiting." Fiancée. We'd been married for six years, and he already had a fiancée. Her name was Celeste. She stood beside him in a white dress—white, at my supposed funeral—and rested her manicured hand on his arm like she'd won a prize. "Adrian," she purred, "are you sure she's really gone? She always was... stubborn." He looked down at my face. My eyes were open. I was screaming inside, every nerve in my body shrieking I'm alive, I'm ALIVE—but the toxin held me frozen. For one second, I thought he saw it. I thought I saw something flicker behind his eyes. Then he leaned down, close enough that I could smell Celeste's perfume on his collar, and whispered: "You should have just signed the company over to me, Maya. This is your own fault." The company. That's what this was about. My father's company—worth nine billion dollars—left entirely to me. They slid the drawer shut. Darkness swallowed me whole. But here's what Adrian didn't know. He didn't know my father's last gift to me wasn't the company at all. It was a name. A second identity. A man in the shadows who owed my father his life and had sworn to protect me until his last breath. He didn't know that the toxin Celeste used had a flaw—it wore off in exactly six hours. And he didn't know that the moment I clawed my way out of that morgue, I would stop being Maya Vance, the disposable wife. I would become someone he'd spent his whole career terrified of. The drawer was cold. My fingers twitched first. Then my hand. Then, finally, I screamed—out loud this time—and the sound echoed off the steel walls like a resurrection. I shoved the drawer open and crawled into the empty morgue, gasping, alive, furious. There was a phone on the attendant's desk. My hands shook as I dialed the only number I'd memorized for an emergency exactly like this. It rang once. A low, calm voice answered. "Miss Vance. Your father told me this day might come." "Adrian killed me," I whispered. "Or he thinks he did." A pause. Then: "Then let's make sure he regrets being wrong." I caught my reflection in the steel of the drawer—pale, hollow-eyed, a ghost. A ghost they would never see coming.
