"Why?" Thaddeus erupted, his voice cracking with fury. "You actually have the nerve to ask me why?"

He grabbed whatever was within reach and hurled it at me, one thing after another, blind with rage.

"Thaddeus, stop!" Geraldine Simmons rushed in and threw herself between us. "Stop hitting her. You'll kill her if you keep going."

"Letting her die that easily would be too kind."

That was the last thing I heard before the darkness took me.

When I opened my eyes again, I was in a hospital bed. My wrists and ankles were strapped down.

The room was familiar. Sickeningly familiar.

I'd stayed in this private ICU suite before. This was the James family's private hospital.

There was no escaping from here. And the news broadcast playing on the television above me made the despair complete.

The wife of James Group Chairman Thaddeus James suffered a tragic fall at home, resulting in a miscarriage. Complications led to massive hemorrhaging, and she passed away shortly after.

On screen, Thaddeus was presiding over my funeral.

In my last life, he'd lied to me and held my funeral while I was still breathing.

In this life, my funeral was being held while I was still breathing all over again.

I was alive. But I knew it would only be a matter of days before he came to finish the job.

The fear burned away, and what replaced it was rage. I'd been reborn, and I still hadn't been able to protect my child.

I hated him. God, I hated him so much.

I couldn't just sit here and wait to die. I couldn't let history repeat itself.

I thrashed against the restraints, twisting and pulling until the skin on my wrists split open and blood ran down my hands.

The pain was blinding, bone-deep, but I didn't stop. If I wanted to live, I had to give it everything.

If I could make it to the funeral in time, I could expose Thaddeus's entire scheme in front of everyone.

Minutes later, at the cost of the flesh on my left wrist, I succeeded. The restraints came loose.

This room had one advantage: it was on the ground floor.

Beyond the window lay a garden. My odds of getting out were real.

But when I shoved the window open, Thaddeus stepped out of the shadows.

"You really thought you'd wake up to a live broadcast?" His voice was almost amused. "It was a recording. On loop."

He studied me, that mocking glint in his eyes. "Or did you actually believe that if I wanted to keep you restrained, you could just break free?"

His words gutted the last shred of hope in me.

He was right. I'd been naive.

When death is staring you in the face, there's no room left for rational thought. He'd installed surveillance cameras in the house and watched my every move. In a hospital that belonged to him, how could he possibly have left anything to chance?

I watched him close the distance between us, step by step, and I made a decision.

In that moment, I finally understood why people take their own lives.

Because when you're drowning in despair with no light anywhere, death starts to feel like mercy.

If I was going to die no matter what, I refused to let him torture and humiliate me again.

I threw myself headfirst at the wall, ready to end it all.

In the split second before impact, I realized Thaddeus had anticipated this too. He hadn't left me a single opening.

The walls were already lined with padding.

"In here, I'm the only one who decides when you die."

He climbed through the window and grabbed a fistful of my hair, then slapped me across the face. Once. Twice. Again.

"And right now, it's not time for you to die yet."

He tied me to the bed again. I knew every line of Thaddeus's face better than my own, but the expression he wore was so cold it belonged to a stranger.

"Do you know what true despair is?" he said.

"It's when you see hope drawing close. When you think you can almost reach it." He paused. "And then it shatters all over again."

"Like just now, when you thought you had a chance to escape."

"Thaddeus, I want to know why." I held his gaze. "At least let me die knowing the truth."

"I don't believe you'd kill me just because you stopped loving me."

"You're not that kind of person. I believe you."

Right now, I needed to do everything in my power to save myself, even if that meant groveling.

He lunged forward and seized my throat. "Even now, you still don't understand why?"

"You vicious bitch. Cutting you into a thousand pieces wouldn't be enough."

I looked up at him through my tears. There was a time when my tears alone could undo him. He'd hold me, ask me what was wrong. He would have moved heaven and earth to make me smile.

He once told me he'd make me the happiest woman in the world.

Now my tears meant nothing to him. If anything, they made him angrier.

"You still have the nerve to cry."

Just as the edges of my vision started to go black, Thaddeus released his grip.

"Geraldine was right. Letting you die this easily would be too good for you."

There was a time when anything I said carried weight with him. Now it was Geraldine's words he treated as gospel. If she told him to take my life, he'd do it without blinking.

"Your funeral's already been held. As far as the world is concerned, you're dead. From now on, you'll spend every single day drowning in despair."

Thaddeus left those words hanging in the air and walked out.

Shortly after he left, Geraldine appeared in the hospital room.

She had been my closest friend. We'd known each other since middle school. Same high school, same college, same major. We never ran out of things to talk about.

When I married Thaddeus, she was my maid of honor.

After I married into the James family, I helped her find a job.

I once believed our friendship would last forever.

Now I saw that for what it was: wishful thinking. She was the real reason Thaddeus had turned on me.

I met Geraldine's mocking gaze head-on. "Geraldine, I don't know what I did that wasn't good enough. I don't know why you hold such a grudge against me."

"For the sake of what we used to be, can you let me go?"

"Please."

Right now, all I wanted was to survive. I had to survive.

Geraldine sat down. She lowered her eyes and traced her left ring finger with a slow, deliberate touch.

The wedding ring that belonged to me was on her hand.

After a moment, she looked up.

"I came here today to tell you the truth."

"It's not that you didn't do enough. It's that you did everything too well."

"Since middle school, you've been better than me in every way."

"I was already exceptional. But next to you, I was nothing more than a leaf making the flower look prettier."

"You don't understand what that feels like. You don't understand that kind of hatred."

"As long as you're alive, I'll never have peace."

"Jealousy turns people into monsters. And I'm the one who's been jealous all along."

"So I spent years thinking about how to destroy you. How to make you die in the most hopeless way possible."

"I waited a very long time for this. And then fate handed me the chance."

She leaned in close and whispered, "Aren't you curious how I pulled it off?"

"Do you remember Dominic Ashford?"

Of course I knew Dominic Ashford. He was the golden boy of our college years, the prince charming every girl dreamed about.

He was also one of Geraldine's admirers.

I'd read every single love letter Dominic wrote to Geraldine. Every one of them was deeply moving.

And Geraldine had me write her replies. I knew every twist and turn of their love story intimately.

They'd been inseparable through those letters, burning with passion on the page. That was why I could never understand why, in our final year before graduation, Geraldine rejected him.

It drove Dominic to leave the country entirely.

What I understood even less was why, when someone as extraordinary as Dominic was pursuing her, she still felt the need to compete with me for Thaddeus.

Geraldine continued. "The truth is, Dominic never wrote a single love letter to me."

"Every one of those letters was written to you. I was just the messenger."

"I was the one who told him you didn't want your name appearing in the letters."

I glared at Geraldine, wanting to rip her lying mouth apart, but my hands and feet were bound. I couldn't move an inch.

She went on, her voice dripping with venom. "You lost Dominic, but then you got Thaddeus. I hated you so much for that. They were both so exceptional. Why did they have to want you?"

"So I took every letter between you and Dominic and planted them in Thaddeus's office under Dominic's name." She tilted her head. "Can you imagine how much he hated you after that?"

My head rang like a bell had been struck inside my skull. I finally understood where Thaddeus's hatred came from.

But Geraldine wasn't finished. "Of course, the letters alone might not have been enough. I needed him to truly despise you. So I made up a little story."

"I told him I'd always been in love with him, and that I'd asked you to deliver my love letters to him on my behalf. But you never did. You kept them from him because you were greedy. You wanted Dominic and Thaddeus, and you resented me for having feelings for him."

"Then I told him that after graduation, you performed a medical examination on me yourself, and that you deliberately damaged my uterus during the procedure. That I had to have it removed because of what you did to me."

Her lips curved into a satisfied smile. "I cried so beautifully that day. Tears streaming down my face like rain on flower petals. Thaddeus was furious at your betrayal, and his heart went out to poor, broken me. Everything that was supposed to happen between us... happened that night."

"Honestly, when I think about the performance I gave?" She pressed a hand to her chest in mock reverence. "I deserve an Oscar."

Then she reached down and loosened my restraints. "I'll give you a chance. Go ahead. Run to Thaddeus and tell him everything I just told you." Her eyes glittered. "Who do you think he'll believe? You, or me?"

Footsteps echoed from outside. Thaddeus was coming.

My mind raced, clawing through everything she'd just confessed, searching for the one thread I could pull to unravel her.

"Ahh—!"

Geraldine screamed. Before I could react, she'd grabbed a fruit knife and dragged it across her own arm.

"Thaddeus, help me! Help!"

She stumbled backward, eyes wide with manufactured terror, staring at me as though I were a monster.

Thaddeus burst through the door. He took one look at the scene and his eyes went red.

"Thaddeus, listen to me—" I looked up at him, desperate to get the truth out.

His palm cracked across my face before I could say another word.

"Geraldine just came to me in tears," he said, his voice shaking with barely contained fury. "She told me you two used to be the closest of friends. She said that even though you destroyed her, even though she has every right to hate you, she begged me not to hurt you anymore."

"She came here to free you. And you repay her by cutting her open?"

He turned to Geraldine, his expression murderous. "This time, I promise you. I won't let her off. She dies today."

"That's not what happened!" The words tore out of me. "Geraldine made it all up! She claims you removed her uterus? Fine—"

I seized the one point I could use. "Take her to the hospital. One examination and the truth comes out."

Crack.

Another slap, harder than the first. My vision blurred.

"She's already been mutilated because of you, and now you want to drag her to a hospital?" His voice was low and dangerous. "What's your plan? Rip open her scars and pour salt in them?"

Geraldine sobbed, clutching her bleeding arm. "Thaddeus, it's okay. Listen to her. Take me to the hospital. Let them examine me. Let them see whether I'm lying." Her voice broke on a hiccup. "I swear I would never deceive you the way Libby did."

Thaddeus pulled her close. "I believe you. I won't let this viper hurt you ever again. Not even a scratch."

He didn't give me another chance to speak. He bound me again, tighter this time, and sealed my mouth shut with tape. Then he draped a white cloth over me.

Within minutes, the temperature around me began to climb.

The incinerator. I was being wheeled toward the incinerator again.

"Libby Fletcher." His voice came from above, flat and final. "I'm going to burn you to ash."

He pulled the cloth away from my face. He wanted me to see it. The gaping mouth of the furnace, the heat shimmering in waves, my body inching closer on the conveyor with every passing second.