The music ended. Vivienne had no memory of how she made it off the stage.

The wound on her chest had torn open during the violent spins, pain seeping through her until cold sweat beaded across her forehead.

But she swallowed it down, cutting quickly through the crowd, turning into the terrace at the far end of the corridor. The first thing she did was make a call, paying someone to move her mother's ashes out of Westhill Memorial Cemetery in secret.

This time, she would tell no one where her mother was buried. From now on, no one would ever use her mother against her again.

Vivienne gripped her phone so tightly her nails dug into her palm.

She couldn't understand it. In this life, she had never once told Tristram where her mother was buried. How had he found out?

She stayed on the terrace for a long time, turning it over and over in her mind, but no answer came.

When the gala began winding down, she decided to leave.

She didn't say goodbye to anyone. She just kept her head down and walked fast.

But at the end of the corridor, Noelle blocked her path.

She was leaning against the wall, clearly waiting for her.

When she saw Vivienne approaching, Noelle's lips curled upward, her smile dripping with undisguised malice.

“Your mother couldn't keep Dad, and you're just like her. The worthless spawn of a worthless woman. Your men, whether it's Tristram or Leslie, their hearts belong to me.”

“Tristram is nothing but my lapdog. I actually felt sorry for you, thought I'd toss you a man, let you marry into the Simmons family. But you didn't even want that. You just had to pick the frontier, that godforsaken place where they eat people alive.”

Noelle covered her mouth and laughed：

“When you're married off and they're making your life a living hell, don't come crawling back crying for Daddy to save you.”

Vivienne's hands clenched into fists at her sides. Looking at that vile face, she couldn't stop herself. Her hand came up and cracked across Noelle's cheek.

“You're right about one thing. Like mother, like daughter. Yours was the other woman, and so are you.”

The sharp crack of the slap echoed down the corridor. Noelle's head snapped to the side, a bright red handprint blooming across her pale cheek.

“You little bitch, you hit me?”

She shrieked and swung her hand back to return the blow.

But Vivienne caught her wrist, twisted, and shoved. Noelle stumbled back two steps in her heels, barely keeping her balance.

The rage inside her had nowhere to go. She glanced over her shoulder at the staircase behind her, and a calculating gleam flashed through her eyes. She took several steps backward and threw herself down.

“Aah——”

Her scream was shrill, piercing, her body crumpling like a dead leaf toward the bottom of the stairs.

“Noelle!”

Two figures bolted toward her at the same time. Tristram and Leslie reached out almost simultaneously, catching Noelle from either side.

Vivienne, who had instinctively reached out to grab Noelle, lost her footing from the momentum. Her balance gave way, and she tumbled down the stairs.

Pain.

Everything hurt.

It felt like every bone in her body had shattered. The old wound on her chest split open, blood soaking through.

She tried to push herself up, but the pain drained every ounce of strength from her limbs, and she couldn't manage it.

She lifted her head and looked up the stairs. Leslie was holding Noelle, murmuring soft reassurances. Tristram stood beside them, face cold, calling an ambulance.

By the time she finally braced herself against the wall and got to her feet, all three swept past her without a glance, as if she didn't exist.

Vivienne watched their retreating backs. A split second later, a hand struck her hard across the face.

A ringing filled her ears, and her father's voice came with it：

“You ungrateful wretch. You're about to be married off to the frontier. Can't you behave yourself for once?”

“Once you're there, remember this: keep your head down, don't bring trouble on this family, make them happy, and find ways to bring us more business.”

“I didn't raise you all these years just so you could make my life harder.”

Aldric let out a cold snort and walked away.

Vivienne stood where she was. The corridor was empty. She was the only one left.

She reached up and wiped the blood from the corner of her mouth, then limped out of the hotel.

Once she was married off to the frontier, she would make sure to mention the Whitmore family often.

But not a single kind word. She would lay bare every dirty, rotten thing they had done over the years.

Her father dreamed of expanding overseas. As long as she drew breath at the border, he would never see that dream come true.

After leaving the Whitmore estate, Vivienne hailed a taxi and gave the driver her apartment address, then slumped against the back seat.

Exhaustion hit her like a tide, dragging her under. Her eyelids were impossibly heavy.

Her consciousness blurred with each bump in the road, dimming bit by bit, until it gave out entirely and she plunged into darkness.

She didn't know how long she'd been out when a bone-deep cold yanked her awake.

Her eyes opened slowly. Her vision swam for a few seconds before it sharpened, and what she saw above her wasn't the ceiling of a taxi. It was the exposed rafters of an abandoned factory.

She tried to move on instinct, but her wrists were bound tight with coarse rope and hoisted overhead.

She jerked her head down to look, and her pupils contracted.

She was dangling at least twelve feet off the ground. Her heart slammed against her ribs. The acrophobia hit instantly, her legs shaking beyond her control, cold sweat breaking out across her forehead and down her spine, soaking through her thin dress.

“Someone! Help!”

The cry tore out of her before she could think. It echoed through the cavernous space and died unanswered.

She gulped air in ragged breaths, forcing herself to stay calm, her panicked gaze sweeping the factory floor.

That was when she saw Noelle, tied to a support column.

The unconscious woman's eyelids fluttered at the sound of Vivienne's voice, and she began to stir.

Vivienne realized they must have both been kidnapped.

But Noelle had been taken to the hospital by Tristram and Leslie. With both of them watching over her, how had she ended up here?

Before Vivienne could work it out, Noelle moved.

Thrashing in apparent panic, she struggled against her bindings. Within moments, the ropes came loose.

Spotting Vivienne suspended in the air, she looked around frantically for a way to get her down：

“Hold on, sis! I'll get you down!”

Vivienne stared at the rope holding her up. It looped through a pulley on the ceiling and disappeared somewhere out of sight. Every instinct told her this wasn't what it seemed.

“Stay back!”

Her voice was taut, urgent, but the words had barely left her mouth when Noelle stepped onto something on the factory floor, a mechanism half-hidden in the grime.

“Click.” A small, precise sound. The unmistakable trigger of a mechanism.

The next second, the rope gave way. Weightlessness seized her and Vivienne dropped straight down.

Her heart lurched into her throat. The memory of falling off that cliff in her last life crashed over her all at once, and she couldn't even scream before her body slammed into a foam mat with a dull, sickening thud.

She wasn't dead.

But the thin padding wasn't nearly enough to absorb a twelve-foot fall.

Agony exploded from her shin. She heard the bone snap from inside her own body, and her vision went black. She nearly passed out on the spot.

Then she heard laughter.

Noelle stood a few feet away, hands on her hips, doubled over with it.

“Oh my God, sis, the look on your face just now! Did you actually think we'd been kidnapped?”

“Relax. I was just messing with you. A little scare, that's all. You shouldn't have pushed me back at the house.”

Vivienne lay on the filthy mat, shaking from the pain, unable to move.

She lifted her head with effort. Under the dim yellow light, a figure stepped out of the shadows. Tristram.

“There was a mat to catch you. Quit the act.”

“Noelle's young. She likes to play around. It was just a prank, nothing serious. She only wanted to teach you a lesson for pushing her at the estate.”

“I've always been frail, so I can't exactly carry you. Pull yourself together and get up on your own.”

Frail.

The word hit her, and Vivienne actually laughed.

Right. He'd always been frail. So frail he sometimes needed a wheelchair to get around. So frail he couldn't stand for long. So frail that every unmarried woman in Ridgeport avoided him like the plague.

Funny, then, how he'd sprinted across the room to catch Noelle at the Whitmore estate. How he'd hauled Vivienne out of her own apartment and dragged her to the hospital to make Noelle feel better. No sign of frailty then.

He'd been performing for her since the last life. It was nothing but the same tired lie he'd never bothered to retire.

Blood kept pooling from the wound. Vivienne's vision blurred, and her consciousness ebbed like a retreating tide, pulling away inch by inch.

In the last second before everything went dark, she thought she heard a voice：

“Vivienne! Don't you dare die!”

It sounded like Tristram.

But that was impossible.

Tristram Simmons would never care whether she lived or died.

It had to be her mind playing tricks.

The next time consciousness found her, Vivienne felt herself lying on a gurney that jolted with every turn. And through the haze, she heard Tristram's voice.

“While she's in surgery, go ahead and remove her uterus.”

“She nearly caused Noelle to miscarry. This is the price she pays. I'll be marrying her soon enough, so I can take responsibility.”

“Whether she has children or not makes no difference to me. It's not as if I actually love her. But she's my only candidate for a wife, so I won't discard her over something this trivial.”

Vivienne lay on the gurney, trembling so hard her teeth rattled.

She tried to open her eyes, but her lids were heavy as lead, refusing to lift no matter how desperately she willed them.

She wanted so badly to tell him. Their engagement had been canceled. He was not her fiancé.

And even if he were, he had no right to make decisions about her body.

The gurney kept moving. She felt herself being wheeled into the operating room, the surgical lights blazing through her closed lids, searing her eyeballs with white-hot pain.

Maybe it was the sheer ferocity of wanting to survive, of refusing to let anyone strip away her right to be a mother. In the last second before the anesthesia mask descended over her nose and mouth, she summoned every scrap of strength left in her body and forced her eyes open.

“No! Don't touch my uterus!”

“However much Tristram paid you, I'll double it. Our engagement was canceled. He'll never know, and he won't come after you.”

“But if you go through with it, the first thing I do when I wake up is drag you into court!”

The operating room went still. The lead surgeon was silent for a long moment, then finally nodded.

Three days later, Vivienne woke from the coma. The hospital room was quiet. Her leg was encased in a cast, and the pain had dulled to nothing.

But the terror of plummeting from that height would follow her for the rest of her life.

Through Noelle's social media, she saw her half-sister trying on wedding dresses.

Leslie stood at her side. And there in the corner of one photo was Tristram, apparently helping her choose a veil.

A cold, thin smile pulled at the corner of Vivienne's mouth. Noelle had been right about one thing: Tristram really was her loyal little lapdog.

The woman he loved was getting married to another man, and there he was, eagerly tagging along to pick out her gown. That level of devotion was almost impressive.

Meanwhile, her own messages held several unread texts from Tristram, each one a photo of a different wedding dress.

It seemed that while selecting gowns for Noelle, he had picked out a few for Vivienne as well, for her to choose from.

She closed her phone without replying.

She wasn't marrying him. What would she need a wedding dress for?

The days in the hospital passed with unexpected calm.

Aside from her daily physical therapy sessions, Vivienne spent most of her time propped against the headboard, carving wood. It was a gift for her future husband.

She hadn't touched a carving knife in years, and her hands were clumsy. She went through several failed attempts before she finally got it right.

The day she finished happened to be the day of her discharge.

That morning, her lawyer sent a message: the evidence for the lawsuit against Tristram over the AI-generated deepfakes was nearly complete. Tristram would likely receive a court summons within the next couple of days.

Everything was falling into place.

It would have been perfect, if Tristram hadn't shown up at the hospital to ruin it.

He arrived carrying a bouquet of fresh lilies.

He set them on the nightstand, and his gaze fell on the discarded carvings scattered nearby.

“You made these?” A flicker of surprise crossed his face, then the corner of his mouth curved upward. “For me?”

Before Vivienne could answer, Tristram had already swept every last carving into his pocket, his voice carrying a rare note of warmth：

“You're barely recovered. No need to exhaust yourself over this. The gift can wait until after the wedding. I'm in no rush.”

The wedding date was almost upon them, and Tristram still had no idea it had been called off. Vivienne drew a slow breath and decided to tell him the truth before she left：“My father didn't tell you……”

But before she could finish, Tristram cut her off.

“Right, there's something I came to tell you. Noelle stopped by your apartment a few days ago. She said she wanted to set up a surprise for when you got out of the hospital, sort of an apology for that prank. She admits she took it too far.”

“But while she was hanging up the string lights, she accidentally shorted the wiring. The apartment caught fire. By the time the fire department got there, the blaze had already burned through most of it. Nothing inside survived.”

The world went silent.

A high-pitched ringing flooded Vivienne's ears. She didn't care that she was still in a hospital gown. She didn't care about the searing pain in her left leg. She grabbed her crutch and lurched out of the room.

When the cab pulled up to her building, all that greeted her was a blackened shell of debris.

Every photograph she had kept of her mother, every last memento wrapped and tucked away, had been reduced to ash.

Vivienne's lips moved, but no sound came out.

She thought she would cry. She didn't.

It was as though every tear she possessed had been wrung out of her across two lifetimes of humiliation and hurt.

She scooped up a handful of ash, watching the black dust sift through her fingers with an expression that held nothing at all. Inside her chest, there was only a hollow where something used to be.

A line of car horns sounded from the street below.

Vivienne rose like a machine, braced herself on the crutch, and limped to the window. She looked down.

A convoy of black luxury sedans glided into the main drive of the complex and parked in a neat row beneath her building.

Her phone rang. It was her father.

“Vivienne, you're being discharged today, correct? The convoy from the border is here to pick you up. I had them come straight to your apartment. Go with them, and don't cause any trouble.”

“Your mother's trust fund, plus a hundred million in cash, will transfer to your account automatically once you arrive at the border.”

Vivienne climbed into the convoy like a marionette on strings. As the familiar skyline of Ridgeport shrank in the rearview mirror, she felt nothing but a terrifying, crystalline calm.

Goodbye, Ridgeport.

Every last person who had hurt her would answer for it.

She would make sure they paid what they owed.

Every single one.