She Laughed At My Real Corpse

I suffered every imaginable torment in that foreign penitentiary, waiting for a justice that never came.

When the embassy finally contacted Chloe to claim my body, she laughed. She told the magistrate it was a sick prank, a silicone dummy I’d commissioned just to torture her.

"That piece of trash violated me," she sneered through the phone, her voice dripping with a cruelty that used to break my heart. "Even if his rotting corpse gets flushed down a storm drain, I wouldn't waste a single breath looking at him."

What she didn't know was that I wasn't hiding. I was really, truly dead.