Chapter 1

The night I died in the basement, my skin was falling off in sheets. My husband was upstairs in bed with the woman who put me there.

In my last life, the orphan my husband took in gave me a necklace.

After I put it on, I couldn't stay awake. My body broke down in ways no doctor could explain, and by the end I was rotting from the inside out.

I didn't learn the truth until after I died.

She was a corporate spy planted by a rival conglomerate.

After her side lost, she used her face and her body to get Julian to bring her home.

Once she was inside the estate, she used that necklace to destroy me.

The pendant contained a trace amount of radium, enough to poison anyone who wore it against their skin day after day.

Slow, invisible, impossible to diagnose until it was too late.

Julian spent every night in her bed. He let me die in a locked room in the basement, alone, on a bare mattress that smelled like bleach and mold.

After I was gone, they rolled me into a body bag and dumped me at a county crematorium.

No service. No marker. Nothing.

The only person who came for me was Seth, a housekeeper from Beatrice Sterling's household.

He pulled strings to get my remains out of that crematorium and buried me himself. All because I'd smiled at him once at a company gala.

That was all it took.

When I opened my eyes again, I was back at the moment she handed me the necklace.

She wanted what I had. I'd make sure she got it.

-----

"Julian really pulled it off. The board's going to hand him the CEO seat after this."

"A full acquisition in three months. The Thornes don't play around."

Guests raised their glasses and turned toward the head of the table where Julian sat beside me. Crystal and candlelight everywhere. The grand hall of the Thorne Estate packed with every name that mattered.

Seraphina didn't have a title or a ring, but she moved through the room like she already owned it. She walked over to me with a glass of champagne in one hand and a small velvet box in the other, all grace, all warmth.

"I know how much you worried while Julian was away. I went to St. Catherine's and had this blessed for you. For good luck."

She opened the box. A simple chain with a small pendant, nothing flashy.

The last time, I was so happy Julian had come home victorious, so touched by her gesture, that I let her clasp it around my neck right there at the table.

I had no idea what it really was.

The pendant was laced with radium. Sealed under a thin coating that wore away with daily use, leaching radiation into the skin at the back of my neck. A little every day. Not enough to set off alarms. Just enough to kill, slowly.

First came the fatigue. Then the aches I couldn't explain. Then the sores.

And Seraphina? She glowed brighter every day. The sicker I looked, the more radiant she appeared, and the more Julian turned to her.

By the time I woke up from a week-long haze, my body was falling apart. Open sores, the smell of decay.

Seraphina stood at the foot of my bed, fanned her nose, and draped herself over Julian like a silk scarf.

"Oh my. She looks awful. What happened to her?"

Julian's face went cold.

"Get this woman out of my sight. Lock her downstairs. Anyone who brings her food or water gets fired on the spot."

I tried to speak. My mouth opened and nothing came out.

All I could do was watch him walk away.

Up until the moment I choked on my own breath in that basement, I never understood how the man who once loved me could turn into that.

It wasn't until my mind was floating above my own corpse that I pieced it together. She'd been a spy all along. Embedded by a rival firm, using her looks to hook Julian and using that necklace to put me in the ground. She didn't need to be sick herself. She just needed me to wear it.

I wanted to scream. I wanted to tear her apart. But I was nothing. Just a thought with no hands.

The clink of glasses brought me back.

I was standing in the grand hall again. The gala. The same faces, the same laughter, the same chandelier light bouncing off Julian's cufflinks.

Seraphina's eyes flashed with something sharp and hungry, and then she smiled, soft as cashmere, and held the necklace out to me.

"Here, let me put it on for you."