Chapter 1
The first time I died, everyone called it an accident. The second time, Eleanor came to finish me herself.
I lay in the hospice wing above East Harbor, ribs taped, lungs stitched, every breath scraping through me like broken glass. Machines blinked around my bed in cold blue pulses. The nurses thought I was too weak to understand them. The doctors spoke over me in careful, tragic voices. Collapsed lungs. Smoke damage. Neurological shock. Poor girl. Poor last heir.
Eleanor Valmont loved hearing that part.
She swept into my room at midnight in a cream silk coat, red soles flashing beneath her like little knives. Her perfume arrived before she did, expensive and bitter, drowning the sterile smell of antiseptic. Behind her came my father’s attorney, Mr. Voss, carrying a leather folder and the dead eyes of a man who had already been paid.
“Leave us,” Eleanor told the nurse.
The nurse hesitated. “Mrs. Valmont, she’s unstable.”
Eleanor smiled. “So is your job.”
The nurse left.
My oxygen tube hissed gently beneath my nose. My fingers curled under the blanket, not from fear, but because I was holding myself still. Stillness was the only weapon they believed I had left.
Eleanor leaned over me, her diamonds glittering against her throat. “Do you know what happened today, Ava?”
I stared at her through swollen eyes.
“The judge declared your biological mother legally dead.” Her voice softened into a lullaby. “Such a sad ending for Marina Vale. Blown apart on her own yacht. Lost to the sea. No body, but enough blood on the deck to make the court sentimental.”
The monitor beside me beeped faster.
She noticed. Of course she did.
“Oh, darling.” Eleanor brushed hair from my forehead. “Don’t waste energy hating me. Your mother should have sold me her shipping patents when I asked nicely.”
My mother’s face flashed in my mind: wind-tangled hair, salt on her cheeks, her hand gripping mine before the yacht erupted into fire.
“Eleanor,” Mr. Voss warned, “we should be careful.”
“She can barely breathe,” Eleanor said. “Let her hear the truth before she disappears too.”
She lifted the folder. Inside were transfer documents, trust releases, inheritance approvals. My mother’s empire, my future, my name, all stacked in neat legal pages.
“Once your oxygen finally gives out,” Eleanor whispered, “your inheritance buys my new private island.”
Then she stepped on my breathing tube.
The plastic flattened under her heel.
Air stopped.
My body seized. The room narrowed. My lungs clawed for breath that would not come. Eleanor watched with delighted patience, as if waiting for champagne to chill.
“Suffocate quietly, darling,” she murmured.
I did not beg.
May you like
My hand slid beneath the pillow.
And my thumb found the hidden switch.
