After I Faked My Death, He Suffered Agony

At the top of an encrypted bounty board was a contract worth enough to buy a small island.

**Target: Valentina Cole Moretti.**

**Objective: Subject must survive one hundred near-fatal incidents before final termination.**

**Progress: 79/100.**

I read it three times before I understood that the target was me.

The last ninety days rearranged themselves in my mind. The avalanche in the Alps. The gas that seeped into our opera box. The swimming pool that turned deadly the moment I stepped into it.

And Damian, always there afterward.

My husband had carried me out of the opera with blood on his sleeve. He had hauled me from the pool and pressed his forehead to mine while I struggled to breathe. When members of his family suggested I might have had something to do with Claudia’s plane crash, he had thrown them out of the house.

I had taken all of it for proof that he still loved me.

I clicked on the employer’s authentication record. Damian Moretti’s private encryption key appeared on the screen.

Then I played the latest voice instruction.

“Claudia had a hundred seconds to know she was falling out of the sky,” he said. “Valentina has only been through seventy-nine attempts. Make sure she survives each one.”

A second message carried the final order.

“On our anniversary, blow up her jet.”

The study clock ticked behind me. I listened until the recording ended, then sat still long enough to hear the clock strike midnight.

Damian believed I had arranged the crash that killed his mistress. He had never asked me. He had simply decided that I was guilty and set a price on my life.

I cleared the traces of my search and called a number I had hoped never to use.

The cleaner answered on the third ring.

“Ms. Cole?”

“I need a body,” I said. “And a way off a locked aircraft.”

There was a pause.

“How much time?”

“Seven days.”

He asked no questions about Damian. In our world, the reason someone wanted to vanish was rarely difficult to guess.

“I’ll need your dental records,” he said. “The airport plans too.”

“I’ll send them.”

After the call, I took an ultrasound image from my desk drawer. At twenty weeks, the baby’s small hands were visible. I had planned to give Damian the photograph as a surprise.

For a moment, I considered telling him about the pregnancy instead. He valued the Moretti bloodline. He would stop the contract if he knew.

Then I remembered the words *make sure she survives each one*. He had watched me suffer seventy-nine times and called it a plan.

I placed the image in the study safe and locked it.

Seven days from now, Damian would see it.

By then, I intended to be gone.