Comeback

My eyes snapped open, and the world was an assault of sterile, fluorescent white. It was the hospital smell, bleach, latex, and the metallic tang of illness, but the air felt thinner, sharper.

My lungs burned as if I hadn't used them in centuries, and my heart hammered against my ribs like a trapped bird.

I couldn't breathe. Every time I tried to draw air, it felt like swallowing liquid diamonds, sharp, cold, and lethal. The last thing I remembered was the rooftop. The white roses. The copper taste of betrayal on my tongue as the sky over Boston turned to ink.

"She’s awake! Doctor, she’s opening her eyes!"

The voice hit me like a physical blow. It was Lurii. But her voice was wrong, it was higher, thinner, vibrating with a youthful, frantic energy untouched by the years of bourbon and bitterness I’d heard on that rooftop.

I blinked, my vision swimming through a haze of tears and the stinging glare of the overhead lights. As the shapes solidified, I saw them. Standing on either side of my bed were the two architects of my ruin. Marcus and Lurii.

But they were distorted.

Lurii’s face was soft, lacking the sharp, cosmetic edges and the expensive filler she’d acquired in her twenties. She looked like a girl, her eyes wide with a performative worry that I now recognized as her primary survival mechanism.

And Marcus... He looked like the boy I had first fallen for at the library basement, fresh-faced, handsome, and seemingly earnest, not the monster who had calculated my value in billions while I choked on my own blood.

A dream, I thought, my mind reeling. The poison. I'm hallucinating the past as I die. My brain is misfiring, giving me a slideshow of my regrets before the lights go out for good.

A doctor hurried into the room, his footsteps echoing on the linoleum. He was followed by a nurse carrying a clipboard, her face a mask of professional neutrality. She began her report in a rapid-fire monotone, her voice cutting through my confusion like a scalpel.

"Patient Ashley, 18, admitted following a severe fainting spell and respiratory distress. Vitals are stabilizing...."

"No," I rasped.

My voice was a jagged shard of glass, a hoarse, terrifying sound that didn't belong to the body I was currently occupying. The room went silent. The nurse stopped mid-sentence, her pen hovering over the chart. Even the hum of the heart monitor seemed to skip a beat.

"I’m twenty-eight," I choked out, the effort of speaking sending a wave of nausea through me that felt like a physical weight in my gut.

"The date. You have the date wrong.. I just... I was at the gala. The award... Marcus, tell them."

The doctor exchanged a look with the nurse, a look of clinical concern that made my skin crawl. It was the look you gave someone who had lost their grip on the shore. Marcus stepped forward, reaching for my hand with a look of pity that made my stomach turn. I flinched away from his touch as if his skin were made of white-hot iron.

"Ash, hey, it’s okay," Marcus said, his voice soft and patronizingly sweet. It was the voice he used when he was trying to manage a difficult client, but he was younger, less polished.

"You’ve had a really rough night. You collapsed during the midterms celebration. The doctor says it was exhaustion and a spike in your heart rate. You’ve been pushing yourself too hard with the pre-law track."

"Midterms?" I whispered, the word tasting like ash.

"No. I graduated. I’m a Master’s student. I’m the Best School Master's Graduand... the Rector, he handed me the glass... Lurii, you were there. You were wearing yellow."

"Ashley," the doctor said, stepping closer and shining a penlight into my eyes. I squinted, the light feeling like a needle in my brain.

"You’re eighteen. You’re a freshman. I think you’re experiencing some post-syncopal confusion. It’s common with the kind of physical trauma your body just went through. Your blood sugar was dangerously low, and your cortisol levels were through the roof."

Eighteen.

The realization hit me with the force of a tidal wave, dragging me under. I looked down at my hands. They weren't the thin, translucent hands of a woman who had been in a coma for a decade, nor were they the hands of the high-powered executive who had just won the highest honor at Harvard.

They were smooth, unlined, and small. The skin was supple, lacking the tiny scar on my knuckle I’d gotten from a broken laptop during my Master’s study.

And they were bare.

My heart stopped. I stared at my ring finger. The skin was empty. No diamond. No six-carat anchor. No silver heart monitor. No physical proof that Marcus had ever knelt before me.

Suddenly, the memories of the rooftop, the taste of the poison, the smell of the jasmine, Marcus’s voice spitting the words fifty billion dollars rushed back with such clarity that I felt I might vomit. It wasn't a nightmare.

I could still feel the phantom fire in my veins. I could still hear the snap of the glass fluted on the stone tiles. I had lived that life. I had built that fortress. I had been betrayed by the two people in this room.

I wasn't dying. I was back.

"Where is it?" I asked, my voice dropping an octave.

"Where’s what, honey?" Lurii asked, leaning in. She reached out to brush a strand of hair from my forehead, her face full of that fake, parasitic sweetness that I had once mistaken for sisterly love.

"My ring," I spat, the word dripping with a venom so potent it seemed to stain the air.

"Where is the ring, Lurii?"

The hatred in my eyes was so palpable, so ancient, that Lurii actually recoiled, her hand flying to her chest as if she had been slapped. She looked at Marcus, her bottom lip trembling. The doctor and nurse froze, sensing the sudden, violent shift in the room's temperature.

"Ashley, you're scaring me," Lurii whimpered, the crocodile tears already welling in her eyes.

"We don't know anything about a ring. We were just so worried about you."

I felt a hysterical laugh bubbling in my chest, but I suppressed it. My mind was working at a thousand miles an hour. If it was 2016, the $50 billion trust fund hadn't been touched. Marcus’s father was still alive and in control. The acquisition that made my career hadn't happened. Lurii hadn't yet poisoned me.

I had ten years of foresight. I knew every move they were going to make before they even thought of them. I knew the secrets they would hide, the people they would bribe, and the weaknesses they would exploit.

I looked at Marcus. He was still the boy in the varsity jacket, but behind those blue eyes, I saw the ghost of the man who would one day value me only as a stability clause.

"You want to know what's going on, Marcus?" I asked, sitting up in the bed. The weakness in my limbs was there, but my mind was a steel trap.

"I just had a very long, very vivid dream. And in that dream, I saw exactly what kind of man you become. I saw the price tag you put on my life."

Marcus stepped between us, his brow furrowed in genuine confusion. He reached out to touch my shoulder, but I leaned back, my eyes never leaving his.

"Ashley?" he asked, his voice wavering for the first time, the confidence of the campus golden boy faltering.

I gripped the edges of the sheets tight, I had one thing on my mind; my revenge.