Chapter 1: The Body I Woke Up In

"You've humiliated this family for the last time."

I open my eyes to a chandelier I don't recognize, hanging from a ceiling I've never seen in my life, and a man standing over the bed like he's already decided I'm not worth the trouble of hating properly.

I know that feeling from the inside. I died in it.

"Say something," he says. "You're good at that, at least."

My mouth doesn't work right. Neither does the rest of me too light, too smooth, hands too soft when I lift them off the sheets and stare at them like they belong to someone else. Because they do. There's a ring on my finger I never put there. A bruise high on my cheekbone that throbs the second I touch it. None of this is mine, and somehow I'm more sure of that than I've ever been sure of anything.

An hour ago or what felt like an hour, time doesn't really work the way you think it does when you're dying I was on a kitchen floor bleeding out from a knife wound my husband told the paramedics was self-inflicted. My sister stood in the doorway the whole time and didn't call anyone. She just watched.

I remember all of it. The slow part. The quiet part. The part where the world decides, without saying so out loud, that you're not worth the noise of saving.

I'm not doing that again. Whatever this is.

"Rowan." He says the name like he's reading a verdict off a piece of paper. He's beautiful in that expensive, engineered way dark hair, a jaw you could cut yourself on, eyes the color of a sky right before it starts snowing. Everything about him built to make people flinch first and ask questions later. "Nothing? No performance today? No tears?"

I push myself upright and the room tips sideways, hard, and I grab the sheet and hold on until it settles. I make myself look at him instead of at the four walls I don't recognize pressing in from every direction.

"Who are you," I say. It's not really a question. I don't have it in me to make it one.

Something moves behind his eyes. Not softness nothing that kind. Closer to disgust, actually. "That's a new one," he says. "Pretending you don't know your own husband. Careful, Rowan. Even you can only sell so many lies before people stop buying them."

Husband.

The word hits me sideways, and for a second I almost laugh the bad kind of laugh, the kind that shows up right before you fall apart because I already did this. I already handed a man everything I had and watched him take it apart with a smile on his face. I am not doing it twice. Not in a body that isn't mine. Not in a life nobody asked me if I wanted.

"I don't feel well," I say instead. It buys me a second. It's also true.

"You never do. Not when it's inconvenient." He's already turning for the door, already done with me, already so sure of what I am that he isn't bothering to check if he's wrong. "Dr. Halloway will see you at ten. Try not to embarrass this House in front of her too."

He's almost at the door when the dizziness comes back, worse this time, rolling up from my stomach into my chest, and my hand goes flat against my abdomen before I've told it to move. Some instinct older than the six minutes I've technically been alive.

I feel it. I don't know how. I don't know what "it" is yet. But something in me goes still in a way that means I already understand, on some level under language, that my whole life is about to come apart again.

He's stopped at the door. He's looking at my hand.

"Caius," I say I don't decide to say it, it just comes out, like some part of this body already knew his name before I did wait."

"Don't." His voice drops, goes flatter and colder than the ice from a minute ago. "Don't you dare use that voice with me. Not after what you did."

"What did I do?"

I actually mean it. I have no idea what Rowan Vance did to earn this much contempt from the man who married him. He laughs, short and humorless, and crosses back toward the bed fast enough that I flinch before I can stop it and something shifts in his face when he sees that, something he buries almost as quick as it shows up.

"You honestly don't remember," he says, quieter now. Quieter is worse than angry. "Or you're that good."

"Tell me."

"Three nights ago you stood in front of the entire Meridian council my mother, Marcus, every House that matters and said you married me for my name and my money and never once pretended otherwise." His eyes drop, just for a second, to my hand still on my stomach, and something crosses his face I can't name. Not tenderness. Not nothing, either. "So forgive me if I'm not rushing to hold your hand today. I don't know what this is. But I know you."

He doesn't know me at all. He knows a dead man's memory of somebody I've never been.

I open my mouth to tell him that I don't even know what's about to come out, only that I can't let him walk out believing whatever version of the truth he's built for himself when the door swings open without a knock and a woman in scrubs steps halfway through it. Out of breath. Her face doing something caught between professional and scared.

"My lord," she says to Caius, then glances at me, at my hand still flat against my stomach like I already know. "I need to speak to you both. Now. It's the results."

Caius goes very still.

"What results."

She doesn't answer him. She looks at me instead, and whatever's written on her face makes the room tilt again, worse than dizziness, worse than grief, worse than anything since a knife went into me in a different life.

"Rowan." Gentle now. "You're pregnant. Eleven weeks."

And in the doorway behind her, I watch every scrap of certainty drain straight out of Caius Thorn's face.