Reborn to ruin the man who broke me

Nora's POV

I woke up smelling my mother's perfume, and for a second, I forgot she was supposed to be dead.

Not the mother I remembered burying at nineteen. The one from before that — warm, sharp-tongued, still alive in this version of my life, still humming off-key in the kitchen most mornings the way she used to before the accident that hadn't happened yet.

I lay there staring at the ceiling of my old bedroom, waiting for my body to catch up with what my mind already knew. Twenty-five years old again. Whole. No frostbite scarring on my fingers from a radiator that never worked right. There was no memory of a locked door that took three months before anyone stopped checking behind it.

I remembered dying anyway. All of it. The cold. My own sister's face at the hearing, calm in a way that had haunted me for years after, like watching someone you loved decide you weren't worth saving.

Today was the day that started it. My engagement to Jude Whitfield, the man my father had decided, was worth more to this family than I was.

I got up. I got dressed. I didn't cry because I'd already spent everything I had crying once, in a life I wasn't going back to.

My father was waiting downstairs, adjusting cufflinks he only fussed with when he was nervous about something he'd already decided not to be nervous about. Behind him, through the open door to his study, I caught sight of a man I hadn't expected to think about this early — Damian Sterling, half-turned away, laughing easily at something on his phone, comfortable in our house the way he'd always been comfortable everywhere. Family friend. My mother's business partner from before I was born. Harmless furniture in every memory I had of this house.

"You're up early," my father said, not really looking at me. "Big day."

"I know what day it is."

He didn't hear anything underneath that. He never had.

The engagement lunch wasn't for two hours. I told the driver to take me somewhere else first, and my father, still on a call about something that wouldn't matter to him in six years, didn't ask where.

I'd been inside the Whitfield building exactly twice before, both times trailing behind Jude, both times invisible to the one person there who actually mattered. Theo Whitfield ran more of that company than anyone with his last name gave him credit for, and in three years of marriage to his nephew, I don't think he'd said a hundred words to me total.

I remembered thinking he simply didn't like me.

I understood now that I'd never given him a reason to notice me at all.

The receptionist on his floor looked up like she already knew I didn't have an appointment. I didn't wait for her to finish the sentence. I walked past her, past an assistant half out of his chair, and let myself into an office at the end of the hall before either of them found the nerve to stop me.

Theo didn't look up right away. Sleeves rolled, pen still moving across a page, a stillness to him I remembered now as control rather than indifference.

"I don't recall an appointment," he said.

"You don't need one for what I'm offering."

That got his eyes up. Sharp. Assessing the way I imagined he looked at contracts with terms too good to be real.

"And what exactly makes you think I want anything you have to offer?"

I told him. Control of my mother's company, the shares stolen from me before I was old enough to fight for them, in exchange for his full backing while I took apart the people who'd wronged me. I didn't mention the asylum. I didn't mention dying. I gave him the version of the truth that made sense on paper because that was the only version a man like Theo would take seriously on a Tuesday morning from a stranger.

He was quiet for a long moment, turning the pen once between his fingers.

"You're asking me to help you destroy my own nephew's engagement."

"I'm asking you to take a deal that's better than the one you're currently not getting anything from."

Something shifted behind his eyes — not quite a smile, not yet, but close enough that I felt it land somewhere in my chest I hadn't expected.

"One hour," he said. "Get me a lawyer and a draft. If the terms are what you say, I'll sign before your engagement lunch even starts."

Relief hit me harder than I wanted it to. I turned toward the door before he could see how much that single sentence had cost me to hear.

"There's one more thing," I said.

"There's always one more thing."

"My sister's going to try to stop this." I thought of Ivy's face the day of my hearing, calm in a way I'd spent years trying to understand. "When she does, I need to know you won't hesitate."

I didn't get an answer.

The door opened behind me without a knock, and Jude walked in already talking, already wearing the easy, practiced concern he used on anyone he needed something from — until his eyes landed on me standing in his uncle's office two hours before our engagement lunch, and the concern dropped away into something colder and far more interesting.

Behind him, in the hallway, another figure paused just outside the open door, close enough to hear everything, and I recognized the shape of him before I even saw his face clearly.

Damian Sterling wasn't supposed to be anywhere near this building today.