Stay Dead This Time

The chapel fell silent.

Daphne Langford was so startled that she stopped her feigned weeping and looked up at me. "You... What did you just say?"

"We're sending you into the crypt to be buried alongside my husband today."

I did not even lift my head. I kept my attention on rubbing liniment into my son's swollen legs, my tone perfectly flat. "Since you love my husband so deeply, I'm granting your wish now. Shouldn't you be thanking me?"

That shut Daphne up. She had nowhere to turn but my mother-in-law, Vivienne Prescott. Her voice went soft as she wheedled, "Vivienne, can you believe her?"

Vivienne patted Daphne's hand to soothe her, then turned to me with fury in her eyes. "Elara Renworth, you must've gone mad. How dare you speak to Daphne that way?! Daphne loves Stellan so deeply that she's offered to be buried alongside him. Where else in this world would you find someone willing to do that?

"Could you? Would you give up every comfort this life has to offer and even your own son to go into the crypt to die for Stellan?"

A cold laugh escaped me. She was right. I could not do it, and I was not willing to. That was precisely how these words of hers had cowed me in my previous life.

Back then, I genuinely admired Daphne for being willing to die for my husband, and I genuinely pitied her for losing her life so young.

That was why even though it galled me to surrender the title of lawful wife, even though it galled me to give up the chance to be laid beside my husband when my own time came, I still gritted my teeth and agreed.

I never imagined that all of it was a conspiracy.

My husband, Stellan Montclair, had faked his death. He did not want the reputation of a man who cast aside the wife who had suffered alongside him through the lean years, so he devised this scheme to make me relinquish my position willingly.

Once Daphne had played her martyrdom act to its conclusion, he would rise from the dead and marry her in full view of the world.

In the last 20 years of my previous life, the two of them lived as a devoted, loving couple. Meanwhile, Ansel and I were banished to a forgotten cottage at the far edge of the estate, left at the mercy of anyone who wished to torment us. We both withered away and died in misery.

This life would be different.

I buried the cold edge in my gaze and looked up at Vivienne.