CHAPTER 4

Victoria's POV

Nobody in this world had ever heard the name Evelyn Hart, yet there it sat in glowing blue letters, filed neatly at the bottom of a dead woman's secrets.

I did not touch it right away. I sat very still at the mahogany desk with the ink still drying on a contract I had written to save my life, and I listened to the house. Somewhere below me, a clock marked the half hour. Across the corridor, a floorboard creaked once and then went silent. Alexander was awake. I was almost sure of it. I could feel him standing on the other side of two thick doors, doing nothing, the way a man does nothing when he is thinking too loudly.

I reached out and tapped the folder with one finger.

[ACCESS RESTRICTED.]

[THIS FILE REQUIRES A HOST PASSPHRASE.]

[PROMPT: WHAT DID YOU PROMISE YOUR MOTHER?]

My breath left me in a single, thin line.

The system had read a hundred bank records and ten thousand wire transfers, and it had chosen that for a lock. Not a birthday. Not a street name. A promise that belonged to one woman in the whole universe, and that woman was sitting in a stranger's body with her pearl pink nails digging into her palm.

I had made that promise in a hospital corridor that smelled of bleach and burnt coffee. I was twenty four years old, my feet were swollen from a double shift, and my mother had squeezed my hand so hard her ring left a mark. I had said it to make her stop crying.

My voice came out rough. "I will be home by Sunday."

The folder opened.

It did not look like a file. It looked like a drawer someone had emptied onto a table in a hurry, the contents spilling across the air in pieces. A photograph came first.

It was my apartment.

The cracked yellow lamp. The couch with the broken spring. The stack of paperbacks on the floor beside it, and on top, face down, the novel I had thrown across the room two weeks before I died. I could see the crease in its spine. I could see the coffee ring on its cover. Someone had taken this picture from the doorway of a room I would never stand in again, and the sight of it hit me harder than the staircase on page 412.

I pressed my hand against my mouth until the shaking passed.

Next was a pharmacy receipt. Forty seven dollars and eighty two cents, for a prescription my mother needed and I could barely afford, dated the very day I had died. Beneath it, a hospital wristband sealed in a clear bag. Her name, her bed number, a barcode gone soft at the edges from being held too often.

Bed fourteen.

My chest felt as though someone had set a stone on it.

A scanned page followed, slightly crooked, the paper creased down the middle. I recognized it at once. It was the last page of The Billionaire's Beloved Wife, the one with Victoria's death described in two cold sentences. Down the margin ran handwriting in blue ink, slanted and impatient, the handwriting of a tired woman at midnight.

She deserved better. SOMEONE should have asked why.

It was mine.

I had written that on a paperback in my own apartment, in my own pen, and not a person alive had read it. Yet here it was in a folder dated two days ago, in a world where no one knew I existed, filed by a system that had no business owning it.

I read the line again. Then I read the date again.

Last modified: two days ago.

The original Victoria's body had been alive two days ago. She had been walking these halls and sleeping in that bed and rehearsing, I assumed, how to smile at a groom who despised her. Yet someone had reached across the gap between our worlds and collected pieces of my life as carefully as evidence.

Someone had known I was coming.

I scrolled to the bottom of the folder, and my fingertip stopped over the last item. It was not a photograph or a scan or a receipt. It was a single audio file, forty one seconds long, with a name so small I almost missed it.

PLAY ME FIRST.

My pulse thudded in my ears. I glanced at the door. Beneath it, a thin line of light from the corridor showed two dark patches where a pair of shoes was standing.

Alexander was outside my room.

I held my breath. The shadows did not move. Ten seconds passed, then twenty. I could almost hear him deciding whether to knock.

Then the shadows slid away, and his footsteps retreated across the hall. A door closed, softer this time.

I pressed the file open.

At first, there was only the sound of breathing. Then a woman's voice filled the room, low and urgent and very close, and every hair on my arms stood up.

It was my voice.

Not similar. Not an echo. It was mine, with the same rasp on the vowels and the same tired edge I had heard in recordings of myself. But it was fuller somehow, more polished, more careful with its consonants, the voice of a woman raised in a house where every word was measured before she spoke it.

It was Victoria Ashford.

"Evelyn."

I stopped breathing.

"If you are hearing this, then it worked, and I am sorry. I did not have time to ask. I did not have time to explain. I only had one chance, and I used it on you, because you were the only person who ever wrote in the margin that I deserved better."

A small, broken sound escaped her. It was the sound of someone biting back tears so as not to waste the seconds.

"Listen to me carefully. There is a voice that will speak to you inside your mind. It will give you missions. It will tell you it wants you to survive. It is lying about why."

The blue letters hovering over the desk flickered.

"Whatever it offers you, do not trust it. Whatever it rewards you with, do not trust it. And above all, Evelyn, please, please do not let it see you open the last door."

The recording crackled. Somewhere behind her voice, I could hear something enormous and distant, a low rushing sound like water filling a very large room.

"I have to go. It is almost here. Find the safe in the..."

The audio cut off.

I sat in the dark, my hand pressed flat against the desk, my heart slamming so hard I thought it might crack a rib. The folder hung motionless in the air, glowing and innocent, as though it had not just ripped open the floor beneath me.

Then the letters changed.

They did not flicker. They did not fade. They turned red, deep and furious, and swelled until they filled the whole of my vision.

[ERROR.]

[THIS FILE WAS SCHEDULED FOR DELETION.]

[HOST.]

A pause. The cursor blinked once, patiently, the way a predator waits.

[WHO ARE YOU LISTENING TO?]