Chapter 2: Thirty Days

The taste of snow was still in my mouth when my eyes snapped open.

Soft, inviting silk sheets. Gentle, warm air. The quiet hum of the penthouse climate system. Soft gray light filtering through the floor-to-ceiling glass, creating a calm and welcoming atmosphere.

For one disorienting second, my body remained locked in the memory of freezing steel and the irreversible thud of hydraulic locks. Then my lungs dragged in a full, unlabored breath and the cold vanished as if it had never existed.

I sat up so fast the sheet slid to my waist.

The wall calendar faced the bed exactly as it always had. Thick black numbers. Today’s date boxed in red by the housekeeper’s tidy hand. I stared at it until the digits stopped swimming. Thirty days. Exactly thirty days before the sky would flicker, the grids would die, and the world I knew would begin its long, screaming collapse.

Victor slept beside me.

He lay on his side, one arm curled under the pillow, breathing in a slow, untroubled rhythm. His hair was still damp from last night’s shower. I had previously found that scent comforting. Now it made my stomach tighten with nausea.

I did not scream or cry.

For several long seconds I simply sat there, naked from the waist up, watching the rise and fall of his chest while the last fragments of dying on a mountain sorted themselves into usable fact.

Him shoving me, then closing the door. Serena’s hand on his arm. The voice shouting my name through the storm. The moment my heart had finally stopped.

All of it was real. And it was about to begin again.

A strange, crystalline quiet settled over my mind. I had been given the one thing every dying person begs for and rarely receives: time. Thirty days. Seven hundred and twenty hours. Enough, if I moved without hesitation, to rewrite every catastrophic choice that had once led me to that frozen hatch.

I swung my legs out of bed. The heated floor was warm under my bare feet. I crossed to the walk-in closet, pulled on black leggings and an oversized cashmere sweater, and returned to the bedroom with a leather-bound notebook I had bought last month and never used. The first blank page stared up at me.

I uncapped a pen.

The list formed itself in clean, decisive strokes.

1. Divorce.

2. Recover Gilbert inheritance.

3. Liquidate everything that will become worthless.

4. Acquire isolated, defensible property.

5. Stockpile food, medicine, fuel, materials.

6. Convert property into a fortress.

7. Trust no one who knew me in the first life.

I paused, then added one more line, smaller, almost reluctant.

8. Survive.

Victor shifted in his sleep, murmuring something unintelligible. I looked at him the way a surgeon looks at a tumor scheduled for removal. I had given him my family’s capital when Lang Dynamics was drowning. I had smiled through every board dinner, because I believed love meant endurance. In the end, he had measured my value in square meters of bunker space and found me lacking.

That version of me was dead on a mountainside.

This one had thirty days and a pen.

I closed the notebook, slid it into the drawer of my nightstand, and walked to the windows. Forty-two floors below, the city still pretended nothing was wrong. People went about their day. Totally unaware that in thirty days the power would die, the rain would turn red, and men like Victor would start calculating who was worth the last remaining seats.

I returned to the bed, sat on the edge, and studied the man who had once been the center of my world. Part of me still wanted to wake him and demand an explanation he would never give. The larger part simply noted the time. 6:14 a.m.

The divorce attorney’s office opened at nine. The Gilbert trust documents were in a safe-deposit box across town. The market would open in less than three hours, and every share of Lang Dynamics I still held needed to be gone before Victor realized the asset he considered his was walking out the door.

I stood, moving through the penthouse with efficiency. In the bathroom, I scrubbed the scent of him from my skin until the water ran cold.

By 7:02 I had packed a single black duffel with the essentials I would need for the next seventy-two hours.

Victor was still asleep when I paused at the bedroom door. I looked at him for a final second before Ì shut the door softly behind me and walked into the main living space.

I stood in the center of a life that no longer belonged to me, and felt the first true spark of something that was not grief or rage.

It was hunger.

Hunger for the version of myself that had never existed in the first life.

I picked up my phone and dialed the number of the attorney whose name I had once saved. The call connected on the second ring.

“Maren Holt’s office.”

My voice came out steady, almost calm.

“This is Cindy Gilbert. I need an emergency consultation this morning. Divorce. Immediate filing. And I’m going to need the sharpest financial investigator you have on retainer.”

There was a brief pause on the other end, the sound of a calendar being checked.

“We can see you at nine-thirty, Mrs. Gilbert.”

“Ms. Gilbert,” I corrected. “And nine-thirty is perfect.”

I ended the call, slipped the phone into my pocket, and walked to the private elevator.

Thirty days.

The number beat in my blood like a second heart.

When the elevator began its smooth descent, I was already rewriting the future, and the man still sleeping forty-two floors above had no idea the woman who once loved him had just become the most dangerous variable in his carefully ordered world.​