Chapter 3: Awakening in the Past

I woke to warmth.

Not the consuming, ancient warmth of death's embrace. This was human warmth. Body heat. The heat of another person pressed against my back, an arm draped over my waist, breath tickling the nape of my neck.

My eyes snapped open.

Sunlight. Actual sunlight streaming through curtains I didn't recognize. A bedroom that wasn't the estate. Wasn't in the hospital. The walls were cream-colored, not white. The bedding was soft cotton, not sterile hospital sheets.

And there was someone in bed with me.

The arm around my waist tightened, pulling me closer. A sleepy, contented sigh against my hair.

I looked down.

A man's arm. Tan. Strong. A watch on the wrist that I knew—that I remembered—that I'd bought three years ago for our anniversary.

No.

No, no, no, no, no—

I exploded out of the bed like I'd been electrocuted, my body moving before my mind could catch up. The sheets tangled around my legs and I hit the floor hard, my hip slamming into the nightstand. A lamp crashed down beside me.

"Seraphine? What the—" Adrian's voice. Sleep-rough and confused.

Adrian.

I scrambled backward on the floor, away from the bed, away from him, my back hitting the wall. He was sitting up now, the covers pooled around his waist, his hair mussed from sleep, his face creased with concern.

That face. That beautiful, lying, murderous face.

"Don't touch me!" The words ripped from my throat, raw and feral. "Don't you fucking touch me!"

"Sera, what's wrong? Are you—"

"You killed me!" I was screaming now, my voice breaking. "You stood there, you heartless, stupid, monster! You and that bitch—"

Adrian was out of the bed, moving toward me with his hands raised like I was a wild animal. Maybe I was. Maybe death had made me rabid.

"Sera, honey, you're not making sense. You had a nightmare—"

"Don't call me that!" Spit flew from my mouth. "Don't you dare call me honey, you lying piece of shit! You took everything from me! Everything!"

My hands were shaking—no, my whole body was shaking. Tremors wracked through me so violently my teeth chattered. I couldn't breathe. Couldn't think. Could only see his face above me as I died, bored and checking his phone while I bled out.

"I'm calling a doctor—" Adrian reached for his phone on the nightstand.

I lunged.

My hand closed around the first thing I could reach—a hardcover book from the nightstand—and I hurled it at his head with all the strength I had. He ducked. It hit the wall behind him with a bang that rattled the picture frames.

"Get out!" I was sobbing now, huge gasping sobs that made my whole body heave. "Get out, get out, get out!"

"Sera, please, just calm down—"

"I'll kill you!" The words came from somewhere primal, somewhere that remembered the smell of death and the feel of marble under my broken body. "I swear to God, Adrian, if you come near me I'll fucking kill you!"

Something in my voice must have convinced him because he stopped, frozen halfway between the bed and where I'd collapsed against the wall. He looked genuinely frightened.

Good.

"Okay," he said slowly, hands still raised. "Okay. I'm going. I'm leaving. Just... just breathe, okay? I'll be right outside if you need me."

If I needed him. As if I'd ever needed anything from him except honesty, and he'd never given me that once in his entire miserable life.

He backed out of the room slowly, never taking his eyes off me, like I might attack at any moment. Maybe I would. Maybe I should. The door clicked shut behind him.

I was alone.

The sobs intensified, my chest heaving, my lungs burning. I couldn't get enough air. The room was spinning, tilting, my vision darkening at the edges. Panic attack. I was having a panic attack.

I needed—I needed—

The bathroom.

I crawled. Actually crawled across the carpet because standing seemed impossible. Made it to the bathroom door, hauled myself up using the doorframe, stumbled inside and slammed the door shut. The lock clicked. Some distant part of my mind registered that the lock was on the inside, that I was safe, that Adrian couldn't get to me here.

I collapsed against the sink, gripping the porcelain until my knuckles went white, forcing air into my lungs. In. Out. In. Out.

The mirror.

I looked up and froze.

The face staring back at me wasn't mine. Couldn't be mine.

My hair—I had hair. Thick, dark brown hair that fell past my shoulders, not the thin, fragile wisps that had barely grown back after chemo. I reached up with shaking hands, grabbed fistfuls of it, pulled. Real. It was real.

My face. My God, my face. No sunken cheeks. No sallow, grayish skin. No dark circles carved so deep they looked like bruises. I was... I was healthy. Young. My skin had color. Life.

My eyes. Blue. Bright blue, not the dull, pain-glazed eyes of a dying woman.

I touched my face with trembling fingers. Smooth. Warm. Alive.

My body.

I looked down, grabbed the hem of my sleep shirt and pulled it up. No protruding ribs. No wasted muscle. No surgical scars. I ran my hands over my stomach, my sides, searching for the evidence of two years in a hospital bed.

Nothing. No pain. No weakness. No cancer eating me from the inside out.

A sob caught in my throat, but it wasn't fear this time. It was disbelief. Wonder. Terror.

What was happening?

My eyes landed on the counter. Skincare products lined up neatly. Face wash. Toner. The moisturizer—I grabbed it, hands shaking so hard I nearly dropped it. Checked the bottom where I always wrote the date I opened products so I'd know when to replace them.

03/15/2019

The numbers swam in my vision. I blinked, looked again.

March 15th, 2019.

No. That was—that was impossible. That was—

I did the math on fingers that wouldn't stop trembling. Seven years. Seven years before March 2026, when I'd signed away my inheritance, when I'd gone home to die, when Adrian and Maribel had—

Seven years.

"Seven years," the presence had said. The presence that smelled like death and felt like home. The thing that had carved the number into my soul with fingers that shouldn't exist.

It hadn't been a metaphor. Hadn't been a promise of peace or punishment or anything I'd imagined in those final, dissolving moments.

It had been literal.

I was seven years in the past.

Or—or maybe I was insane. Maybe the cancer had spread to my brain and this was all a delusion. Maybe I was still dying on that marble floor and my mind had cracked, had invented this elaborate fantasy to cope with the reality of being murdered by my husband and best friend.

Maybe none of this was real.

But it felt real. The cold porcelain under my hands felt real. My hair felt real. The panic clawing at my chest felt devastatingly, terribly real.

I sank to the bathroom floor, back against the door, and let myself cry. Not the weak, silent tears of a woman too broken to properly grieve. These were loud, ugly, wailing sobs that tore out of me like they'd been trapped for years. Maybe they had been. In that other life—that other timeline—that dream or memory or whatever the hell it was, I'd had no strength to cry like this. Had no voice to scream my pain.

Now I had both.

I cried until my throat was raw, until my ribs ached, until the front of my sleep shirt was soaked with tears and snot and I didn't even care. I cried for the woman who'd died believing she was loved. For the baby I'd lost. For the years I'd wasted trying to be enough for people who saw me as nothing but a bank account.

I cried until there were no tears left.

Slowly, so slowly, the pieces of my mind started to reassemble. I became aware of my body again. Of the bathroom around me. Of the date.

March 15th, 2019.

Seven years before my death.

The presence had given me seven years. To do what? To relive everything? To change it? To suffer through it all again knowing how it would end?

Or to rewrite it entirely?

"Sera? Honey?" Adrian's voice came through the door, tentative. Worried. "Are you okay in there?"

Honey.

My stomach lurched. I wanted to vomit. Wanted to grab his razor from the sink and open the door and—

My eyes fixed on the razor. Silver. Sharp. It would be so easy. One quick motion across his throat. Watch the light leave his eyes the way he'd watched it leave mine.

Justice.

Revenge.

Murder.

I stared at the razor, my mind fracturing between what I knew and what I'd dreamed and what I could prove. Because that was the question, wasn't it? Should I kill my husband for something that hadn't happened yet? For something that might have only been a nightmare?

But it hadn't felt like a nightmare. It had felt like memory. Like truth carved into my bones.

Adrian's phone rang in the other room, the sound muffled through the door.

"Yeah?" His voice, distant. A pause. Then: "Lucien. Didn't expect to hear from you."

Lucien.

The name hit me like a physical blow. Adrian's estranged brother. The one he'd cut off after—after—

After I got my inheritance.

This conversation. This day. I knew this day.

I'd lived this day before.

The bathroom tiles were cold under me. The moisturizer still clutched in my hand. My reflection in the mirror showing me a face I hadn't seen in years—young, healthy, alive.

This wasn't a nightmare.

This wasn't a delusion.

This was real.

I had seven years.

And I had a choice to make about what I was going to do with them.