บททั้งหมดของ KILLED BY MY HUSBAND, RETURNED AS HIS NEMESIS : บทที่ 1 - บทที่ 10

## **AMARA** The house was quiet, except for the low, jagged sound of my mother. It was a keening so raw it seemed to vibrate through the very floorboards of the sitting room. I stood frozen in the center of the rug, my arms hanging uselessly at my sides, watching her. She was collapsed, her body folded in a way that looked physically painful, right beside a shape I couldn’t quite make out. *Mum is crying?* I thought. The observation felt dull and flat, like a radio frequency that hadn't quite tuned in. *Why is she crying like that?* I wondered. The front door stood wide open, letting in the heavy, humid evening air. A bag of groceries sat abandoned on the entryway table; a carton of eggs tilted precariously on the edge. They must have just walked in. They must have just seen... whatever was on the floor. My father, Chris, stood a few feet away. He hadn't even taken off his coat. He was perfectly still—a gray monument of a man, his hands curled into white-knuckled fists. He looke

AMARAI was dead.And apparently, my sister was a terrible actress.Sasha stood in the middle of the room crying her eyes out, and all I wanted to do was grab her by the shoulders and shake her. You suck at this. She knew it. I knew it. The only people who didn’t know it were the ones busy being actually devastated—my mother, folded into herself like something broken, and my father, his hand pressed flat against his chest as if he could hold his own heart in place.I watched them and felt something I didn’t have a name for. Not quite grief. Not quite rage. Something in between, something with teeth.Then there was Antonio.Antonio, who killed me. Antonio, letting people wrap their arms around him. Antonio, accepting condolences with the practiced ease of a man who had rehearsed this moment and found it suited him.You are a damn liar, I thought, standing close enough that I could have reached out and touched his face. And I will ruin your life.I didn’t know if the dead could make pr

## AMARA The food was good. That was the part that made it worse, somehow—sitting across from Antonio's empty chair, eating the breakfast he had made with his own hands. I forced myself to chew, tasting the butter and the salt, but all I could think about was the ordinary domesticity of a man who didn't know I had felt his hands on my back, heard the air whistle past my ears as I fell. I finished every bite. I had to. I needed the strength for the war ahead. Antonio came out of the shower with a towel slung low around his waist. He was moving at that particular, frantic pace he always had when his mind was already three steps ahead of his body—half in the room, half already at his meeting. He looked so clean. So innocent. It made my blood turn to ice. "You liked it," he said. It wasn't a question; he was used to being the provider of my joy. "Thank you," I said, stretching my lips into a smile that felt like it might crack my face. He took the dishes without being asked, his mo

## SASHA "Who was that?" Antonio's voice came from behind me, low and unhurried, the way he spoke when he was still half-submerged in the warmth of the sheets. I set my phone on the nightstand and turned back to him. "My sister." He raised an eyebrow. "What did she want?" "I invited her tonight." I settled beside him, tucking my feet beneath me. "You're proposing, Antonio. She has to be there." He didn't look away from the ceiling. He didn't tighten his jaw or pull back. He just went still — the particular stillness of someone running a calculation. "Tonight," he said. "Tonight." A beat of silence. Then he turned his head toward me slowly, his dark eyes moving over my face with that unhurried attention that had undone me the first time I ever sat across a table from him. "Come here," he said. "Antonio—" "Come here, Sasha." I went. I always went. That was the thing about us that I had stopped pretending to be ashamed of — I was not a woman who was managed or manoeuvred, ex

## AMARA "Ja—" I stopped. I started again. "Jason." His name came out of me like something I hadn't meant to say out loud. I stood there on the tarmac with the wind moving between our two cars and my heart doing something completely unreasonable inside my chest. "Is that — wait." I looked at his car. I looked at him. And then a thought surfaced from somewhere deep and involuntary, the kind that arrives before you can stop it. *He was the one I hit six years ago.* I hadn't even remembered his face until this moment. I had driven away and told myself it was nothing, told myself everyone was fine, and now here he was — same man, same junction, different version of me — looking at me with those dark eyes and that particular expression of someone who is deciding exactly how much trouble to be. He stepped away from his car and closed the door quietly. Then he leaned back against it, folding his arms, and the ghost of a smile crossed his face. "I sing the heavens are graciou