Chapter 2

My head throbbed. The drug they used was still in my system, making the world swim.

I remembered this moment with perfect, horrifying clarity. In my first life, I woke up ashamed, confused, and terrified. Julian' s mother, Eleanor Vance, had set this up. She drugged my drink at the pre-wedding dinner, had Julian carry me here, and then "discovered" us in the morning.

The scandal was their weapon. It forced me into a quick, quiet wedding. It gave them leverage over my family and my inheritance for decades. They made me feel dirty, like I was the one who had done something wrong.

My stomach churned with a memory forty years old. The memory of his cold words: "an unfortunate loose end."

Not this time.

I slid out of the bed, my movements careful and silent. I looked at the man I had once loved, the man who had built his empire on my back. His handsome face, so charming to the world, now looked like a mask.

I went into the bathroom and turned the shower on, the water as cold as I could stand it. I scrubbed my skin until it was red, washing away his touch, washing away the shame that had clung to me for a lifetime.

I wasn't the naive, heartbroken girl anymore. I was a sixty-year-old woman with a score to settle, trapped in a twenty-year-old' s body.

As a spirit, I had seen the full picture. I saw how they mocked my devotion. I saw how they laughed at my trust. I saw the legal documents that proved I was nothing more than a placeholder, a local broodmare to secure a bloodline while he built his real life elsewhere.

The Vances didn't just want my family's money. They wanted its legacy, its name, its quiet dignity, all to polish their own tarnished reputation. And they used me to get it.

The cold water shocked my system into full alertness. The fog of the drug was clearing. The rage was not. It was a clean, sharp blade in my mind.

I stepped out of the shower, wrapped a towel around myself, and looked in the mirror. I saw my own young face, full of a life I hadn't yet wasted.

This time, there would be no shame. No quiet wedding. No forty years of servitude.

There would only be payback.