The last thing Elara Sterling knew was the cold.
It was a brutal, invasive cold that seized her lungs and turned her blood to ice. The dark water of the marina was a suffocating shroud, pulling her down. The weight of the chains around her ankles was an anchor dragging her into oblivion. Above the surface, distorted by the rippling water, was a face. Handsome, charming, and utterly merciless.
Julian Thorne.
His words, spoken just before he pushed her, echoed in the water-filled cavern of her skull. "It's just business, my dear. And you were the key piece. But the board is changing. Kael will break, and his empire will be mine. You were simply the most beautiful pawn."
Panic flared, a final, futile spark before the darkness swallowed her whole.
Then, light.
Not the soft, welcoming light of the afterlife, but the harsh, golden glare of a summer morning. Elara gasped, a ragged, desperate sound, her lungs screaming for air they suddenly found. She was not underwater. She was in a bed. A vast, canopied bed she hadn't seen in five years.
Silk sheets tangled around her legs. The scent of Freesia and Lilies—her mother's favorite arrangement—cloyed the air. She pushed herself up, her hands trembling as they pressed into the expensive mattress. The room was a monument to old money and taste—the Sterling family mansion. Her old bedroom.
"A dream," she rasped, her voice hoarse. "A cruel, beautiful dream."
She stumbled to the full-length mirror. The woman staring back was a ghost. Not the hardened, weary thirty-year-old who had been murdered, but a girl of twenty-two. Soft-faced, with eyes that had yet to learn the price of trust. Her skin was unlined, her hands smooth. She was wearing the silk chemise she'd worn the night before her wedding.
Her wedding.
A cold dread, deeper than the marina's water, seeped into her bones. This wasn't a dream. The memories of the life she had lived—the cold marriage, the lonely years in Kael Vance's gilded penthouse, the seductive attention from Julian, the final betrayal—were too vivid, too painfully detailed.
She had been reborn. Returned to the day she would marry the billionaire who would become her widower.