Ericka POV

The doctor held the X-ray up to the fluorescent light, his expression grim, but Caleb was already checking his Rolex, his patience thinning with every second.

"Broken ribs," Dr. Evans murmured, clipping the film into place. "Two of them. Fractures consistent with... blunt force trauma."

I sat on the edge of the examination table, cradling my side. Every breath felt like a jagged shard of glass twisting between my bones.

"She fell," Caleb said flatly.

He stood by the window, refusing to look at me. His thumbs flew across his phone screen. Texting her. Always her.

"I didn't fall," I whispered, my voice thin and brittle. "You pushed me."

Caleb looked up then. His eyes were cold, void of even a flicker of empathy. "You threw yourself against the car to make a scene. Don't rewrite history, Ericka. It's pathetic."

Dr. Evans cleared his throat. He looked terrified. In our circle, physicians who asked too many questions tended to vanish.

"There is... something else," Dr. Evans stammered.

He swapped the film for another scan. It looked like a storm of grey static blooming in the center of a clear sky.

"The systemic stress from the marrow transplant, followed by the coma, and the... severe malnutrition from her weeks in isolation," the doctor said, his voice dropping. "Her immune defenses have completely collapsed. These shadows... they are masses in the pulmonary tissue."

The room went dead silent.

The air conditioner hummed, a dull roar in my ears.

I stared at the grey blobs on the film.

Cancer.

"It's aggressive," Dr. Evans said softly. "Stage four."

I felt a strange, cold numbness wash over me. Not fear. Just a hollow confirmation that the universe was finally done with me.

"Bullshit," a voice cracked through the silence like a whip.

Fitzgerald walked in. My brother. The Heir.

He looked radiant. Strong. His skin was flushed with the very life my blood had bought him.

"Fitz," I breathed.

He didn't look at me. He glared at the doctor.

"Hailie warned us about this," Fitzgerald sneered, stepping further into the room. "She said Ericka would feign a terminal illness to get out of the safe house. To crawl back into the Estate."

"This isn't feigned, Mr. Reid," Dr. Evans said, his hands trembling as he gestured to the light board. "These are medical scans. You can see the tumors."

"Faked," Caleb said, slipping his phone into his pocket. "She has access to your systems, Evans? Did she bribe you? Or threaten you?"

"No! Sir, please, look at her! She is wasting away!"

They looked.

But they didn't see a dying woman. They saw a manipulator. A rat.

"Hailie just called," Caleb said, turning to Fitzgerald. "She's locked in the master bathroom at the Estate. She says she heard glass breaking. She thinks it's Ericka's old loyalists trying to get in."

Fitzgerald’s face went pale. "We need to go. Now."

"What about the diagnosis?" Dr. Evans asked, frantically holding out a prescription pad. "She needs immediate oncology support—"

"Give her some Tylenol," Caleb cut in, his voice icy. "And get her back to the Marsh. If she wants to play sick, she can do it alone."

He strode over to me.

I flinched, shrinking back against the paper-covered table.

He seized my chin, forcing me to look up at him. His fingers dug into my jaw, bruising the delicate skin.

"If you think dying will make me forgive you for what you did to this family," he whispered, his breath hot against my face, "you don't know me at all."

He released me with a shove.

They left.

I watched my brother and my fiancé walk out the door, rushing to save a woman who was in no danger, leaving me to face a death sentence in silence.

*

I was discharged an hour later.

The guards drove me back to the Marsh—the isolated safe house that had become my prison.

When I walked inside, the maid, a woman fiercely loyal to Hailie, was waiting in the foyer.

"Mr. Skinner gave orders," she said, her face a mask of stone.

"What orders?" I asked, clutching my aching side.

"He said you're contaminated. Said you need to be cleaned before you're allowed in the main quarters."

She pointed a bony finger toward the downstairs bathroom.

The tub was already filled. The water was steaming, fogging the mirrors. The air was thick with the acrid sting of bleach and industrial cleaner.

"Get in," she commanded.

"It's too hot," I whispered, looking at the rising steam. "And the chemicals... my skin is too sensitive..."

"Get. In."

I stripped, my hands shaking. My body was a grotesque map of scars and protruding bones, a testament to everything they had taken from me.

I stepped into the water.

It scalded.

I screamed, but the sound was swallowed by the tiled walls.

I sat there, the bleach stinging my eyes and burning my throat, scrubbing my skin raw until the water turned pink. I tried to scour away the sins they said I committed.

But as the skin peeled away, I realized the only thing I was washing down the drain was the last, foolish hope that they would ever see me as human again.

Ericka POV

I sat on the floor of the dusty attic, surrounded by the ghosts of my past.

Old Polaroids littered the floorboards. My sixteenth birthday. The day Caleb became a Made Man. The day Fitzgerald graduated.

In every photo, I was smiling. Back then, I was the glue holding this family together.

Now? I was the toxic solvent they were desperate to dispose of.

I struck a match.

The flame flickered to life, orange and blue against the shadows.

I held it to the corner of a photo of Caleb and me. The fire curled the paper, devouring his face, then mine.

It felt good.

"Dramatic," a voice purred.

I looked up.

Hailie stood at the top of the stairs. She was wearing a white cashmere coat—pristine, expensive, and utterly untouchable.

"What are you doing here?" I coughed, the acrid smoke already beginning to sting my lungs.

"Checking on the prisoner," she said. She walked over, her heels clicking on the wood, and looked at the burning pile in the small metal brazier I had found. "Burning bridges?"

"I'm burning lies," I said.

She smiled. It was a shark's smile—all teeth and dead eyes.

"You know," she said idly, "Caleb hates fire. Reminds him of the warehouse explosion that killed his father."

Without warning, she lifted her booted foot and kicked the brazier.

It tipped over with a metallic clang.

Burning embers scattered across the dry, dusty floorboards. An old rug, brittle with age, caught instantly.

"Oops," she said.

The flames jumped, hungry and fast, licking up the curtains.

"Are you crazy?" I scrambled back, trying to stomp out the fire with my bare feet, ignoring the heat blistering my skin. "Help me!"

She didn't move. She just pulled out her phone and dialed.

"Caleb!" she screamed into the receiver, her voice instantly transforming into a performance of terrified panic. "Help! She's trying to burn the house down! She's trying to kill me!"

She hung up and looked at me. Her eyes were dead calm.

"Run, Princess."

The guards burst in seconds later. They dragged us out just as the smoke turned the hallway into a gray chokehold.

Caleb arrived ten minutes later.

His car screeched to a halt on the gravel drive.

Hailie ran to him, sobbing, her face perfectly smudged with a little soot she had applied herself.

"She's insane, Caleb! She lit the rug! She said if she couldn't have the house, no one could!"

Caleb looked at the smoke billowing from the attic window, his jaw tight.

Then he looked at me.

I was coughing violently, black phlegm spotting the white gravel. My feet were burned and raw.

"I was burning photos," I wheezed, desperate for air. "She kicked it over."

Caleb walked up to me. He didn't hit me.

That would have been too kind.

"You like heat?" he asked softly.

Before I could answer, he grabbed me by the back of my neck.

He marched me past the main house to the detached sauna near the pool.

"Caleb, please," I begged, my fingers clawing at his wrist. "My lungs..."

He shoved me inside.

"Crank it," he ordered the guard.

He locked the glass door.

The heat rose.

180 degrees. 200 degrees.

The air became thick, an unbreathable soup that scorched my throat with every gasp.

I pounded on the glass.

Caleb stood outside, watching. His face was stone. He was the executioner, and I was the witch.

My chest felt like it was imploding. The tumors in my lungs reacted to the extreme heat, constricting my airways until I was breathing through a straw.

I slid down the glass, gasping for air that wasn't there.

I was dying. Again.

Through the haze, I saw Hailie walk up to the door.

She held a bucket of ice water intended for the post-sauna plunge.

She unlocked the door.

I fell out, landing on the cedar deck, my body convulsing as I tried to pull in oxygen.

I thought she was saving me.

"Cool off," she sneered.

She dumped the ice water over me.

The shock was instant and brutal. My body seized. The temperature differential sent my nerves into overdrive, pain exploding behind my eyes.

I lay there, shivering violently on the wood, gasping for breath, while the man who promised to protect me watched his mistress torture me and called it justice.

Ericka POV

I woke up in the hospital again, the sterile smell of antiseptic doing little to mask the scent of smoke that still clung to my memory.

My skin felt too tight, blistered and raw from the heat and the shock of the explosion.

Caleb was sitting in the chair next to the bed.

He wasn't reading. He was just watching me, his gaze unreadable.

"You're a danger to yourself," he said, his voice devoid of warmth. "And to everyone around you."

"I have cancer," I whispered, my throat dry and scratching. "I have broken ribs. I have burns. And you think *I'm* the danger?"

"Stop lying," he snapped, the sound sharp like a whip crack. "Dr. Evans told me everything."

"He told you I was dying."

"He told me you paid him to fake the report."

My blood ran cold. Hailie. She had gotten to Evans. Or maybe she had just threatened his family. Either way, the trap had snapped shut.

"I didn't..."

The door swung opened. Hailie walked in, holding her arm delicately against her chest. It was wrapped in a bandage.

"Oh, Caleb," she whimpered, her lower lip trembling. "It hurts."

Caleb was out of his chair in a second. "What happened?"

"When she... when she pushed past me at the sauna," Hailie lied, her eyes tearing up on command. "She shoved me into the doorframe. I think it's fractured."

I hadn't touched her. I had crawled out of that sauna on my hands and knees, gasping for air.

Caleb turned to me. The look in his eyes was terrifying. It wasn't just anger anymore. It was pure hatred.

"You hurt her," he said, his voice dangerously low.

"I couldn't even stand!"

He walked over to my bed. He reached out, wrapped his fingers around the plastic tubing, and ripped the IV line out of my arm.

Blood spurted —a stark, violent red against the white sheets.

"You don't deserve comfort," he said. "Get up."

"Caleb, please."

"Get. Up."

He dragged me out of the hospital room, ignoring the nurses who stared but dared not intervene. He didn't sign discharge papers. He was the Underboss; he didn't have to.

He drove us to the Family Cemetery in silence.

It was raining. A cold, grey Chicago drizzle that felt like ice against my feverish skin.

He pulled me out of the car.

"Walk," he ordered.

We walked to the plot where his father was buried. The father who died in the fire he thought I tried to replicate.

"Kneel," he said.

"Caleb, the gravel..."

He kicked the back of my knees.

I collapsed instantly. The sharp stones tore through my thin hospital pants, digging into my skin like teeth.

"Apologize," he said. "Apologize to my father for disrespecting his memory. Apologize to the Family for being a traitor."

Hailie stood under a black umbrella, watching. She looked like a widow grieving a husband who wasn't dead yet.

"I'm sorry," I sobbed, the rain mixing with my tears until I couldn't tell the difference. "I'm sorry I loved you. I'm sorry I saved Fitzgerald. I'm sorry I didn't die in the coma."

"Louder," Caleb said.

I screamed my apologies to the wet earth until my voice gave out into a broken rasp.

He left me there.

He took Hailie and drove away, leaving me alone with the dead.

I knelt in the rain for an hour, shivering, bleeding.

Finally, I stood up.

My knees were raw meat.

I limped to the cemetery office. The caretaker, an old man who knew the Families, looked at me with pity.

"Miss Reid?" he asked. "Should I call your father?"

"No," I said, my voice hollow. "I need to buy a plot."

"For whom?"

I pulled a crumpled wad of cash from my pocket—emergency money I had stitched into my gown before the coma, the only thing Hailie hadn't found.

"For me," I said.

He hesitated.

"Do it," I said. "Somewhere far away from the Reids. In the pauper's section. I don't want them to find me."

I signed the papers with a shaking hand.

It was the first decision I had truly made in five years.

I realized then that I wasn't just buying a grave. I was buying my freedom.