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.

Ericka POV

The wind on the lake was fierce, whipping the dark water into jagged whitecaps.

I stood on the lower deck of the *Vittoria*, the Family yacht.

I wasn't a guest. I was a prop.

Caleb had dragged me here for Hailie's birthday party. "To show the Associates that the Reids are united," he had insisted.

I wore a dress that didn't fit, the fabric straining to cover the bruises and the burns.

Upstairs, on the main deck, the music throbbed. Laughter floated down like shards of broken glass.

I saw them through the glass railing. Hailie was wearing a tiara. A literal, sparkling tiara.

She was holding court. My mother was laughing at her jokes; Fitzgerald was pouring her champagne.

And Caleb... Caleb was watching her with a look of feral, intense protection.

Then, he spotted me.

He came down the stairs, his expression thunderous.

"Why are you hiding?" he demanded. "You're making us look bad."

"I'm dying, Caleb," I said, my weight sagging against the railing. "I can't pretend anymore."

"Stop with the cancer act," he spat, snatching my arm. "You bought a grave yesterday. Just to manipulate me. To make me feel guilty."

"I bought it because I have nowhere else to go."

"You have *here*!" he shouted. "You have the life I give you!"

"This isn't a life! It's hell!"

Hailie appeared at the top of the stairs. "Caleb? Is she bothering you?"

"Go back up, Hailie," Caleb said, his voice softening instantly.

"I just wanted to offer her a drink." She walked down, balancing two flutes.

Suddenly, the boat lurched violently as a massive wave slammed into the hull.

Hailie stumbled.

She wasn't wearing deck shoes; she was in six-inch stilettos.

She pitched forward, crashing into me.

I lost my footing.

Together, we tumbled over the low railing.

The water hit me like concrete.

It was freezing. Pitch black.

I clawed my way to the surface, gasping. My lungs burned; icy water filled my mouth.

"Help!" Hailie screamed, flailing nearby. "Caleb!"

I saw Caleb grip the railing.

He scanned the water.

He saw me. He saw Hailie.

He had two hands, but the current was ripping us apart. He could only reach one of us before the dark water swallowed us whole.

I looked at him and stopped struggling.

*Choose,* I thought. *Show me who you really are.*

He locked eyes with me. For a split second, I saw hesitation. I saw the boy who used to braid my hair.

Then his gaze snapped to Hailie.

"Hailie!" he roared.

He dove.

He swam past me.

He swam *right* past me.

The wake from his powerful strokes pushed water into my face.

He grabbed Hailie and hauled her toward the ladder.

He didn't look back.

I watched them climb up. I watched him wrap her in his jacket.

I stopped kicking.

The cold was numbing, but strangely peaceful.

I let the water take me.

They had thrown me away years ago; the lake was just finishing the job.

I sank into the black, and for the first time since waking up, I felt warm.