Amira Osborne POV:

They appeared at my mother’s funeral.

Carter and Francine walked into the quiet, somber chapel as if they held every right to be there. Francine, in a ridiculously flamboyant black hat, had the audacity to approach me, her face arranged into a mask of sorrow.

“Amira, I am so, so sorry for your loss,” she murmured, placing a hand on my arm.

The touch felt like a hot brand. I recoiled, my voice dripping with ice. “I hope you die screaming, Francine.”

Her smile faltered for a second. Carter stepped forward, his face tight with disapproval. “Amira, that is enough. Have some class.”

“Class?” I laughed, a harsh, grating sound. “You wish to speak of class, after what you two have done?”

“Francine was just being her usual, blunt self. You are too sensitive,” he said, dismissing my pain with a wave of his hand.

“Get out,” I said, my voice low and shaking with a rage that vibrated through my entire body. “Both of you. Get out of my mother’s funeral.”

He had the nerve to look offended. “I am going nowhere. Edie was to be my mother-in-law. I have a right to be here.” He leaned in closer, his voice dropping to a threatening whisper. “And if you continue to make a scene, I promise you, there will be no wedding to concern yourself with at all.”

My eyes burned. I was about to tell him I did not give a damn for the wedding, for him, for any of it. I was about to unleash the plan that had been forming in the back of my mind, the escape route Arjun had offered me.

But I never got the chance.

Francine let out a sudden, theatrical shriek. She stumbled backward, colliding with the small table that held my mother’s portrait and her urn.

Time seemed to thicken, to slow to a crawl. I watched in horror as the table tipped, as the urn containing my mother’s ashes tumbled through the air, as her smiling face in the photograph met the marble floor.

The urn did not shatter so much as burst, a soft, percussive sound like a clod of dry earth being struck. My mother’s ashes, a fine, pale grey dust, mingled with the shards of pottery and bloomed in a small, tragic cloud before settling on the cold, unforgiving stone.

A strangled cry escaped my lips. “Mom!”

I fell to my knees, scrambling to scoop up what was left of her, my fingers digging into the gritty dust, tears blurring my vision until the world was nothing but a smear of black and grey.

Francine just stood there, a hand pressed to her mouth in a mockery of shock. She did not move to help.

Carter, held back by Francine’s grip on his arm, did not move either. “Do not go near it, darling,” I heard her whisper to him. “It is bad luck.”

He listened to her. He actually listened.

Instead of helping me, he took the small brass basin used for burning memorial papers, strode over to the mess, and began sweeping my mother’s remains into it with a dustpan. Then, he walked out of the chapel and emptied the entire thing—ashes, pottery shards, and all—into the nearest public trash receptacle.

I watched him, my mind unable to process the sheer, methodical cruelty of the act. He moved with a kind of brisk efficiency, as if he were merely tidying up a minor spill.

My voice came out as a strangled whisper, filled with more venom than I knew I possessed. “You are nothing but her pathetic little dog.”

His head snapped toward me. And then he did something I never, ever thought him capable of.

He slapped me.

The heat of his palm had not yet registered on my cheek when the sound of it—a flat, ugly crack—reverberated through the chapel. The mourners’ faces blurred into indistinct ovals of shock. A high-pitched ringing began in my left ear, and I could taste the faint, coppery tang of blood on my tongue. The warmth he had left on my skin felt like a burn from ice, and I looked at him, at this man I had once believed would protect me, and for the first time, I understood that the most grievous weapons are often held in the hands of those we have loved.

He had a moment of panic, of regret in his eyes, but it was swiftly extinguished by a cold defensiveness. “There were embers in the basin,” he said, his voice loud enough for everyone to hear. “It could have started a fire. I was protecting everyone.”

In that moment, I saw with a terrible, final clarity. There was nothing left to save.

Amira Osborne POV:

I did not weep. I did not cry out. I merely raised a hand to my throbbing cheek and regarded him, my eyes as vacant and still as a winter pond.

“You are right, Carter,” I said, my voice unnervingly level. “That was a very brave thing to do.”

My composure, the sheer absence of hysterics, seemed to disquiet him more than any outburst. He appeared to perceive, for the first time, the immense and silent distance that now separated us—a void across which my voice, my very self, could no longer travel to reach him.

He reached for my hand, his voice attempting a softer register. “Amira, listen… I am sorry. These affairs have been stressful. Let us simply endure this. We shall go and select your wedding gown tomorrow, precisely as we planned.”

I stared at a point just past his shoulder, my gaze unfocused. The wedding gown. It felt an entire lifetime ago that I had cared for such frivolities. From the instant he had proposed, from the moment I had consented to set my own aspirations aside for his, the whole enterprise had been a profound and ruinous error.

He must have sensed he was losing his hold, for he did something unprecedented. He turned to Francine, his tone uncharacteristically firm. “Francine, I believe it is best you return home. Amira and I require a interval of privacy.”

He spent the remainder of the day by my side, a perfect facsimile of a grieving, supportive fiancé. He even knelt with me before my mother’s empty memorial niche until late into the night. It was a masterful performance, but it was too little, too late.

When we finally returned to the apartment, she was there, waiting for us. Francine was huddled by our front door, wrapped in a thin blanket, shivering and affecting a look of utter terror.

She threw herself into Carter’s arms. “Carter! I was so frightened! I kept hearing noises… I think… I think it was Edie’s ghost. She is angry with me!”

He attempted to gently disengage himself, glancing nervously at me. “Francine, do not be ridiculous.”

She turned to me, her eyes wide and pleading. “Amira, you believe me, do you not? You must understand, I feel such a weight of guilt.”

A short, brittle laugh escaped me. “Oh, I am certain my mother’s spirit is near. But she would not squander her energies on you. She would be seeking out the persons who are truly responsible for her death.”

Francine’s face crumpled. She burst into loud, theatrical sobs. “I cannot remain here! I shall have a breakdown! I shall… I shall throw myself from the balcony!”

That was all it took. Carter’s resolve crumbled. He whirled on me, his eyes blazing with fury. “Why must you be so cruel? So selfish? She is distraught, and all you can do is mock her! At times I wonder why I ever imagined I could spend my life with someone so heartless.”

The argument drew the neighbors from their apartments. They stood in their doorways, watching, listening. Francine, ever the actress, played to the gallery, sobbing about how she was but a lonely widow who saw Carter as a son, and how I was a jealous, vindictive shrew.

The neighbors, of course, took her side. I heard the whispers. “Poor woman.” “That Amira is so cold.” “This is naught but petty jealousy.”

Carter did not defend me. Not once.

He simply wrapped his arm around Francine and led her inside our apartment, shutting the door firmly in my face.

Amira Osborne POV:

Someone in the small assembly of onlookers raised a telephone, its small lens a malevolent, glittering eye. The humiliation was a physical pressure, a great weight upon my chest that stole the very air from my lungs. My nails dug into my palms, the sharp sting a welcome anchor in the rising tide of mortification.

I turned to go back to my mother’s empty apartment, anywhere but here. I twisted the doorknob. It was locked.

He had locked me out.

I pounded on the door, my voice raw. “Carter, let me in! What are you doing?”

His voice came from the other side, cold and distant. “Not until you apologize. Get upon your knees and tell Francine you are sorry for upsetting her.”

The neighbors snickered. I stood there in the drafty hallway, shivering in my thin funeral dress, stripped of my home, my dignity, my last shred of self-worth.

Finally, defeated, I sank to my knees. The cold of the tile seeped through the thin fabric as I bowed my head in feigned repentance.

The door clicked open. Carter stood there, holding his suit jacket. He draped it over my shoulders in a gesture that might have once seemed tender.

But the jacket was redolent of her. That cloying, expensive perfume of gardenia and musk, mingled with the scent of his skin. It was the very odor of my betrayal.

Francine appeared behind him. She did not smile, but a low, satisfied hum escaped her throat, and she reached out, not to comfort him, but to straighten the lapel of his coat, a small, proprietary gesture of ownership. “Oh, that is my jacket, darling,” she purred. “Carter let me borrow it earlier. My feet were so cold.”

My stomach heaved. I tore the jacket from my shoulders and threw it upon the floor as if it were on fire.

“I shall sleep in the study,” I said, my voice flat and devoid of all emotion. I pushed past them without another glance.

Carter frowned, a flicker of unease in his eyes. But then his telephone pinged with a calendar notification: “Wedding Day - 2 Days.” The anxiety on his face smoothed away, replaced by his usual arrogance. He thought he still had me. He thought I was merely throwing a tantrum, that I would never abandon him, not with our wedding so close. He believed I had nowhere else to go.

He was wrong.

In the study, I opened my laptop. An email glowed on the screen. “Security Clearance: APPROVED. Welcome to the Chimera Project.”

Tears of relief, of gratitude, of a pure, unalloyed sense of deliverance streamed down my face. My telephone rang. It was Arjun. “Your flight is booked, Amira. Day after tomorrow. Seven o’clock in the morning. Sharp.”

I looked around the study, the room where I had spent innumerable nights laboring over Carter’s business proposals instead of my own research. My eyes fell upon a pair of small clay figurines on the bookshelf—ones we had fashioned on our first anniversary. He had promised then that we would always be a shield to one another.

Without a second’s hesitation, I swept them from the shelf. They made a dull, unsatisfying thud as they landed in the wastepaper basket.

Then, I booked my ticket.