Return Of The Billionaire's Ghost Wife

The water was warm.

Too warm.

Isadora's eyes snapped open, her lungs seizing as if she'd been drowning. She jerked upright, water sloshing violently over the rim of a massive freestanding tub, soaking the Calacatta marble floor.

She wasn't drowning.

She wasn't in the ocean.

Her hands gripped the smooth porcelain edge, knuckles white. She looked down at herself-naked, submerged in water that was unnaturally warm and carried a strange, cloying scent she didn't recognize. Her skin was unblemished. No cuts. No bruises. No burns from jet fuel or salt from seawater.

Just smooth, pale skin. Perfect. Untouched.

Her breath came in short, ragged bursts. This wasn't right. None of this was right. The last thing she remembered was the screaming. The metal tearing. The impossible cold of the Pacific rushing through the cabin as Flight 815 plunged toward the black water.

She'd been dying. She was sure of it.

Isadora tried to stand, her legs trembling beneath her. The bathroom-because that's what this was, some kind of obscene luxury bathroom with brass fixtures and marble walls that probably cost more than her parents' house-swam in her vision. She made it halfway up before her knees buckled, her hip slamming against the tub's edge, her palm slapping wet marble.

The door opened.

No knock. No warning. Just the soft whisper of hinges and a silhouette filling the frame, backlit by light from somewhere beyond. The figure was tall. Broad-shouldered. Familiar in a way that made her chest ache even as her instincts screamed danger.

"Jordi?"

Her voice cracked. She hated how small she sounded. How desperate.

He didn't answer.

He stepped inside, each footfall deliberate on the heated floor. The door clicked shut behind him, sealing them in. Isadora couldn't see his face, not yet, but she could feel him-the weight of his presence, the way he seemed to consume the oxygen in the room.

She reached for a towel. Her fingers brushed terry cloth.

His hand closed around her wrist.

The grip was iron. Cold. Nothing like the warmth she remembered, the way his thumb used to trace circles against her pulse when they lay in bed talking about nothing. This hand was a vise, yanking her forward, out of the tub, her feet slipping, her body colliding with his chest before he shoved her backward.

Her spine hit the marble wall.

The shock of cold stone against wet skin stole her breath. His other hand found her throat-not squeezing, not yet, but resting there with terrifying precision, his thumb pressing against her windpipe in silent warning.

"Look at me," he said.

She did.

And she didn't know him.

The face was Jordi's-the sharp cheekbones, the jawline she'd traced with her fingers a thousand times. But everything else was wrong. His eyes, those blue eyes that used to crinkle when he laughed, were sunken. Glacial. They looked at her like she was a specimen. A problem to be solved.

"Who sent you?"

His voice was gravel and smoke, stripped of any melody she recognized.

"I don't-" She coughed, his fingers tightening just enough to remind her who controlled the air. "Jordi, it's me. It's Isadora."

He laughed.

The sound was worse than his silence. It was dry, humorless, scraping against her nerves like sandpaper.

"Isadora Vaughan died fifteen years ago." He leaned closer, his breath warm against her ear, his body pinning her to the wall. "Flight 815. I identified her personal effects myself. Watched them lower an empty coffin into the ground because there was nothing left to bury."

Fifteen years.

The number hit her like a physical blow. Her vision tunneled. She turned her head, desperate for something to anchor her, and found it in the mirror across from them-a massive gilt-edged thing that reflected the scene in cruel clarity.

A woman with her face. Her exact face. Young. Unlined. Twenty-eight, maybe twenty-nine. No gray at the temples. No lines around the eyes from laughing at their children's jokes.

Her hand rose instinctively, touching her own cheek. The woman in the mirror did the same.

"The resemblance is perfect," Jordi said, his fingers leaving her throat to grip her chin, forcing her to face him. "Whoever did the work-Reyes family? Kerrs?-they got creative. Memory implants, too, judging by the performance." His thumb traced her cheekbone, clinical, assessing. "How much did they pay you? Enough to risk the Vaughan trust? Enough to die for it?"

"I don't know what you're talking about." Her voice shook. She hated it. "I don't know any-"

"Your handler's name." His hand returned to her throat, pressure building slowly, deliberately. "You get one chance. One."

Tears blurred her vision. Not from fear-though God, she was afraid-but from the sheer wrongness of this. From looking into her husband's eyes and seeing nothing. No recognition. No love. Just calculation and something darker, something that looked almost like hope being strangled in real time.

"I don't have a handler." She forced the words out, her fingers clawing at his wrist, useless against his strength. "Jordi, please. Look at me. Look at-"

"Your silence is your answer."

His face was inches from hers now, close enough that she could see the broken capillaries in his eyes, the tremor in his jaw that he couldn't quite control. He was holding himself together with thread and spite, she realized. Had been for a long time.

"Assets that outlive their usefulness," he whispered, his thumb finding her pulse point, feeling it flutter like a trapped bird, "need to be liquidated."

The word hung between them. Final. Absolute.

Isadora stopped struggling. She let her hands fall from his wrist, let her body go limp against the wall, her only movement the desperate rise and fall of her chest as she fought for air he hadn't quite stolen yet.

She was going to die.

In her own bathroom-because this was his bathroom, their bathroom, she recognized the view of Central Park through the frosted window now-in the arms of the man who'd promised to love her until death did them part.

The irony tasted like copper and salt.

Jordi's grip tightened. Just a fraction. Enough to tell her he was deciding. Weighing her value against the risk of keeping her alive, of whatever game she represented in the war he clearly thought they were fighting.

She closed her eyes.

And waited.