The interior of the Rolls-Royce smelled of expensive leather and suffocating silence.

Eleanor sat stiffly on the right side of the backseat. She stared straight ahead. Beside her, Alistair had his face turned toward the window. He watched the blurred trees of the rural highway speed by, completely ignoring her existence.

The tension in the car was thick enough to choke on.

Eleanor swallowed hard. She needed to break the ice. She needed to know her son was okay.

"Evelyn will take good care of Ethan, right?" Eleanor asked. Her voice sounded too loud in the quiet car.

Alistair let out a short, breathy scoff. He didn't turn his head.

"My mother knows how to raise a Montgomery far better than you ever could," he said.

The words sliced right through her. Eleanor's face drained of color.

She pressed her thumb deep into her palm. She remembered the Blackwood estate. She remembered her adoptive father, Arthur Blackwood, tearing the family apart. She remembered being pushed to the front lines, the sacrificial lamb offered to the Montgomery family to save a dying reputation.

She married Alistair out of duty. But somewhere along the way, the duty had turned into a desperate, bleeding love for a man who treated her like a ghost.

A sharp, vibrating ringtone shattered her thoughts.

It was Alistair's private phone. The one he kept in his inner breast pocket.

Alistair pulled it out. He frowned at the screen. There was no caller ID. Just a blank screen flashing with an incoming call.

His thumb hovered over the red button to decline it. But something made him stop. He swiped green and pressed the phone to his ear.

"Yes?" he answered flatly.

The car was so quiet Eleanor could hear the faint, crackling static from the speaker.

Then, a voice. A woman's voice. It was weak, trembling, and barely a whisper.

"Alistair..."

Alistair's entire body went rigid.

It happened in a fraction of a second. His broad shoulders snapped straight. His jaw locked. The color vanished from his face, leaving him looking like a corpse.

His hand gripped the phone so hard his knuckles turned stark white. The veins on the back of his hand bulged against the skin.

"Cordelia...?"

The name scraped out of his throat. It sounded like he was choking on glass.

Eleanor's heart stopped beating.

Cordelia.

The name she had heard him whisper in his sleep. The ghost that haunted the halls of their marriage. His first love. The woman who had died in a boating accident five years ago.

Alistair completely forgot Eleanor was sitting inches away from him. He leaned forward, his chest heaving.

"Where are you?" Alistair demanded, his voice cracking with a frantic, desperate energy. "Are you alive? Tell me where you are!"

A tiny, muffled sound came through the speaker. An address.

Alistair dropped the phone into his lap. He lunged forward, slamming his hand against the glass partition separating them from the driver.

"Stop the car!" Alistair roared. "Victor, stop the damn car right now!"

The Rolls-Royce swerved. The tires shrieked against the asphalt. Victor slammed on the brakes, bringing the massive vehicle to a violent halt on the shoulder of the deserted dirt road.

Dust kicked up around the windows.

Alistair turned to Eleanor.

His dark eyes were wild. They were completely devoid of the cold indifference he usually showed her. Instead, they were filled with a manic, terrifying urgency.

"Get out," he ordered. His voice was a lethal weapon.

Eleanor blinked. Her brain couldn't process the words. "What? Alistair, we are in the middle of nowhere. This is-"

"I said get out!"

He didn't wait for her to move. He reached across her body, his arm brushing roughly against her chest, and shoved the heavy car door open.

The hot, dusty wind of the rural highway blasted into the air-conditioned cabin.

Eleanor stared at him. Her chest tightened so hard she couldn't pull in oxygen. The sheer madness in his eyes terrified her.

She slid across the leather seat. Her high heels hit the gravel. She stepped out into the dirt, the thin fabric of her beige dress whipping around her legs.

Alistair didn't look at her. He didn't check if she was safe. He pulled the door shut with a violent slam.

"Turn around," Alistair shouted at Victor through the partition. "St. Catalina Hospital. Drive like your life depends on it!"

Eleanor took a step forward, raising her hand. "Alistair, wait!"

The Rolls-Royce's engine roared. The tires spun, spitting gravel and dirt onto Eleanor's bare legs.

She stood frozen on the side of the empty road.

She watched the black car speed away, shrinking into a dark speck against the horizon. Through the tinted rear window, she saw the silhouette of her husband. He was hunched over, clutching his phone to his chest like a lifeline.

The wind howled around her. It dried the moisture in her eyes before the tears could even fall.

Cordelia.

The dead Crescent moon light. She was back.

The realization hit Eleanor's stomach like a physical punch. It was colder than the air conditioning in the bedroom. It was colder than anything she had ever felt in her life.

The wind whipped across the empty highway, biting through the thin fabric of Eleanor's dress. She wrapped her arms tightly around her waist, shivering uncontrollably.

She looked up and down the road. Nothing. Just endless stretches of dry grass and cracked asphalt.

She pulled her phone from her small clutch. The screen lit up. One bar of signal.

Her fingers trembled as she opened a ride-sharing app. The loading circle spun for ten agonizing seconds before a red banner popped up: No cars available in your area.

The sun was beginning to dip lower in the sky. The shadows stretched long and distorted across the dirt. From the distant woods, a low, guttural howl echoed through the trees.

Panic clawed at her throat.

She couldn't call Alistair. The image of his manic, desperate eyes flashed in her mind. He was gone. He had erased her from his reality the second he heard that voice.

Eleanor opened her contacts. She scrolled past the Montgomery numbers and tapped the only name that meant safety.

Stella Foster.

The line rang. Once. Twice. Static hissed through the earpiece.

"Ellie?" Stella's voice crackled through the phone.

"Stella... it's me." Eleanor's voice broke. A sob tore its way up her throat, raw and humiliating.

"Ellie? What's wrong? Where are you? You sound like you're crying." Stella's tone shifted instantly from casual to fiercely protective.

Eleanor swallowed hard, tasting the dust in the air. "I'm on Route 9. Outside the city. Alistair... he made me get out of the car."

She couldn't say Cordelia's name. Her tongue refused to form the syllables.

"What the hell?!" Stella screamed into the phone. "That bastard left you on the side of the road? Send me your pin.I'll come right away to pick you up."

Eleanor pulled the phone away, shared her location, and put it back to her ear. Her hand was shaking so badly she almost dropped it.

"Stella," Eleanor whispered. Her heart hammered a frantic rhythm against her ribs. "Have you... have you heard anything today? About the Blackwood family?"

She asked the question like she was stepping on a landmine.

The line went dead silent. The static seemed to amplify.

"Ellie," Stella said. Her voice was suddenly very low, very serious. "Take a deep breath. I was going to call you. It's... it's crazy."

Eleanor's lungs stopped working.

"The whole Upper East Side is exploding with it right now," Stella continued, her words rushing out. "Cordelia Blackwood. She's not dead."

The ground beneath Eleanor's feet tilted.

"They're saying she didn't die in that boating accident five years ago," Stella said. "She had amnesia. Some fisherman in a remote village in Europe took her in. She got her memory back a few weeks ago. She secretly flew back to New York a week ago. She's been hiding, watching you."

Every word was a nail being driven into Eleanor's skull.

The phone call in the car. The frantic desperation in Alistair's voice. The way he threw her away like a piece of garbage.

It was all real.

He didn't just abandon her. He abandoned her to run back to his resurrected true love.

"Ellie, are you still there?" Stella asked, her voice tight with worry. "This bitch coming back is bad news. You know how obsessed Alistair was with her. You need to-"

Eleanor couldn't hear the rest. A loud ringing started in her ears, drowning out Stella's voice.

Her fingers went completely numb.

The phone slipped from her grasp. It hit the asphalt with a sharp crack. The glass screen shattered into a spiderweb of jagged lines.

Eleanor stared down at the broken phone.

Five years. Five years of swallowing her pride. Five years of letting Evelyn strip her of her dignity. Five years of trying to warm a man made of ice.

It was all a joke.

She was never his wife. She was just a placeholder. A warm body to keep the seat clean until the real queen returned to claim her throne.

Eleanor's knees gave out.

She collapsed onto the dirt shoulder of the road. She pulled her knees to her chest and buried her face in her arms.

The dam broke. The humiliation, the grief, the sheer, suffocating agony of the last five years ripped out of her chest. She screamed into her knees, her body shaking violently as the tears finally came.

She sat alone in the dirt, crying until her throat bled.

Eleanor sat on the gravel. Her tears had dried into tight, itchy tracks on her cheeks. The violent shaking in her chest had stopped, leaving behind a hollow, numb cavern.

She didn't pick up the shattered phone. She just stared at the dirt.

A pair of blinding headlights cut through the gathering dusk.

Eleanor shielded her eyes. She grabbed the guardrail and pulled herself up, her legs stiff and aching. She thought it was Stella.

But as the vehicle rolled to a stop, the sleek, heavy grill of a black Bentley came into view.

It wasn't Stella.

The driver's side window rolled down smoothly. Victor Kowalski sat behind the wheel. His face was a blank, emotionless slate, exactly as it always was.

"Mrs. Montgomery," Victor said. "Please get in."

Eleanor didn't move. The cold wind whipped her hair across her face. She stared at Victor, her voice scraping out of her dry throat. "Did he send you?"

Victor nodded once. "Mr. Montgomery instructed me ，he is handling an emergency situation, so let me take you home first."

Emergency.

Eleanor let out a short, hollow laugh. The sound was brittle enough to snap. His emergency was his dead lover.

She wanted to scream at Victor to drive away. She wanted to wait for Stella. But the sky was turning a bruised purple, and the temperature was dropping fast. Survival instinct overrode her pride.

She bent down, picked up her shattered phone, and opened the heavy rear door.

She slid onto the leather seat. The heater blasted warm air against her frozen skin, a sickening contrast to the ice in her veins.

The Bentley pulled away. The cabin was dead silent. Eleanor turned her head, pressing her forehead against the cool glass of the window, watching the darkness swallow the trees.

Miles away, the smell of industrial bleach and rubbing alcohol burned Alistair's nostrils.

He stood in the sterile hallway of St. Catalina Hospital, right outside the VIP suite. Through the rectangular glass window of the door, he stared at the hospital bed.

Cordelia lay there. She looked impossibly fragile, her skin translucent against the white sheets. She was sleeping.

The doctor had just left. Severe malnutrition. Post-traumatic stress. Extreme physical exhaustion.

Alistair pressed the heel of his hand against his forehead, rubbing hard. A crushing weight pressed down on his chest. Guilt. It was a suffocating, toxic guilt. Five years ago, he had pushed her to run away with him. If he hadn't, she never would have been on that boat. She never would have suffered for five years in a fishing village.

He dropped his hand. He remembered the phone call in the car. He remembered the look of absolute terror on Eleanor's face when he shoved the door open and ordered her out.

A sharp, unexpected spike of irritation flared in his gut.

He knew he had crossed a line. He knew leaving a woman on a dirt road was unacceptable. But his brain had short-circuited. He couldn't process two realities at once.

Alistair reached into his pocket and pulled out his phone. He stared at the screen.

He didn't call Eleanor. He couldn't face the sound of her voice right now.

He dialed Victor's number.

"Did you get her?" Alistair asked the second the line connected.

"Yes, sir," Victor's voice came through the speaker. "We are currently on route back to the estate."

Alistair let out a breath he didn't know he was holding. "Make sure she gets inside safely."

He hung up. He stared at the black screen of his phone. His heart was beating too fast. Why was he so anxious about Eleanor? She was safe. She was fine.

The realization that he cared made the irritation in his gut burn hotter.

He shoved the phone back into his pocket. He pushed the heavy door open and walked into Cordelia's room, forcing his mind to focus on the fragile woman in the bed. The woman he owed his life to.

Back in the Bentley, Eleanor's broken phone vibrated in her lap.

The cracked screen lit up with Stella's name.

Eleanor swiped to answer. "Stella."

"Ellie! I'm almost at the pin, where are you?"

"I'm in Victor's car," Eleanor said quietly. Her voice was completely devoid of emotion. "Alistair sent him. I'm going back to the estate. You can turn around."

"Are you okay? Do you want me to come to the house?"

"No," Eleanor said. She looked at her reflection in the dark window. Her eyes looked dead. "I'm fine, Stella. I'll call you tomorrow."

She hung up before Stella could argue.

She leaned her head back against the headrest and closed her eyes. The tears were gone. The panic was gone.

Alistair had made his choice. He had drawn the battle lines on that dirt road.

Eleanor took a deep, slow breath. When she opened her eyes, the dead look was gone. It was replaced by a cold, hard clarity.

She was going back to the Montgomery estate. But she wasn't going back as a victim.

The war was about to begin.