Chapter 1

I died on my husband's birthday, and he didn't even pause the party.

The monitors flatlined at 11:47 PM. Through the glass wall of the ICU, I could see the rooftop celebration he'd thrown for himself — champagne towers, a jazz band, his mistress in the red dress I'd bought for our anniversary.

Three years of marriage to Dominic Ashford, CEO of Ashford Industries, and my death was an inconvenience that interrupted dessert.

His assistant called him. I watched him glance at his phone, read the message, and put it back in his pocket.

Then he kissed her. Right there. While my blood cooled on the operating table thirty feet away.

I know because I saw it. Somehow, even as the darkness swallowed me whole, I saw everything with a clarity I never had while alive.

I saw the doctor's pitying look as he pulled the sheet over my face.

I saw the nurse cry — a stranger who cared more about my death than my own husband.

And I saw Dominic finally walk in, forty minutes later, smelling of Veuve Clicquot and another woman's perfume, and say to the attending physician: "How quickly can we handle the paperwork? I have a board meeting at seven."

Not — is she really gone?

Not — was she in pain?

Paperwork. A board meeting. That was my eulogy.

I should tell you how I got here.

I was nobody. Ivy Castillo, twenty-two, drowning in my mother's medical debt, working double shifts at a diner in Brooklyn. Dominic walked in one Tuesday night, all tailored wool and cold blue eyes, and ordered black coffee like it was a command, not a request.

He didn't flirt. Didn't smile. He slid a manila folder across the counter and said, "I need a wife. Specifically, you."

His grandfather's will required him to be married by thirty to inherit controlling shares of Ashford Industries. Not just married — married to someone "of modest, honest background." Old Alistair Ashford had been a self-made man and despised the socialites circling his grandson.

"Two years," Dominic said. "You play the devoted wife. Your mother gets the best oncologist in the country. When it's done, you walk away with two million dollars."

My mother was dying. The tumor was growing. The bills were drowning us.

I signed.

What I didn't sign up for was falling in love with him.

It happened slowly, stupidly. The way he'd leave his reading glasses on my nightstand. The rare, unguarded laugh when I burned dinner. The night he carried me to bed after I fell asleep on his office couch, and I felt his hand linger on my hair, just for a second, before he pulled away.

I thought I was breaking through. I thought the coldness was armor, and underneath was someone who might, someday, love me back.

I was a fool.

The contract said two years. He kept me for three because the board was suspicious.

During year three, I found out I was pregnant.

I was terrified and radiant. I thought — maybe this changes everything. Maybe this makes us real.

I told him over dinner, hands shaking, a tiny ultrasound photo hidden under his napkin.

He looked at it for exactly three seconds.

"Get rid of it," he said. "That's not part of the deal."

The air left my lungs. "Dominic—"

"We agreed. No complications. A baby is a complication."

"This is our child."

His eyes were glacial. "There is no 'our,' Ivy. There never was. You're a contract. Don't confuse proximity with intimacy."

I didn't get rid of it. I couldn't.

Two weeks later, I started bleeding.

The stress, the doctors said. The grief. My body, already weakened by the punishing schedule Dominic kept me on — galas, board dinners, photo ops — couldn't hold on.

I lost the baby at fourteen weeks.

I hemorrhaged on the bathroom floor of his penthouse. By the time the ambulance came, I'd lost so much blood my heart stopped twice.

The third time, it didn't restart.

And Dominic Ashford threw himself a birthday party thirty feet from my cooling body.

That should have been the end.

But I opened my eyes.

And I was standing in that Brooklyn diner, a coffee pot in my hand, staring at a man in a tailored coat who had just slid a manila folder across the counter.

"I need a wife," Dominic Ashford said. "Specifically, you."

My hand didn't shake this time.

My heart didn't flutter.

I looked at the man who would kill me, and I smiled.

"No."