THE BILLIONAIRE I BURIED

The coffin was open.Maya Vale peered into it. Adrian Cross. Dead. Unmoving. Completely different from the man who had destroyed her life. There was no smugness in his expression, no flash of the expensive watch he always wore when he was signing someone else's life away, only folded hands and an expression that suggested nothing could hurt him anymore. It was a scene she'd imagined dozens of times in the three years since his death, always with some part of her heart lightening as she saw him dead and unmoving, but this was not the relief she expected.A sick twist of something like jealousy curled in her stomach as she stared into his face. "Why are you crying?" Maya stiffened.The voice was coming from right behind her, saying something she barely registered. She turned around. Adrian Cross was standing six feet away from her, breathing calmly.His voice had been familiar, but nothing about the man who had just appeared in front of her was normal. He was wearing the same tailored suit, the same scent of the woodsy cologne she'd grown to dread, but more importantly, he was alive. Her eyes snapped to the coffin behind him, then back to him. "You planned to kill me," Adrian said, taking another step closer. "Why are you crying over that?" Her heartbeat was pounding in her ears. She knew his voice, that particular drawl, from boardrooms and screaming matches and the last phone call before her family was murdered-and the last conversation in the months before her funeral, when it had somehow still managed to sound like it was coming from his mouth instead of her own. She hated that she still knew, deep down, which version of him had hurt more. "You're dead." "Apparently not." He took another two steps forward until he was close enough that she could smell his cologne, three years and a funeral too late. "Who are you?" Maya finally asked. Something dark flickered across his face, colder than the expression she'd expected. "That's a cruel question to ask your wife." "I'm not your wife." "You were. Until you killed me." "I watched you die. That's not the same thing." "You watched, and you smiled." "That never happened." He leaned closer until his breath was ghosting against her ear. "Tell me what happened that night, Maya." Pain lanced through her skull-heat, fire, the sound of her mother's screams, the feel of her father's blood on the floor, and Adrian's hand reaching out to her through the smoke. Her hands flew up to her temples. "Stop." He reached out, but she smacked his hands away before he could touch her. "Don't touch me." For a moment, his mask slipped, revealing something close to shock. "You still hate me." "You burned my family's house down." "I tried to save them." "Say that again, and I'll spit on your grave." His jaw tightened, and he took a step back instead of answering. Somewhere far away, a siren wailed. Maya turned toward the sound, her heart hammering, for a moment, but when she turned back, he was gone. "Adrian-" There was nothing but the sound of wind rustling through the trees. She was alone with the other ghosts in the cemetery, and the single black coffin that waited among them. Maya forced herself to look down into it one last time. The man inside was not Adrian Cross. He wasn't anyone she recognized at all. "What-" Her phone vibrated in her hand. UNKNOWN NUMBER: You buried the wrong man. It vibrated again in her hand just as fast, a second text sliding onto the screen. If you want to know who killed your family, don't trust the man you married. She'd never married Adrian Cross. Not in this lifetime, not in any - A sharp knock on the back of her head sent her sprawling. Maya's eyes flew open to see a white ceiling she recognized all too well. Her old bedroom. The same jagged crack in the glass of the dresser mirror across the room, the same blue curtains her mother had hung when she was little. She scrambled to her feet, knocking over the nightstand in the process, and grabbed her phone, shaking hands barely able to make sense of what was on the screen. August 27, 2023. Three years before her parents' deaths, before Adrian's, before any of it. "No." She was already walking before she registered the word, already pushing open the door to the hallway, calling out into the silence. "Mom!" Her mother appeared in the doorway in her robe, a mug of tea in her hands. "Maya? What is it?" Alive. Not a ghost, not a memory, but real blood pumping through her veins. Maya crossed the hall, her heart pounding, and gripped her mother's arms so hard she spilled her tea. "Hey, hey, you're scaring me." Maya couldn't answer. She just held on, because the last time she'd seen this woman, she'd been choosing the coffin she'd be laid to rest in. "Maya. Get down here." Her father's voice. Real, too. Alive. Whole. She pushed herself toward the stairs, her legs shaking, and stumbled into the kitchen when her father gestured to the chair. He sat across from her, a folder open on the table, and next to him, standing with a hand outstretched toward her, was the man she'd once trusted with her life. Ethan Reed. Her fiancé. The man who had eventually become her family's murderer, but that was before she knew everything she did now. Ethan smiled at her, all charm and reassurance, as if nothing in the world could have gone wrong yet. She took a step back before his hands closed around her shoulders. "What's the matter with you?" Ethan asked, frowning. She opened her mouth to explain, to tell him what she knew-but in her first lifetime, she'd loved this man for two more years before she realized what he was capable of. Her father cleared his throat and gestured to the folder on the table. "We need to talk. The company is in trouble." She didn't need to look, didn't need him to say it, but she did anyway. Papers full of late payments and liens and law suits in red ink, all things that had been the beginning of the end. "Who's buying the debt?" she asked, already knowing the answer. Her father hesitated, jaw tightening before he spoke. "How did you know that?" "Who?" Her father exhaled slowly. He said the name like it was a bitter taste in his mouth. "Adrian Cross." Maya's phone buzzed in her hand. ADRIAN CROSS: We need to talk, Maya. She looked up to see the window, just in time to see a black car pull up to the curb. The driver's door opened, and out stepped Adrian Cross himself, three years before he was supposed to exist in her lifetime at all, and he was looking up at the window where she'd just been standing.