WANT ME BACK. BREAK ME TWICE

The Poisoned Web

The countdown timer on the sterile wall didn’t care about wealth, power, or ancestral bloodlines. It simply blinked, shedding its red numbers in the heavy silence of the laboratory.

`00:01:05`

`00:00:32`

`00:00:00`

"Now!" the elderly man commanded, his voice fracturing the quiet room like shattering glass.

The female assistant immediately plunged the amber-tinted syringe directly into Elara’s central line, pushing the high-concentration reversal serum into her system. At the same instant, the operatives charging the advanced defibrillator pads stepped forward, their faces pale under the fluorescent lights.

"Clear!"

Elara’s translucent, cold body jolted violently on the medical table as the electrical current ripped through her chest. The metal frames of the bed rattled.

Everyone froze, their eyes locking onto the massive digital monitor above her head. The silence stretched for five seconds. Ten seconds. Fifteen seconds.

The piercing, unbroken electronic drone filled the room. The green line remained a flawless, terrifying horizon.

Heart Rate: 0 BPM.

"Again! Increase the voltage to maximum!" the old man roared, sweat breaking out across his forehead as he slammed his hand against the console. "The serum isn’t absorbing! The hypothermia has constricted her blood vessels—the compound is trapped in her muscle tissue! Her heart isn't catching it!"

"Sir, the twelve-hour threshold has officially passed," the assistant cried out, her fingers flying across the neuro-mapping keyboard as a warning light began to flash amber. "The oxygen stasis is beginning to degrade. If her core doesn't restart right now, the cellular damage becomes irreversible!"

"Charge it again!" the old man yelled, his voice laced with an aggressive, panicked desperation. "We cannot let her die in this room!"

Thousands of miles away, the atmosphere inside the grand parlor of the Margualie Mansion was suffocating for a completely different reason.

"Are you completely out of your mind?!" Marina hissed, her voice a sharp, venomous whisper as she paced frantically across the expensive Persian rug. She turned on Treas, her eyes wide with a cold, calculated panic. "You burned her? With an industrial iron? In the basement?!"

Treas sat on the velvet sofa, her hands trembling violently as she chewed on her manicured nails. "I didn't think she would die, Mother! She was always so resilient, always taking whatever we gave her! How was I supposed to know her heart would just stop?!"

"Rohan is completely changed," Marina warned, leaning down until she was inches from Treas’s face, her voice dripping with malice. "He isn't the indifferent husband we manipulated anymore. His eyes... he looks like a dead man walking, and he is looking for blood. If he finds out what we did while he was in Zurich, he won't just divorce you, Treas. He will dismantle our entire family legacy until we are begging on the streets."

Treas swallowed hard, a cold sweat breaking out across her neck. "What do we do? The servants... Nina knows."

"Nina is a nobody. We handle the evidence first," Marina snapped, turning toward the double oak doors of the parlor and calling out sharply. "Come in."

The heavy doors pushed open, and the estate’s Head of Security stepped inside, his expression rigid and uncomfortable. He knew the power dynamics of the house, but he also knew who signed his paychecks.

"Madam," the security chief said, bowing his head slightly.

"The CCTV footage from the basement corridors and the kitchen scullery from the last forty-eight hours," Marina commanded, her voice dropping into a smooth, commanding baritone. "Delete it. Completely wipe the server logs and ensure no backups exist on the cloud network. Do it now, and there will be a permanent bonus added to your offshore account."

The security chief hesitated, his eyes darting between Marina and the terrified Treas. "The master server requires an administrative override code, ma'am. Mr. Margualie's personal..."

"I don't care what it requires," Marina hissed, stepping closer, her aura predatory. "Erase it before.."

"Erase what?"

The freezing, gravelly voice cut through the room like a executioner's blade.

Marina and Treas violently gasped, turning toward the doorway.

Rohan stood in the entrance of the parlor. He looked entirely monstrous. His expensive white shirt was unbuttoned at the collar, wrinkles marring the fabric, and his knuckles were wrapped in thick, coarse medical gauze that was already staining with fresh blooms of dark blood. His eyes were heavily bloodshot, surrounded by dark, hollow shadows of pure psychological torture. He didn't look like a billionaire; he looked like a wraith that had crawled out of a grave.

The security chief immediately froze, pulling his hands behind his back. Treas's heart hammered so hard against her ribs she felt faint, her face turning a chalky, guilty white.

"Rohan! Darling!" Marina recovered first, forcing a smooth, tragic smile onto her face, though her fingers clutched her pearl necklace so tightly the string threatened to snap. "We... we were just instructing security to tighten the perimeter. With the tragic passing of Elara, we wanted to ensure no paparazzi or press managed to leak any unsavory rumors about the estate."

Rohan didn't look at Marina. His dead, obsidian gaze moved slowly across the room, locking onto the sweating security chief. He walked forward, his footsteps heavy and unhurried, creating an unbearable, high-friction tension in the tight space.

He stopped directly in front of the guard.

"Leave us," Rohan whispered.

"Yes, sir," the chief muttered, practically running out of the parlor without looking back.

Rohan turned his bloodshot eyes onto Treas. The sheer, suffocating guilt inside his chest was mutating into a volatile, lethal quietness. "I am going down to the server room myself. I want every frame of footage from the day I left for Switzerland until the minute her body was carried out of this house."

Treas choked back a scream of pure terror, her fingers digging into the sofa cushions. "Rohan... please, you're obsessing over a dead girl. You need to rest, for the baby's sake..."

"If I find a single second of missing footage," Rohan interrupted, his voice dropping into a lethal, quiet rasp that made the air in the room drop twenty degrees, "I will burn this entire house to the ground with everyone inside it. Do you understand me?"

Without waiting for an answer, he turned and walked out, leaving the two women trembling in the wake of his terrifying, unhinged aura.

Thirteen Hours Unalive.

Back in the hidden laboratory, the aggressive panic had reached a fever pitch.

The clock on the wall now read `13:02:14`. An entire hour had passed since the safety window had slammed shut.

Suddenly, the flatline on the monitor didn't stay still. It began to jolt violently, sending erratic, jagged spikes across the screen as a horrific electronic alarm began to blare through the speakers.

Warning: Severe Neuro-Muscular Spasm.

Warning: Cardiac Tachyarrhythmia.

On the table, Elara’s cold body suddenly convulsed, her back arching off the mattress as her limbs stiffened rigidly. The raw, blackened iron burn on her arm stood out in horrific contrast against her seizing, pale skin.

"She's convulsing! The compound is mutating against the reversal serum!" the assistant screamed, desperately trying to hold Elara's shoulders down as the machines beeped maniacally. "Her core temperature is dropping to fatal levels! The brain waves... sir, the brain waves are flatlining into total zero!"

The elderly man lunged forward, grabbing a manual resuscitation bag, his face twisted in absolute horror as he looked at the dying monitor.

"The stasis is collapsing!" he cried out, his voice cracking with the ultimate realization of failure. "The drug didn't hold her safely... it locked her inside the dark! Sir... we are losing her permanently! She’s turning into a real corpse!"

Elara's body gave one final, violent shudder before falling completely, terrifyingly limp against the white sheets.

The monitor snapped back into a single, high-pitched, endless flatline.

Heart Rate: 0.

Brain Activity: 0.

The clock kept ticking into the thirteenth hour, and in the blinding white light of the room, Elara Vale lay entirely, unrecoverably dead.