Chapter 2: Waking Up Dead
1059 Words
For three full seconds, Mia didn't move at all.
She stared at the date on her phone, waiting for it to blink, glitch, correct itself into something that made sense. It didn't. The numbers sat there, telling her a lie too specific to be one.
Three years. Not "a while." Three years, to the day.
"That's not possible," she whispered, and her voice came out cracked, too loud in the empty room.
Her hand went to her side, pressing against the cotton nightshirt. Nothing. No wound. But her palm stayed there a beat too long, curled protectively over the place a knife had gone in, as if her body hadn't caught up with the news that there was nothing left to guard.
Down the hall, off-key and cheerful, Nadia was murdering a pop song while she got ready for school. Mia's chest ached, sudden and sharp.
She's alive. None of this has touched her yet.
She yanked her nightshirt up and stared at her bare stomach, half-expecting the wound to bloom back the moment she stopped watching for it. The morning light through the blinds was warm, ordinary, wrong—she'd died under candlelight, and this plain gold sun felt like an insult to that memory.
Not a dream. Dreams didn't carry the smell of her mother's burnt toast drifting down the hall—a smell that used to mean safe, before it meant something closer to We can't afford a new toaster.
She grabbed the notepad off her nightstand and wrote three words before she could talk herself out of it: gold. black. chanting. Then, smaller: the pendant—circle inside a broken circle.
Her hand paused over the page. Memory faded fast—she knew that much already. If she waited even a week, she'd be softening the edges into something safer and less true. She wasn't going to let the only evidence she had die twice.
She folded the page small enough to hide inside her shoe.
A knock made her flinch—harder than a knock deserved, her whole body flooding with useless alarm before her brain caught up and called it a door.
"Mia? Breakfast's getting cold, and you have work in forty minutes." Her mother's voice, warm and unhurried, followed the door open before Mia could answer.
She crossed the room and smoothed a piece of Mia's hair back—the same absent gesture she'd done a thousand mornings before—and Mia had to stop herself from flinching away from it.
"You're freezing." Her mother frowned, catching Mia's trembling hand. "And pale. Didn't sleep?"
"Bad dream."
"Rough one, by the look of you." She set a plate of toast down on the desk. "You work too hard for someone your age. Once things settle down, you'll finally get to just be young for a while."
Things were never going to settle down. I was going to marry the man who fixed it, and it was going to kill me.
"I just want good things for you," her mother added, missing the way Mia had gone still. "You deserve them."
Mia caught her wrist before she could leave. "Mom—if I told you something completely insane, would you believe me?"
"Depends how insane." Amused. Unsuspecting.
Insane enough that I died in a wedding dress with your future son-in-law's hand on the knife.
"Nothing." Mia's voice cracked. "Never mind."
Her mother studied her a beat too long, unconvinced but unwilling to push, and left with a soft click of the door.
Mia sat with her hands flat against her knees, breathing hard. She'd almost said it. Careful. You get one chance not to sound insane. Don't waste it.
She picked her phone back up, scrolling without thinking, and stopped cold on a photo in her camera roll she didn't remember taking—herself, older, laughing at something off-frame, a bracelet on her wrist she'd never owned in this life. She zoomed in on the charm. A circle inside a broken circle. The same shape she'd just written down from memory. Around the photo's edges, faint enough to miss, warmth bled in gold at the corners and dark at the center, like something had pulsed there the instant the shutter clicked.
The timestamp reads two years from now.
Her stomach dropped. She hadn't taken this photo yet. She wouldn't, for years. But it already existed, glowing faintly wrong at the edges—proof of a day that hadn't happened, bleeding backward into a day that had.
"Mia!" Nadia's voice, from near the front door, is too sharp for a girl running late for the bus.
Mia's whole body went cold.
She was halfway to her feet when Nadia burst in, ponytail coming loose, words tumbling faster than she could sort them. "The Ashford car is here, downstairs, Mom's stalling the driver—it's about the dinner, the loan thing, they moved it up they never move things up, is that bad? That feels bad—"
The introductory dinner. Not the wedding. Not yet. The first time the Ashfords would ever set foot in her family's life—the dinner that would decide whether the bank gave her mother's business another six months to survive. The dinner her mother could not afford to refuse, and so neither could she.
"They've come to take you to meet them. Right now." Nadia yanked at Mia's sleeve. "You have to get dressed, like, now—why do you look like that?"
Mia didn't answer.
She was already looking past her sister, out through the window, to the black car idling at the curb below—and to the man stepping out of it, unhurried, in a suit the color of every nightmare she'd had since she'd opened her eyes this morning.
She hadn't expected him to come himself. Not this early. Not before she'd had even one hour to prepare for the sight of him alive, untouched, three years away from ever holding a knife.
Her legs moved before her mind caught up, carrying her toward the closet, toward the mirror, toward whatever version of herself she was about to become in front of him.
She had exactly one meeting to convince Kade Ashford she was nothing worth watching closely.
This time, she would let him underestimate her—and she would remember everything he showed her.
- Writer
