REBORN TO RUIN HIM

Chapter 2: Five Years of Memories, One Morning to Use Them

POV: Elara

I wake up screaming, my hands scrabbling at my own throat like I'm still trying to breathe through dark water, my lungs already burning. I sit upright in bed, and the scream dies, and the room assembles itself around me in pieces.

The rosewood vanity, the pale blue duvet. The framed photograph on the nightstand — Dad and me at Lighthouse Point, 2019, his arm around my shoulders, both of us squinting against the sun. The lace curtain stirring against the window, morning light cutting through in long gold stripes across familiar floorboards.

My childhood bedroom.I put one hand flat on the mattress and hold it there, pressing down like I'm checking if the floor will hold.

You are twenty-three years old, I tell myself, my voice perfectly steady inside my head even as my hands tremble. You are in your parents' house. You are alive. It is the morning of.

The morning of my wedding.

Everything hits at once, and it isn't like remembering, it's like being struck, years of memories arriving simultaneously and enormous, each one perfectly preserved: every document I signed without reading, my own handwriting looping across pages that were slowly unwinding my family's legacy one clause at a time. Every boardroom introduction I made, smiling, proud of my husband, handing over trust that wasn't mine to give. The cheating, starting around year three, Vivian's perfume on his collar and his explanations so smooth, so practiced, that I chose them over the evidence of my own eyes. The quarterly reports Nathaniel summarized for me in gentle terms, the numbers I didn't scrutinize because I trusted him, because I loved him.

And then the anniversary, the railing. His face at the rail above me.

I get off the bed and my legs don't hold me properly, so I end up on the floor, back against the bed frame, knees pulled to my chest, and I stay there for four minutes. I know it is four minutes because I can see the clock on the nightstand from here, and I watch each minute change, and I let the shaking run its course until it doesn't, and then I breathe. In through the nose, out through the mouth.

He did it, he killed you. He built a machine out of your marriage and ran it for five years and when it was done with you, he threw you overboard and watched you drown. And he's downstairs right now expecting to marry you this afternoon.

I get up. My desk is in the corner by the window, small and cluttered the way it always was when I was young — stacks of paper, a cup of pens, a leather journal I bought the September before I met him and barely used. I open the journal to the first page, uncap a pen, and I sit down.

I start writing in chronological order. Full names, dates, amounts where I know them, descriptions where I don't. Every forged document I can reconstruct from memory. Every acquisition move I watched him engineer through the access I gave him. Every conversation I wasn't supposed to hear, every lie I chose to believe.

My handwriting is very small and very precise and doesn't shake at all. My mother's voice drifts up from the kitchen below she's talking to someone on the phone, and she laughs that particular high, light one she uses for people she's performing for. My father's coffee maker gurgles. Outside, a car passes slowly, its engine breaking the silence.

I have eighteen hours before the ceremony is scheduled to begin, before the cars are sent, before the flowers are arranged and the guests arrive and Nathaniel Hawthorne stands at the altar at Ivory Hall waiting for a woman who died on his yacht and came back.

I fill four pages in the first thirty minutes.

"Elara?" My mother's voice carries up the stairs, polished and careful, the way she always is. "Sophia is on her way over. Don't be still in your pajamas when she arrives."

"I won't," I call back, and my voice sounds completely normal, which surprises me, though it probably shouldn't.

I turn to a fresh page as I keep writing. The man at the center of everything, the one Nathaniel ground to powder to fund his first year of expansion, the one whose company was the foundation stone of everything Hawthorne Global was built on, his name surfaces through the rest of the memories.

Julian Cross.

Cross Dominion Group, stripped of three subsidiaries in eighteen months through contracts that shouldn't have been signed and regulatory moves that couldn't have happened without someone on the inside, I know where the office is. I know what floor, I know what was taken and when and through which shell companies and which intermediaries, because Nathaniel was proud of it in the private way he was proud of everything never boasting, but leaving the architecture of it visible to someone who knew how to look.

I knew how to look but instead I just looked too late. I close the journal, press my palm flat against the cover, and stare at the window for exactly three seconds. Then I stand up and go to my closet to find something appropriate to wear to a man's office on the morning you were supposed to marry someone else, because it definitely won't be a wedding dress.