Chapter 3

Once he agreed, I let out a breath, finally let the phone slip from my hand, and passed out.

When I woke again, every inch of me hurt.

"Quit faking. Get up." Robert nudged me with his foot, disgust in the motion.

A cough tore out of me before I could stop it, and I spat a mouthful of blood.

I wiped it away and stared him down. "Don't push your luck."

He turned, grabbed a sheet of paper, and shoved it into my hand. "Sign this. The share transfer. You sign it."

I laughed, a bleak little sound, and let the paper drift to the floor. "I'd rather die."

For a second Robert froze. He looked at me, bloodied head to foot, and something in his eyes turned unfamiliar.

The old me had leaned on him every day, bent to him in everything.

He crouched and reached out to wipe the blood from my forehead. I turned my face away. "Don't put your filthy hands on me," I said, weak as it came out.

He paused, then stood and looked down at me. "Stop making this hard on yourself. Sign, and I'll still let you be Mrs. Randall, fair and proper."

Under that imperious stare, I tore the transfer into pieces.

He swept Tiffany against him and slammed out. "Sit here and think about it. Until you're ready to sign."

"Let's see how long that backbone of yours holds." His voice went calm, then turned tender. "Tiffany's the easy one. She understands me."

After they left, I gritted my teeth and dragged myself to the study computer, hunting for the records of how he'd transferred the company's assets.

Robert's machine was spotless. But I found the second hidden system underneath it anyway.

I tried his birthday, our wedding anniversary. Nothing. In the end I typed in Tiffany's birthday, and the hidden system opened.

I clicked fast and found it all without trouble — every filthy thing he'd done out in the open.

I saved every transfer record, every stolen core secret from my father's company, onto a hard drive.

The whole study was dead silent, nothing but my own breathing. And every breath came laced with pain.

When the screen showed the save was complete, I sagged against the back of the chair.

Then footsteps came pounding down the hall.

Robert kicked the door open, eyes fixed on me like a snake's. "What did you do on my computer?"

I slipped the drive into my clothes and said the first thing that came. "Typing up a new copy of the share transfer."

He bought it. His eyes eased, and he hauled me up out of the chair. "Good that you've come around. Come with me. We're going to your father's grave."

I couldn't work out what he wanted at the grave. By the time I'd stopped wondering, we were already there.

Tiffany stood off to one side, pointing and directing a crew of construction workers. An excavator shoved my father's headstone over, hard.

She lit up the second she saw me. "I'm starting my own business. This plot is already in my name. I had a master look at it specially. He says the feng shui here is the best, so I'm putting up a fifty-thousand-square-foot mall. Your dad can keep blessing my venture, watch it flourish."

She leaned close to my ear. "On the surface it's a mall. Underneath, it's a red-light district."

Rage burned through me. I threw myself in front of the excavator, waving my arms. "Stop digging!"

Tiffany stepped up and said it softly. "You should go die. Just like your father."

I backhanded her across the face. She clutched her cheek, weeping prettily, and at the same time pressed her body against mine, raising her voice. "Hit me all you want, as long as you spare the baby in my belly."

Then she forced a dagger into my hand, gripped my wrist, and drove it toward her own stomach, murmuring in a voice only the two of us could hear. "Finally, a use for the blood pack I prepped."

Tiffany clutched her bleeding stomach and wept over my shoulder at the people behind me. "I only begged her to spare my baby..."

Robert's face went black. "I came here meaning to be kind, to tell you your dad's grave was being redone. A dog never quits eating its own filth, does it."

I couldn't be bothered to explain. "This is my father's grave. What gives you the right to hand it to some woman you've known three years?"

He looked me dead in the eyes. "Tiffany isn't just 'some woman' you can wave off."

"Three years ago, someone drugged me at a bar. If it weren't for her, I'd be dead."

Three years ago, a rival had planted a bomb in the bar Robert frequented and slipped sleeping pills into the drink he loved. When I found out, I went into the fire to save him, risking my life. He came to his senses fast enough. I came out with the skin of my lower back ruined, a full month of grafts in the burn unit.

When I was discharged and went to find him, I walked in on him and Tiffany in our wedding bed, doing what they were doing.

So why was Robert now saying it was Tiffany who saved him?

He waved a hand. "Level the rest of it."

I ignored the roar of the excavator and threw my arms around my father's headstone, holding on.

Robert kicked me clear and took a hammer to the stone I had carved with my own hands.

I clawed my way back toward the grave. Only my father's ashes were left now. I dug into the earth that was his, hands already torn open, fingers running with blood within moments. I didn't care. I only wanted to keep one last piece of him.

Robert hauled over a bucket of sulfuric acid. I wrapped my arms tight around the urn, the way my father had held me when I was small.

He ordered the bodyguards to drag me up. The urn fell from my arms and broke apart, my father's ashes scattering like shattered snow. I reached for them, and the bodyguards held me fast, gripping me so I couldn't move.

In that instant my eyes burned wide enough to split, and one thought was all that was left: I would make every one of them pay.

With all that hatred filling me, the dark closed in.