Chapter 3

Anna's POV

For a whole month, I played the perfect, broken wife.

When Arthur came home, I had dinner waiting. When he pulled me close, acting deeply concerned about my "lingering trauma," I rested my head on his chest and forced out grateful tears. Every time his hands touched my skin, it felt like I was covered in spiders. But I swallowed the bile. I smiled. I waited.

I was hunting for something.

Arthur was a massive control freak. He despised cloud servers. Anything that could destroy him was locked inside the wall safe behind his office bookshelf. A bank-grade beast with a dual lock.

I didn't know the code, but I knew his ego. He loved numbers with sick, personal meanings.

I tried his birthday, mine, Lillian's. Nothing. Then, while dusting his study, a faded Polaroid fell out of an old medical text. Arthur and Lillian, young and smiling. On the back, in Arthur's neat handwriting:

Our rebirth - 0914.

September 14th. The day they met.

My chance finally came the day before Thanksgiving. Arthur caught a last-minute flight to New York for an overnight medical conference.

By midnight, the house was dead quiet.

I locked the study door, pulled the heavy curtains, and turned on a single, dim lamp. I dropped to my knees in front of the steel box. My hands were shaking so badly I could barely punch the keypad.

0-9-1-4.

Beep.

It flashed green. My heart hammered against my ribs so hard it hurt. I twisted the cold handle. It clicked.

Inside were deeds, cash, and trust documents. But all the way in the back, sitting in the dark, was a sleek, black flash drive.

I stared at it. I knew that plugging it in would destroy whatever was left of my sanity. But I grabbed it anyway.

I booted up my laptop and shoved the drive in. One single folder popped up.

E_Project.

Sick bastard. I clicked it. Two video files.

I clicked the first one. Dashcam footage. The timestamp matched the rainy night of Emily's crash. On the screen, Emily's car sped toward an intersection. Seconds later, a massive delivery truck blew through a red light and smashed into her driver's side.

The visual was a nightmare, but the audio stopped my heart entirely.

Right before the impact, Emily's voice screamed through my laptop speakers. Frantic. Terrified.

"The brakes! God, the brakes aren't working! Help! Somebody h—"

CRASH.

I clamped both hands over my mouth, sobbing so violently I choked. Someone cut her brakes. And suddenly, a memory hit me like a baseball bat to the skull: The day before the crash, Arthur insisted on taking Emily's car into the shop. A 'routine tune-up', he'd called it.

I couldn't breathe. My hands shook as I clicked the second video.

Hidden camera footage. High angle. St. Jude's VIP ICU.

Emily was on the bed, buried under tubes and wires. Her face was totally bruised, but the green line on the heart monitor was pulsing. Strong. Steady. She was fighting.

The door opened. Arthur walked in, wearing his scrubs. Alone.

He walked right up to her bed. He stood there, staring down at my 22-year-old sister. No hesitation. No mercy. He reached over and turned off the ventilator's audio alarms.

Then, he grabbed her breathing tube and yanked it out.

On the screen, Emily's body convulsed. Her chest heaved wildly, fighting for air she couldn't get. But she was in a medically induced coma. She couldn't wake up. She couldn't fight back.

Arthur just stood there. He casually shoved his hands into his pockets, watching her suffocate. He didn't flinch. He didn't look away. He just raised his wrist and checked his Rolex, tracking her exact time of death.

11:45 PM.

He choked my little sister to death so he could rip her heart out while it was still warm.

The video lasted five minutes. Five minutes to murder my only family.

I broke.

A raw, screaming wail ripped out of my throat. I bit down viciously on my own arm to kill the noise, biting until I tasted hot, metallic blood. I collapsed onto the floor, pulling my knees to my chest, suffocating on my own tears.

The man I cooked for. The man I slept next to. He sabotaged her car, and when that didn't kill her fast enough, he walked into her ICU room and snuffed her out himself. Just to give his mistress a shiny new heart.

I wanted to run to the kitchen, grab a butcher knife, drive to the hospital, and carve his chest open. I wanted to see if he even had a heart.

No.

I forced myself to gasp for air. Killing him was too fast. Too merciful. For what he did to Emily, I needed him to suffer. I wanted to watch them strip his medical license. I wanted to see the police drag him out of his hospital in handcuffs. I wanted him and Lillian to rot in concrete cells until they forgot what sunlight looked like.

I ripped the flash drive out and shoved it into my bra. I put the safe back exactly how I found it, and locked the door.

I walked into the bathroom and turned the sink on full blast. I splashed freezing water over my face until the tears stopped and my skin went completely numb.

I looked up at the mirror.

Bloodshot eyes. Messy hair. A bruised, bleeding arm. I didn't look like a grieving victim anymore. I looked like a nightmare.

"Arthur Vance," I whispered to the empty room, tasting my own blood. "I'm going to ruin you."