Reborn a CEO

It was cold.

The pavement was hard and unyielding under me. I could feel the grit pressed against my skin, although its sharpness dulled with each passing minute. The air clawed at my throat, each inhale shallow, like my lungs had forgotten how to expand. When I exhaled, it rattled, a wet, gurgling sound that should make me terrified. Yet, I was numb.

Snowflakes drifted down, melting on my skin, cold against the warmth pooling beneath me, spreading faster, thicker, stickier with every second. The world tilted strangely, sounds seemed muffled by a blanket. Headlights shone above me, harsh and blinding, before they dimmed.

Voices reached me, jagged and panicked. I knew something terrible had happened to me and I’m supposed to feel something, yet all I could summon was the faintest curl of my lips. The truth was simple.

I was dying.

I could tell what was going on, blood loss, shock. Skin clammy, fingers tingling then going numb. My body was shutting down, organ by organ, and yet, all I felt was… relief?

As I bled out on the street on a January morning in New York city, I couldn’t help but ask myself, when had it all started going wrong?

Was it the day I signed away my father’s company, the empire he had bled and sweated for to Collin?

Or before then, when I dropped out of business school just to assure him that I didn’t need the education in an attempt to show him how much I trusted him to run the company.

Was it the first time he insulted me and I swallowed it down? The first time he struck me, only to fall to his knees afterward with tears and apologies, and I believed him? Maybe it was every day after, when I scrubbed until my knuckles bled, settling into my role of his naive housewife. When I stopped crying at his words, ugly, useless, stupid and began to believe them.

Or was it when his mother would storm into the house, her voice thick with scorn, accusing me of gorging myself on her son’s food while refusing to give him a child, though she knew exactly why I couldn’t. Countlessly, Collin had beaten the child out of me and left me bleeding, storming off while I laid unconscious on the floor, only to expect dinner waiting when he returned.

Or was it further back? The day I said yes to his ring? The day our driver got sick and he sent his son over in his place. Our eyes had met, and I had been mesmerized by how beautiful his were, green with flecks of gold.

He had grinned at me showing off breathtaking dimples and I’d flushed, heart racing.

Or maybe it was long before I even met him, when I decided I wasn’t good enough for my father’s legacy because I was an illegitimate child even though I was his preferred successor?

I had been unambitious, simple, naïve. I yielded too easily to my scheming older stepsister, gave in more than I should have, convinced that if I stayed out of their deceitful games, I could somehow live quietly, happily, obliviously.

Suddenly, I didn’t want to die. Not like this. Not here. I wanted to start over, to undo every choice that had led me here. The thought struck me with a desperate, clawing urgency. I wanted another chance. My lips trembled, trying to shape the words, but nothing came, only a rasp lost beneath the snow and the chaos around me. Yet, I begged.

I want to live. Please. I want to live.

Snow thickened, softening sirens into distant echoes, smothering voices into silence. My chest hitched, breaths thinning, heartbeat skipping wildly, then faltering…

The white sky folded over me, its falling flakes dissolving on my lashes, blurring the last of the lights.

And then nothing…