Chapter 1

When our commercial jet began its plunge, my captain husband looked between me and his secret lover, feigning agonizing indecision over the last emergency flotation vest.

This time, I shoved the vest straight into their hands.

In my past life, Kian had put on a torturous show of weighing his options before strapping that very vest onto my pregnant body.

He had chosen to stay behind on the plummeting aircraft, orchestrating a romanticized double-suicide so he could die in the arms of his beloved Maren.

But Maren died on impact, while Kian walked away from the wreckage without a scratch.

For months, he played the traumatized survivor. Then, just after our daughter's one-month birthday, she was killed in a tragic accident.

Instead of consoling me, Kian cornered me, his eyes burning with vindictive malice.

"This is karma. If you hadn't forced your way onto my flight, we wouldn't have been short a vest. You killed my true love. Now, the universe is finally making you feel my exact hell."

Shattered by the sudden loss of my baby and his monstrous confession, my mind snapped. I lunged at him, sparking a desperate, violent struggle that dragged us both to our graves.

Then, the deafening roar of failing engines filled my ears. The cabin lights flashed a bloody red.

I was back on the doomed flight.

...

"Ladies and gentlemen, do not panic! Secure your emergency flotation vests and remain in your seats. No pushing!"

The blaring intercom sliced through the suffocating darkness, jolting me awake.

I didn't scramble for the drop-down oxygen masks or frantically search under my seat for a vest. Instead, my hands flew instinctively, to my lower abdomen.

Still there. My baby was still safe inside me.

Before I could wrap my mind around the impossible reality, a sharp rap on my shoulder made me flinch.

Standing over me was Briar Hale, the senior flight attendant. She wasn't panicking. Instead, she was looking down her nose at my dazed expression, her lips curling into a sneer of undisguised contempt.

"Captain's orders," Briar snapped. "We're letting the revenue passengers evacuate first. As the captain's wife, you're expected to hold the line and bring up the rear with the crew."

I stared at her and replied, "I bought a ticket just like everyone else on this manifest. Why exactly should I take the fall for your crew's liabilities?"

Briar scoffed, rolling her eyes as she braced herself against the aisle seat.

"Oh, please. Everyone knows you only bullied your way onto this flight to babysit Kian. You couldn't stand the thought of him working a route with Maren. Because you insisted on claiming a passenger seat, Maren is currently squeezed onto the jump seat in the cockpit flight deck. And just so we're clear? Thanks to your petty jealousy, this aircraft is now short one emergency flotation vest."

Without waiting for a response, Briar turned on her heel, efficiently snapping her own safety harness into place as she routinely checked the trembling passengers nearby.

I remained frozen in my assigned seat, a storm of revulsion and disbelief churning in my chest.

I was back. Somehow, I had been ripped back to the exact moment of the crash.

In my previous life, I hadn't been stalking my husband. I hadn't even known his ex-flame, Maren Corvin, was on this route. I had simply booked the last available commercial ticket to attend a corporate conference in our destination city.

It was Kian—my esteemed, narcissistic captain of a husband—who had blatantly violated federal aviation regulations. When the cabin booked full, he sneaked Maren aboard anyway, stashing her in the cockpit and tipping the safety manifest over its legal limit.

One extra undocumented passenger meant one less survival kit.

When the catastrophic engine failure hit in my past life, I had been utterly oblivious to the shortage. I had fully intended to stay behind, ready to face the freezing ocean and whatever came next right by Kian's side.

But as the cabin filled with smoke, Kian had played the tormented hero. He strapped the final remaining vest onto me.

Through my tears of gratitude, I remembered him grabbing my face. "Raise our baby, Soraya," he had choked out. "Tell our child their father was a hero."

But just as I tumbled out into the screaming winds, I caught the end of his whispered confession—not to me, but to Maren.

"We couldn't live out in the open, my sweet Maren. But dying in each other's arms... maybe this is our own kind of paradise."

The tragic, romanticized double-suicide he envisioned didn't quite pan out. The jet hit the water. Maren Corvin died on impact. Yet Kian, defying all odds, miraculously survived without a single broken bone.

I mourned his loss and welcomed him home, believing him to be the shattered hero he portrayed to the media. I stayed by his side, heavily pregnant, doing everything to heal the man I loved.

Then came the day our daughter turned one month old.

I remembered the horrific accident that took our one-month-old daughter. I remembered Kian standing over me in the aftermath, his eyes burning not with grief, but with cold, vindictive malice.

"This is karma," he had snarled over my hysterical sobs. "If you hadn't forced your way onto my flight, we wouldn't have been short a vest. You killed my true love, Soraya... and now the universe is making you feel my exact hell."

The grief had shattered my mind entirely. In a blind haze of absolute devastation, I fought him, ultimately dragging us both into a fatal, bloody end.

A violent shudder racked my body now, rattling my teeth as the aircraft pitched downward.

Kian was the one who broke the rules. He was the one who smuggled his mistress onto a commercial airliner. He was the one who orchestrated his own twisted martyrdom. Yet somehow, my innocent baby girl was the one executed to settle the score for his dead lover.

How was any of this my fault? Why was I the villain in his sick, twisted fantasy?

As the tremor of hatred shook my frame, Briar strutted past my row one last time.

"Look at the esteemed captain's wife," Briar sneered, loud enough for the adjacent rows to hear. "Shaking like a leaf when things get real. You don't possess a fraction of the backbone Maren has."