Chapter 2

The call ended, and the baby celebrated.

"Yes! Dad's coming. We're saved!"

My knees gave out. I sat down hard on the edge of the bed and waited for the voice to say something else.

It didn't.

I pressed both hands flat against my stomach. Still flat. Still nothing but the small, private flutter I had been taught to call gas.

"Mom?" Delight flooded the tiny voice. "You can hear me! At least dying once bought us this."

The baby kicked.

Then the memory hit me.

I saw myself eight months pregnant in a filthy apartment, wearing torn clothes and lying beside bags of garbage.

The apartment smelled like bleach over something older. I knew that smell. I had spent six months learning it.

Mason stood over me, one fist twisted in my hair, a knife pressed to my swollen belly.

"Six months I let this bastard live under my roof," he said. "Now it finally pays off."

I begged until my throat tore. "Take anything you want. My savings. My mother's jewelry. I'll tell my father nothing. Hurt me if you have to. Just don't touch my baby."

He slapped me.

"You still think you're the Foster princess? Your family wrote you off the second you ran. You don't get to order me around."

He grinned and lifted the knife.

"Someone's offering fifty grand for it. I'd be an idiot to say no."

Then Mason cut my child from my body, killed it in front of me, and left me to bleed out.

The last thing I heard was not my own screaming.

It was the small, wet sound of him setting the knife down on the floor.

I came back to myself on my bedroom floor, one hand clamped over my mouth.

I don't know how long I stayed there. Long enough for the carpet to print its pattern into my knees. Long enough to notice the clock on my nightstand still ticking like nothing had happened.

Then I understood what the ticking meant.

I was alive. My baby was alive. And the man who would kill us both was standing at my rear gate, waiting for me to walk into his arms.

The baby told me it had awakened in my womb after dying—that it remembered the first life from beginning to end.

So did I now.

After I ran away, Mason's tenderness had lasted only until my family cut me off.

Then he had beaten me, starved me, and bartered me away whenever he wanted money. So this was what I had called freedom.

Grief burned through my shock and left something colder behind.

I crossed to the intercom. "Security. There's a man near the rear gate. Bring him to the house."

I hadn't moved from the spot. I was still standing there when the shouting started downstairs.

"Please, I swear I didn't let in a stranger," Tessa cried. "Mason isn't a thief. He's Miss Vivian's friend. Ask her!"

I walked down the stairs.

My hand stayed on the banister the whole way down. Not for balance.

I needed something to hold.

Two guards had Mason pinned facedown on the floor. Tessa stood beside him, pale and furious.

"Ask me what?" I said. "Go on."

Mason lifted his head. Relief flashed across his face.

Mason looked up at me with the face he had worn the night we met—open, patient, ready to be forgiven.

Two lifetimes ago, that face had worked.

I let him hold it for a second. Then I looked past him.

"I know he was your childhood friend," I said, to Tessa. "But I never invited him onto this property."

Her mouth fell open.

"You brought a man here without my permission," I continued. "You know better."

Mason's relief vanished.

Tessa was ready for a girl who would run into Mason's arms.

She was not ready for this one.