Chapter 2 Twenty-Four Hours

The door shut. The key turned.

I slid down the wall until I hit the floor, and for the first time since I’d opened my eyes in this body, I let myself breathe.

Okay. I was alive.

Good job, me. Gold star.

Unfortunately, that had been the easy part. I stayed on the carpet with my back against the bed and tried to count my problems on my fingers, and I ran out of fingers on the second hand. The door was locked. Jeffery’s family had my phone, my freedom, and quite possibly my funeral already booked.

The promise of divorce papers tonight might mean nothing by morning, because Margaret struck me as exactly the type to decide that a dead daughter-in-law was tidier than a divorced one. And every person in this house knew Juliet better than I did.

How the hell was I supposed to get out of this?

Ding.

I jumped so hard I banged my head on the bed frame.

[Return System activated. Host detected.]

The words hung in front of my eyes, pale blue, like a notification from a phone that didn’t exist. I rubbed my head, then my eyes, then my head again, and they stayed exactly where they were. A moment later a second message slid in beneath them, followed by a thin, empty bar.

[Welcome, Host. To return to your original world, you must fill the Return Bar to 100% by completing missions. Current progress: 0%.]

“Return,” I whispered. “As in, home?”

[Correct.]

“Oh, wonderful.” The laugh that came out of me was high and cracked. “So I went to bed reading a novel and woke up in a murder scene. And now there's a system involved?”

Apparently, being kidnapped into a fictional world wasn't enough. I also had to complete missions before I could go home.

The annoying thing was how badly I missed my old life. It had been boring, truly and spectacularly boring: an alarm at 6:40, instant noodles over the sink, a spreadsheet that never ended, and a boss who said “quick question” at 5:58 every evening. My biggest drama had been the neighbor’s dog. Nobody had ever tried to pour poison down my throat, and I missed that so much my chest hurt.

“Fine,” I told the empty room, wiping my eyes with the heel of my hand. “What’s the first mission?”

[Mission One: Prevent Ronan Whitaker from dying within the next 24 hours.]

[Reward: 10% Return Progress.]

[Warning: Failure to complete this mission will reduce the host's chances of returning to her original world.]

Ronan Whitaker.

I knew that name. It sat at the back of my head like a song I couldn’t place, so I dug for it the way you dig through a purse for your keys, and eventually it came up. He drove for the team that had spent years chasing Jeffery’s: the rival, the charming one with the grin and the lap times. The novel had barely given him a page, because he had never mattered to the story.

Then I remembered why.

“Ronan Whitaker’s car hit the wall at two hundred and eighty kilometers an hour. By the end of that season, Jeffery Stanton had his fourth title.”

That was all. Two lines, no funeral, no grieving friends, not even a full paragraph. A rival had died in a crash so the hero could win.

“Damn it!” I slammed my fist on the carpet and regretted it at once. “Damn it, damn it, damn it!”

I had barely managed to save my own life, and at least I’d had my own mouth to argue with. Now I was supposed to save a Formula 1 driver from a crash when I didn’t know the date, the place or the cause, and I was locked in a bedroom.

“Can I at least get a hint?” I begged the ceiling.

The blue text blinked. It took its time, as though deciding whether I deserved one.

[Hint: Check the most personal belonging of this body’s original owner.]

“That’s not a hint. That’s a scavenger hunt.”

No reply. Of course not.

So I tore the room apart. The vanity drawers gave me perfume, hairbrushes, and a jewelry box full of necklaces that glittered at me coldly. The wardrobe was worse: dresses sorted by color, shoes in neat pairs, every hanger exactly the same distance from the next. It looked less like a bedroom than a catalog photo, and nothing in it suggested a real person had ever lived here.

Then, right at the back of the wardrobe, behind a row of winter coats, my fingers hit metal. It was a small locker tucked low to the floor, as though someone hadn’t wanted it found. I worked at the lock with a nail file until it gave a grudging pop, and inside lay a single worn leather book.

A diary.

I nearly laughed. A diary belonging to a woman who, according to the novel, thought of nothing but her husband. What could it possibly tell me about a racing driver? But my survival, my way home and a stranger’s life all depended on it, so I sat in the wardrobe doorway and opened it.

The first page read “Juliet Valcourt.”

Not Stanton. Valcourt.

I skimmed the way you skim an email from your boss, quickly and a little bitterly, until one line stopped me cold.

[Father says I am the next heir. One day the Valcourt Group will be mine. I told him I would rather be loved.]

I read it again, and then a third time, slowly.

The Valcourt Group. I had seen that name in the novel exactly once, in a throwaway line: a global automotive empire with luxury cars, high-performance engines, engineering labs on three continents, racing sponsorships, and hotels in every city that hosted a Grand Prix. It was the sort of company that never returned Jeffery’s calls, and I remembered the chapter now, the one where he paced his office, furious, trying and failing to land a deal with them.

“The Valcourt Group won’t even take my call,” Jeffery had said, slamming his hand on the desk.

The diary slipped from my fingers.

That company’s only heir had been living in his house, sleeping in his bed and eating at his table, and nobody had known. And there was more. Valcourt engines sat in exactly one car on the grid, and it wasn’t Jeffery’s. It was the car Ronan Whitaker drove. The hint was right. The hint was very right.

I picked the book up again, though my hands weren’t quite steady anymore. Something ugly was shifting in my stomach. According to the novel, Juliet had clung to Jeffery for his money, but his entire family fortune would have fit inside one Valcourt lobby. Why would a woman with all of this behind her walk into a house that looked at her like a stain?

I turned the page.

[I left home today. Father says that if I walk out, the door will stay closed. I walked.]

I turned another.

[I never told Jeffery who I really am. I want to be loved for me.]

And another.

[Margaret told the guests I bought the dinner from a restaurant. I made it myself. I stayed up until 2 a.m. Jeffery laughed along. I smiled so hard my face hurt.]

Page after page like that. Five years of trying to earn her place in the Stanton family. She had memorized Margaret’s favorite dishes, worn the dresses her mother-in-law chose, endured the family’s snubs with a smile, and apologized for things she hadn’t done.

But most of all, she had spent those five years loving Jeffery with a devotion that bordered on desperation, defending him, supporting his career, and making excuses for every time he let her down. In the book, readers had called it obsession. On the page, it read like someone knocking on a door that would never open, still convinced that if she knocked long enough, someone inside would finally let her in.

Then I found an entry in handwriting that practically bounced with joy:

[Today I’m sure. We’re going to have a baby. I’m so happy I’m afraid.]

The next pages were blank, except for one that had been torn out, leaving a ragged edge behind. When the writing started again it was small and cramped, the ink blotted in places.

[They say it was my fault the baby died. Nobody will tell me what happened. Nobody will tell me anything. Abby sat with me all night. She was the only one who did.]

My throat went tight.

The novel had given this woman one line about all of it: “she lost a child, and became unbearable.” As if a baby were a personality flaw. As if grief were a bad habit.

On the inside of the back cover, I found an address written over and over, as if she had copied it a thousand times and never once used it.

I closed the diary slowly.

For months I had cheered for Juliet’s death. I had called her a migraine. But the woman in these pages was no monster. She was someone who had given up everything for people who treated her like dirt, and who had then been blamed for her own heartbreak. She hadn’t been born the villain. She had been made into one, and somebody in this house had made sure the story stuck.

A chill crept up my spine.

If they had done all this to her over five years, why on earth would I trust any of them with one more night?

So I didn’t wait for the divorce papers. I tore the curtains from their rods, knotted them together and tugged on every knot until my fingers burned, then tied one end to the foot of the bed and tucked the diary into my waistband. I climbed out of the window with my heart in my teeth, my feet scraping the wall and my hands slipping on the silk.

The mansion was crawling with guards. I knew, because I had passed three of them before I even reached the garden. A man in black looked straight at me on the lawn before looking away. Another yawned beside the fountain. A maid carrying a tray glanced up at the window I’d climbed out of and went right on walking. Nobody stopped me. Nobody even seemed to care, as though I were a piece of furniture they had stopped noticing years ago. Anyone else would have called that luck. To me it felt like proof.

I walked out through the gate in my house slippers, flagged down the first taxi I saw and gave the driver the address from the diary. I didn’t have a single coin on me, and I decided to worry about that when we got there.

The Valcourt estate sat at the end of a quiet, tree-lined street where every house hid behind its own wall. I stood in front of the iron gates, huge and beautiful and silent, and forgot how to breathe for a second. A security guard stepped out of his booth and looked me up and down.

“Can I help you, miss?”

“I’m here to see my family.” My voice came out smaller than I wanted. “I’m Juliet Valcourt.”

His eyebrows drew together. He glanced at a tablet, then back at me, politely blank. “I’m sorry, miss. There’s no Miss Valcourt in this household. The family has only one child, their son.”

Only one child.

“Miss, please step away from the gate.”

“Lady.” The taxi driver had come up behind me, arms crossed, patience gone. “I need my money.”

“Just a minute,” I whispered, though nobody was listening.

Then I heard it: a low, smooth growl rolling down the silent street like distant thunder. Headlights swept across the wall. The guard spun around and his whole body changed, and he nearly tripped over his own feet in his hurry to open the gates.

A sports car slid into view, low and sleek and the color of midnight, the kind of car that cost more than the house I grew up in. It should have swept straight through. It stopped beside me instead, and the window slid down.

A man rested one elbow on the door. Dark, messy hair, a sharp jawline, and a smile with just enough mischief in it to make my pulse stumble, even though I was in no mood for it.

“Well, well.” His eyes traveled slowly from my slippers to my face, bright with amusement. “Mrs. Stanton, standing outside the Valcourt gates in the middle of the night. Has your family’s house suddenly become more fascinating than your Romeo?”

I barely heard the joke. The moment I saw him properly, the world went still, and a familiar blue glow bloomed at the corner of my vision.

[Target located. Ronan Whitaker. Time remaining: 21 hours, 46 minutes.]

It was him. The man I had twenty-four hours to keep alive was grinning at me through a car window, waiting for me to say something clever.

And I couldn’t think of a single word.