Chapter 3

Three years passed.

From my strange, disembodied prison, I watched the world move on. My father' s career soared. Scarlett became a D.C. socialite, her hit-and-run a forgotten secret. The Georgetown Four were more powerful than ever.

And Noah Vanderbilt... he disappeared for a while after that night. When he returned to D.C., he was different. Colder. Harder. He never spoke to the other three again. I watched him sometimes, a silent specter, and my hatred for him burned cold. He was the one who had led me to my death.

Scarlett, in her effort to build a perfect life, got engaged to Carter Sterling. Their engagement party was the event of the season.

That night, Carter left the party early, complaining of a headache. He got into his brand-new sports car. I watched him.

Suddenly, he started screaming. He clawed at the air, his eyes wide with terror. He was hallucinating, yelling that the car was filling up with dust, with concrete dust, choking him. He slammed his foot on the gas, racing blindly down the highway.

The crash was spectacular. The car wrapped around a bridge support at over a hundred miles an hour. Carter was killed instantly. The police ruled it a tragic accident, likely caused by a bad reaction to drugs.

I felt a dark, cold satisfaction. One was down.

Scarlett mourned for a respectable few months before moving on. Her next choice was Blake Ashford. They were perfect for each other, both cruel and beautiful. Their wedding was planned for the fall.

The night before the ceremony, Blake couldn't sleep. He told Scarlett he was going to the new panic room to check the security systems. He seemed nervous, on edge.

He never came back.

They found him the next morning. He was inside the panic room, which had been locked from the outside. He had been tortured. His tongue was cut out. His eyes were gouged. The walls, the walls made of my ashes, seemed to watch, silent and gray.

The media went into a frenzy. Scarlett Hayes, the beautiful daughter of a Senator, was now the "Black Widow of D.C." Two fiancés, both dead in bizarre, violent ways. Whispers of a curse began to circulate through the city' s elite.

Scarlett was a wreck. My father was furious, his perfect family image crumbling.

Desperate and terrified, Scarlett agreed to a third engagement. This time, to Julian Croft. He claimed he could protect her, that his tech and security skills were unparalleled. The family clung to him like a life raft.

They were all fools. They still didn't understand what was happening. They thought it was a curse, a ghost.

They were right about the ghost. Me. But they were wrong about who was pulling the strings.