Chapter 1

The last thing I remembered was the cold, sterile air of the prison visiting room and Sarah' s face, twisted into a mask of contempt.

"Ethan, that data-exfiltration device was clearly planted by you; you were just jealous of Alex and wanted him dead!"

Her voice was sharp, cutting through the thick glass that separated us.

"I truly regret leaving Alex for a simpleton like you; you deserve to rot in prison for what you did to him!"

The guard had pulled me away then, my orange jumpsuit coarse against my skin. The words echoed in my mind, a relentless drumbeat accompanying the clang of the steel door that sealed my fate. Life in prison. For a crime I didn't commit. Framed by my own wife.

It all started with a ring.

I remembered the day she got it. I came home from a long day at the Bureau, my muscles aching from a stakeout that went nowhere. Sarah was in the living room, her face lit up by the glow of a small, sleek black box.

"Ethan, look what Alex gave me!" she said, her voice full of a kind of joy I hadn't heard in a long time.

She opened the box. Inside, nestled on a bed of black velvet, was a smart ring. It was a simple, elegant band of polished titanium, seamless and modern.

"It' s a prototype," she explained, her eyes wide with excitement. "Alex said it' s the next big thing in wearable tech. It tracks biometrics, handles payments, everything. He wants me to test it for him."

Alex Thorne. The charismatic tech mogul. Sarah' s "mentor." I never liked him. He had a way of looking at Sarah that made my skin crawl, a possessive glint in his eyes that he didn't bother to hide. And she, a brilliant cybersecurity expert, seemed completely blind to it, caught up in his world of innovation and boundless wealth.

My FBI instincts screamed at me. An unvetted piece of hardware from a man like Alex was a massive security risk, especially for the wife of a federal agent.

"Sarah, you can' t wear that," I said, trying to keep my voice even. "We don' t know what' s in it. It could have anything on it."

She rolled her eyes, her good mood vanishing instantly.

"Oh, here we go. Agent Miller on the job. Can' t you just be happy for me, for once? This is a huge opportunity."

"I am happy for you," I insisted. "But this is Alex Thorne we' re talking about. His company has been flagged for data privacy issues before. You know that."

"You' re just jealous," she shot back, her voice turning cold. "You' re jealous of Alex' s success, and you' re jealous that he values my expertise. You can' t stand that I have something that' s mine, outside of this marriage, outside of your world of suspicion and paranoia."

She slipped the ring onto her finger. It was a perfect fit.

That night, while she slept, I couldn't rest. I slipped out of bed, found the ring on her nightstand where she' d left it to charge, and took it to my home office. I had a small lab setup, basic stuff for analyzing electronics. It took me three hours, but I found it. Tucked away beneath the biometric sensor, so small it was almost invisible, was a sophisticated data-exfiltration device. It was designed to skim data from any network the ring connected to, and it had a low-frequency transmitter, powerful enough to send that data to a receiver miles away.

My blood ran cold. This wasn't just a privacy risk. This was espionage.

I had a choice. I could go to my superiors, report the device, and Sarah would be immediately arrested as a potential foreign agent. Her life, her career, everything would be over in an instant. Or I could try to handle it myself, to protect her.

Blinded by a love that I now understood was completely one-sided, I made the stupidest decision of my life. I reported the device to the FBI, but I framed my report carefully. I claimed I' d received an anonymous tip about a potential vulnerability in Thorne' s new technology. I didn' t mention Sarah at all. I sacrificed a major career advancement, a promotion to lead a new counter-espionage unit that was practically mine, just to keep her name out of it. I told my superiors I needed to run a "controlled observation" to see where the data was going. I was trying to buy time, to figure out how deep she was in this, to somehow pull her out of it.

The FBI started monitoring Alex Thorne. The pressure mounted. A week later, Alex tried to flee the country. His private jet crashed on takeoff from a remote airfield. The official report called it a tragic accident, but I knew better. His partners, or whoever he was working for, had silenced him.

Sarah' s grief was a performance worthy of an Oscar. She cried in my arms, telling me how devastated she was to lose her mentor and friend. I held her, believing, wanting to believe, that she was an innocent victim caught in Alex' s web. I thought his death was the end of it. I thought we could finally move on.

But I was a fool.

She grew closer to me in the weeks that followed, more affectionate than she had been in years. It was all a lie. While I was working to shut down the investigation into Alex to protect her, she was secretly accessing my work files. She copied classified intelligence about ongoing FBI operations, the very cases I was working on, and leaked it.

The leak was traced back to my credentials. I was the only one with access to all the compromised files. And then came the final, perfect piece of her frame-up: an anonymous tip to the director' s office, with a detailed map leading to a dead drop. There, the FBI found a hard drive containing the leaked data, along with financial records showing large, untraceable payments into a ghost account. An account that was linked, through a complex web of shell companies, back to me.

I was arrested at my desk. My colleagues, men and women I had trusted with my life, looked at me with a mixture of shock and disgust. The evidence was overwhelming, meticulously crafted. Sarah had used her genius-level skills not to protect networks, but to destroy my life.

I never saw her again until that day in the prison visiting room, where she delivered the final, venomous blow.

The guard' s grip on my arm, the cold dread of a life sentence, the mocking cruelty in Sarah' s eyes... it all swirled together, a black vortex pulling me down into nothingness. I closed my eyes, a single, bitter thought forming in my mind.

If I could do it all over again...

And then, I felt warmth on my face. The scent of coffee filled the air. Not the burnt, cheap stuff from the prison cafeteria, but the rich, dark roast Sarah always liked.

I opened my eyes.

I wasn't in a prison cell. I was standing in my own living room. Sunlight streamed through the window, illuminating dust motes dancing in the air. Across from me, on the couch, sat Sarah. Her face was lit with that same, excited glow.

And in her hands was a small, sleek black box.

She looked up at me, her smile bright and guileless.

"Ethan, look what Alex gave me!"

Time hadn't just rewound. It had given me a second chance. And this time, I wouldn't be a fool. I wouldn't try to save her.

I would save myself.