Chapter 1

The cold was the last thing I felt, a deep, invasive chill that seeped into my bones and slowed my thoughts to a crawl. I was dying. I knew it with a certainty that was as clear as the ice forming on the cabin window. Outside, the blizzard howled, a final, mocking scream from a world I was about to leave.

My husband, Mark, had left me here. He had looked at me, his eyes empty of the love I once thought I saw, and locked the door. He cut the phone line. He took the keys to the only car. He left me to freeze and starve in our remote mountain cabin, the place we once called our escape.

All for a project. For my designs.

Just a few days ago, I had found the evidence. It was an accident, a stray email left open on his laptop. A thread between him and my sister, Chloe. It was all there, their plan laid out in cold, hard text. Mark, the ambitious star of the real estate firm, was going to present my groundbreaking eco-city designs as his own. And Chloe, my own sister, was helping him. She was feeding him information, subtly sabotaging my work, whispering poison into the ears of our colleagues. All because she was in love with my husband and sick with envy of my career.

The confrontation was ugly. I screamed, I cried, I showed him the printouts of their messages. He didn't even deny it. He just looked at me with a terrifying calmness.

"You can't prove anything, Ava," he had said, his voice flat. "It's your word against mine. And Chloe's."

Then he suggested a trip to the cabin. To "talk things out." Like a fool, I agreed. I still held a sliver of hope that the man I married was in there somewhere. He wasn't.

Now, huddled under a thin blanket, my energy gone, my mind drifted. I remembered the day I told him I was pregnant. We were so happy. But the eco-city project was in its infancy, demanding all my time. Mark pushed me, telling me this was our one shot at the big leagues. He said the stress was good for me, that it was "fueling my creativity."

The stress led to complications. My doctor warned me to take it easy, to step back from work. I told Mark we needed to slow down. He got angry. He said I was being weak, that I was jeopardizing our future. He accused me of using the pregnancy as an excuse. A week later, I lost the baby. He didn't come to the hospital. He was in a "critical meeting" with a potential investor, a meeting Chloe had arranged. When he finally showed up that night, he smelled of Chloe's perfume and told me we could "always try again later, when the timing was better." The coldness in my heart started then, a frost that was only now reaching its final, fatal bloom. He hadn't just betrayed my work; he had betrayed our child. He had let our baby die for his ambition.

My thoughts grew fuzzy. The howling of the wind sounded distant. But one sharp, clear thought cut through the fog. The hard drive. A small, encrypted drive hidden in the spine of an old architecture textbook back at our apartment. It contained everything: the original design files with metadata proving my authorship, recordings of Mark and Chloe discussing their plan, a copy of the secret clause in my family's trust. The clause was my grandfather' s doing, a way to protect his legacy. It would disinherit any family member-including those who married in-involved in unethical practices connected to the family's philanthropic projects, and the eco-city was the biggest one.

It was irrefutable proof. But what good was it now? My fingers were numb. I couldn't feel my toes. Mark and Chloe would have everything. My career, my family's money, their freedom. And I would be just a tragic story, a wife who got lost in a blizzard. The injustice of it was a fire that burned what little life I had left.

My eyes fluttered shut.

Darkness.

Then, a sudden, violent jolt.

My eyes snapped open. I wasn't in the cabin. The air wasn't frigid. It was warm, stuffy, and smelled of stale coffee and paper. I was sitting at my desk in the firm' s office. My heart hammered against my ribs, a frantic, panicked rhythm. I looked down at my hands. They were fine. I could feel them. I wiggled my toes in my shoes. Everything was there.

Sunlight streamed through the large window, illuminating the dust motes dancing in the air. Across from me, my assistant, a young intern named Leo, was sorting blueprints. He looked up, his expression concerned.

"Ava? Are you okay? You just blanked out for a second there."

I stared at him, my mind reeling. I looked at the calendar on my monitor. It was a date from two weeks ago. Two weeks before the confrontation. Two weeks before the blizzard. Before my death.

It was impossible. A dream? A hallucination of a dying mind?

But it felt real. The solidness of the desk under my palms, the low hum of the office computers, the pounding of my own pulse in my ears. It was all too real.

A miracle. I was back. I had been given a second chance.

A slow, cold smile spread across my face. It was not a happy smile. It was a promise. This time, there would be no confronting them. No screaming matches. No foolish trips to the mountains.

This time, I would be the one setting the trap.

Mark and Chloe thought they could destroy me and take everything. They were about to find out how wrong they were. This wasn't just about getting my designs back. This was for the life they stole from me, for the child I lost.

This was for revenge.