Buried Alive With My Fake Husband

The darkness had weight. It pressed against her eyelids, heavy and suffocating.

Her lungs burned. It wasn't the sharp sting of cold air, but a dull, starving ache. She tried to inhale, to pull in a deep breath, but the air was thick. It tasted stale. It smelled like chemicals and dying flowers.

She tried to sit up.

Thud.

Her forehead slammed into something hard. Wood. Solid, unyielding wood.

The pain radiated through her skull, a sharp bolt of lightning that shattered the fog in her brain. She reached up. Her hands didn't find open space. They found satin. Tufted, soft satin lining a ceiling that was three inches from her nose.

Panic didn't creep in. It exploded in her chest.

Her heart hammered against her ribs like a trapped bird. Her throat constricted. She was in a box. A small, rectangular box.

She scrabbled at the sides. Satin. Wood. Satin. Wood.

She was buried.

A scream clawed its way up her throat, but she swallowed it down. It tasted like bile. If she screamed, she would use up the oxygen. She needed to think. She needed to breathe.

Her left hand flailed in the dark and hit something cold.

Not wood. Not satin.

Flesh.

She froze. Her fingers trembled as she traced the shape. A shoulder. A stiff, wool suit jacket. A tie clip. She knew that tie clip. It was silver, simple, cheap.

Cedric.

Her husband. Her fake husband.

She moved her hand up to his neck. His skin was clammy, like refrigerated dough. She pressed her fingers into the hollow of his throat, searching for a pulse.

Nothing.

Wait.

There. A flutter. Faint, erratic, barely there, but it was a beat. He was alive. Barely.

Her mind raced backward, rewinding the tape of the last few hours. The Spencer Memorial Gala. Not a funeral, but a lavish fundraiser in her name. The glittering lights. Hermina, her stepmother, handing her a glass of champagne.

"A toast, Delphine. To new beginnings."

The champagne had tasted wrong. Acrid and bitter. Not like almonds, but like crushed medicine.

A fast-acting neurotoxin? A sedative mixed with a paralytic?

She did this. Hermina. She poisoned them. She put them in a box. She was going to bury them to get the trust fund.

She heard a sound from outside. Muffled, low. A string quartet playing a somber adagio. Not a dirge, but close enough. Voices.

She was at her own memorial service.

If she screamed now, Hermina would hear. She would know the dose wasn't lethal enough. She would finish the job. She would say it was a muscle spasm, a final release of gas. She would inject her with something that would stop her heart for good.

She couldn't be Delphine Spencer, the heiress. She couldn't be sane.

She thought of the year she spent at the clinic. The white walls. The screaming in the night. The way the patients survived by becoming something else.

She bit down on the tip of her tongue. Hard. The metallic taste of blood filled her mouth. The pain grounded her.

She reached for her collar and ripped it open. She clawed at her hair, tangling it, pulling it until her scalp burned. She needed to look like a monster.

She dug her nails into Cedric's upper lip, right into the sensitive skin under his nose.

"Wake up," she hissed.

He didn't move. He was dead weight. A prop.

She was alone.

She pulled her knees up to her chest, cramping in the tight space. She positioned her heels against the lid of the coffin.

Thump. Thump. Thump.

She kicked a rhythm.

The music outside stopped. The murmuring ceased. Silence.

She kicked harder.

THUMP. THUMP.

"My God! Did you hear that?" A woman's voice. High-pitched. Terrified.

"It's just the settling of the wood," Hermina's voice cut through. Smooth. calm. "Please, everyone, the viewing is about to conclude."

Hermina wasn't going to stop.

Delphine coiled her legs tighter. She channeled every ounce of terror, every drop of adrenaline into her thighs.

She screamed. Not a help-me scream. A guttural, animalistic shriek.

And she kicked upward with everything she had.

The wood groaned. The latch snapped.

Light.

It blinded her, searing her retinas. But she didn't blink. She widened her eyes until they felt dry and raw. She forced a laugh from her chest, a broken, jagged sound.

She was ready to put on a show.

The coffin lid didn't just open. It flew.

It crashed into a stand of white lilies, sending the vase shattering to the marble floor. The sound was like a gunshot in the silent hall.

"Seal it!" Hermina screamed. Her composure cracked. "It's escaping gas! Contamination risk!"

Two security guards lunged forward, their hands reaching for the wood.

Delphine sat up.

The air rushed into her lungs, cold and sweet. She gasped, loud and wet, like a drowning woman breaking the surface.

The room gasped back.

She saw them. The sea of black suits and designer dresses. The horrified faces of Manhattan's elite.

She looked at Hermina. Hermina was pale, her hand clutching her pearls.

"Oh, my poor Delphine!" Hermina wailed, stepping forward, her eyes hard as flint. "She's having a post-mortem spasm! Don't look!"

Delphine didn't look at Hermina. She looked at the ceiling. She tilted her head to the side, twitching.

"Hehehe."

The laugh bubbled out of her. She scrambled over the edge of the coffin, her limbs flailing. She hit the cold floor with her bare feet. Her knees buckled, and she let them. She crawled.

She moved like a broken doll, jerky and wrong.

A woman in the front row-Mrs. Vanderwall-shrieked and backed away, knocking over her chair.

Delphine turned her head sharply to look at her. She put a finger to her lips.

"Shh," she whispered, her eyes wide and unblinking. "The bad man is sleeping."

Hermina signaled the butler. A sharp, cutting motion across her throat.

The butler nodded. He motioned to three large men in black suits. They moved toward Delphine, a wall of muscle.

Delphine watched them come. She didn't run. Not yet.

When the first guard reached for her arm, she went boneless. She dropped to the floor, sliding through his grip like wet soap.

She wrapped her arms around his leg. She buried her face in his trousers.

"Don't eat me!" she screamed, her voice shrill. "The apples are poisoned! The bubbles bite!"

Hermina flinched. She knew what Delphine meant. The champagne.

"Cedric?"

The voice was frail, trembling.

Delphine looked up. Dame Beatrice Hays. Cedric's grandmother. She was clutching her chest, staring at the open coffin. "Is my grandson alive too?"

Delphine heard Cedric's name and she let out a piercing wail. She rolled on the floor, thrashing, kicking her legs.

"Dead! Dead! All fall down!" she chanted.

The guards hesitated. They were trained to handle drunks and paparazzi, not a grieving, resurrected, insane heiress. Liability was written all over their faces.

"Don't hurt her!" Hermina shouted, playing the role of the saint. "She's sick! Her mind is broken!"

She was giving them permission to grab Delphine.

Delphine saw the gap. Under the long table holding the hors d'oeuvres.

She scrambled on all fours, diving under the tablecloth. She kicked upward as she went. Trays of caviar and silver platters crashed to the floor.

Glass shattered. People screamed.

Flashes went off. The press. Hermina had invited the press to document her tragedy. Now they were documenting her nightmare.

"Cut the feed!" Hermina roared. "Confiscate all phones! Now!"

The lights died.

The hall plunged into gloom, lit only by the red glow of the exit signs.

Delphine crouched in the darkness, breathing hard, smelling the shrimp and the fear.

Game on.

The darkness was Delphine's friend.

She pressed her back against the table leg. She could hear the heavy boots of the security guards crunching on the broken glass.

"She's under the table," one of them whispered. "Grab her legs."

Delphine wasn't under the table anymore.

She had rolled out the other side the moment the lights died. She was crouching behind a velvet curtain near the window.

She remembered the self-defense classes she took at the clinic. The instructor was an ex-Marine with a limp. Chaos is a ladder, he used to say. Climb it.

She grabbed a handful of walnuts from a spilled bowl on the floor. She tossed them hard toward the left side of the room.

Clatter. Crack.

"Over there!" A guard lunged to the left.

Delphine moved right.

She kept her movements erratic. She hummed a broken tune, "London Bridge is falling down," stopping and starting, throwing her voice.

A guard loomed out of the shadows. He reached for her.

Delphine didn't pull away. She stepped into him. She hooked her foot behind his ankle and shoved his chest.

He went down hard, crashing into a tower of champagne glasses.

Crash! Boom!

"Yay!" Delphine clapped her hands, dancing a little jig in the dark. "Make it go boom!"

"Just sedate her! Now!" Hermina's voice was a screech in the dark.

Delphine saw the glint of steel. The butler was moving toward her, a syringe in his hand. He wasn't hesitating like the guards.

She needed a shield.

She saw Senator Miller standing frozen near a pillar.

She sprinted toward him and wrapped her arms around his waist.

"Daddy?" she sobbed, wiping her snot on his expensive suit. "Is that you? Did you bring the ponies?"

The Senator stiffened. "Delphine? My dear, please..."

The butler stopped. He couldn't stick a needle in Delphine while she was hugging a U.S. Senator.

Out of the corner of her eye, Delphine saw Beatrice moving toward the coffin. She was going to check on Cedric.

Hermina saw her too. She turned away from Delphine, moving to intercept the old woman.

No. Delphine needed Cedric found. She needed a witness.

She let go of the Senator. She dropped to all fours and galloped-actually galloped-toward the wall.

The butler lunged, the needle missing her neck by an inch.

She grabbed a heavy silver candelabra from a side table.

She didn't swing it at the butler. She swung it at the wall. Specifically, at the red box labeled 'FIRE'.

Smash.

The alarm shrieked. A deafening, pulsing wail that vibrated in her teeth.

And then, the hiss.

The sprinklers overhead burst to life.

Water, cold and relentless, poured down on them. It soaked the silk dresses, the wool suits, the expensive hairdos.

The room erupted into chaos. People were slipping, screaming, running for the doors.

Delphine stood in the rain, the water plastering her hair to her skull. She watched the makeup run down Hermina's face like black tears.

She stuck her tongue out at Hermina.

Then she pointed a shaking finger at the coffin.