Choosing The Imposter Over His Dying Wife

My fiancée sacrificed five years of her life to save my family, falling into a deep coma.

But when she finally woke up, I didn't greet her with love. I greeted her with pure hatred.

Convinced by my mistress, Hailie, that Ericka was a traitor faking her illness for sympathy, I became her tormentor.

When she told me she had stage four cancer, I laughed and accused her of manipulation.

I locked her in a freezing safe house.

I forced her into a sauna until her skin blistered, then doused her failing lungs with ice water.

I dragged her out of the hospital to kneel in the rain until she collapsed.

Even when she fell from a balcony, broken and bleeding, I let my men beat her.

I watched her waste away, believing every one of Hailie's lies over Ericka's desperate truths.

It wasn't until I saw her cold, blue body on the rocks below the cliffs that the truth finally shattered me.

The autopsy confirmed the cancer I mocked was real.

A hidden recording revealed Hailie had framed her all along, admitting she treated me like a dog on a leash.

I realized I had tortured the woman who saved my life until she bought her own grave just to escape me.

I burned Hailie alive at Ericka's funeral, but death was too easy a punishment.

I lived in agony, a scarred monster praying for the end.

But when I finally closed my eyes in the fire, I didn't die.

I heard a beep.

I opened my eyes, and the date on my phone was three years ago.

The day Ericka woke up.

Chapter 1

Ericka POV

I sacrificed five years of my life to the void to save the heir of the Chicago Outfit. But when I finally clawed my way back to the surface, I wasn't greeted as a savior.

I was looked at like a mistake that had the audacity to survive.

The hospital room smelled of antiseptic and expensive lilies-the scent of a funeral, not a recovery.

My body felt heavy, anchored by lead instead of blood.

I tried to speak, but my throat was lined with sandpaper.

"She's awake," a voice said.

It wasn't my mother.

It wasn't my fiancé, Caleb.

It was a woman I didn't recognize.

My vision blurred, then sharpened into cruel focus.

Standing at the foot of my bed was a petite brunette with doe eyes and a trembling lip, clutching my mother's hand.

My mother, Beverley Reid, the Matriarch of the Outfit, looked at me.

There were no tears of joy.

There was only a tight, inconvenienced line where her smile should have been.

"Ericka," my father, Franklin, said from the corner. His voice was the same gravelly baritone that commanded armies of soldiers, but it was stripped of all warmth.

"You're back."

It sounded like an accusation.

I looked around the room, desperate for a familiar anchor.

Then I saw him.

Caleb Skinner.

The Underboss. The man who had promised to burn the world down if anyone touched a hair on my head.

He was leaning against the doorframe, his suit cut sharp enough to bleed on.

His dark eyes were cold. Dead.

He wasn't looking at me with love. He was looking at me like I was a liability he had forgotten to liquidate.

"Caleb," I rasped.

He didn't move.

The brunette squeezed my mother's hand. "I'm so glad you're okay, Ericka. We were all so worried. Especially Fitzgerald."

Fitzgerald. My brother. The one whose leukemia I had cured with my bone marrow-the very procedure that had sent my body into shock and trapped me in the dark for half a decade.

"Who are you?" I asked.

"I'm Hailie," she said softly. "I've been... helping the family while you were away."

*Helping.*

I looked at Caleb again.

Hailie let go of my mother and walked over to him. She placed a hand on his bicep. A possessive, familiar touch.

Caleb didn't shake it off.

My heart hammered against my ribs, a painful, frantic rhythm that threatened to crack bone.

"Where is my brother?" I asked.

"He's busy," my father said. "Running the family. Something you wouldn't understand anymore."

The air in the room shifted. It became suffocating.

I tried to sit up, but my muscles had atrophied into useless strings.

"I need to go home," I said.

"You aren't going to the Estate," Caleb said.

His voice was a low rumble that used to make me feel safe. Now, it made my skin crawl.

"What?"

"You're unstable," Hailie chimed in, her voice dripping with fake concern. "The doctors said the coma might have... affected your mind. We can't risk the Family's security."

"My mind is fine," I snapped.

"See?" Hailie flinched, burying her face in Caleb's shoulder. "She's aggressive."

Caleb's jaw tightened. He looked at me with pure disgust.

"You're going to the safe house in the Marsh," Caleb said. "Until you learn your place."

"My place is here. My place is with you."

"That place was taken," he said, looking down at Hailie. "By someone who actually puts this Family first."

*

I was discharged three days later.

I wasn't taken home.

I was put in the back of an armored SUV.

Hailie sat in the front seat with Caleb.

I watched them through the rearview mirror. She whispered something in his ear, and his hand rested on her thigh.

A scream built in my throat, but I swallowed it down. It tasted like bile and betrayal.

Suddenly, the car swerved.

Hailie screamed.

"She grabbed the wheel!" Hailie shrieked, pointing back at me through the partition gap. "Ericka tried to crash us!"

I was handcuffed to the door handle. I hadn't moved.

"I didn't touch anything!" I yelled.

Caleb slammed on the brakes.

The SUV skidded to a halt on the gravel shoulder.

He got out. He ripped my door open.

He didn't ask for an explanation.

He dragged me out by the hospital gown.

The gravel bit into my bare feet.

"You want to kill us?" he growled, shoving me against the hood of the car. "After everything Hailie has done to keep your memory alive?"

"She's lying, Caleb! Look at the handcuffs!"

He didn't look. He didn't care.

"You broke Omertà when you were awake before," he hissed, repeating a lie I knew Hailie must have planted. "And now you try to kill the future Don's right hand?"

He leaned in, his face inches from mine. I could smell his cologne-sandalwood and gunpowder. The scent of the man I loved; the scent of the man who was destroying me.

"You aren't a Princess anymore, Ericka. You're a prisoner."

He threw me back into the car.

We drove in silence to the Marsh.

He locked me in a house that smelled of mold and neglect.

"Three years," he said through the heavy oak door. "You stay here until I say you're fixed."

I slid down the door, my knees hitting the floor.

I didn't cry.

I realized then that the Ericka Reid who went to sleep five years ago was dead.

And the men who killed her were the ones she died to save.

Ericka POV

The doctor held the X-ray up to the fluorescent light, his expression grim, but Caleb was already checking his Rolex, his patience thinning with every second.

"Broken ribs," Dr. Evans murmured, clipping the film into place. "Two of them. Fractures consistent with... blunt force trauma."

I sat on the edge of the examination table, cradling my side. Every breath felt like a jagged shard of glass twisting between my bones.

"She fell," Caleb said flatly.

He stood by the window, refusing to look at me. His thumbs flew across his phone screen. Texting her. Always her.

"I didn't fall," I whispered, my voice thin and brittle. "You pushed me."

Caleb looked up then. His eyes were cold, void of even a flicker of empathy. "You threw yourself against the car to make a scene. Don't rewrite history, Ericka. It's pathetic."

Dr. Evans cleared his throat. He looked terrified. In our circle, physicians who asked too many questions tended to vanish.

"There is... something else," Dr. Evans stammered.

He swapped the film for another scan. It looked like a storm of grey static blooming in the center of a clear sky.

"The systemic stress from the marrow transplant, followed by the coma, and the... severe malnutrition from her weeks in isolation," the doctor said, his voice dropping. "Her immune defenses have completely collapsed. These shadows... they are masses in the pulmonary tissue."

The room went dead silent.

The air conditioner hummed, a dull roar in my ears.

I stared at the grey blobs on the film.

Cancer.

"It's aggressive," Dr. Evans said softly. "Stage four."

I felt a strange, cold numbness wash over me. Not fear. Just a hollow confirmation that the universe was finally done with me.

"Bullshit," a voice cracked through the silence like a whip.

Fitzgerald walked in. My brother. The Heir.

He looked radiant. Strong. His skin was flushed with the very life my blood had bought him.

"Fitz," I breathed.

He didn't look at me. He glared at the doctor.

"Hailie warned us about this," Fitzgerald sneered, stepping further into the room. "She said Ericka would feign a terminal illness to get out of the safe house. To crawl back into the Estate."

"This isn't feigned, Mr. Reid," Dr. Evans said, his hands trembling as he gestured to the light board. "These are medical scans. You can see the tumors."

"Faked," Caleb said, slipping his phone into his pocket. "She has access to your systems, Evans? Did she bribe you? Or threaten you?"

"No! Sir, please, look at her! She is wasting away!"

They looked.

But they didn't see a dying woman. They saw a manipulator. A rat.

"Hailie just called," Caleb said, turning to Fitzgerald. "She's locked in the master bathroom at the Estate. She says she heard glass breaking. She thinks it's Ericka's old loyalists trying to get in."

Fitzgerald's face went pale. "We need to go. Now."

"What about the diagnosis?" Dr. Evans asked, frantically holding out a prescription pad. "She needs immediate oncology support-"

"Give her some Tylenol," Caleb cut in, his voice icy. "And get her back to the Marsh. If she wants to play sick, she can do it alone."

He strode over to me.

I flinched, shrinking back against the paper-covered table.

He seized my chin, forcing me to look up at him. His fingers dug into my jaw, bruising the delicate skin.

"If you think dying will make me forgive you for what you did to this family," he whispered, his breath hot against my face, "you don't know me at all."

He released me with a shove.

They left.

I watched my brother and my fiancé walk out the door, rushing to save a woman who was in no danger, leaving me to face a death sentence in silence.

*

I was discharged an hour later.

The guards drove me back to the Marsh-the isolated safe house that had become my prison.

When I walked inside, the maid, a woman fiercely loyal to Hailie, was waiting in the foyer.

"Mr. Skinner gave orders," she said, her face a mask of stone.

"What orders?" I asked, clutching my aching side.

"He said you're contaminated. Said you need to be cleaned before you're allowed in the main quarters."

She pointed a bony finger toward the downstairs bathroom.

The tub was already filled. The water was steaming, fogging the mirrors. The air was thick with the acrid sting of bleach and industrial cleaner.

"Get in," she commanded.

"It's too hot," I whispered, looking at the rising steam. "And the chemicals... my skin is too sensitive..."

"Get. In."

I stripped, my hands shaking. My body was a grotesque map of scars and protruding bones, a testament to everything they had taken from me.

I stepped into the water.

It scalded.

I screamed, but the sound was swallowed by the tiled walls.

I sat there, the bleach stinging my eyes and burning my throat, scrubbing my skin raw until the water turned pink. I tried to scour away the sins they said I committed.

But as the skin peeled away, I realized the only thing I was washing down the drain was the last, foolish hope that they would ever see me as human again.

Ericka POV

I sat on the floor of the dusty attic, surrounded by the ghosts of my past.

Old Polaroids littered the floorboards. My sixteenth birthday. The day Caleb became a Made Man. The day Fitzgerald graduated.

In every photo, I was smiling. Back then, I was the glue holding this family together.

Now? I was the toxic solvent they were desperate to dispose of.

I struck a match.

The flame flickered to life, orange and blue against the shadows.

I held it to the corner of a photo of Caleb and me. The fire curled the paper, devouring his face, then mine.

It felt good.

"Dramatic," a voice purred.

I looked up.

Hailie stood at the top of the stairs. She was wearing a white cashmere coat-pristine, expensive, and utterly untouchable.

"What are you doing here?" I coughed, the acrid smoke already beginning to sting my lungs.

"Checking on the prisoner," she said. She walked over, her heels clicking on the wood, and looked at the burning pile in the small metal brazier I had found. "Burning bridges?"

"I'm burning lies," I said.

She smiled. It was a shark's smile-all teeth and dead eyes.

"You know," she said idly, "Caleb hates fire. Reminds him of the warehouse explosion that killed his father."

Without warning, she lifted her booted foot and kicked the brazier.

It tipped over with a metallic clang.

Burning embers scattered across the dry, dusty floorboards. An old rug, brittle with age, caught instantly.

"Oops," she said.

The flames jumped, hungry and fast, licking up the curtains.

"Are you crazy?" I scrambled back, trying to stomp out the fire with my bare feet, ignoring the heat blistering my skin. "Help me!"

She didn't move. She just pulled out her phone and dialed.

"Caleb!" she screamed into the receiver, her voice instantly transforming into a performance of terrified panic. "Help! She's trying to burn the house down! She's trying to kill me!"

She hung up and looked at me. Her eyes were dead calm.

"Run, Princess."

The guards burst in seconds later. They dragged us out just as the smoke turned the hallway into a gray chokehold.

Caleb arrived ten minutes later.

His car screeched to a halt on the gravel drive.

Hailie ran to him, sobbing, her face perfectly smudged with a little soot she had applied herself.

"She's insane, Caleb! She lit the rug! She said if she couldn't have the house, no one could!"

Caleb looked at the smoke billowing from the attic window, his jaw tight.

Then he looked at me.

I was coughing violently, black phlegm spotting the white gravel. My feet were burned and raw.

"I was burning photos," I wheezed, desperate for air. "She kicked it over."

Caleb walked up to me. He didn't hit me.

That would have been too kind.

"You like heat?" he asked softly.

Before I could answer, he grabbed me by the back of my neck.

He marched me past the main house to the detached sauna near the pool.

"Caleb, please," I begged, my fingers clawing at his wrist. "My lungs..."

He shoved me inside.

"Crank it," he ordered the guard.

He locked the glass door.

The heat rose.

180 degrees. 200 degrees.

The air became thick, an unbreathable soup that scorched my throat with every gasp.

I pounded on the glass.

Caleb stood outside, watching. His face was stone. He was the executioner, and I was the witch.

My chest felt like it was imploding. The tumors in my lungs reacted to the extreme heat, constricting my airways until I was breathing through a straw.

I slid down the glass, gasping for air that wasn't there.

I was dying. Again.

Through the haze, I saw Hailie walk up to the door.

She held a bucket of ice water intended for the post-sauna plunge.

She unlocked the door.

I fell out, landing on the cedar deck, my body convulsing as I tried to pull in oxygen.

I thought she was saving me.

"Cool off," she sneered.

She dumped the ice water over me.

The shock was instant and brutal. My body seized. The temperature differential sent my nerves into overdrive, pain exploding behind my eyes.

I lay there, shivering violently on the wood, gasping for breath, while the man who promised to protect me watched his mistress torture me and called it justice.