Chapter 1
Alice
The first thing I noticed wasn't the pain—there wasn't any. It was the cold seeping into my bones like liquid nitrogen.
I opened my eyes to the bathroom tiles. My bathroom tiles, now painted crimson with something that used to keep me alive.
'What the fuck?'
I was standing—floating?—next to the bathtub, staring down at what remained of Alice Crawford.
My wrists gaped open like screaming mouths, the razor blade still clutched in my death grip. The water had turned the color of old blood, and my skin was the shade of winter fog.
'So this is what I've become. A fucking corpse.'
The front door slammed downstairs. Nicolas was home from base. I'd timed it perfectly—wanted him to find me while the blood was still warm, while the betrayal was still fresh.
"Alice?" His voice echoed through the house.
I watched my husband of two years climb the stairs, still in his Army fatigues. Still the perfect soldier boy with his perfect jawline and those ice-blue eyes that had frozen my heart to death long before I'd picked up that blade.
He pushed open the bathroom door, and for a split second, his face went completely blank.
Then he smiled.
Not horror. Not grief. Not the shattered cry of a man who'd lost his world. A slow, satisfied smile that spread across his face like poison.
'NO NO. This can't be real.'
"Finally," he whispered, crouching beside the tub like he was admiring his handiwork. "Sarah can finally rest in peace."
Sarah. Even in death, it all came back to his dead fucking girlfriend.
He never stopped believing I killed Sarah, so he orchestrated this twisted nightmare.
Now that I was dead, he was probably celebrating like it was Christmas morning.
'I killed myself for nothing. He's HAPPY I'm dead.'
"This is exactly what you deserved, Alice." His voice was soft, almost loving. "Now you know how Sarah felt when she died."
The words hit me like physical blows. I tried to scream, but no sound came.
I was dead, voiceless, watching the man I'd died loving celebrate my corpse.
'I gave you everything! I loved you through your nightmares! I held you when you cried for her!'
Nicolas stood up, pulled out his phone, and his entire face transformed. The satisfaction vanished, replaced by carefully rehearsed devastation.
"911? Please, God, I need help. My wife—I found her in the bathroom. There's so much blood. Please hurry."
His voice cracked at exactly the right moments. The tremor was perfectly calculated. He'd practiced this, planned for this moment.
'You bastard. You fucking WANTED this.'
Within an hour, our bathroom became a crime scene.
Paramedics, cops, photographers—all dancing around my corpse while Nicolas played the grieving widower.
"Sir, did your wife show any signs of depression or suicidal ideation?" Officer Martinez asked.
"She's been spiraling since her miscarriage last year. I tried to get her help, but she refused therapy. I should have seen this coming."
'LIAR! You drove me to this! You made me believe I was worthless!'
But what destroyed me wasn't his lies to the police. It was watching him kneel beside my body when no one was looking, his fingers trailing along my cold cheek with something that looked almost like tenderness.
"Thank you," he whispered against my ear. "For finally giving me what I needed."
'I loved you. I LOVED you and you turned that love into a weapon.'
After the last cop car pulled away, Nicolas moved through our house like a man possessed.
He gathered my journals first—two years of documentation about his psychological torture, my desperate attempts to understand his cruelty.
Into the fireplace they went, along with every photo where I looked genuinely happy.
I followed him to our bedroom, watching him erase me with surgical precision. But when he opened my jewelry box and reached for my wedding ring, his hands shook.
The simple platinum band caught the lamplight as he held it up.
For a moment, his mask cracked completely.
"She really thought I loved her," he muttered, staring at the ring like it was evidence of his crime. "Right until the end, she thought this was real."
'It WAS real! For me, it was everything!'
In his study, Nicolas gathered my psychology textbooks. When he opened my PTSD treatment manual, he froze.
The pages were covered in my handwriting—desperate notes I'd made trying to save him, trying to save us.
"Patient may exhibit emotional detachment as defense mechanism," he read aloud. "Recovery requires patience and unconditional love."
The margins were full of my frantic scribbles: [How to help veterans process grief. Signs of survivor's guilt. Methods for rebuilding trust after trauma.]
"You actually..." His voice cracked, real emotion bleeding through for the first time. "You were trying to fix me."
He set the book aside. Didn't burn it with the rest.
'I tried to love you back to life, and you used that love to kill me.'
Nicolas ended up in the garage, sitting in his black pickup with the engine off. I materialized in the passenger seat, studying this monster who'd worn my husband's face.
He pulled my wedding ring from his pocket, rolling it between his fingers like a rosary. His eyes were hollow, staring at nothing.
"Mission accomplished," he whispered to my ring. "So why does everything feel... empty?"
'Because you destroyed the only person who loved you unconditionally, you fucking psychopath.'
But as I watched him sit there in the dark, something twisted in my chest. Not sympathy—never that. But a sick realization that his victory was as hollow as my death.
He'd won. I was dead. Sarah was avenged.
When he finally started the engine and backed out of our driveway, I felt an invisible chain snap tight around my soul.
Even as he drove away from the house where I'd died, I remained locked beside him.
I tried to leave, to drift away from this bastard who'd orchestrated my destruction.
But I couldn't.
Some cosmic joke had me tethered to Nicolas for eternity.
'You wanted me dead, Nicolas? Congratulations. Now you're stuck with my ghost forever.'