He did not know that the quiet, agreeable wife he had just tried to erase had, with the last of her strength, made herself into the one thing his money and his power could not overcome: a witness that would not die.

And then the darkness took me.

Chapter 5 — Three Days Later

Three days later, I opened my eyes in the intensive care unit.

I was alive.

Against every expectation, including my own, and certainly against the expectations of the two people who had left me for dead, I had survived.

And I had barely finished registering the ceiling tiles and the beeping monitors and the tremendous ache in my body when the door of my room opened, and Julian walked in, carrying an enormous bouquet of white roses, looking disheveled and haggard, as though flowers could somehow repair what he had done.

“Nora,” he said.