Chapter 4

Cold traveled through the steel between my heartbeats, while blue light seeped through the sheet and a compressor hummed behind drawers that had already accepted my death.

Each breath was too shallow to lift the cloth, but the stolen label felt warm above my heart, and I repeated one word inside the body no one believed in: alive.

When the door opened, hope recognized Dante before he pulled the sheet below my chin. “Mara.” I burned through the effort of brushing one finger beneath his watch, and his breath caught. “She moved.”

Yes. Surely this time he would believe the body beneath his hand instead of the man beside it.

Moreau pressed my falling hand against the gurney. “A reflex,” he replied, turning my only proof into a symptom. “It can happen after death.”

Dante insisted he had felt me upstairs, and hope jumped at the protest. Then Moreau's hand stayed on mine, Dante did not remove it, and the hope collapsed; he was arguing for me while still allowing the man beside him to silence every answer.

Dante leaned closer, his voice fraying around my name. “Mara, if you can hear me, move again.”

I pushed until pain filled my arm, but Moreau held me flat while Dante demanded a monitor. The house unit stayed flat, and Vittorio's alarm sharpened behind the locked treatment door. Moreau listened above my hidden label for five seconds. “There is nothing. The other doctor is keeping your father alive.”

Blue light drained Dante's face, and I wanted to scream that my pulse did not need Moreau's permission to exist.

Valentina entered with a folder against her stomach and warned that police would examine my body, search the clinic and endanger Vittorio. Dante ordered her out without looking at her, although his hand had already left my face.

She placed the folder beside my hip, and Moreau opened it to two phrases beneath the crest: immediate cremation and family authorization required.

The pen remained untouched. “I am not signing this.” His refusal warmed me until Moreau warned that police would take my body at sunrise and Dante asked how long remained.

Moreau turned the authorization toward him. “Not long enough to protect Vittorio.”

I forced out a breath that stirred the sheet, then dragged one nail along the gurney until steel screamed. Moreau lowered the temperature and called both signs postmortem reactions.

Please doubt him. It was the last prayer my marriage had left.

Valentina covered her belly and complained of cramping, pulling Dante from the sound I had made. He settled her into a chair without returning to my face, and the distance opened through the last part of me still waiting for him. “What happens if I refuse?”

“The police cut her open, search the clinic and question everyone who touched Vittorio tonight,” Moreau answered before Dante had finished breathing. “By sunrise, they will control this house.”

Valentina held his sleeve as though she were the one keeping him upright. “Your father will wake in handcuffs.”

The nib scratched three times. My chest pulled tight on the first stroke; by the third, I was no longer waiting for him to stop. He had signed my body toward fire.

I tried to make the sound belong to another page, another dead woman, another husband. It would not. I waited for something inside me to break, but the pressure beneath my ribs simply eased, taking with it the last frantic thought that Dante might look up and choose me.

He wasn't going to. I let that thought go and saved my breath for the body bag.

The zipper reached my ribs as her careful voice followed it upward, each inch of plastic sealing away my marriage while she tested how much of my place already belonged to her. “Will the engagement announcement still happen?”

Dante said the announcement would wait, and beneath the rising zipper I heard what he did not say: it was not over. I was.

The destination form rustled as Dante wrote HOLD across it, but Moreau removed the page and let the zipper cover my face before he answered.

Plastic darkness closed as the gurney moved, but I held the stolen label and made my first promise independent of my husband: I would get out alive.

The transport doors slammed near my feet, an engine started, and a man's voice came through the partition. “The furnace is already hot.”