Chapter 1

The blood pump let out a harsh, grating whine as eight hundred milliliters of blood were drawn from my body, my warmth draining away with every drop.

Outside the operating room, the man I had loved for seven years, my husband, Samuel Hart, was on his knees beside Lily Lane's bed, devotion written all over him. "If it saves Lily, take all of Nina's blood. She owes her that much."

In my last life, I died on that operating table from blood loss. Even after my body went cold, he never once came back to look at me.

But this time, I tore the needle from the back of my hand, blood spilling in its wake, and without hesitation flung the scalding water from the table straight at their faces.

"You want me dead? Why don't you go to hell first?"

*****

The smell of disinfectant clawed its way into my nose like a piece of rusted wire, bringing with it a suffocating wave of nausea that made my stomach turn.

The moment my consciousness returned, a sharp, stinging pain shot through my arm.

I snapped my eyes open, and the blurry shapes around me slowly came into focus.

What I saw was not the cold, damp chill of a morgue, but the VIP blood draw room where I had spent five years of my life.

The surgical light overhead blazed down with a harsh, blinding white, so cold that it reminded me of the way Samuel Hart used to look at me, with that utterly detached indifference.

The nurse was holding a needle easily twice as thick as a standard IV catheter, tapping methodically against my already bruised and battered veins as she searched for a place to insert it.

"Bear with me, Ms. Grant," she said, her voice flat and mechanical. "Ms. Lane's condition is critical, and Mr. Hart specifically asked for an extra four hundred CCs this time."

She spoke as though I were not a living, breathing person but a disposable blood bag to be used and thrown away. She did not even bother to look at my face. Her eyes remained fixed on the needle about to pierce my arm.

In my past life, that extra forty CCs had been the final straw that broke the camel's back.

When I died, every last drop of fluid had been drained from my body. I lay curled up on the operating table like a dried-out corpse.

And Samuel? He was in the next room, peeling grapes for Lily. When the doctor told him I was gone, he barely looked up. "Tell her to stop putting on a show," he said. "Don't make a fuss over something so trivial. I don't want Lily to worry."

My heart clenched as if a giant fist had reached into my chest and squeezed. The crushing pain snapped me wide awake, cold sweat sliding down my spine and soaking the back of my hospital gown.

I had been reborn, back to the fifth year of serving as Lily Lane's mobile blood bank, the very day I was supposed to die.

Hatred clawed through my chest like weeds in overgrowth, burning so fiercely it nearly consumed what was left of my sanity.

"Ms. Grant?" The nurse's voice turned sharp with impatience when I didn't respond. The needle pressed against my skin. "Mr. Hart is waiting outside. If Ms. Lane's surgery gets delayed and he loses his temper, we'll all pay for it."

"Lose his temper?" I let out a low, raspy laugh, my voice shredded from dehydration until it sounded like I'd been swallowing gravel.

Before the nurse could react, her eyes still wide with shock, I raised my arm and knocked the needle aside with a single, brutal sweep.

She gasped, a short, startled yelp, as the tip grazed the back of her hand, leaving a thin line of red in its wake.

The tray flew from her grip, sending forceps, vials, and cotton balls crashing across the floor in a chorus of brittle, jarring noise.

"Have you lost your mind?" she demanded, clutching her hand and staring at me as if I'd grown a second head.

"Maybe I have." I forced my exhausted body upright and yanked the tourniquet from my arm.

The skin beneath was a wreck, a dense patchwork of puncture wounds, some crusted over with scabs, others still weeping blood, stitched together like some grotesque badge of shame that spelled out seven years of loving someone from the very bottom of the dirt.

I rolled my sleeve back down with slow, deliberate care, covering the evidence before I lifted my gaze to hers, cold as a winter sky. "Go tell Samuel if he needs blood so badly, he can go slash his own wrists and drain himself dry. I'm done being his little blood bag."