Caleb Hart came back to himself in darkness, unable to move, while strangers whispered prayers over the coffin he was lying in.
At first, he thought he had gone blind.
Then he tried to blink and realized his eyelids would not obey him. He tried to lift his hand and felt nothing but the dead weight of his own arm resting against smooth satin. He tried to call for help, but his tongue lay heavy and useless in his mouth.
His mind, however, was awake.
Painfully awake.
The air was thin and perfumed. Lilies. Furniture polish. A faint chemical sweetness clinging to fabric. Somewhere above him, a woman sniffled. Someone shifted in a chair. A man murmured that Caleb had been taken too soon.
Too soon.
The words crawled through him.
Caleb was not in a hospital bed. He was not waking from a nightmare in the lake house he had inherited from his father. He was lying inside a coffin, dressed and arranged for his own memorial service, while the people he loved gathered to say goodbye.
And nobody knew he was alive.
Panic arrived without a sound. It slammed into him so violently that he thought his heart would burst. He ordered his hands to move. He begged his legs to kick. He imagined himself hammering the lid until wood split and mourners screamed.
Nothing happened.
Only his breath moved, shallow and weak, slipping in and out of him like a secret.
Then he heard Naomi.
His wife was close. Close enough that the soft rose scent of her perfume seemed to slip through the seams above his face. She had worn that perfume the night he proposed to her on the pier behind his father’s house. She had worn it to charity dinners, company galas, and the winter morning they signed the papers that made her half owner of everything he had built.
Now she wore it to bury him.
‘By sunset, this will all be over,’ she whispered.
There was no tremor in her voice. No grief. Only impatience.
A man answered from beside her. ‘It will be, unless Aaron keeps making noise.’
Victor Vale.
Caleb’s blood seemed to freeze inside him.
Victor was not family, despite the shared surname that had amused clients for years. He was Caleb’s business attorney and oldest friend, the man who had handled every contract since Hart Marine Components was still a two-room operation above a machine shop. Victor knew where every asset was held, which accounts were protected, which signatures mattered.
He also knew how much Caleb’s death was worth.
Naomi spoke again, lower this time. ‘Aaron is emotional. He always is. He’ll cry, accuse everyone, and go home.’
‘He found the vial.’
The silence that followed was so complete Caleb could hear the faint hum of the chapel lights.
Naomi’s voice changed. ‘What vial?’
‘The one from the guest bathroom trash. The one you promised was gone.’
Caleb could not breathe deeply enough for the terror filling him.
A vial.
His brother had found something.
Aaron. Stubborn, restless Aaron, who had once driven three hours through a storm because Caleb had sounded tired on the phone. Aaron, who never trusted Naomi’s polished smile. Aaron, who had left Caleb a dozen messages during the last week because he said
