**Part 1.**
I saw my own funeral before feeling my body again.
Trapped inside the coffin, paralyzed by my husband’s poison, I heard him lean close and whisper: “Enjoy being buried alive, you rich old witch.”
The cathedral was full.
The cameras were rolling.
He thought my fortune was already his.
But my eyes still worked, and with a silent command I turned my coffin into his confession chamber.
Real stories.
By the time my husband kissed my cold forehead, I had already heard him sell my death twice: once to the doctor and once to God.
I lay inside my silk-lined coffin, paralyzed from the throat down to my toes, while four hundred mourners wept for a woman who was not dead.
The cathedral smelled of lilies, candle wax, and money.
My money.
The white orchids around my coffin had cost more than most people’s cars, because Julian Vale believed grief should photograph well.
He stood over me in a tailored black suit, silver at the temples, tears shining perfectly on command.
“My beloved Eleanor,” he said, voice breaking for the crowd.
“She was my entire world.”
Liar.
Inside my skull, rage moved like lightning trapped in glass.
My body did not move.
My lungs barely stirred.
The synthetic neurotoxin Doctor Armand had injected into my IV had done its work with obscene elegance.
Total paralysis.
Cooling skin.
Pulse reduced to a whisper.
The body of a rich old widow could be mistaken for a corpse if the doctor had been paid enough.
Doctor Armand stood nearby, hands folded, face solemn.
His cufflinks were new.
Sapphire.
Julian had always been vulgar in rewarding his servants.
My sister Celeste sobbed into a handkerchief near the front pew.
My board members sat behind her, pale and stunned.
Reporters lined the back walls, hungry for tragedy.
Eleanor Vale, founder of Vale Biotech, dead at sixty-two.
The husband inherits everything.
The nation mourns.
Julian leaned down as if to kiss me goodbye.
Then his hand slipped under the satin.
He pressed my rigid wrists against the coffin lining, digging his nails into my skin where no one could see.
“Enjoy being buried alive tonight, you rich old witch,” he whispered in my ear.
“I’m going to take your fortune and fly my lover to Ibiza.”
His breath was warm.
His smile was poison.
I could not blink.
I could not scream.
I could not even give him the satisfaction of seeing fear.
But Julian had forgotten one thing.
He had married the woman who built half of Europe’s surveillance medicine.
In my right eye, behind a cloudy contact lens, a microscopic retinal tracker waited for a precise command.
Three fixed visual points.
The candle flame.
The rose window.
The bronze cross.
I had installed the system months earlier, after first noticing Julian’s mistress wearing my mother’s emeralds.
Julian squeezed my wrist harder.
“Sleep well, darling.”
I looked at the candle.
Then the rose window.
Then the cross.
And deep within the cathedral walls, my revenge woke up.
