REBORN TO RUIN YOU novel Chapter 1

The Last Breath

VIVIENNE'S POV

My marriage anniversary became the worst day of my life.

It was the day where I was arrested for a crime I didn't commit. The day I ran and got run over by an SUV.

Now I lay here begging for nothing but death. My body is a prison I can't escape, paralyzed from the waist down, dependent on tubes and wires to keep what's left of me functioning. I should have died in that crash, but the universe hated me so much that it kept me alive to suffer.

The door opens with its familiar creeping sounds, and I don't have to turn my head to know who's entered.

That particular sound of footsteps has haunted my nightmares. I would remember it no matter where I was. Even in half dead form, I knew who it was.

Margaret Lancaster.

The woman I've called Mother for twenty-three years, approaches my bedside. Even now, she looks perfect. Pearl earrings. Blonde hair perfectly styled. Lipstick hiding the venom she’s about to spill.”

"Still fighting my love?"

Her voice carries that familiar note of false concern, the same tone she used when I was eleven and crying over a scraped knee, when I was sixteen and heartbroken over my first boyfriend, when I was twenty three and naive enough to believe she loved me.

But I see her clearly now, in these final moments. The mask has slipped just enough to reveal the coldness beneath—the calculating stare of a woman who has been planning this moment for years.

And all I can do is watch as she settles into the chair beside my bed with the air of someone visiting an old friend rather than watching their daughter die.

"You know," she begins, her voice taking on a conversational tone that makes my blood run cold, "I've been thinking about your biological mother lately. Elena was such a brilliant woman, too brilliant for her own good. She asked too many questions, just like you started to do."

Elena. My birth mother's name falls from Margaret's lips like a curse, and suddenly the fragmented memories I've carried all my life begin to shift into focus. Everything about my life had been a lie.

Margaret's perfectly manicured fingers trace the edge of my blanket, and I catch the glint of satisfaction in her green eyes. "She discovered things she shouldn't have. About the pharmaceutical trials, about the money, about what we were really doing to those poor refugees in Syria. Elena thought she could expose us, thought her research gave her power." A soft laugh escapes her lips, "She learned how wrong she was."

The machines around me seem to beep faster, matching the frantic rhythm of my trapped heart. My mother, my real mother…was murdered. And the woman who raised me, who I trusted, who I called family, was her killer.

"You should have stayed dead the first time, just like your mother. But even after that car dove into yours, you still managed to survive. You lucky fucker."

The words hit me like physical blows. If I wasn't already half dead, her words were enough to have put me in a grave.

"Poor little Vivienne," Margaret continues, her voice dripping with mock sympathy. "Always so desperate to please. Do you know how pathetic it was to watch? The way you tried so hard to earn love from people planning your death?"

My vision blurs with tears I can't shed, rage I can't express. Twenty-three years of my life have been a carefully orchestrated lie.

"It's time," she says simply, and the doctor moves toward the machines that have kept me alive.

No. This isn't how it ends. I won't let it end this way.

But I have no voice to protest, no strength to fight. I can only watch as they begin disconnecting the life support that has sustained me through months of slow dying. The ventilator's steady rhythm falters, and for the first time in months, I have to struggle for each breath.

Margaret leans down close to my ear, her perfume—the same Chanel No. 5 she's worn since I was a child, filling my senses with memories of a life that was never real.

"Goodbye, darling," she whispers, her lips brushing my cheek, "You were always too trusting, too soft. Juliette will make a much better Lancaster heir than you ever could have been."

As darkness creeps in from the edges of my vision, I closed my eyes and make a prayer that's more of a vow, than a plea. If there's any justice in this universe, any power that listens to the dying wishes of the betrayed, let me come back.

Let me return with the knowledge I have now, with the truth they thought would die with me.

Let me show them what a real monster looks like.

(The machines flatline at 11:47 PM, their electronic screams echoing through the sterile room as Vivienne Lancaster takes her last breath.)

But death, I discover, isn't always the end.