The MC President's Forsaken Wife (Zara and Knox) novel Chapter 4

Zara

Freezing water strikes my face and shoulders hard enough to drag me upward from the dark, quiet place I had been drifting in.

For a second, I don’t know where I am. 

I only know the feeling: water clinging to my skin, soaking through fabric, sliding down my throat in thin, icy lines.

My body shudders as though it remembers something that I haven’t caught up to yet, and I realize that I’m sprawled across a sofa.

A cup slams down against glass.

“Are you awake now?” His voice cuts through the ringing in my ears. “If not, go jump in the goddamn pool.”

Knox.

Not yet as the man that I would later understand him to be. Not fully formed into the version of him that leaves nothing untouched by distance, but already – already – carrying that same stillness, that same absence, that same quiet refusal to meet anything that reaches for him.

My breath catches.

Not because of the cold, but because something else is settling into place.

This isn’t happening. Not now. I’ve already lived this.

The realization comes slowly, and when I finally look around, really look, the room falls into place with a familiarity that feels almost cruel: The broken vase scattered across the floor, flowers crushed beneath careless steps. Cushions pulled loose and soaked through as though the room itself had been caught in the middle of something neither of us knew how to stop.

I remember this day, two years ago. I remember him slapping me hard enough to knock me into the sofa. 

Why, though?

Ah. The watch. I broke his watch.

It was a simple mistake… until the way he looked at me made it clear that it wasn’t.

Not to him. 

At the time, I didn’t understand why something so small had enraged him, why his reaction felt disproportionate.

I learned later, of course, that it had been a gift from her. Becca.

God, I fought the day that I learned that.

I raised my voice, threw things, broke whatever I could reach, as though noise and chaos might pull something out of him that silence never did.

And he hit me hard enough that I blacked out, and he chucked icy water on my prone body.

In the memory, Knox moves past me without touching me, not even close enough to brush against me.

And there it is. The truth I refused to face at the time.

But in the now, I can feel the difference between who I was then and who I am in this moment.

I can feel the way something inside me no longer reaches for him in the memory, no longer tries to bend itself into something he might accept.

Because I already know where this leads. I already lived it.

Suddenly, the floor gives way beneath me. Not breaking, not collapsing, but dissolving into something fluid, something that rises to meet me as the room fades, as the memory releases its hold.

More water.

It closes around me completely, warm and endless, holding me in a way that feels nothing like the violence that brought me here. For a moment I simply exist inside it, suspended, weightless, aware of the way it moves over my skin, through my hair, as though it’s washing something from me that I no longer need to carry.

My chest tightens, breath building slowly until my body responds, rising without hesitation. It pushes me upward through the water toward something brighter, something that waits just beyond the waves.

Air. Light. Something new.

I break through the surface with a sharp inhale… fully awake.

Reborn.