Montgomery Michael Portmann

At my own funeral, I watched my husband slide my wedding ring onto my sister's finger. I wasn't dead. I was standing twenty feet away, in a black wig and sunglasses, watching them lower an empty casket into the ground while three hundred people in Hartwell black wept for me. "Seraphina was the love of my life," my husband, Lucian Hartwell, said into the microphone, his voice cracking on cue. "But she would want us to move forward. She would want… family." Then he reached for my younger sister, Delphine, and pulled her against his side. And the bitch had the nerve to dab her eyes with my handkerchief. Six days ago, they pushed me off a yacht into the Atlantic during a storm. Six days ago, I should have drowned. I remember Lucian's face as he watched me go under—calm, almost bored, like he was checking something off a list. And Delphine, leaning over the rail, whispering the words that have lived in my skull ever since: "You were always just a placeholder, Sera. Now I get everything." Everything. The $4 billion Voss fortune my dead parents left in a trust. A trust that only unlocks to the married heir. A trust I controlled—until Lucian married me to get to it, then decided he'd rather have the version of me that did what she was told. A fishing trawler pulled me out of the water at dawn. I spent three days in a stranger's cottage, coughing up seawater, piecing together exactly how thoroughly I'd been betrayed. Because here's the part they don't know. The trust doesn't pass to the husband when the heir dies. It passes to the next blood Voss. And there's only one other living Voss on this earth. Me. The real me. And the woman they buried today—the body they think drowned—was never going to be found, because there is no body. There's only an empty coffin, a grieving widower, and a sister wearing my crown. I lowered my sunglasses just enough to catch Delphine's eye across the cemetery. For one perfect second, the color drained from her face. She'd seen a ghost. Then a hand closed around my arm from behind, and a low male voice murmured in my ear: "You're supposed to be dead, Mrs. Hartwell. Walk with me, or you will be."