Rachel Yarelli Aryana

The first shovel of dirt hit my coffin while I was still breathing inside it. I'm not speaking in metaphor. I mean I was lying in a satin-lined casket, eyes wide open, lungs working, listening to my husband deliver my eulogy six feet above my head. "Vivian was the love of my life," Damien said, his voice breaking at exactly the right moment. I could hear the fake tremor. Three years of marriage taught me what his real grief sounded like — and this wasn't it. My name is Vivian Cross. Two hours ago, I was alive in a hospital bed, paralyzed from a sedative my husband's mistress slipped into my IV. Conscious. Aware. Completely unable to move a single muscle. They declared me dead at 9:42 a.m. I felt the doctor — bought, obviously — press two fingers to my throat, pause for show, and announce there was no pulse. I screamed inside my own skull. Nothing came out. Now here I was. Buried. Another shovel. The thud of soil landing on lacquered wood, dull and final. "She left everything to me," Damien continued above. "Her shares. Her trust. Everything." That was the part that mattered. That was the only part that ever mattered to him. Because what Damien didn't know — what nobody at that funeral knew — was that the paralytic was already wearing off. I could move my fingers now. My toes. My lips parted, and a thin breath of stale air slid into the dark. And what Damien really didn't know was something far worse for him. I wasn't Vivian Cross, the quiet, dutiful wife he married for her family's failing company. That was the costume. Three years ago, I walked into his life as a nobody on purpose. I let him believe I was small, breakable, easy to discard. I let him underestimate me down to the bone. Because the company he was so desperate to steal from my "dead" body? I already owned the holding company that owned his. My fingers curled into fists in the dark. I heard a woman laugh above the grave. Celeste. His mistress. The one who poisoned me. "Can we hurry this up?" she murmured to Damien, not even bothering to lower her voice. "I want to celebrate." He chuckled. Actually chuckled, over my coffin. And in that black, airless box, with three feet of dirt already piling onto the lid, I smiled. Because I had exactly forty minutes of oxygen. And I had planted one thing in this casket before the funeral that not a single one of them checked. My fingers found it now, tucked into the silk lining beside my hip. A phone. Fully charged.