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Chapter 1

I woke up screaming.

My hands clutched at my throat, feeling for wounds that weren't there. My heart hammered against my ribs so hard I thought it might break through.

It had felt so real. The rotting flesh. The milky eyes. The teeth sinking into my arm as I pounded uselessly against our front door, begging David to let me in.

"Emma? Jesus, what's wrong?" David's voice came from beside me, thick with sleep and annoyance.

I turned to look at my husband. In the dim light filtering through our bedroom curtains, his face looked almost unfamiliar. When had the warmth left his eyes?

"Just a nightmare," I whispered, my voice still shaking.

He rolled away from me. "Well, keep it down. Some of us have important meetings in the morning."

I sat there in the darkness, my pulse still racing. It wasn't just a nightmare. It couldn't be. The details were too vivid, too specific.

In the dream, the news had broken on a Tuesday morning—three weeks from now. A new virus outbreak in Southeast Asia. By Friday, it had spread to the West Coast. Within ten days, the dead were walking.

And David had locked me out of our home in Greenwood Hills, the gated community forty minutes outside Seattle. He'd let someone else in instead. A woman with honey-blonde hair and a familiar laugh.

My stomach twisted. Not just from the dream, but from something else. Something I'd been ignoring for months.

I slipped out of bed and padded downstairs to David's office. He never locked it—why would he? I was his wife. He trusted me.

Or maybe he just didn't think I was smart enough to find anything.

His laptop sat on the desk, still warm. He must have been working late again. Or so he claimed.

I opened it. No password—another sign of his arrogance. The screen lit up, showing his email inbox.

And there it was. A thread with "Melissa" at the top. The preview text made my blood run cold:

"Can't wait for this weekend. Book the usual place? Love you."

My hands trembled as I scrolled through message after message. Planning meetups. Discussing me—how I was "clingy," how I "didn't understand him." How he was just waiting for the right time to leave.

But he wouldn't leave. Not really. Because David loved our house. The sprawling five-bedroom estate with the three-car garage and heated pool. The house my trust fund had purchased.

I closed the laptop carefully, my mind racing.

The dream. The affair. Two separate disasters, or were they connected?

I walked to the kitchen and poured myself a glass of water with shaking hands. My reflection stared back at me from the darkened window—thirty-two years old, my brown hair messy from sleep, my green eyes wide with fear.

Was I losing my mind? Or was my subconscious trying to warn me about something?

I pulled out my phone and searched "virus outbreak" with today's date. Nothing unusual. Just the normal background noise of global health monitoring.

But then I remembered something from the dream. A specific detail. The outbreak had started at a research facility in Bangkok. Mutated rabies, they'd called it initially. Patient Zero was a lab technician named Dr. Somporn.

I searched again, adding "Bangkok research facility rabies."

One result. A tiny article from a Thai news site, published just yesterday. A researcher had been hospitalized after an accidental exposure to a modified rabies strain. The facility was under quarantine. His name: Dr. Somporn Chitprasert.

The glass slipped from my fingers and shattered on the tile floor.

It was real. The dream was real.