I Buried My Husband's Lie in My First Will

The first time I died, my husband signed the cremation papers before my body was cold.

He needed me gone fast. Because my signature was the only thing standing between him and the four hundred million dollars I'd built.

I was Cassandra Reyes—founder of Reyes Capital, the woman who turned a garage startup into Wall Street's most feared private equity firm. And the man I'd married, Marcus Hale, was my Chief Financial Officer. My partner. My husband.

The love of my life.

What a fucking joke.

For three years, he drained my accounts through shell companies I'd trusted him to manage. He forged board resolutions. He moved my assets into a trust controlled by his mistress—my own personal assistant, the soft-spoken Brielle, who used to bring me coffee and call me "boss" with that adoring little smile.

And when I finally found the paper trail? When I sat across from Marcus and laid the forged documents on our marble kitchen island and said his name like a verdict?

He smiled.

"You're tired, Cass. You've been working too hard. Maybe you should rest."

I should rest.

Forty minutes later, my brakes failed on the coastal highway. The official report called it driver fatigue. Single-vehicle accident. Tragic.

I remember the guardrail. I remember the water rushing up to meet me. I remember thinking, in the last clear second before the cold swallowed everything, that no one would ever know what he did.

Then I opened my eyes.

I was twenty-nine again. Sitting in the leather chair of my own boardroom, the morning sun cutting across the glass table, and the contract in front of me was the one that started it all—the merger documents that, in my first life, I'd let Marcus structure.

The deal that handed him the keys to my kingdom.

My phone lit up. Marcus's name. The photo I'd set was him laughing on a beach in Maui, sunburned and beautiful and lying.

"Babe, the board's waiting. You ready to sign? After this, it's official—we run the whole thing together. You and me against the world."

My hands didn't shake.

The fury inside me wasn't hot. It was cold. Surgical. The kind of rage that builds an empire and burns one down in the same breath.

I declined the call.

Then I scrolled to a number I'd never had the courage to dial in my first life. A man whose name made grown CFOs sweat through their tailored shirts. Dominic Sterling. The corporate raider who'd tried to take over Reyes Capital eighteen months ago and walked away the only loser my firm had ever produced.

The man Marcus hated more than anyone alive.

I typed: "I have proof that Reyes Capital is being looted from the inside. $90 million and climbing. I'll hand you the whole map—names, accounts, signatures—in exchange for fifteen minutes and an NDA."

Thirty seconds later, my phone rang.

A voice like smoke over ice. "You have ten minutes. Talk."

I smiled for the first time since I'd come back from the dead.

"Mr. Sterling. My name is Cassandra Reyes. And I'm about to hand you every secret buried inside the company you failed to take last year."