The Villain Dies Tonight

The divorce papers were still warm from the printer. My husband's penthouse smelled like her perfume. I signed my name, and then I swallowed every pill in the bottle.

I was almost home.

The pills worked fast. My vision softened at the edges, and the rooftop wind turned gentle, almost kind. Forty-two floors below, Manhattan glittered like a promise I had once believed.

Three years in this world. The System had dropped me into this satisfying satisfying body with four targets and one rule: make any one of them fall into Absolute Affection, and the version of me dying of leukemia in my real world would be cured.

Four men. Each one powerful enough to reshape industries,eli, cities, legacies. Each one had loved me first and then destroyed me because of her.

Sienna Blake. The heroine.

She arrived like a wound that wouldn't close. One by one, she took everything — my husband, my brother, my business partner, my bodyguard — and turned them into weapons aimed at my chest.

The System's final verdict had been clean and cold: Mission Failed.

So I was leaving on my own terms.

The rooftop door slammed open behind me.

"Vivian!"

I didn't turn around. The railing was already against my hips. One push, and gravity would do the rest.

A hand clamped around my wrist so hard the bones ground together. I was yanked backward and thrown onto concrete.

My skull cracked against the ground. Stars burst white and sharp.

I blinked up at the man standing over me.

Ethan Cross. My husband. Ex-husband. The ink on the divorce papers wasn't even dry.

His jaw was locked tight. Rain had started, and water streaked down his face like tears he would never actually shed. He looked furious, disgusted — the same expression he wore the night he told me I was the most repulsive woman he had ever met.

"Still performing?" he spat. "Sienna just got home. She doesn't need your theatrics ruining her night."

Of course.

Even my death was an inconvenience measured against Sienna's comfort.

Ethan Cross — billionaire, CEO of Cross Industries, the man Forbes called untouchable — had once carried me through a rainstorm because I sneezed twice. He had once canceled a merger because I mentioned, offhand, that I missed the stars.

That was before Sienna.

When I found him, he had been bleeding in a crashed car on a mountain road in Vermont. I pulled him out, drove forty minutes to the nearest hospital with his blood soaking through my coat, and sat beside his bed for nine days until he woke.

He said, "You're the first person who didn't want something from me."

He proposed three months later.

Then Sienna appeared — wide eyes, trembling voice, a tragic past that unfolded like a screenplay. She claimed I had hired men to assault her in a parking garage. She left a letter and vanished.

Ethan didn't ask me a single question.

He moved me out of the master bedroom. He froze my accounts. He let his lawyers dismantle my name in every courtroom in the state.

"A woman like you doesn't deserve to breathe the same air as Sienna," he had said, calm as aeli reading a verdict.

For three years, I lived in the basement of his penthouse. I cleaned. I cooked. I endured.

Now Sienna was back, and Ethan wanted a clean slate — one wife, one love, one story. Even the basement was no longer mine.

I looked up at him from the wet concrete and smiled.

"If my dying ruins Sienna's night," I said softly, "then you should have let me finish."

Something flickered behind his eyes. It vanished before I could name it.

"Get up," he said coldly. "I'm taking you to your brother. After tonight, I don't care what happens to you."

My brother.

The person in this world who wanted me dead more than anyone.

Ethan's driver pulled the car around. He shoved me inside like luggage and didn't look at me once during the drive.

When the car stopped, I stepped out in front of my brother's townhouse, barefoot, still bleeding from where my head had hit the concrete.

I walked straight past the front door, through the garden, and toward the river behind the property.

I jumped.