Part 1She Laughed At My Real Corpse

I suffered every imaginable torment in that foreign penitentiary, waiting for a justice that never came.

When the embassy finally contacted Chloe to claim my body, she laughed. She told the magistrate it was a sick prank, a silicone dummy I’d commissioned just to torture her.

"That piece of trash violated me," she sneered through the phone, her voice dripping with a cruelty that used to break my heart. "Even if his rotting corpse gets flushed down a storm drain, I wouldn't waste a single breath looking at him."

What she didn't know was that I wasn't hiding. I was really, truly dead.

Three years ago, after she was assaulted on that yacht, her trauma fractured her reality. She became hysterical, pointing a trembling finger at me, accusing me of being the monster who ruined her. Both of our families knew the truth. They knew the real culprit was inextricably tied to Brady—the golden boy, the untouchable center of her universe. Yet, they all looked away. They fed me to the wolves to satisfy her need for vengeance.

They left me to rot in a sun-baked hellhole halfway across the world. And while I was bleeding on concrete floors, Chloe liquidated the tech company I had built from nothing, using my money to bury the evidence and keep her true love out of prison.

I often wondered what she would do when she realized the truth. I imagined her holding my skeletal remains, laughing in manic triumph. I imagined her laughing so hard that eventually, the laughter would break, and the tears wouldn't stop falling.

* * *

My remains were extradited back to the States.

My wife, Chloe, received the formal notice to identify the body.

She walked down the stark, fluorescent-lit hallway of the county morgue. As they approached the heavy metal doors, the faint, unmistakable stench of decay leaked into the air.

She hesitated.

Her stunning features twisted into a mask of pure revulsion. "Does he really think this is going to work?" she muttered, her heels clicking aggressively against the linoleum. "He fakes his death to guilt-trip me into forgiving a rapist? In his dreams."

In the end, she only made it through the doors because Brady had his arms wrapped securely around her waist.

My soul drifted silently behind them. I watched, numb, as Chloe playfully bit Brady’s neck, right there in the morgue, as if she were trying to purge the sterile air from her lungs. Then, realizing she might have bitten too hard, she soothed the red mark with her tongue, letting out a soft, breathy giggle.

A phantom pressure seized my chest. I couldn't breathe, even though I had no lungs left to fill.

She was flirting with her lover mere feet from my corpse.

The medical examiner shifted uncomfortably, clearing his throat to enforce some semblance of respect.

Chloe pulled away from Brady, rolling her eyes. She spat a curse under her breath and finally yanked back the white sheet covering the steel table.

Just one look.

My nonexistent breath hitched.

It wasn't just that I was dead. It was that I had died with zero dignity. My remains were grotesque.

"A rotting silicone dummy, Holden. Really?" Chloe's voice was sharp, bouncing off the tiled walls. "You think you've fooled everyone, don't you? You're probably hiding in some pathetic little motel right now, laughing at my family. Laughing at the woman you brutalized. You make me sick!"

"You might fool the embassy, Holden, but you can't fool me!" she screamed at the mutilated flesh. "I wish you were dead. I wish you died so thoroughly that your soul wouldn't even dare cross the border back into this country!"

No, Chloe! I'm not lying to you!

I surged forward, desperate, reaching out to grab her shoulders. But my translucent hands passed right through the expensive wool of her coat.

She turned away from the table and buried her face in Brady’s chest, pressing a lingering kiss to his collarbone. "Let him play dead," she whispered. "At least now we don't have to hide anymore."

Brady carried her into the morgue, and he carried her out.

The entire walk back to the administrative desk, she stroked his jaw, his neck, kissing him repeatedly as if demanding compensation for having to look at my face.

At the front desk, the clerk handed them a thick manila envelope containing my autopsy reports and biometric data. Dozens of pages of irrefutable DNA matches and dental records.

If she had bothered to look at even the first page, she would have known the body couldn't be faked.

Instead, Chloe shoved the envelope into her designer tote like it was garbage.

Brady stroked her hair, his eyes heavy with practiced sorrow. "Three years ago, Holden almost dragged me down with him. If it weren't for you fighting for me, exhausting yourself to clear my name... I would have been ruined. I owe you everything."

Chloe shook her head, her gaze softening. "Don't say that. It wasn't a big deal. I just spent a little money... liquidated a few of Holden’s start-ups. It didn't cost my family a dime."

The tech firm I had bled for. The company I worked hundred-hour weeks to build from a garage to a high-rise office—gone in an afternoon. Sold off by my wife to buy the freedom of another man.

The dead aren't supposed to feel anything.

So why did it hurt so much? Why did the sheer memory of her voice feel like glass in my veins?

Forget it, I told myself. I built that company to afford the experimental treatments for her severe respiratory condition anyway. At least the money was used.

"Holden owed me," Chloe gritted her teeth, her eyes darkening. "Selling off his little vanity projects was letting him off easy."

Brady glanced back down the hallway toward the cold storage rooms.

"Are you sure you don't want to take one last look? Once you sign the release, they'll bury him. Whatever he did, he was your husband once. He loved you in his own way." Brady sighed, running a hand through his perfectly styled hair. "Man to man... I almost pity him."

Chloe spat on the ground, her face contorting with disgust.

"God, Brady, you're too kind for your own good. Why are you defending a monster who tried to destroy us? He forced himself on me! Marital rape is still rape!" Her voice trembled, pitching up with genuine, manufactured trauma. "You fought him off. You saved me, and you almost went to prison for assault because of it! He doesn't even deserve to have his name spoken."

The heavy doors of the morgue slowly swung shut.

The clerk slid a clipboard across the counter. "Ma'am, I just need your signature on the release forms."

Chloe picked up the pen. Then, suddenly, her hand froze. She slammed the pen down and backed away.

"I am not tying my name to that man."

"Excuse me?" the clerk asked.

"Even if he is dead—which he isn't—I will not put my name on a document as his wife. I have nothing to do with him!"

She spun on her heel and stormed out.

The clerk looked bewildered and chased after her. "Ma'am! You are legally married. By state law, the spouse must claim the remains—"

Chloe paused at the automatic doors. She didn't look back.

"I don't have a husband. Let his body rot in there. Let the rats eat him. It's exactly what he deserves."

She threw open the door of her Porsche 911, slammed it shut, and peeled out of the parking lot, the engine roaring in defiance.

In the passenger seat, Brady’s phone began to ring incessantly. The police. The morgue.

Chloe glanced at the caller ID and shook her head sharply.

"Ignore it. Just thinking about him makes my skin crawl. Every time I close my eyes, I’m back on the deck of that yacht, crying, begging him to stop, and he just... he didn't care. I could kill him myself."

My spirit trembled.

Watching the absolute, venomous hatred radiate from her eyes, listening to her rewrite history until it justified grinding my bones to dust—it was a bitter, suffocating pill to swallow.

Chloe was my wife, yet she had convinced the world, and herself, that I was a rapist.

But I wasn't.

It happened shortly after our wedding, on a luxury cruise through a lawless stretch of international waters in the Caribbean.

Armed mercenaries boarded the ship. Chloe was dragged up to the upper deck. By the time I tore through the ship like a madman and finally found her, it was over. She was catatonic, bleeding heavily onto the teakwood floor. The ship's doctor later told me the trauma had been so severe, the internal damage so catastrophic, that she would never be able to carry a child.

I was consumed by a blinding, agonizing guilt. I wanted to rip my own heart out and give it to her if it would make her whole again.

But when Chloe finally woke up in the hospital, her mind had snapped. She screamed the moment she saw me. She threw things. She clawed at her own face, demanding that I die to atone for what I had done to her.

Her trauma had completely rewritten her memories. She truly believed I was the one who had attacked her.

I closed my ghostly eyes, letting the memory wash over me.

To give her peace, I let her and her influential family lock me away in a brutal offshore prison.

It was a cage built for the worst of humanity. Cartel enforcers, murderers, monsters. And in a place like that, a convicted rapist is the lowest link on the food chain.

For three years, I was subjected to torture that defied human comprehension.

And on the very night I was finally scheduled to be released, I was given my final release.

I died in unimaginable agony.

My body was beaten until it was no longer recognizable as human.

...

Brady drove like a maniac, eventually pulling up to the driveway of my sprawling estate in the suburbs.

As Chloe stepped out into the freezing rain, he pulled her flush against his chest, kissing her deeply, hungrily.

"It's okay. Shhh, it's over now. You're safe," he murmured.

They held each other tightly in the downpour.

I remembered my final moments on earth. I had begged a sympathetic guard to let me make one last phone call.

Please... I had choked out into the receiver, blood bubbling in my lungs. Please, just pick up. I'm dying. This is my last chance, Chloe. My last chance to hear your voice...

If she had answered.

Even if she had picked up just to tell me how much she hated me. Even if she called me pathetic, manipulative, a coward trying to play the victim!

If I had just heard her voice, I would have fought. I would have clawed my way back to life just to breathe the same air as her.

But the phone just kept ringing.

I died in absolute, suffocating despair.

I died one day before my sentence was up.

Now, I was a wandering ghost. An exile, tethered to the woman who put me in the ground.