The blade pressed down, drawing a thin, brilliant line of red.

Several guests screamed.

Julian moved faster than anyone else. He lunged across the room and clamped his hand around my wrist.

The veins stood out along the back of his hand as he tore the knife away.

"Have you lost your mind?"

His chest heaved with the effort of containing his rage.

The force of his grip threw me off balance. My crutch hit the floor with a heavy thud.

Meredith clutched her chest, gasping as if she might faint. Theo had already pulled Sloane into his arms, where she trembled against him.

"Nora Hale."

Julian stared at me. For the first time, something that looked like fear entered his eyes.

He buried it beneath control almost immediately.

"Take her upstairs," he ordered the frozen security guards. "Lock the door. No one lets her out without my permission."

The welcome party ended in disaster.

Two guards half carried, half dragged me to a bedroom on the third floor. The door locked from the outside.

For the next week, I remained a prisoner.

They removed every sharp object. They even wrapped the corners of the nightstand in padding. The windows were locked, opening only a few inches.

They called it protection.

It was imprisonment.

Julian also confiscated the antidepressants I had brought with me, insisting that taking medication without his supervision was making me unstable.

"You're not sick," he told me as he took the bottle. "You just need attention."

Going off the medication abruptly was agony.

I stopped sleeping. My head throbbed constantly. Despair swallowed me in black, relentless waves.

The System panicked.

[Hang on, Nora! You cannot die before the mission is complete!]

Curled on the carpet in the corner of the room, I watched cold moonlight spill through the window.

No.

I had to die.

Only the complete death of this body could free me from their suffocating control.

My chance came two weeks later.

It was Sloane's twentieth birthday. The Ashfords rented an entire estate for the celebration.

To make sure I could not cause trouble, Meredith stationed two private-duty nurses outside my door around the clock.

"Stay in your room and think about what you've done," she said through the door. "Once you understand that you cannot use suicide to manipulate this family, I'll let you out."

One by one, car engines started below.

They left.

I rose slowly from the carpet and opened the bottom drawer of the dresser.

Inside, fifty white pills lay in neat rows.

Every night, I had pretended to swallow my sleeping medication, then hidden the pills under my tongue and saved them.

Julian had smugly replaced my antidepressants with powerful sedatives. He thought they would keep me quiet.

He never realized he had handed me the perfect weapon.

I went into the bathroom and filled a glass with warm water.

The System sensed what I was doing. Its voice began to shake.

[Nora... what are you holding?]

[Don't do this! There are other ways. You only have to stay alive...]

I poured every pill into my mouth and forced them down with the water.

Bitterness coated my throat.

I returned to bed, lay flat on my back, and folded my hands over my stomach.

Peace at last.

The drugs took effect faster than I expected. My thoughts blurred. The System's alarms grew sharp, then distant.

[WARNING: VITALS CRASHING.]

[WARNING: TERMINATION PROTOCOL IMMINENT.]

I closed my eyes and felt my heartbeat slow.

Slower.

Slower.

Until there was nothing.

My final moment of awareness froze around the System's horrified electronic scream.

[Fuck! She actually did it!]

Death turned out to be less peaceful than I had expected. There was no tunnel. No light. No dead relatives waiting with open arms. There was the System screaming.

[HOST STATUS: DECEASED.]

[SECOND LIFE PROTOCOL ACTIVATED.]

[NEURAL RECONSTRUCTION: 0.3%.]

I ope

Rebecca Shaw did not look like someone who had come to comfort a grieving family. She looked like someone who had brought paperwork. Julian noticed that too. His shoulders straightened the moment she introduced herself. Grief disappeared behind the same controlle