Chapter 1

The first time Daniel told me to take off my clothes, I thought helping him would make him love me.

The second time, I bit him hard enough to make him let go.

He stumbled back from the couch, clutching his forearm. I scrambled to the other end and pulled my collar closed.

I could feel my legs.

That was the first thing I understood. Both feet were on the floor. Both knees bent when I told them to. There was no smoke in the room, no locked door, no men waiting for Daniel to tell them what they could do to me.

“Claire. What the hell?”

He stood between me and the window, flushed and sweating. A lamp lit the side of his face. I knew this room: his apartment, the night Grandpa sent me over with company documents.

The night everything started.

Daniel Whitmore was thirty-three. I was twenty-five. He was my grandfather's adopted son, eight years older than me, and the person our family had taught me to call Uncle Daniel.

We weren't related by blood. That was the excuse I'd used for feelings I should have taken somewhere safer than his doorstep.

In my first life, I'd found him here, confused and unwell, and mistaken his demands for something I was supposed to fix. Later, Grandpa tried to turn what happened into a marriage, saying a promise would put everything right.

It didn't.

Daniel said I'd destroyed his chance to be with Lydia Price. He tried to die on the railway after drinking. I tried to save him and lost both legs.

He agreed to the wedding after that. I thought guilt had finally made room for kindness.

On the night our family called my wedding night, he had me taken to a private club where men paid to hurt women. He watched while they assaulted me.

Afterward, he kept me there. There were drugs, locked rooms, days I couldn't put in order. He pushed Grandpa down a staircase when he tried to get me out, then left him in a care facility where nobody answered my calls.

The last thing I remembered was a fire. I'd started it. By the time I understood that other people might die too, smoke had taken most of the room away.

Daniel died there. So did I.

Now he was alive in front of me, and the small clock on his wall read 10:17.

My phone, lying beside the couch, showed the date I'd never forgotten.

I was back.

“I told you to listen,” he said.

He reached toward me. I flinched so hard my shoulder struck the wall.

For a moment, his hand stayed in the air. Then his expression hardened.

“Don't think this changes anything. I don't want you.”

I stared at him. Once, those words would have been enough to keep me begging for an hour.

“Good.”

He looked startled.

I stood, keeping the couch between us. My knees shook. I could have cried from the simple relief of standing on them.

There was a kitchen beyond the hallway. I remembered where he kept the knives, and the thought frightened me more than his hand had.

I wasn't going to lose another life to him.

“Where's Lydia?” I asked.

His gaze sharpened.

“Why do you want her here?”

I knew everything he'd spent the next year blaming me for. He didn't need to know that yet.

“She's your girlfriend. You want her here. Give me the address.”