Reborn Heiress: Marrying The Wall Street Emperor

The smell hit her first. Antiseptic and iron. Disinfectant and blood. Her blood.

Consciousness was a slow, fractured thing. Chloe couldn't move. Couldn't open her eyes. But she could feel. The blanket over her legs was thin, scratchy. A cold prick slid into the crook of her arm, a slow, steady drain that pulled at the edges of her awareness.

Then came the voices. Not muffled. Not distant. They were right there, inside the room, unhurried and unguarded. Because they thought she was already gone.

"She can hear us, you know." It was Arthur Walton's voice - her fiancé's voice, the voice that had promised her forever. Now it was almost conversational, stripped of all pretense. "Not that it matters anymore."

The air hitched in Chloe's lungs.

"Why not?" Kaitlyn Hayes, her stepsister, made no effort to disguise the curiosity in her voice. Gone were the manufactured tears. Gone was the fragile, trembling girl. "She's actually conscious?"

"Barely." Arthur's footsteps moved closer, and she felt the faint depression of weight at the edge of the bed. "The blood drain's almost finished. She won't last more than a few hours. I'd rather she know exactly what's happening to her." A pause, savoring. "I think she's earned that much."

David Hayes, the man she called father, spoke from across the room, his voice stripped of all warmth. "Then let's not waste the moment."

A hand - cold, ringed - lifted her chin.

"Open your eyes, Chloe." Arthur's thumb pressed into her jaw. "I know you can."

She couldn't fight it. Her lids dragged open, and the fluorescent light of the hospital room bladed into her skull. Three faces looked down at her. Arthur. Kaitlyn. David. None of them flinched.

"There she is." Arthur smiled, and it didn't reach his eyes. It never had. "Our little cash cow, right to the end."

"The blood first." David nodded toward the IV line running from her arm to the bag beside the bed - a bag connected, she now saw, to another line running to the bed where Kaitlyn sat, serene and pink-cheeked, already receiving. "Kaitlyn's condition requires a precise match. You were always the perfect donor. How convenient."

Chloe's lips cracked apart. "You -"

"Don't." Arthur pressed a finger to her mouth, almost gently. "Don't waste what little strength you have. Just listen."

He straightened, tugging his cuffs, and began to speak the way men speak when they've rehearsed a thing a thousand times and finally get to perform it.

"The heart comes next. The surgical team is prepped. Kaitlyn's cardiologist assures us the procedure is straightforward - donor hearts rarely get fresher than this." He gestured at her chest, clinical and unhurried. "Your mother's trust fund and your Beaumont Industries shares transfer automatically upon your death. The estate lawyers drafted the documents months ago. We sign at nine."

"My mother -" The words scraped out of her.

"Eleanor." David said the name the way one says the name of a country they once visited. "Yes. That accident of hers. Not much of an accident, I'm afraid." He examined his watch. "She trusted me completely. That was her fatal flaw. You have the same one, I've noticed."

Something ruptured inside her chest - not her heart, but something older. Something that had believed, against all evidence, that this man had once loved her mother.

"You killed her." It wasn't a question.

"We made a decision," David said, "as a family."

Kaitlyn turned from the IV to look at her, head tilted, expression mild. "Don't look at me like that. You were never really family."

Arthur crouched to her eye level, elbows on his knees, almost intimate. "The cleanest part of this whole thing? Everyone will be devastated. The grieving fiancé. The heartbroken father. Tragic, really - Chloe Beaumont, dead at twenty-six, her last act a gift of life to the stepsister she loved." He touched her face. "I've already written the statement."

"What about Julian Sterling?" Kaitlyn's voice carried the faintest edge of nerves. "He's been asking about her."

Arthur scoffed. "Some Wall Street psycho. What is he going to do - audit us? Chloe will be a dead woman in a few hours. By the time Sterling asks his next question, there'll be no Chloe to answer for."

Julian Sterling. The name cracked through the fog like a stone through ice. A cold, ruthless face from the covers of financial magazines. Why would they be afraid of him?

"We're not afraid," Arthur said, as though she'd spoken aloud. "We're careful. There's a difference." He rose, smoothing his jacket. "Rest now. It's almost over."

A raw, animal heat flooded her veins. She wanted to scream, to tear them apart with her bare hands. But her limbs refused to answer. She had nothing left - nothing but the scalding, clarifying weight of everything she now knew.

A desperate, primal need to live surged through her. With the last of her strength, she bit down. Hard. The sharp, coppery taste of her own blood filled her mouth as something inside her snapped.

Then, nothing.

She woke with a gasp, air flooding her lungs in a desperate, ragged breath. The cold hospital gurney was gone, replaced by the impossible softness of high-thread-count sheets. The air no longer smelled of death. It carried a crisp, masculine scent - sandalwood and a faint hint of whiskey.

Chloe looked down. She was wearing a man's silk dress shirt, the cuffs hanging past her hands. Her skin, pale in the dim light, was littered with the faint, purplish marks of a passionate night.

Her head snapped up. Floor-to-ceiling windows revealed the glittering, sleepless skyline of Manhattan. Her own terrified face stared back at her from the reflection.

This wasn't a hospital. It was a lavish penthouse.

Her trembling hand reached for the phone on the nightstand. The screen lit up. It was five years ago. The day before her wedding to Arthur Walton.

She had been reborn. Back before it all went wrong.

The sound of a door opening startled her. Steam billowed out from the en-suite bathroom, and through the mist, a tall, imposing figure emerged. A white towel was slung low on his hips, water tracing paths down a lean, corded abdomen. He looked up, and his face stopped her breath.

It was a face carved from granite and ice, with eyes as deep and cold as a frozen lake.

It was him. The man from the magazine covers. Julian Sterling.

Chloe's pupils constricted. Of all places, she was reborn in Julian Sterling's bed.

Arthur's last words echoed in her mind - some Wall Street psycho, what can he do - and something shifted behind her ribs. Not fear.

A tremor started in her hand, low and simmering, and it had nothing to do with fear.