Her Vengeful Rebirth novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Twenty Below
Thalia freezes to death in her own lab's walk-in freezer while her fiance and stepsister photograph her notebook, then wakes at the ribbon-cutting with the keycard in her hand and keeps it; across the lobby the rival who died with her touches his watch.
The lock clicked, and the cold came down on me.
Through the little window in the freezer door I watched my fiance open my lab notebook.
Cameron turned the pages slowly.
My stepsister stood at his elbow in a green dress, filming each page with her phone.
"Cameron," I said, and hit the steel with my fist. "The inside release is jammed."
He looked straight at me through the glass.
Then he smiled the same smile he had worn when he proposed, and tucked my notebook under his arm.
Daphne blew me a kiss.
They turned off the lights in Lab 4 and walked out, and the only thing left was the red bulb over my head.
The thermometer on the wall read twenty below.
I knew what that number did to a person, because I had written the safety manual.
I pounded until my knuckles split, and then I sat down against the door and pulled my knees up.
My lab coat was a joke against that air.
At some point I stopped feeling my feet.
Then the outer door shrieked, and something heavy bit into the seam.
A crowbar came through the gap, and then a man's shoulder, and then Jericho Lund fell into the room.
He was the CEO my father had crushed in court that spring, and he had no business being in my building.
He crossed to me in two strides and dragged me into his lap.
Behind him the big door swung slowly shut on its own weight, and the latch dropped.
For a moment neither of us said a word.
He wrapped both arms around me and tucked my frozen hands under his shirt.
"Your car was in the lot," he said into my hair. "The lights were on."
"You shouldn't have come," I said.
"Probably not."
He was shaking as hard as I was.
"Stay awake, Thalia."
"What time is it?"
He lifted his wrist so the red bulb caught his watch.
"Eleven forty-seven," he said.
The last thing I felt was his breath on my forehead, still warm.
I woke up in a blaze of heat.
Someone was holding my right hand, and my fingers were curled around a piece of plastic.
I knew it by its edges before I looked.
It was a keycard with a green stripe, the second admin card, the one that opened Lab 4 and Room 4C.
I was standing in the lobby of Markham Biologics in a cream blouse I had thrown out three years ago.
Bunting hung from the mezzanine.
A red ribbon was stretched across the lab doors, and two hundred people were smiling at me.
"Just hand it over, Thal," Cameron said softly, his fingers closing around mine. "So I can run things while you're making history."
His thumb was warm.
It was the same thumb that had turned the pages of my notebook.
I looked past him at the banner over the stairs.
LAB 4 OPENING, it said, and under it the date.
October 14, three years before I died.
I was twenty-four, I was alive, and I was still wearing his ring.
My father stood at the podium with a pair of giant scissors, telling the room how proud my mother would have been.
Daphne waited beside the cake in a green sundress, her eyes already on my hand.
I did not let go of the card.
I closed my fist around it and slid it into my pocket in one smooth move.
"Oh, silly me," I said brightly, loud enough for the row behind us. "I left your copy in my other coat. I'll bring it tomorrow."
Cameron's smile did not move.
His fingers closed on my wrist, hard enough to grind the bones together.
"Give it to me," he said, very low, without moving his lips.
I looked at his hand, and then up into his clean, handsome, murderer's face.
"Not today," I said, and smiled back.
He let go first.
I rubbed my wrist and turned to face the crowd, and the clapping started up again.
That was when I saw the one man in the lobby who was not clapping.
He stood at the very back by the coat check, a head taller than everyone, in a charcoal suit that strained across his shoulders.
His head was shaved and his beard was black, with the first grey at the chin.
Jericho Lund held a paper cup in one hand and stared at me.
He touched two fingers to his left wrist, where a steel watch was ticking, and did not look away.
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