Chapter 2 Blood on Ivory Sheets

The first time Mia Harper saw her obituary, she was sitting in a rusted bathtub in a motel on the outskirts of the city, clutching a burner phone with scraped knuckles and dried blood beneath her nails.

She hadn't slept in thirty-six hours.

The bathwater was pink.

Her obituary was short-three paragraphs in the local newspaper's online edition. Her law firm issued a cold, corporate statement expressing "regret and condolences." Her supposed death, reported as a suspected suicide, was framed around stress, legal investigations, and "personal tragedy." Not a single quote from Daniel. Not even Elena pretending to grieve.

They had erased her like a stain on white silk.

Mia stared at the cracked phone screen until her vision blurred.

She should have felt something-anger, despair, grief. But she didn't.

There was only stillness. The kind that settles in after the screaming stops.

She emerged from the bath and dressed in silence. A hoodie. Jeans. A fresh burner phone in her pocket. The money she'd withdrawn before everything went to hell-five grand in cash-was stuffed into a duffel bag along with her mother's old locket and the forged IDs she'd bought from a woman named Sable two hours earlier. Sable didn't ask questions. Mia didn't offer answers.

It was a start.

Outside, the rain had finally stopped, leaving behind steam rising from the streets like smoke. Mia moved like a shadow-head down, eyes scanning. She couldn't be seen. Not yet. The city was still hers, but she no longer belonged to it.

She headed for the edge of the industrial zone. The part of town where names didn't matter, and the past could be traded for a pack of cigarettes.

She needed help. Skills. A plan. Revenge wasn't a fantasy anymore-it was a process. And that process required precision.

A name came to her.

Jonas Vale.

A myth in legal and criminal circles. Former intelligence asset, turned fixer, turned ghost. He trained people to vanish. Or to reappear as someone else. Word was, if you had enough money-or enough motive-he could make you into whatever the world needed you to be.

Mia had both.

She found him in a bar with no name.

It took three fake identities, a violent poker game, and two whispered passwords just to reach the backroom.

Jonas looked nothing like she expected. Gray at the temples, weathered hands, sharp blue eyes like a hawk's. He didn't speak when she entered, just lit a cigarette and waited.

She laid the duffel bag on the table.

"I want to disappear," she said. "But not forever."

He looked up.

"I want to become the kind of woman Daniel Ward can't buy or break. I want to destroy everything he built. And I don't care what it costs."

Jonas took a long drag, then exhaled.

"I can make you disappear. I can teach you how to fight, lie, kill, and vanish again. But once you start down this path, there's no turning back. Are you sure you're not just angry? "

"I'm not angry," she said coldly. "I'm focused."

He studied her for a long time.

"Good," he said. "Because you're already dead."