Reborn: The Twin's Fatal Choice

Last life, my twin sister waited until I had everything she wanted. Then she pushed me off a seventh-floor balcony.

This life, I opened my eyes in the same room, in the same chair, across from the same woman holding the same check.

And I thought I was the only one who remembered.

I was wrong.

Years ago, in both lives, Mara and I pulled a woman out of a wrecked car. Vivienne Sinclair. Billionaire. The kind of grateful that comes with terms.

She offered each of us a way out of being poor. One of us could marry her only son, Adrian, and inherit everything she'd built. The other could walk away with five million in cash.

Last life, Mara grabbed the son before the words were out of Vivienne's mouth. Dumped the man she'd been about to marry. An empire, she figured, was worth more than a measly five million.

She'd spend the next year telling anyone who would listen that the cold, beautiful heir was a control freak who'd shut her away and taken her mind apart.

Me, I took the five million. An Ivy League degree. A company I built in Silicon Valley from nothing and rang the bell for the morning it went public. By thirty I was the name Manhattan dropped at dinner, the one every Wall Street golden boy wanted standing next to him.

And now here we were again. Same study. Same warm, smiling woman. Her quiet, handsome son on one side of her, a five-million-dollar check on the other.

"Mara. Mira." She tilted her head. "Which of you chooses first?"

My sister's hand went up first. Same as always.

But this time her finger landed on the check.

That was how I knew.

She remembered everything too.

Chapter 1

Blood. The smell of it hit first, then the white ceiling of a psychiatric ward, Mara's face above mine, her hair wild, both her hands already flat on my chest.

Then the railing. Then the drop.

The world cracked into white on the pavement, and over the sound of my own body breaking came her scream.

"Why you, Mira? Why do you get to have everything, the luck, the life, all of it? That was supposed to be mine. I just picked wrong."

Then I was back in the leather chair, in the study I'd sat in once before. In the life that had ended with that fall.

"I'm a direct woman, girls, so I won't waste your time."

Vivienne Sinclair folded her hands. Her son on her right. On her left, more money than our grandmother had made in her life.

"This is Adrian. He was hurt when he was small, he's quiet, and he has no interest in running what I've built. So one of you marries him and inherits all of it. The other walks away with five million." A pause, warm, unbothered. Then she looked at me, just me, a beat too long. "Though I have a feeling I already know which way each of you leans."

She blamed me for all of it. Which was rich, considering it was Mara who chose to marry into that family last life. Mara who dropped the man she'd dated for years to do it.

She came out of that marriage swearing the polished, soft-spoken heir was a man so swallowed up by his own equations that living with him was like being buried alive, cut off from everyone she knew, until her mind came apart at the seams.

At least that was what she screamed at me later, in the ward, after she'd already lost her grip on what was real.

I'd pitied her. I'd wanted to pull her out of it, get her some kind of justice.

It took me far too long to understand. The thing eating her alive wasn't anything that marriage had done to her. It was that I hadn't suffered the way she had. That I'd ended up so much better off.

That envy, that rot, was enough to put both her hands on her own twin and shove.

So. Reborn, my palms going cold.

This time I would not lift a finger to save Mara. I would not set foot in that ward.

I'd finish school, build something of my own, and bring Grandma somewhere warm to grow old.

And right on cue, Mara's hand shot up first. Of course it did.

She always chose first. Poor family, never enough to go around. She'd spent our whole childhood snatching. I'd spent it stepping aside.

Except this time I was the one holding the future in my head. This time I could afford to just watch.

"Aunt Vivienne," Mara said sweetly. "I have a boyfriend. Someone as wonderful as Adrian should go to my little sister." Her finger came down on the check. "I'll take the five million."

My hand froze halfway to nothing.

Across the table, my sister was already smiling at me. Like she'd been waiting two lifetimes to do it.

Chapter 2

I knew my sister. Greedy, vain, allergic to anything that felt like work.

Five million in her hands would be gone inside a year. Why take a lump sum when she could marry into a fortune that never ran dry?

That was the math. It had always been the math. So why was she reaching for the check?

She didn't spare Adrian a single glance. Her eyes were on the check, only the check.

She leaned in, slid it out from under Vivienne's hand, and put her mouth to my ear.

"This time," she whispered, "you get to find out how it feels."

And there it was.

She remembered too.

The sound I'd heard right before I died last life, that heavy second thud just behind my own: that had been her body going over the railing after mine.

She'd planned it. She had hated me enough to die, just to take me down with her.

And now here she was, the cash already in her fist, working to shove me into the seat she'd just climbed out of.

"I hear Adrian keeps to himself. Reads. Loves his math." She smiled around the table. "What a coincidence. My Mimi's a little genius too. They'll have so much to talk about."

Marry Adrian. Become the plaything she swore that monster of a husband had made of her last time, while she skipped off with five million and a clean conscience she didn't own.

I'd been reborn. I hadn't been lobotomized.

So while she wasn't looking, I plucked the check right back out of her fingers, still warm, and set it down in front of Vivienne. Neat. Polite. Done.

"Thank you. Both of you. But we can't take something like this." I held Vivienne's eyes. "Whatever I want, I'll earn. I don't need anyone's charity. We pulled you out of that car by accident. You don't owe us a marriage or a check to make it even."

I stood, and I looked at the son who hadn't said one word the entire time.

Don't get me wrong. The man was unfairly beautiful. If I hadn't already lived a whole life, I'd never have believed a face that clean was bolted onto wiring that bent.

Mara thought she'd locked in the winning script. Take the prize, shove me into the fire.

Then let's all admire what a woman with a spine looks like, turning down a fortune. Nobody gets anything.

"Are you out of your mind?"

The second we got home she was in my face.

"She's worth ten figures. Adrian is her only son, and he can't run a company to save his life. She's going to hand it all to whichever daughter-in-law she trusts. Why would you throw that away?"

When the yelling didn't land, she switched instruments.

"Fine. Don't do it for us." Her voice went soft, reasonable, the way it always did right before it cut. "Do it for Grandma. We never had parents. She raised us alone. She's past seventy and still cleaning motel rooms all day, still carrying trays on the night shift, putting away dowries for two girls who never asked her to."

She tilted her head, eyes shining right on cue.

"Don't you want her last years to be comfortable?"

Chapter 3

"I'll have my master's by next year." I didn't flinch. "I can land a good job and take care of Grandma myself. I'm not marrying anyone, Mara. If you can't stand to let it go, then you marry Adrian."

Her eyes filled right on schedule.

"You're putting me in an impossible spot. I've been with Brett almost a year. You think I'd betray him to go play house with Adrian?" She dabbed at nothing. "Aunt Vivienne gave us three more days. Just say yes to him, Mimi. Otherwise we look like we're taking her money and spitting on her son. How humiliating would that be?"

I worked a bit of grit out from between my teeth. As if the woman who'd kicked her own poor sucker to the curb last life had ever been humiliated by anything.

I threw her out of my room. Within the hour, Grandma went down.

She collapsed closing up her shift. By the time they got her to the hospital it was bad.

Acute allergic reaction, the doctors said. A stroke on the back of it, her diabetes turning one complication into three. They couldn't pin down what she'd reacted to.

And the only person with her when it happened was Mara.

What Grandma had eaten, only Mara knew.

An ICU with no insurance runs a number with too many zeros to read. By day three Grandma had maxed every card I owned, and the hospital sent the notice they send right before they stop.

Mara's phone went to voicemail. So I texted her instead. Told her I was ready to sign Vivienne's gift agreement.

She showed up at the French restaurant exactly on time, like a shark that had caught the scent.

I'd marry Adrian. Mara would walk away with her five million, on one condition: half of it went to Grandma's care.

She agreed before I finished the sentence. Losing half the money stung, sure. But watching me get buried alive in that marriage was worth every cent, the way she saw it.

A week later Grandma moved out of the ICU and into a regular room, off the danger list.

I signed a thick contract-marriage agreement at City Hall and moved with Adrian into the Sinclair estate on Long Island, all gated acres and quiet security.

Everything was ready before I asked for it. The paperwork. A wing of the house already made up for me. A car already in my name. Vivienne arranged the world the way other people breathed. I told myself that was just how the very rich lived.

I should have asked myself how she'd known, weeks ago, that I would say yes.

The wedding night, I set the stage.

Silk slip. A whiteboard wheeled to the center of the bedroom, markers in a row, a stack of graduate differential geometry piled beside it.

If the man wanted a freak, I would be the bigger freak. Take the pervert's road and leave the pervert nowhere to stand.

Adrian came out of the bathroom and went paler than the sheets.

"What," he said, "are you doing."

His throat worked. Twice. I'd turned the thermostat up. That was probably it.

He crossed to the nightstand, picked up the water glass, and drained it.

I draped myself along the edge of the bed like a cat with a plan and let my eyes drag over him. "Playing a grown-up game. The kind you need a license for."

Calculus.

I rose, slow, and wrote a long ugly string of f(x) across the board.

"Where do you want to start?" I tapped the marker and blinked at him. "Partial differentials? Limits? Newton-Leibniz is baby stuff. Want something with teeth? The Yang-Mills mass gap. Navier-Stokes. Any of that ring a bell?"

He crossed the room. Not fast. Each step deliberate, the way he moved toward a problem he already knew how to solve.

He stopped close enough that I had to tip my head back to hold his eyes. Close enough to feel the heat coming off him, to catch the change in his breathing. The marker went still in my hand, and whatever I'd meant to say next, I forgot the shape of it.

His gaze dropped to my mouth and stayed there a beat too long.

The next second, every poisoned equation still in my mouth was sealed shut under his.

Chapter 4