QUEEN NATASH Queen of the game

"Aimee Bennett, your sentence is complete. Someone's come to get you." The prison guard's frosty voice rolled through the visiting room, cutting through the stale air like a blade. Aimee's pen faltered, and a fat drop of ink bled across the discharge certificate, spreading into a dark, uneven bloom.

Lifting her gaze, she caught sight of the man waiting beyond cold steel bars — Laurence Bennett, her older brother and the Bennett family's second son.

"Mom and Dad sent me to bring you back," he said, his tone calm but distant. Laurence stood poised in a tailored suit, his polished shoes catching the light, the designer watch on his wrist flashing with an almost clinical chill. "You've had it hard these past three years," he added smoothly. "But the family intends to make it right."

Make it right?

A dry laugh almost slipped from Aimee's throat. Those empty promises were painfully familiar. In her last life, the Bennetts had lured her home with the same gentle words, only to shove her — the real daughter — into prison to shield Rylie Bennett, the fraud who'd stolen her place.

When she walked free years later, no one from the family had even bothered to show up. Instead, Rylie's hired thugs had been waiting to drag her into a nightmare that ended with her death.

And when she was gone, the Bennetts had erased every trace of her existence, refusing to even collect her ashes.

Bitterness had burned in her chest for so long that it had become part of her soul.

Her vengeful spirit had drifted through the world for years before uncovering the cruel truth — there had never been a mistake at birth.

Her parents had deliberately exchanged her for Rylie after a fortune teller claimed that Rylie would bring prosperity, while Aimee herself was labeled a curse. They'd cast her aside like unwanted baggage, sending her off to survive alone in a distant village after she was born.

That bottomless resentment had fueled her rebirth, pulling her back to the third year of her prison sentence.

Armed with every memory of her past life, she quietly forged an alliance with Andreas Reid, a calculating business magnate, and secured her early release.

"Three years back, when you dragged me home to the Bennett family, you swore you'd make things right," Aimee said as she set the pen down with unsettling composure, her voice low and steady. "And what did I get in return? I served time for Rylie's crimes, and do you know how my prison life was? Someone even put shards of glass in my prison food."