Part One: The Smell of Lilies
I realized I was being cremated alive when I smelled lilies through the darkness.
At first, I thought I was trapped inside a nightmare.
I couldn’t open my eyes.
Couldn’t move my fingers.
Couldn’t even force my tongue to form a sound.
But I could hear everything.
The prayers.
The muffled crying.
The soft shuffle of expensive shoes across the marble floor.
Funeral guests whispered about my “sudden heart attack” as though I were already a memory.
That was when the truth struck me.
I wasn’t in a hospital bed.
I was inside my own coffin.
I was forty-five years old, the CEO of Blackridge Bourbon, a family company worth hundreds of millions of dollars—and I was fully conscious while people mourned me as if I were dead.
I tried to scream.
Nothing happened.
My body remained perfectly still.
A woman nearby sobbed loudly.
