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My body recoiled, and my legs tingled. The door was solid, yet my feet still went through it. Pulling my knees back, I slowly moved my legs forward again, waving them, and passing them through the metal once more.

What in the world?

“I heard sounds coming from Jane Doe’s refrigerator,” a woman said from outside my chamber.

“Doubtful. She is very, very dead, Andrea. You cut her open.” A second voice.

“I know, it’s just...” She hesitated and then lowered her voice. “We should check.”

The door creaked open, light flooded in, and I blinked several times to adjust to it. Two people stood on either side of me, their expressions dripping with shock. They looked as though they had seen a ghost.

Of course, they hadn’t.

Which was precisely their problem.

“Where did she go?” they both said at once, one voice timid and low, the other frantic and loud.

I sat upright, fixing my gaze on the woman’s face, but she didn’t even blink or acknowledge my existence at all. She just stared right through me.

Through me.

Because I was a ghost?

A ghost.

I examined my hands. They were translucent, with a glowing ring around their edges, yet neither examiner seemed to notice. I turned my hands over, but the movement didn’t even faze them. Because they couldn’t see me at all.

I was a ghost.

I had died.

But then why did my skin burn? And why did my lungs feel so squeezed for air?

Dead people couldn't feel pain, right? Because if we could, that was utterly unfair. Death was supposed to be a sweet release, and an end to hurt and torment, not this.

Could this be hell?

I was a murderer and a mobster. Hardly an innocent woman and certainly not a saint. But did the thousands of wrongs the Order committed against me outweigh my own?

I didn’t know.

I jumped off the table before they could slide me back into the freezer, because absolutely no thanks to that plan. Waking up in the morgue once was more than enough for me.

But as I moved, the sheet fell off me, and both people let out a startled noise.

“Was that you?”

“No.”

Well, oops, I’d forgotten about the sheet. The moment it slipped off me, it materialized out of thin air and fluttered to the floor.

That must have been a sight to see.

“It was probably the wind…”

“Yeah, because there is wind in the morgue refrigerator,” the woman said sarcastically.

They stared at each other, wide-eyed, before pushing the tray back into the refrigerator and returning to the lab. I followed. Beyond the dim refrigerator room, the lab was bright, an unforgiving white—hospital white—with every polished surface reflecting the overhead lights.