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Cold rain fell in needles.
I held my school bag over my head and stood on the curb, heart tight, waiting for Julian.
He'd always been exceptional — polished, cold, untouchable. The Harrington family's carefully cultivated heir. And he'd never had a good word for me.
In his eyes, I was a nobody — some orphan girl his mother had brought home from nowhere. Stupid. Malicious. Always stirring up trouble.
He thought I'd framed the scholarship student he liked. He thought I'd snuck into his room on purpose while he was in the shower, wearing nothing but a thin silk slip.
Eighteen-year-old Julian had stood there wrapped in a towel, his expression dark as a storm:
"You're pathetic, Ivy. Get out."
Those were the last two things he ever said to me in our first life.
So when the fire broke out and I was nearly suffocated by smoke — when I clawed for one last breath and called him to apologize — he didn't answer.
Now, reborn, I wanted a different life. I hadn't planned to contact him at all.
But I had no money in my bag. Not a single cent.
My ID had been invalidated. I was officially dead.
The person most capable of helping me — and the one who most wanted me gone from the Harrington estate — was Julian. If he could lend me enough money and help me sort out a new identity, I would turn over a new leaf. Stay far away from him. Forever.
I didn't wait long.
A black Bentley cut through the darkness, sleek and fast.
The window rolled down. A mature, striking face appeared.
Twenty-eight-year-old Julian Harrington wore a well-tailored black suit. He had the same cold self-possession as the boy I remembered, but the years had added something else — a controlled intensity, a quiet restraint that made him more dangerous, not less.
His gaze swept over me, unhurried — and stopped.
I lowered the school bag I'd been holding over my face.
He stared.
For a long moment, even as I jogged over and leaned toward the window to say, "Julian," he didn't move. Didn't speak.
Ten years.
To Julian, I had been dead for ten years.
In those years, countless women had dressed like me, styled themselves after the girl in the photos, tried to climb into his bed. Every single one of them had been driven away with a few devastating words.
And now I was standing right in front of him.
Exactly as young as I'd been in the photo on my headstone.
Clear eyes. That old, faint fearfulness in my gaze when I looked at him.
I was wearing my white pleated skirt. My little bear backpack. The same outfit I'd had on the day he stood in the morgue and identified my body.
Even the crack across my phone screen — he had made that crack, once, in a rage.
"Get in," he said. His voice wasn't quite steady.