The last thing Cameron knew was the cold, hard bite of marble steps against his spine and the fading sound of three voices, his sister's shrill panic, his lover's calm dismissal, his father's calculating murmur. 'We should try to save him… I was about to sell him.' The words swirled with the pain, a final, cruel punchline to a life that had never been his own. His last, desperate thought was a silent scream into the void: Who are my real parents?
Then, nothing.
Then, everything.
A spinning, nauseating headache pulled him back to consciousness, a violent throb behind his eyes that felt more like a memory of impact than a new injury. His body felt… strange. The deep, fatal ache was gone, replaced by a familiar, lighter soreness...the residual strain from a long study session. The sheets were the same, smelling faintly of the lavender detergent the housekeeper used.
I'm dead. This has to be death. Or a dream.
He forced his eyes open, blinking against the soft morning light filtering through familiar, hideous blue curtains. His curtains. From his room in the Reed mansion. He sat up slowly, the movement triggering a wave of dizziness. He looked down at his hands. They were his hands, but… younger. The faint, silvery scar from a bicycle accident at seventeen was there, but the smaller callus from his future part-time job was not. His arms were leaner, less defined.
A cold, clinical terror, sharp and clear, cut through the disorientation. No.
He scrambled out of bed, his legs unsteady, and stumbled to the full-length mirror on the back of his closet door. The young man who stared back was a ghost from a painful past. A face on the cusp of adulthood, around eighteen. Dark hair messy from sleep, eyes wide with a panic no eighteen-year-old should ever hold. His skin was clear, unmarked by the final ordeal. No fresh bruises. No sign of the fatal fall.
He was whole. He was young, but not a child.
He was back.
A hysterical sob caught in his throat, half terror, half a wild, impossible hope. He slapped a hand over his mouth to stifle it, his eyes darting to the door. The Reeds couldn't hear. He couldn't attract attention. The habits of a lifetime...of staying small, quiet, invisible...kicked in automatically, even as his mind reeled.
Regression. Reincarnation. A second chance. The concepts, borrowed from the fantasy novels he'd hidden under his mattress, flashed through his mind. He had them. He had time, but less of it.
The initial shock began to recede, replaced by a chilling, focused clarity. The memory of his death played on a loop...his sister's smirk, Lucas's cold eyes, his father's betrayal, the hidden memory of being "returnable." The pain, the fear, the utter loneliness of it all solidified into a new core inside him, hard as diamond.
He would not live this life again. He would not be their victim, their pawn, their commodity.
He turned from the mirror, his breathing deliberately steadying. He looked around the room, his gilded prison. The expensive, impersonal furniture bought for show, not comfort. On the desk, a sleek laptop and acceptance letters to universities, the future that had led him to Lucas, to his death.
He had four years until he would meet Lucas Thorne in college. Four years until the betrayal that would kill him.
He had four years to disappear.
A plan, raw and basic, began to form. Money. Information. Escape. He would need to be smarter, faster. University was now imminent, a battlefield he thought he knew, but he could change the rules. And he would find them. His real parents. The answer to his dying question.
A soft knock at the door made him jump, his body tensing with ingrained fear.
"Cameron? Are you up? Your father wants to see you before you finalize your university choice today." It was Victoria Reed's voice, perfectly modulated, perfectly cold.
He looked at his face in the mirror once more. The fear in his eyes was still there, but beneath it, something new was hardening. A resolve forged in a future death.
"I'm up," he called back, his voice surprisingly steady. It was the voice of Cameron Reed, the quiet, obedient young man.
But behind those eyes lived someone else. Someone who had seen the bottom of the stairs and climbed back up.
He had a second chance. And he would use it to burn this life to the ground.