2. The Third Time

Sia’s POV

Strawberry perfume.

I came back to myself gasping, my arms locked around something hard against my chest. The diary. I was sitting up on the same silk sheets, in the same pink room, and my throat was whole. No bruises, no ache. I clawed at my neck like an idiot anyway, just to be sure.

The phone on the nightstand lit up.

[6:42 AM. EMERGENCY ALERT: Containment failure in Sector 4.]

The boom rattled the windows, exactly on time.

I had died. I was certain of it. I had felt something give way in my neck, and the world had gone black. And now it was 6:42 again, with the same sirens, the same scream, and the same bottles chattering on the vanity as if nothing had happened.

I’d read enough web novels to know what this was.

Regression.

The heroine dies and wakes up at an earlier moment with her memories intact, ready to do it all differently. I had skimmed those chapters for years, because the heroine always got the rewind and never really paid for it. It had never occurred to me what it would feel like from the inside, with my own pulse knocking against my throat as if it remembered.

So, rules. If I was right, the moment was fixed. Same time, same room, diary in my arms, five minutes before the door opened. I didn’t know how many times I’d get to do this, and I had a nasty feeling the answer wasn’t “forever.”

Five minutes. One chance to say the right thing.

‘Just tell him the truth,’ I thought. ‘Tell him fast.’

The door banged open before I’d finished deciding how. Skyler, soot on his coat, ice in his eyes. This time I knew what to say. I scrambled upright, the diary still crushed to my chest.

“Wait! Skyler, please, I didn’t kill Mia!”

Nothing moved in his face. Not a flicker.

“Liar,” he growled.

His hand closed around my throat. I tried again, “I didn’t, I swear, read the diary—” but there was no air to say it with. The white came, and then the

—————————————————————

This time there was no perfume.

There was only dark, and a square of pale text hanging in front of me as though it had been written on the inside of my eyelids.

[SYSTEM ACTIVATED]

[Host: Sia. Status: Transmigrated.]

[Warning: You have died twice. A third death will be permanent. You will not return.]

My mouth felt dry, which seemed unfair, considering I didn’t think I had a mouth.

So there it was, the fine print. The rewind wasn’t a gift. It was a limited number of tries, and I had just burned two of them.

[Task: Raise the affection of the target, Skyler, to 100% within 30 days.]

[Reward: Return to your original world.]

[Failure: Permanent death.]

“Thirty days?” I said. “He just strangled me twice in a row. I can’t get him to listen for ten seconds!”

The text didn’t answer. It just glowed there, patient and pitiless.

Okay. Think. Think.

Beg? He would not believe me. Deny it? He had already called me a liar. Run? He had killed me in my own bedroom with the door open. There was nowhere to run.

I was the villainess. Everyone had decided what I was before I even opened my eyes. Nothing I said about myself would matter.

So I needed to say something that wasn’t about me.

I thought about the city outside, the screaming, the red alert. I thought about the book, about the research team that had spent four months hunting for a cure and never found it. I thought about what Skyler wanted more than he wanted revenge.

He’d kill the woman who took Mia from him. Of course he would. But there was one thing in the world he wanted more than that.

And I knew something he didn’t. One loose thread, buried near the end of the book, that nobody in the story had ever pulled.

The darkness broke apart.

—————————————————————

Strawberry perfume. Pink ceiling.

I was sitting up in bed with the diary pressed against my ribs, her arms around it, my arms around it, and I didn’t let go this time. It felt strange to say, but it felt like holding her hand.

The boom shook the windows right on schedule.

I didn’t look at the phone. I got to my feet, wiped my damp palms on the silk nightgown, and turned to face the door.

It slammed open.

Skyler walked in, exhausted and cold and quiet, and his hand rose toward my throat exactly the way it had twice before.

I didn’t beg. I didn’t deny a thing.

I stepped toward him, so close his fingertips brushed my skin, and I screamed with every last bit of air in my borrowed lungs.

“I know how to end the apocalypse!”