Chapter 1

The icy mountain wind cut across my face like a blade, carrying the damp chill of the forest.

I couldn't take my eyes off the man standing before me—the one claiming to be me, twenty years in the future.

He looked ancient.

Hideous.

His face, buried beneath wrinkles and scars, looked as though it had been ripped apart and crudely stitched back together.

And yet...

The moment his clouded, despair-filled eyes met mine, something deep inside my soul trembled.

"W-What are you talking about?" My throat tightened, and my voice shook uncontrollably. "Nicole... how could she possibly..."

"How could she not?" he snapped. His rough, calloused hand clamped around my wrist with astonishing strength, the coarse skin scraping painfully against mine.

Without waiting for another word, he dragged me deeper into the woods, deliberately avoiding the routes where the search party was most likely to look.

As we stumbled over rocks and uneven ground, his raspy voice echoed through the trees like something crawling out of a nightmare.

Step by step...

He tore open the next twenty years of my future.

Every word felt soaked in blood.

"You were supposed to call Nicole for help. She would've found you by sunset.

"But not long after that, a violent storm would hit. A landslide would trap the two of you inside a cave halfway up the mountain.

"You'd be stuck there for three days."

He paused for only a heartbeat before continuing.

"During those three days, Jason Carter—who came to the city with you—would get drunk alone at a bar. He'd run into a gang of thugs.

"They'd drag him into an alley, strip him, assault him, record everything...

"And afterward, he'd jump off a building."

The moment I heard Jason's name, I froze.

My stomach lurched violently.

He was my stepbrother.

The son of the woman who had stolen everything from me... the woman who had driven my mother to death.

Back in high school, he'd cornered me in the restroom with his friends and humiliated me for fun.

After I left for college in Ashton City, I'd never seen him again.

I'd thought he was gone from my life forever.

"If he died..." I swallowed hard. "Why would Nicole blame me? What does that have to do with us?"

The older me stopped walking and looked back at me.

"Because on the night he was assaulted, he called Nicole.

"Twenty-seven times.

"But you and Nicole were trapped inside that cave. There wasn't any cell service."

He studied my stunned expression for a moment.

Then something seemed to occur to him.

The light in his eyes dimmed, and a bitter smile tugged at the corner of his mouth.

"Right, you don't know yet. They started sleeping together during your sophomore year.

"The truth is...

"Nicole has always been involved with the man who destroyed the first half of your life."

The words hit me like a punch to the gut.

I thought I was going to throw up.