Ghost

Kira’s POV

Normally, receiving a picture of your own death at midnight would cause a person to lock their doors, close the blinds, and panic.

But honestly? I just felt a rush of pure adrenaline.

I sat on the edge of my bed, staring at the screen of my burner phone. The photo of my burning car glared back at me, a bright orange warning in the dark room. Below the image was that single, taunting sentence:

“Welcome back, Kira. You’re not the only one who remembers.”

In my past life, this would have broken me. But I was done crying. If someone else out there remembered the previous timeline, it simply meant the game had multiplayer enabled. I didn't know if this person was a friend trying to warn me, or an enemy trying to scare me. Either way, they were about to learn that the new Kira did not scare easily.

I threw off the blankets, cracked my knuckles, and marched straight to my laptop.

"Let’s see who you are," I whispered, opening a secure terminal.

My fingers flew across the keyboard. I ran a highly advanced trace on the incoming phone number. My screen instantly filled with scrolling lines of green code as my software hunted down the signal.

The tracker pinged off a server in Tokyo. A split second later, it bounced to a data center in London, then jumped to a satellite connection in Brazil. Finally, the trail hit a massive, solid digital wall in Switzerland. It was a military-grade firewall, thicker and more complex than anything used by regular corporations.

“Okay, Mr. Anonymous,” I muttered, a smirk touching my lips. “You have serious money.”

I typed out a string of commands, attempting a clever backdoor exploit I had mastered during my three years of isolated boredom in my first life. For a moment, the firewall flickered. Then, it aggressively pushed me out, shutting down the connection and wiping its own tracks completely clean.

I leaned back in my chair and popped a peppermint into my mouth. Whoever this was, they had incredible resources and top-tier security. But the most important detail was what they didn't do. They hadn't attacked me. They hadn't exposed me to the Peterson family assassins. They had only waved hello.

"Challenge accepted," I said to the empty room and closed the laptop. The mystery of the text message would have to wait. The sun was coming up, and I had a billionaire husband to annoy.

The next morning, I walked into the grand dining room wearing a casual emerald green dress. The morning sunlight poured through the floor-to-ceiling windows, warming the hardwood floors. For some reason I couldn’t pinpoint, I felt absolutely fantastic.

Sitting at the far end of the absurdly long table was Aziel Lockwood.

He looked like a brooding model posing for a luxury watch commercial. His dark, tailored suit was pristine. His sharp jaw was tight. And he was silently drinking black coffee while reading a thick financial dossier spread open next to his plate.

He didn't even look up when I pulled out a chair and sat down.

I poured myself a glass of fresh orange juice. The silence in the room stretched, thick and awkward. In my past life, his brooding energy felt like a weight pressing down on my chest. I would have nervously tried to make small talk, desperate for him to notice me.

Today? His silence was just free entertainment. I happily reached for a warm croissant and spread a thick layer of butter over it.

Aziel finally set his coffee cup down. With a smooth, casual motion, he pushed his open dossier slightly toward the center of the table. It was perfectly positioned so I could easily see the contents without leaning over.

I took a bite of my pastry and glanced down.

It was a test. He was definitely fishing for a reaction. After my stunt exposing Zara and Raheem at the wedding, Aziel wanted to know exactly how smart his new wife really was.

The pages displayed detailed, complex blueprints of a massive European shipping port. I recognized that port immediately. In my previous life, Aziel had confidently invested hundreds of millions into its development. Exactly one year later, a severe winter storm caused the entire eastern sea wall to collapse, costing the Lockwood empire a massive fortune.

He was watching me out of the corner of his eye, waiting to see if I understood the complex architectural notes.

I didn't want to give him the satisfaction of a brilliant business lecture. He needed to figure out that I was smart, but I wanted to do it on my own terms. I wanted to drive him crazy.

I reached across the table, aiming for the crystal butter dish. As my arm passed over the open dossier, I made sure my elbow "accidentally" clipped the heavy silver salt shaker.

A pile of salt landed directly on the blueprint. It perfectly covered the exact section of the eastern sea wall that contained the fatal structural flaw.

"Oops," I said, my voice completely flat and unbothered. "My hand slipped. Could you pass a napkin?"

Aziel’s eyes snapped up from the paper to meet mine. The air in the room suddenly shifted, buzzing with almost palpable tension. He looked at the spilled salt, tracing the exact coordinate it covered, and then looked back at my face.

His gaze was piercing. He was dissecting my calm expression, searching for a sign of some sort. He found neither. He was a genius in the business world, and he knew instantly that the spill was not an accident. The precision was entirely too perfect.

I calmly brushed a few pastry crumbs off my lap and stood up.

"The croissant was lovely," I said, flashing him a smile. "Have a wonderful day at work, Mr. Lockwood."

I turned and walked out of the dining room, my heels clicking cheerfully against the floorboards. But right before the doors swung shut behind me, I heard the sound of paper turning. Aziel was already frantically re-evaluating the blueprints. I smiled all the way up the staircase.

Back in the safety of my room, I locked the door and pulled the curtains shut.

The playful morning was over. It was time to get to work. The text message from last night proved one very important thing: I needed my own untraceable funds.

I could not rely on my former family's crumbling wealth. They were broke, and I was actively trying to ruin them anyway. I certainly wasn't going to ask my deeply suspicious billionaire husband for an allowance. If the Peterson family's shadow assassins eventually came knocking, I needed financial power to defend myself.

I opened my laptop again, activated my heaviest VPNs, and navigated into the hidden, encrypted layers of the dark web. This was the underground network where corporate secrets, dirty data, and high-level bounties were bought and sold by the world's elite.

First, I needed a handle. A name that commanded respect in the shadows.

I typed three letters into the registry box.

Nyx. The ancient goddess of the night. It felt fitting for a girl who had returned from the dark.

I scrolled through the glowing bounty boards. Various anonymous corporations and shadowy syndicates were offering massive payouts to anyone who could retrieve encrypted files, expose rival trade secrets, or break into secure networks.

Most hackers would take weeks to breach these systems. But I had an unfair advantage. I had future knowledge. I already knew the backdoors and weak points of half the systems listed because the security patches to fix them hadn't been invented yet.

My eyes landed on a highly profitable bounty. An anonymous client was offering a quarter of a million dollars to retrieve a hidden digital ledger from a corrupt, overseas pharmaceutical company.

I cracked my neck, pulled up a coding terminal, and went to work.

It felt like playing a video game on the easiest setting. I bypassed their outer firewall in ten minutes, slipped through a known glitch in their email server, and downloaded the ledger directly into a secure, encrypted folder.

I submitted the file to the dark web bounty board. Five minutes later, the system pinged. The anonymous client had verified the data.

I routed the payment through three different cryptocurrency mixers, washing the trail completely clean, before depositing it into a freshly created offshore bank account. The funds cleared instantly.

I spun around in my chair, looking out the window at the green lawns of the Lockwood estate.

Just a few days ago, I was a tragic victim bleeding out on a mountain road. Today, I was a wealthy ghost operating right under the nose of the city's most dangerous billionaire.

Zara and Raheem were going to have a very, very bad week. And Aziel Lockwood was going to lose his mind trying to figure out who I really was.

I smiled, closing my laptop. This second life was going to be incredibly fun.