The First Domino

Kira’s POV

I could not stop thinking about the shattered crystal on the floor.

I paced the length of my massive bedroom in the Lockwood mansion. The sun had set, casting long shadows across the walls. But my mind was stuck on the entryway downstairs.

Miss Peterson.

The elderly servant had looked at me as if I were a ghost rising from the grave. In my previous life, she had simply offered a polite bow and walked away. I spent three years in this house without her ever speaking a word out of turn.

What had changed? Was it the way I held myself? The lack of fear in my eyes?

I walked over to the desk and opened my laptop. I needed answers. Before I became a docile, broken wife in my past life, I had taught myself to code. Over the years of isolation, that skill had sharpened into a weapon. The underground world would eventually know me as Nyx, a hacker who could breach any firewall. Right now, I was just Kira, warming up.

My fingers flew across the keyboard. I bypassed the Lockwood estate’s basic internal network and accessed the household employee records.

I found her file in less than a minute. Martha Gable. Head housekeeper.

I scrolled down to her previous employment history. My eyes locked onto a single line of text near the bottom of the screen.

Twenty-five years ago, before she came to work for Aziel’s family, Martha Gable was a head nurse at the Peterson Private Hospital.

The exact hospital where I was born. The exact place where a desperate nurse supposedly sold me to Eleanor Myles.

I leaned back in my chair, staring at the glowing screen. The mystery was deepening. Martha knew something about the baby swap. She knew who I really was. But I could not confront her yet. I had no power, no money, and no leverage to protect myself if she alerted the people who wanted me dead.

I closed her file. Martha was a puzzle for another day.

Right now, I needed to start my war.

I opened a new, encrypted browser window. I turned my attention to target number one: Raheem.

In my previous life, Raheem had been my first love. He was a struggling tech entrepreneur when we met. I supported him, fed him, and cheered for him. When I was forced to marry Aziel, Raheem cried in my arms. He promised he would wait for me.

It was all a lie. He had been sleeping with my sister the entire time. He stood in the rain and threw the lighter that set my crushed body on fire.

He helped destroy me. This time, he was first on the chopping block.

I leaned closer to the screen, my mind pulling up a crucial piece of future knowledge. In the original timeline, exactly one week after my wedding, Raheem invested his entire startup fund into a rival tech company called NovaCore.

At the time, NovaCore looked like a sure victory. But I had accidentally overheard Aziel discussing their financial records on a phone call. Aziel knew NovaCore was secretly bankrupt and under federal investigation.

Wanting to protect Raheem, I had secretly messaged him and warned him to pull his money out. He listened. Two days later, NovaCore collapsed. Raheem saved his fortune, bought a new company, and became a millionaire. He built his wealth on my warning.

This time, I was going to push him off the ledge.

I began actively setting the trap. I created an untraceable email address, posing as a senior financial analyst from a major overseas bank. I sent a message directly to Raheem’s private inbox.

The email was full of complex, fake financial projections. It claimed NovaCore was about to be acquired by a massive global conglomerate. It promised a guaranteed four-hundred-percent return within days.

I hit send. Then, I sat back and waited.

I knew Raheem. I knew his greed. I knew his desperation to become part of the city's elite. He wanted to be wealthy enough to openly claim Zara without my father rejecting him.

He took the bait perfectly.

Over the next forty-eight hours, I monitored his public business accounts. Raheem did not just invest his startup capital. He borrowed money from illegal lenders. He convinced his wealthy friends and early investors to join him, promising them massive returns. He poured millions into a sinking ship.

On the morning of the fourth day, the trap snapped shut.

I sat on the velvet sofa in my bedroom, holding a cup of hot tea, and turned on the morning news.

"Breaking news in the financial sector," the news anchor announced, her face serious. "The CEO of NovaCore has been arrested early this morning on multiple charges of massive corporate fraud. Trading has been halted as the company’s stock value plummeted to zero in a matter of minutes."

The screen cut to live footage outside Raheem’s office building.

A crowd of furious investors had gathered. They were shouting, waving papers, and demanding answers. The camera zoomed in as Raheem was escorted out by building security. His suit was wrinkled. His face was pale and terrified. He looked like a man who had just watched his entire world burn down.

Millions had vanished overnight. His friends hated him. The loan sharks would be coming for him. His reputation in the business world was completely, permanently destroyed.

I took a slow sip of my tea.

The hot liquid slid down my throat, but it was nothing compared to the warmth spreading through my chest. For the first time since waking up in this second life, I felt a genuine sense of justice. It was a small victory. It was not enough to balance the scales of my murder.

But it was a beginning.

While I watched the news, I kept a separate window open on my laptop. To survive in the Lockwood mansion, I had installed a quiet monitoring script on the home’s primary router. I needed to know what Aziel was doing.

A red alert flashed on my screen. My script had intercepted a highly classified report sent from Aziel’s head of security to Aziel’s personal tablet.

I opened the file and read the contents.

‘Sir, regarding the sudden collapse of NovaCore. We traced the anonymous email that prompted Raheem’s disastrous investment. The sender used heavy encryption, but our team managed to track the original IP address. The signal did not come from a rival firm.

The trail leads directly to the Lockwood estate's private network. Specifically, to a device registered to your wife, Kira.’

My breath hitched. Aziel’s security team was much faster and smarter than I anticipated. I watched the screen as Aziel’s reply was typed out in real-time.

‘Impossible,’ he wrote back. ‘My wife is a sheltered girl with no financial background. She could not bypass your firewalls to execute market manipulation. You made a mistake. Dig deeper. In the meantime, monitor her quietly.’

I closed the laptop quickly, my heart pounding against my ribs.

Aziel did not believe I was capable of ruining a man. He thought I was just the timid girl from the wedding altar. But the seed of doubt had been planted in his mind. He was watching me now. The game had just become infinitely more dangerous.

I stood up to pace the room again, needing to clear my head.

It was past midnight. The mansion was completely silent, surrounded by the dark woods of the estate.

Suddenly, the burner phone I used to text Raheem vibrated on the glass nightstand.

I frowned. No one had this number. I hadn't even given it to Silas or any of my underground contacts yet.

I walked over and picked it up.

It was an anonymous text message. I swiped the screen to open it.

An image loaded slowly over the secure connection.

My blood turned to ice, my lungs completely forgetting how to work when the image fully loaded.

It was a photograph, taken at night, during a heavy storm. The flash of the camera illuminated the smoking wreckage of a car smashed against a pine tree on a rocky slope.

Flames were licking the edges of the crushed windshield.

It was my car. From the night I died.

My hands began to shake violently. I stared at the photo, my mind screaming in denial. This was impossible. This event hadn't happened yet in this timeline. This was three years in the future.

Below the horrifying image was a single sentence.

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