Chapter 1

My twin brother, Aiden Hale, and I were in a car crash together.

The car that hit us sent me flying several feet through the air, and I coughed up mouthful after mouthful of blood. Aiden barely had a scrape on his leg, but he sat on the ground, clutching it and pretending it was killing him.

A crowd of concerned bystanders quickly called for an ambulance. The paramedic who arrived with it was my wife of ten years—Sabrina Callahan, the very woman I'd once been sent here to win over.

Despite the agony, hope surged through me. I waved frantically, trying to get her attention, but she only spared me one cold, indifferent glance. She ignored me lying in a pool of my own blood and turned to have my brother loaded into the ambulance first.

"Dr. Callahan, shouldn't we treat that man first? He's hurt far worse—" one of the nurses on the crew said, taking in my injuries at a glance.

Sabrina cut her off flatly. "I'm the doctor here. I'll make that call myself. In a crash like this, the ones who look fine are actually the ones in the most danger."

She looked at me the way you'd look at a corpse, and I couldn't tell anymore whether it was my body or my heart that hurt worse. She had Aiden carried onto the ambulance without so much as a backward glance, leaving me alone on the cold pavement, watching in despair as she drove away.

It was over ten minutes before a second ambulance finally got me to the hospital—I'd already lost consciousness by then, and missed the golden window for treatment entirely. The doctors rushed me into emergency surgery, then wheeled me into the ICU.

The truth was, I already knew I wasn't going to make it. And really, I was never supposed to stay in this world in the first place.

I was a Player. This had been my final mission here. If I could successfully win over Sabrina, I'd be sent back to my own world.

Before I met her, Sabrina was just an ordinary surgeon in this world—cursed with rotten luck her whole life. Flowerpots falling from balconies, manholes swallowing her mid-step—that kind of disaster was practically routine for her. To win her over, I'd spent every last Point I'd saved up across other worlds trying to clear away her bad luck. It was the hardest mission I'd ever been given. I drained my entire Point balance canceling out her misfortune, and put myself in mortal danger more than once doing it.

When she finally agreed to marry me, I completed the mission.

The night before I was set to leave, snow came down in thick flakes. I told her I was leaving. She braved the storm and came running to see me anyway, bringing along a batch of meat pies she'd made with her own hands.