Chapter 1: Brilliance Lost, Reborn Into Softness, Power, And Desire

Chapter 1: Brilliance Lost, Reborn Into Softness, Power, And Desire

The first thing Evangeline noticed was the light. Not the warm glow of the estate lamps, nor the filtered sun through grand windows, but the cool, constant pulse of neon and screen glare.

She blinked against it, her fingers curling instinctively around the soft edge of a tablet that hadn’t existed in her first life. Notifications blinked in tidy rows: messages, reminders, calls she didn’t recognize. The world had moved on, she realized, while she had been somewhere else entirely. Somewhere quieter, softer, impossibly small.

Her body felt strange — not wrong, just new. Her hands weren’t stiff with fatigue or too long from endless typing. They were capable of touching without trembling. Her heartbeat didn’t hammer against exhaustion.

Even her mind, so accustomed to processing millions of lines of code in seconds, felt curious rather than pressured. She could think without obligation, see without expectation, and hear without calculation. The hum of technology wasn’t oppressive. It was familiar. Like a friend waiting for her to remember the rules of engagement.

Evangeline sat up on the edge of the bed, her feet brushing against a plush rug that smelled faintly of cedar and lavender. The tablet vibrated softly, a subtle insistence she no longer felt compelled to answer immediately.

Outside, the city pulsed with life: hover cars gliding through glass corridors of skyscrapers, pedestrians with smart - glass lenses tracking their schedules, drones weaving between buildings carrying meals, parcels, messages. Every bit of it felt effortless, seamless, designed to serve a rhythm she could finally choose to follow.

She touched the screen, scrolling through streams of information she didn’t need but couldn’t resist. Stock markets, tech updates, news flashes — the world of her old life compressed into neat, digestible bites.

She realized she remembered algorithms that hadn’t yet been written, trends that hadn’t yet emerged, possibilities that felt like destiny in her fingertips. But for the first time, she didn’t feel compelled to act on them. Not yet. She could simply watch. Simply be.

A ping drew her gaze to a video call request. The caller was unfamiliar — an elegantly composed face framed by city lights. Evangeline paused, recognizing a familiar thread in the confidence, the quiet assertion in the curve of a smile.

Someone who would be part of her new life, though she couldn’t yet name them. She didn’t answer. Instead, she let the device rest on her lap, fingers brushing its surface lightly, savoring the absence of urgency.

Her reflection shimmered in the glass wall beside her. The girl looking back wasn’t brilliant and broken. She was soft, alive, awake. Her eyes traced the city lights like constellations, mapping a universe she could now touch without fear. She could choose. She could act. She could let someone in. Or not.

And for the first time since rebirth, she allowed herself to smile — not out of calculation, not out of desire for recognition, but simply because she could.

The world waited, buzzing with technology, alive with people, possibilities, and choices. And Evangeline, once a ghost in a machine, was finally here to live it.

“I was brilliant, exhausted, and unloved. Then I was reborn — helpless, soft, and wanted.”

In her first life, Evangeline Claire Lioré died surrounded by glowing screens and surgical steel.

The machines hummed quietly in the sterile white room. Artificial light blared from every wall, buzzing like a tired breath. Eva’s hands were still connected to her neural interface gloves, though her wrists had long stopped trembling.

Hours had passed without movement — her spine locked in an ergonomic chair, pupils dull, light - starved. Sleep had become a faded myth, devoured by deadlines, data, and endless design cycles.

The last memory before death was a sharp ache in her chest, a surrender more than pain. Her body screamed silently, a breath caught between exhale and eternity.

She had been twenty - nine. Rich. Respected. Alone.

And when the ache won, and her brain short - circuited beneath the weight of brilliance and neglect, she whispered:

“I just wanted someone to tell me to stop.”

Her first life was a sprint on a treadmill made of platinum and code. Her world had been algorithms, medical revolutions, and billion - dollar boardrooms filled with men who mistook silence for obedience.

Her work had saved lives: cancer diagnostics accelerated by predictive AI, prosthetics that responded like flesh, surgical drones precise enough to stitch neurons. They called her a miracle, a genius, a once - in - a - century mind.

No one asked if she was happy.

Days bled into nights inside steel towers with windows that didn’t open. Nutrition came in pills; sleep in twenty - minute recharge cycles. She didn’t remember her last vacation — didn’t remember the last time someone touched her without needing something. Her last human moment had been a hospital janitor offering her a mint, saying, “You look like you’ve been fighting wars.”

She had smiled. Just for a second.

Then she went back to building empires with no one beside her.

Until the stress clotted in her chest, until her blood forgot how to move, until her heart — trained to ignore its own needs — simply stopped.

No family called. No next of kin listed. Her name trended on networks for forty - eight hours before vanishing beneath the churn of the news cycle. Another lost genius. Another quiet death.

And then —

Warmth. A cry.

Rebirth wasn’t a tunnel of light. It was pressure, disorientation, and the unbearable softness of a body too small, too weak, too new. When she opened her eyes again, the ceiling wasn’t cold and white — it was carved stone, golden with lamplight. The air smelled not of antiseptic, but of jasmine and warm cloth.

A woman’s face hovered over her, eyes wet with joy. Hands she didn’t recognize cradled her like she was sacred.

She was no longer Project EV0 , the prodigy who died in silence.

She was now Evangeline Claire Maxwell — Lioré, the infant heir to the most powerful dynasty in a world that didn’t know hers had ever existed.

Her second life began with names she didn’t understand, languages like silk against her ears. Her bones grew slow and sure. Her hair returned in darker strands, her skin paled to marble. Though she couldn’t speak for nearly two years, her eyes never stopped watching.

She learned fast. She always had.

By four, she memorized the floor plans of her family’s estate, noting the timing of guard shifts. At six, she could read trade agreements and eavesdrop on diplomatic guests. At nine, she asked why no one ever called her mother by her real name.

By twelve, she had uncovered her inheritance — wealth, yes, but also influence.

The Lioré Dynasty didn’t need thrones. It owned them. Their influence ran through equity shares in global companies, private security firms, and strategic silences where silence meant power.

Eva would become their crown. Publicly, she was the only daughter of a respected medical lineage, enrolled in a prestigious university for biomedical science. She played the role to perfection: diligent, quiet, distant. Professors praised her discipline. Classmates thought her cold. Men admired her from afar. Women watched her with unspoken hunger.

What no one saw was the girl who remembered another life. A girl who had died once under the weight of her brilliance, now carrying the ache of having no one to share it with.

But she was not entirely alone.

Caretakers adored her — not for her intellect, but for the soft, strange things she did: tracing sunlight with her fingers, refusing to cry when injured, standing still in the rain like it was an answer. She had a private tutor who called her “little moon” and baked almond cakes when no one watched. She had thousands of books and devoured each one like it might save her.

Then she met them.

Liora Esmé Ardent — Lio. The fox in the garden. A genius masked in softness, who watched Eva like a code she longed to decrypt.

Calista Inez Beaumont — Cali. A storm in silk, whose touch was chaos and clarity, sketching Eva in margins and dreams.

Seraphina Yue Langford — Yue. The heir of empires, carrying herself like war and kissing Eva like surrender.

And finally, Aristea Arethusa Celestine Artemis Kallistráti Rousseau – Parnassos — Arry to Eva. A presence that commanded attention even in a room of nobles. Tall, silver - blonde, eyes like moonlight, elegance both untouchable and threatening. The world called her Lady Parnassos. Eva called her Arry. The bond between them would deepen slowly, under the guise of aristocratic propriety and Eva’s personal guardian.

Each of them would come to change her. But in the beginning, Eva simply learned to exist.

She learned to walk barefoot through marble halls, to sit in silence and listen to power without speaking it, to smile in a way that disarmed rather than revealed.

She learned how to be wanted.

Not for her mind. Not for her genius. But for the quiet gravity of her presence.

Old instincts died hard. She kept her core locked behind seven layers of calm. She never told anyone the full truth — not about her past life, not about the endless brilliance humming in her bones, not about the fear that being seen would drive them away.

So she stayed untouchable. Elegant. Ghostlike.

Until one day, Lio touched her wrist and asked, “Do you ever feel like you’re pretending to be someone smaller than you are?”

And Eva didn’t answer. Because yes. She did.

She was pretending every day. Pretending to be a student while attending underground summits. Pretending to be indifferent when Cali’s smile made her breath hitch. Pretending to be above it all when Yue tilted her chin with two fingers, asking if she ever let herself be loved.

Eva had died once from overexposure. She would not die again from softness.

But she wondered if living without it was another kind of death.

And now, here she was.

Reborn. A living myth in a world that didn’t know she had once been just a girl coding until her hands bled.

Now she could be touched, held, kissed, loved.

But only if she allowed it.

Only if she could let the gates down — one at a time.

Only if she dared.