Alle Kapitel von 30 Days To Win His Heart: Rewriting The Apocalypse Novel : Kapitel 1 – Kapitel 10

Sia’s POVStrawberry perfume.I came back to myself gasping, my arms locked around something hard against my chest. The diary. I was sitting up on the same silk sheets, in the same pink room, and my throat was whole. No bruises, no ache. I clawed at my neck like an idiot anyway, just to be sure.The phone on the nightstand lit up.[6:42 AM. EMERGENCY ALERT: Containment failure in Sector 4.]The boom rattled the windows, exactly on time.I had died. I was certain of it. I had felt something give way in my neck, and the world had gone black. And now it was 6:42 again, with the same sirens, the same scream, and the same bottles chattering on the vanity as if nothing had happened.I’d read enough web novels to know what this was.Regression.The heroine dies and wakes up at an earlier moment with her memories intact, ready to do it all differently. I had skimmed those chapters for years, because the heroine always got the rewind and never really paid for it. It had never occurred to me wh

Sia’s POVThe dust hadn’t even settled when Skyler started giving orders.“Marcus, get the truck. Jun, check everyone for cuts, anything that broke skin. Eli, where is it?”I hadn’t heard any of their names until then, and the second I did, I knew all of them. Marcus was the big man. Jun, the thin one with glasses. Eli, the kid. Lena, the tall woman who had called me a princess. They were secondary characters in a book I’d finished just hours ago, and Lena had maybe nine lines in the whole thing.The kid crouched at the curb with a battered tablet. “Still on the roof. It isn’t moving. I think it’s confused.”“Day one,” Jun said quietly. “They always are, on day one.”“It won’t stay that way.” Skyler jerked his chin toward the corner, where Marcus was already wrestling a battered military truck around the rubble. “Move.”We moved.The truck had a cracked windshield and smelled like engine oil and old coffee. When I dropped onto the bench in the back, I almost cried with relief, because

Sia’s POVI handed Skyler the coffee at ten to five, which seemed like a brilliant idea at the time.Operation Make Him Love Me had officially begun when I woke up at four with a stiff neck and a dead fire. The cold from the night had gone, and I still didn’t know what it had been. What I did know was that I had thirty days, a number sitting at -110%, and one real advantage: four years of someone else’s obsessive notes on exactly what this man liked.So I borrowed the camp stove, found a tin mug, and made it the way the diary said. Black, with three sugars, because he looked exhausted.He was in the passenger seat, one hand braced on the dashboard while Marcus drove us out of the depot. I leaned over the back of the seat and held the mug out like an olive branch.“What’s this?”“Coffee. Black, three sugars. You look like you could use it.”The cab went very quiet.Skyler didn’t take the mug. He turned his head and looked at me, and I watched the exact second his face closed.“Who told

Sia’s POVThe horizon had stopped being a horizon.Where the sky should have met the road, there was a brown-black wall now, turning slowly, taller than any building I had ever seen, with dust boiling off the base of it and a sound like a freight train coming up through the floor. Eli’s tablet had promised thirty minutes. Eli’s tablet had been wrong by about twenty-two.I had a new line on the diary’s last page, written in a hand that wouldn’t stop shaking.Apologize to Marcus. Properly. Later, when nothing is trying to kill us.“Faster!” Skyler barked.“I’m doing what I can!” Marcus had the pedal flat against the floor and both hands locked on the wheel, and the truck was howling about it. Without its rear door, the back of the cab was an open mouth. Wind tore through it. Jun flattened himself against the bench with one arm hooked around a strut. Lena’s ponytail whipped across her face like a rope.A car came sailing out of the dust ahead of us, turning end over end, and smashed down

Sia’s POV“Stop the truck.”Marcus didn’t slow down. “We’ve got forty minutes before that wind-type finds us, and you want to stop?”“Marcus. Please.”It was the please that did it. He glanced at me in the mirror, swore under his breath, and eased the brakes until we rolled to a halt in the middle of the dead pines.Every head in the truck turned. Skyler twisted in the passenger seat, his eyes narrowing.“What now?”I had a choice to make, and I’d been circling it for days.The cold was sitting at the base of my skull, steady and unhurried. Someone out there was watching us, and they weren’t afraid, and they weren’t angry, and they weren’t grieving. Whoever it was had been standing perfectly still for a very long time.I could say something vague and hope he trusted me. Or I could tell him the truth.The system had told me what it wanted. How the host treats the people he cares about. It hadn’t said anything about how I treated him. But every instinct I had left from my old job whispe