Hell isn't fire and brimstone—it's waking up in your own past with the memories of your own funeral.
NOAH'S POV
I stared at the group chat, the screen's glow casting pale shadows across my face.
They came back too?
No. That can't be real.
There's no way I'm back in this shitty place again.
With a heavy sigh, I dropped my phone onto the nightstand. It landed with a soft thud, the sound oddly final in the silence of the room. My gaze drifted up to the ceiling, cracks spreading like veins through the old paint. Everything was still, suffocatingly familiar.
Why?
Why the hell would life—or death, or whatever twisted force behind this—send me back here?
Here...
Where I had no one.
No friends.
No home.
No warmth.
Just Abigail and Violet. Two strangers I only ever knew through a glowing screen, our connection built on late-night chats and the shared love of fictional worlds. They weren't even real constants in my life—and yet, they were all I had.
My family?
They could buy me luxury cars, designer clothes, the kind of life others would kill for.
But they could never offer me the one thing I craved: belonging.
A place to breathe.
To be wanted.
To be loved.
All I ever wanted was to be enough—for my parents, for my siblings. So I bent over backward trying to become their perfect son. Their golden boy. I smiled when I wanted to scream. I agreed when I wanted to fight.
And in the end?
None of it mattered.
They still looked through me like I was invisible. Like I was just... taking up space.
I died alone.
No hand to hold. No voice calling my name.
Just the cold, sterile walls of that damn hospital and the bitter sting of knowing I was forgettable.
A hollow laugh slipped past my lips. I ran a hand through my hair, trying to shake the ghosts off my back.
No.
I wasn't going to sink back into those memories.
Not again.
My jaw clenched as I turned toward the window. The night outside was thick with shadows, and the glass reflected a younger version of me—barely eighteen.
Ten fucking years back.
How wonderful.
YAMI'S POV
I stared at my reflection in the cracked bathroom mirror, heart pounding against my ribs like a war drum.
I'm back.
Ten years.
Gone. Just like that.
I'm sixteen again.
And to be brutally honest?
I'm not happy.
Not even a little.
In this timeline, it's only been four years since I clawed my way out of hell.
Four years since I escaped the brothel where my aunt sold me for a crumpled twenty-dollar bill—like I was nothing more than a disposable object.
Twenty fucking dollars.
That's all I was worth to her.
Now, on the surface, I'm a waitress in a quiet little café that smells like burnt coffee and cheap perfume. A nobody. A ghost blending into the background.
But that's just a cover.
A lie I wear like second skin.
Because for four years...
I wasn't just a waitress.
I was an assassin.
I learned how to fight—not because I wanted to—but because I had to.
Because survival doesn't come with mercy in the kind of world I crawled out of.
And I was good.
Too good.
By the time I was twenty-six, I was at the top of the food chain. The perfect killer.
Clean. Swift. Untraceable.
But even monsters like me have hearts, right?
I let someone in. A man I believed would understand me. Save me.
Maybe even love me.
But he didn't.
He betrayed me.
He sold me out to my own boss.
He rigged my car's brakes and watched me drive off, knowing it would be the last time.
To the world, I died in a tragic car crash.
But I knew better.
It was a planned execution.
By the man I trusted most.
A dry, bitter laugh echoed in the empty room as I leaned back against the bathroom wall, the chill of the tiles seeping through my shirt.
So yeah. I died. Alone. Like I had lived most of my life.
The only thing that ever offered me a sliver of peace...
Was stories.
Books became my escape, my comfort.
And in the process, I found two people in an online reading forum who made the loneliness just a little more bearable—Abigail and Noah.
Virtual friends.
But the only real ones I ever had.
I closed my eyes, trying to steady my breathing.
This has to be some cosmic joke.