Chapter 1

This was my ninth life. My ninth attempt to save Julian Blackwood.

The system' s objective was clear: "Rehabilitate Target: Julian Blackwood."

The reward was just as clear: my student debt wiped clean, and my mother' s terminal cancer cured.

So I tried. For eight lifetimes, I tried.

I endured his coldness, his contempt, his fanatical obsession with "purity." I told myself it was a shell, a defense mechanism built around a wounded soul. I thought I could heal him.

In my eighth life, I thought I' d finally succeeded. He let me close. He even smiled. For a fleeting moment, I felt the warmth of a normal life. I fell in love. I got pregnant.

That was my biggest mistake.

"You are a vessel of filth," he whispered, his voice as sterile as the medical room he' d built in his penthouse. "This… transgression… must be cleansed."

He forced the miscarriage himself. I remember the cold instruments and his colder eyes. He had the embryonic tissue cryogenically frozen. A memento, he called it. A monument to my failure.

Then he drowned me in his sensory deprivation tank, the one he used for his "purification" rituals. The saltwater filled my lungs. Darkness took me.

I expected the reset. The familiar, disorienting lurch back to day one.

But this time, it was different.

[System Glitch Detected. Reset Delayed.]

The robotic voice echoed in the void. I was a ghost, a disembodied presence floating in the penthouse I had just died in. I saw my own body, pale and still in the isolation tank.

Julian didn' t even look at it. He walked to a wall that slid open with a hiss, revealing a vault. He stepped inside. I drifted after him, pulled by a force I couldn' t explain.

The vault wasn't minimalist like the rest of his home. It was a shrine. Her clothes hung in glass cases. Her letters were framed on the walls. And in the center, a life-sized hologram of a woman with sad, beautiful eyes glowed in the dark.

Eleanor Vance. His dead fiancée.

Julian reached out, his hand trembling as he caressed the hologram' s cheek. His cold facade shattered, replaced by an expression of agonizing love.

"Eleanor," he whispered, his voice breaking. "Just one more time. I only need to kill her one more time."

My non-existent heart stopped.

"She remembers, you know," he continued, speaking to the hologram as if she were alive. "Every time, she comes back. But I remember too. I remember all nine. This next one, the tenth, will be the final one. It will be enough to reset the world. To reset it back to the day before the party. Before you left me."

He looked at the hologram, his face contorted with a hatred so profound it was terrifying.

"It was her fault, my love. She drugged me. You saw us, and you thought… you thought I betrayed you. But I never did. She is the filth that ruined us. And I will erase her. Then you' ll come back to me. You' ll be real again."

The world around me warped. It wasn't trauma I was meant to heal. It was vengeance. I was the target of his endless, repeating revenge. The mission was a lie.

He wasn't a man to be saved. He was a monster to be escaped.

[System Reset Initiated. Final Loop Engaged.]

The world dissolved into static.