Part 1The Heiress Knew I Was Back

It was the third year I’d been bound to the Maxwell name, serving out my debt. The third year I belonged to Sloan Maxwell. That’s when I decided to leave.

I managed to acquire a slow-acting poison, injected it, and walked alone to the edge of the city’s oldest bridge. I thought I would finally die in peace, a quiet exit from the endless storm.

But a Rolls-Royce Ghost cut through the sheet of rain and screeched to a stop beside me. The tinted window lowered, revealing the exquisite, cold face that had captivated countless men.

“Get the client in the car.”

I was practically thrown into the back seat, my sodden clothes soaking the expensive leather in a flash. Sloan didn’t seem to notice. Instead, she gripped my jaw, her thumb rubbing away the rain streaking my forehead.

“If you were truly determined to die, you should have chosen a more private way,” she murmured, her voice silk over steel. “Otherwise, I will always find you before death does.”

“Will you? I think this time, you’re too late.”

Watching the blood bubble from my mouth, a flicker of genuine panic—a rare and startling thing—crossed Sloan’s eyes.

“Asher Reed, you have not finished paying for the sin you inflicted on Owen. I forbid you to die!”

She summoned the best doctors money could buy, but it was useless. My consciousness was already sinking. In the haze, my mind flashed back to the night that changed everything.

Sloan had been standing beneath the fireworks, smiling at me, her phone vibrating in her hand, unseen. Later, she would say it was my selfish insistence that made her miss the final desperate plea from Owen, trapped in the fire. My sin was needing her. My life was supposed to be the payment.

I thought, I have paid the full price.

But then I opened my eyes.

I was back. Back to the very first day I met her.

She was standing there, a girl in a white sundress, like a dew-kissed gardenia in the summer, smiling and waving.

I fled like a man possessed.

This time, I would not let our lives become entangled. Never again.

* * *

I ran until my lungs burned, finally leaning, trembling, against an old maple tree on the roadside. I scanned my surroundings frantically.

On this exact day in the previous life, I had dropped a prized steel fountain pen. Sloan had picked it up.

“Excuse me, classmate, you dropped this.”

Just that one look, and I was irretrievably lost.

I followed her like a shadow, chasing the faint hope of a fleeting smile. But she remained aloof, a beautiful, perfect statue. I was naive enough to think my relentless passion could eventually melt her cold composure.

I poured all my teenage longing into my best friend, Owen Bell. I dragged him to watch Sloan play tennis, pointing to the most radiant girl on the court.

“See that? That’s the one I love.”

I was full of innocent joy, introducing the two most important people in my life to each other. I was too blind to see the lightning-fast spark of tenderness in Sloan’s cold eyes when she looked at Owen. I missed the complex, unspoken things in Owen’s gaze whenever I brought her up.

There was already a current, an undertow of feeling between them that I knew nothing about. I was the clueless fool standing on the shore.

On my twentieth birthday, I mustered every ounce of courage and asked her out.

“Sloan, could you… could you spend the evening with me for my birthday?”

I expected the usual excuses, the polite refusal. But she said yes.

She arranged for a spectacular firework display, igniting the night sky in bursts of blinding, dazzling light. I stood there, mesmerized by her elegant profile, illuminated by the flashes of fire. I felt like the luckiest man alive, and I even asked, foolishly:

“Sloan, how did you know I love fireworks?”

She didn’t answer. All the fireworks that night were shaped like forget-me-nots. Owen’s favorite flower.

She just drank with me, glass after glass. Fueled by the alcohol and the stunning light show, I finally lunged, kissing her.

“Sloan, I love you. I’ve loved you for so long. Please, be my girlfriend.”

Only later did I learn her true plan: she intended to use my birthday party as the setting to confess her feelings to Owen. But Owen never showed up. She stayed silent for a long time before finally agreeing to be with me.

The fragile bubble of happiness lasted less than half the night. The moment she picked up her phone, she saw the emergency text from Owen. He’d been trapped in a sudden fire right before the party and had been begging her for help.

“Sloan, save me.”

“Sloan… I’m so scared.”

She was with me, celebrating my birthday, and she missed the chance to save him forever.

It became my unforgivable sin. She believed that if I hadn’t selfishly demanded she attend that damn party, if I hadn’t monopolized all her time and attention, she would have seen the message. She would have saved him.

So, when Sloan graduated and took over the Maxwell family empire, the first thing she did was systematically dismantle and crush my family’s company. I fell from wealth into the deepest mire. My parents, unable to cope, both ended up in intensive care.

I knelt before her, begging her to spare my parents. The cold, elegant girl of my memories stood over me, looking down.

“Asher Reed, sell yourself to me. Use your life to pay the debt.”

Facing the exorbitant hospital bills, I had no choice. I signed a devastating contract and became her captive husband. I thought it would buy my parents safety, but they died anyway. The day after Sloan and I formally signed the marriage certificate.

I never knew if Sloan arranged it, but I never got to see them one last time.

From then on, she kept me isolated in the Maxwell Estate, escalating her cruelty. I watched her kiss countless men who bore a passing resemblance to Owen, and I was thrown into the basement innumerable times for being "disobedient." She used every extreme method to punish me, slowly driving me toward a breakdown. She demanded I spend my entire life repaying a mistake I didn’t know I’d made.

It wasn't until my first failed attempt at self-harm that she, as if bestowing a terrible gift, choked me and told me the truth:

“Asher Reed, if it hadn’t been for you that night, I would have saved Owen. I have only ever loved him. You are only here to pay the debt for your sin.”

The memory seized my chest, a fresh, sharp pain. I doubled over, clutching my heart, sinking to the ground beneath the maple tree.

Since our meeting was a mistake from the very start, I prayed it would never start again.