Part 1The System Made Me a Substitute for His Dead Wife Not Knowing I Was the Original

I was supposed to be a ghost. The first love, the one enshrined in memory, the wife who died too young.

Ten years after the fire, a System brought me back.

My mission: to save him, the villain my husband had become.

The only problem? I couldn't remember a thing. Not him, not our life, not even my own name until the System gave it to me.

So when I saw him from a distance, a man carved from shadow and ice, I didn’t get close.

His security saw to that.

As they threw me against the alley wall, the world spitting me out like something bitter, a series of comments flickered into existence before my eyes, a ghostly feed only I could see.

【Here we go again. I’ve lost count of how many have tried to ‘save’ the big bad wolf.】

【For a decade, the System has been terrified he’ll burn the world down. So it keeps sending these candidates, these replacements, to try and pacify him.】

【There have been girls who looked just like his dead wife, girls who had her exact personality, even one who came armed with all of her memories…】

【They all failed. Spectacularly.】

【So this one? This painfully average girl? How many days does she get?】

* * *

When the System dropped me into this life, the man whose moods dictated the stability of the entire world was thirty-four years old. And he had a son who was nearly ten.

I woke from a long, dreamless sleep into a world of total unknowns.

All I knew was my name—Nora. I was twenty-three. The System had just informed me of this. Beyond that, it gave me a litany of warnings, a thousand cautions about the man I was supposed to save. It urged me not to end up like the others who came before me, who had their lives extinguished the moment they entered his world.

The System told me his name was Damian Shaw, a man who sat at the absolute apex of global wealth and power.

He was brutal, vindictive, a caged animal pacing the confines of his own gilded world. The only shred of humanity he had left, it seemed, was reserved for his young son.

I stared at my reflection in the mirror for a long time.

“I don’t see anything special in me,” I said, my voice barely a whisper. “Nothing that would make a man like that even look my way.”

The System was silent for a moment.

When it spoke again, its tone was heavy with meaning. “You’re the last chance, Nora. If you can’t do this—”

It cut itself off, the voice hardening with a strange resolve. “No. You can. You have to.”