It was strange, watching a world move that you already knew would fall apart.
Adrian Voss stood outside the glittering glass tower of Montrose Group, the very building that would one day bear his name in the headlines ..CEO found dead in mysterious circumstances.
He remembered this morning from his first life. He'd been impatient, ambitious, too blind to see the strings being pulled around him. Now, standing in the same place with a decade's worth of scars buried behind a young man's eyes, he saw everything differently.
The hum of the city bled into his thoughts, the rush of cars, the click of heels on the marble sidewalk, the faint scent of coffee and ambition. Everyone was in motion, chasing something. Adrian was chasing ghosts.
Inside the revolving doors, the world he once ruled greeted him with sterile perfection silver elevators, polished floors, and the quiet hum of controlled chaos. He still knew the layout by heart, every corridor, every office, every betrayal that had happened here.
And yet, as he passed the reception desk, the air shifted.
That was when he saw her.
She shouldn't be here. Not yet.
Elara Montrose ,the quiet storm behind the empire.
In his previous life, their paths hadn't crossed until much later, after she had become a whisper in the financial world , a name that sent tremors through boardrooms. But here she was, standing in the lobby, a file tucked beneath her arm, arguing softly with an assistant who looked terrified to correct her.
Her voice was steady, warm with a strange edge of defiance.
"I told Mr. Grant I'd deliver this myself."
Her tone didn't rise, but it didn't need to. There was a quiet command in her words,subtle, dangerous.
Adrian froze mid-step, watching her from a distance that felt both infinite and painfully close.
She was exactly as he remembered raven hair falling in soft waves against a crisp white blouse, eyes a shade between steel and storm. But there was something else he hadn't seen before something he'd been too consumed by power to notice the first time around. Vulnerability. The kind that hides behind strength.
He shouldn't speak to her. Not yet. Every instinct screamed that he was too early, that he could unravel the very fabric of what fate had given him.
But fate had never asked for permission.
When she turned, their eyes met.
For a heartbeat, the world tilted, sound faded, breath caught. She blinked, as if startled by something she couldn't name. And then, her lips curved, the ghost of a polite smile offered to a stranger.
"Mr…?" she asked softly, voice measured but curious.
Adrian hesitated, then smiled careful, calm, the mask of a man who'd lived and died before. "Just someone who's late for a meeting," he said.
"Then I won't keep you," she replied, turning away.
But as she walked toward the elevator, Adrian felt the pull, that quiet, magnetic ache that had once destroyed him. Only this time, he wasn't the same man.
He wasn't the prey.
The elevator doors closed with a soft chime, taking her away.
He stood still, the sound echoing like a promise.
The meeting that shouldn't have happened had just changed everything again.
Adrian exhaled, glancing at the floor indicator rising steadily to the executive level.
Fate, it seemed, still had a sense of humor.