New Life
1222 Words
Adrian (inside Kairo II Damaris’s body)
Air claws down my throat like I’ve never breathed before as I wake up choking on nothing. My eyes snap open. A ceiling swam above me glowing like someone held a lamp to my skull.
I jerk upright.
Wrong body.
I feel too light.
My chest rising and falling in sharp, frightened bursts. My hands…God. My hands are small. Slim. Not the scarred, calloused ones I know. These look like they belong to a teenager.
“What…?” My voice cracked.
“No.”
“No, no, no.”
The last thing I remember:
The warehouse, Blood, and Zarai’s body being dragged away.
And the strange man's words : “You should never have trusted us.”
A gunshot and darkness swallowing everything.
Now this?
A soft hum filled the room, the quiet whir of an air purifier.
I don’t know this place, but my body does.
I feel an echo of familiarity deep in the bones I’m wearing.
Throwing the blanket aside, I swing my legs off the bed. They hit the floor too quickly, shorter than what my brain expects. My knees buckle, and I catch the edge of a dresser to steady myself.
The room is pristine. Soft grey walls. Chrome accents.
My breathing grew uneven as I touched my face and felt cheeks too soft, jaw too smooth, no stubble, no old scar under my chin. This isn’t me. This isn’t Adrian Cole; the man built out of battles, survival, poverty and corporate warfare.
This is someone else.
A sharp pain bursts at the back of my skull as memories that aren’t mine slammed into me like a car crash.
Metals screeching and a rain of glass shards as thick smoke filled the air.
I stumble back.
“No… no, that’s not…”
It is.
The memory isn’t mine, but my body recognizes it. And suddenly, like a curtain flung open, a name crashes into me with full force:
Kairo II Damaris
My heart stops.
Kairo Damaris…
The boy whose portrait hung in the Damaris Mansion’s east hallway.
The boy whose death shattered the empire’s heart.
The boy whose parents; Kairo I and Selene Damaris never recovered.
The boy whose hit-and-run was the mystery of the century even decades after his death.
The boy whose death happened fifteen years before I joined the Damaris Corporation.
And I am breathing with his lungs.
The realization hits me so hard I grip the dresser until my knuckles whiten.
“Impossible,” I whisper.
But the air, the heartbeat, the smallness of my body contradicts everything I refused to accept.
I pace the room, barefoot on cool tile, trying to force logic into the chaos. My mind racing in precision, analysis, everything I’m used to controlling.
I was shot. I died.
But I woke up here, twenty years in the past inside Kairo's body.
This shouldn’t be real.
But every breath screams that it is.
A sudden knock slices through the silence.
“Master Kairo? Are you awake?”
A familiar voice. Too familiar.
Amy.
Kairo Damaris’s head housekeeper.
Strict. Efficient. Loyal to the bone.
She was already old when I met her but the voice sounds young and sharper.
My breath hitched. If she opens the door and sees me panicking like a man in a child’s skin, she’ll notice something’s wrong. The Damaris household has many things, but being oblivious is not one of them.
I clear my throat and aim for what would be Kairo’s tone, something gentler, unsure, nothing like the commanding voice I used to wield.
“Y-yes,” I manage. “I’m… up.”
The doorknob twitched but she didn't enter.
“Breakfast is in thirty minutes. Your grandfather wants to see you after.”
My stomach twisted into knots.
Alder V Damaris, the empire’s kingmaker.
The man who was my boss's father… and, eventually, the closest thing I had to family.
But right now?
“I’ll be there,” I call out, forcing steadiness.
“Very well, Master Kairo.” Her steps fade down the hall.
When silence returned, I inhaled shakily.
This isn’t just a second chance at life.
It’s a collision and my death smashing into another boy’s.
But why this boy?
Why Kairo?
Why a timeline twenty years before my own death?
And the bigger question
Why does it feel like someone pulled me here on purpose?
Walking to the window. The estate grounds stretch wide, gardens trimmed to perfection, fountains glittering in morning light. It was the same Damaris household as I once knew it, but brighter, and untouched by tragedy.
A world poised on the edge of a wound.
Snapping back to my senses with only one thought.
I need confirmation.
I need the truth, even if it destroys me.
My gaze lands on a narrow door near the dresser. Instinct says bathroom and I move toward it, not too fast, because the body isn’t built for my pace.
I push the door open.
Light spills across a marble sink.
And above it was…
A mirror.
My reflection stared back at me.
But it wasn't Adrian Vale.
Not the hardened strategist.
Not the man who clawed his way up a corrupt empire.
Not the man who died in a warehouse with betrayal carved into his last breath.
A boy looked back at me, with messy strawberry brown hair falling over wide hazel eyes.
Cheeks still holding traces of youth.
A faint birthmark on his right cheek.
I looked exactly like the portrait I used to walk past every morning.
Fifteen.
Alive.
And breathing.
Kairo Damaris II.
My chest tightened so painfully, so I grip the nearest object to me to stay upright.
“I’m… him.”
The mirror fogs with each trembling exhale.
I lift a hand; he lifts a hand.
My fingers brush the cool glass. His palm meets mine.
The truth sealed itself with that single mirrored touch.
I didn’t just wake in another body.
I woke up in the corpse of a legend.
The boy whose loss carved a permanent wound in two powerful hearts.
The boy whose mystery was never solved.
And now I am standing in the middle of that unsolved tragedy.
My pulse pounding in my ears.
Then…
A sudden memory not mine slashes across my vision:
A car skidded across the tarred road from a heavy and intentional impact from a bigger vehicle.
I gasp and slam both hands on the sink.
Someone had killed this boy.
And now I am living in the gap of that crime.
My breath begins to steady; slow, heavy, and controlled the way it used to be when facing enemies across a negotiation table.
If destiny put me here… it wasn’t for mercy.
It was for war.
I lean closer to the mirror, studying the young features that now belong to me.
And I whispered to the reflection:
“I don’t know why I’m here… or who brought me back.
But I’m definitely not dying again.”
The floorboard creaked behind me; soft and subtle, but it rubbed off me in a wrong way.
I freeze.
Someone else is in the room.
Before I can turn, a cold voice drifts out of the shadow near the doorway:
“Funny,” the voice says.
“I thought we killed you.”
- Writer
