Reborn to Love the Man Who Killed Me

I didn't know his name yet, and already he was looking at me like I'd died in his arms once before. Maybe I had. Just not in this life. The first time Kaelan Voss touched my wrist, his hand shook — not from nerves, but from memory, though I wouldn't understand that until it was too late to run. "You shouldn't be here," he said, like I was a ghost he hadn't finished burying. I laughed it off. I always laughed things off. It's what got me killed the first time. He didn't laugh with me. The gala was the kind of event I only ever saw through glass — the Voss Foundation's annual dinner, three hundred of Manhattan's richest people pretending they liked each other for one night a year, in a ballroom with ceilings so high the chandeliers looked like they belonged to weather, not architecture. I was only there because I catered the dessert table, arranging spun-sugar swans in rows so even that someone in a tuxedo could photograph them for an i********: nobody would remember by morning. I'd been on my feet since four. My shoes had given up somewhere around course three. I wasn't supposed to be noticed. Waitstaff never were — we were furniture that occasionally refilled your glass, and I'd made peace with that a long time ago, because invisible people don't get fired for staring too long at the room they're standing in. I stared anyway. I always did. There was a kind of math to it — one bracelet on that woman's wrist probably covered my rent for a year, easy, and I did that math at every one of these things, half out of spite and half because it was the only souvenir I ever let myself take home. So when the heir to the Voss empire crossed an entire ballroom just to stand in front of me, I assumed he had the wrong girl. "I'm sorry," I said, stepping back, tray still balanced on my palm. "Do you need something?" Something shifted behind his eyes — relief and horror at once, like a man checking a pulse he didn't expect to find. "You're alive," he said quietly. "Last I checked." He didn't smile. Up close, he looked older than twenty-eight, the way people look older when they've survived something instead of just lived through it. His tie was crooked. I noticed that before I noticed anything else about him — how strange, for a man who owned three companies, to walk around with a crooked tie, like some part of him had gotten dressed on autopilot while the rest of him was somewhere else entirely. "Do I know you?" I asked, because it felt safer than asking what I actually wanted to ask, which was why do you look like you've been grieving me. "No," he said. Then, softer, like the truth slipped out before he could stop it: "Not yet." I should have walked away then. Every instinct I had — and I had good instincts, the kind that kept a girl alive in a city like this, the kind that had gotten me out of two bad apartments and one worse relationship before either could do real damage — told me to put the tray down, disappear into the kitchen, forget the rich stranger with the shaking hands and the eyes that didn't match his face. Instead I asked, "Then how do you know my name's Ivy?" Because I hadn't told him. I was sure of that. I replay it constantly now, combing through that single minute for the moment I gave myself away — and I never do. I never said my name. Denise didn't introduce staff by name at these things; we were "the caterer" or, if someone was feeling generous, "sweetheart." I'd checked my own name tag twice that week out of pure boredom and knew for a fact I wasn't wearing one tonight — the pin had snapped off in the subway doors two stops before the venue, and I'd shoved it in my bag rather than deal with it. He went very still. Whatever color the room's low light had left in his face, it left faster. "I don't," he said. "I made a mistake. Excuse me." He turned and walked into the crowd like the floor was burning under him, shoulders set the way people set them when they're trying very hard to look like they're not running, and I stood there holding a tray of untouched champagne, my pulse doing something it had no reason to do for a stranger. I watched him go. I told myself I was watching to see if he'd trip some kind of alarm, get escorted out by security for accosting the help — anything that would make this feel like a story instead of a warning. He didn't trip anything. He found his sister near the string quartet, said something short to her, and she looked past him, straight at me, for exactly as long as it takes to memorize a face. I went back to the dessert table. I straightened a swan that didn't need straightening. My hands were not steady, and I hated that they weren't. I didn't know yet that he'd watched me die in a life I couldn't remember. I didn't know yet that he came back for exactly one reason — to stop it from happening again. And I didn't know that the reason he said my name wrong that night wasn't a mistake. It was a memory. He'd said it a thousand times before, in a version of this year that never happened for me, and happened for him twice.