Rebirth13 min read
I Was Supposed to Meet a Suitor — I Found a Time Loop, a Rival, and My Own Wedding Ring
ButterPicks10 views
"Where are the crash victims they just brought in? Is there a girl named Eliza Cox?" I ran into the emergency entrance like a wind and gasped, "Please, tell me quickly."
The nurse blinked, then pointed. "They're fine. One girl—mild concussion. She passed out. We moved her upstairs."
"Thank you!" I said, and ran.
I was late for a date I hadn’t wanted—arranged by my family—but I still expected a quiet coffee, a stiff handshake and then escape. I did not expect a crash on the way.
I pushed open the ward door and froze. A man stood by an empty bed and turned his back to me. He was tall, calm, dangerous like a storm held back.
"Looking for Eliza?" he asked with a slow smile. "You should rest. My woman—I'll take care of her."
I tasted iron in my mouth and my skin felt thin. I didn't belong in this scene. I had died. I remembered cold and a long hospital night—pain had taken me. Then the world tilted.
On the taxi, my head throbbed. I checked my phone: the date was ten years earlier. The city looked the same and wrong.
"No." I shut the screen. "This isn't possible."
Two names broke into my chest: Leonardo Cortez and Kingston Rice. I remembered them like old scars.
"Driver, take me to Longbridge University," I told him.
The car had hardly changed course when my phone buzzed. Kingston Rice. My fingers shook. I turned it off.
At the university gate eight men closed around me like a net.
"Miss Cox, come with us. Kingston won't do anything," the leader said, smiling like he owned the world.
I bit the air. I would have moved mountains to avoid Kingston this time. I had good reasons.
A syringe slid into my arm and my last clear thought before darkness was a vow: not him. Not again.
I woke up in the same hospital room. Ten years younger. The bed felt like a trap.
A voice said from the chair at the bedside, cool and folded: "The doctor says you have a mild concussion. Stop running off to your brother's school."
I clenched the sheet. The voice was Kingston. He had the same green-blue eyes but younger, less guarded. He turned and left.
I kept my fist clasped beneath the sheet until my throat stopped making sound. My memories weren't erased. They were sharp as knives. In the ten years I had lost everything because of fights between the Rice and other families. Kingston had been at the center of that whirlwind. He had been a monster to me. He had burned my life.
Now he sat in the chair, younger, fresh. I didn't know what to do.
"I’m fine," I heard myself say, and it sounded small.
He smoothed his sleeve. "Rest. Don't run off again."
He left. I watched the ceiling and then quietly pulled the IV out of my hand. I dressed slowly and crept to the door. My father's voice stopped me. I flopped back into bed and pretended to sleep.
They moved me home. Nothing looked different—except for the family talk.
"He hid it?" my mother said, tea cooling in her cup. "Kingston Rice is a son of the Rice family, of course he is. He’s a Rice heir."
My heart punched at the techo of my ribs. Everything I knew was suddenly rearranged. In the life that had been, my choices had led to disaster. Kingston and I had been crushed by the war of families. He had crushed my family, my future—everything.
I lay awake at night and breathed like someone learning how to stay alive. If this was a second turn, I would change things. Not by avoiding risk—by choosing differently. I would stop families from burning.
Days passed. I watched Kingston from the sidelines. He was different in small ways—softer sometimes—but the past had taught me not to trust sudden warmth. The man who had held me down in a hospital once could still be cruel.
One evening at Redberry Manor, my parents and I went to a private dinner. Kingston's father, Willem Elliott, was there with him. The old ties between families surfaced with polite smiles.
"Sit," Willem said, standing to welcome us.
Inside, Kingston sat across from me. He poured tea for the elders and all I could feel was alertness.
My father fumbled. "We thought—it's a match, right? For business ties and later family."
Willem smiled. "But young people must decide."
When my father hinted at a match with Leonardo Cortez, a polite and earnest man from my past, Kingston's face changed like a storm passing. He rose. "I'll take Eliza home," he said, and the sound was casual but absolute.
I wanted to protest and I found my voice. "We broke up," I said. "We already said it's over."
He closed the gap between us and lowered his voice, like thumb on a glass. "Stop. Don't make trouble."
A slight chill twined my spine. He stood like a rock between Leonardo and me. Hold him back or push him? I wrenched out of his hold.
Leonardo smiled and tried to keep the conversation light, but we hadn't gone a hundred meters when an explosion shook the restaurant.
"Run!" someone shouted.
I spun toward the smoke and flames and slammed into Kingston's arm. He lifted me like I had no weight at all and threw me into a car, then ran toward the fire.
"Put me down!" I screamed. "My parents—"
He slammed the door and said, "I won't let anything happen to you."
Then I bit his hand so hard his skin broke. He didn't curse. He only pushed me back, locked the car, and ran.
Hours later the news screamed across the city: a blast at the Red Dragon House. Seven dead, many injured. My parents were among the wounded. Kingston's father, Willem Elliott, was also hurt and rushed to ICU.
Kingston walked past the waiting crowd and closed his jaw.
"You okay?" he asked me, quiet and imploring, minutes later in the hall.
I looked at him and saw the lights of a different city in his eyes. "You lied," I said. "You said he was fine."
He smiled, and his smile was a lie in delicious fabric. "Your parents are stable," he said. "I saw them. You'll go home."
He stayed. He led us through the mess with a hand at the small of my back, and for the first time since I had woken up in the past, I felt something melt—only a little. He told my brother, Finbar Ludwig—no, not him; Finbar was my family elder—he told my brother to stay. My brother, who was building robots at school, stood by my side and asked why I looked like someone being scanned by the world.
"You were here," he said. "You were everywhere when the bad things happened."
I lied and told him I had been sleeping.
A week later, Kingston's father left ICU. He limped and looked older, but alive. The news called it an equipment failure. I did not believe it. The Rice family had money and a clean kitchen. Accidents like that did not visit big mansions easily.
Kingston kept visiting. He sent me messages, little updates. He was odd—insistent, caring. He wrote things I'd never expected.
"Have you eaten?" he would text.
"Do you sleep?"
He even sent a photo of his therapy exercises. Sometimes he was almost gentle. I kept my guard up.
When I needed someone to help sign a deal to bring a rising online talent into the company, my instinct told me to go to the woman who ran a company owned by the Rices—my contact was in the Rice domain. I found Jaliyah Vincent in a small live-streaming room in Tang City. She looked tired, but bright. Her audience was small and poor, and she needed help.
I flew to Tang City with my assistant and our legal counsel. Jaliyah's voice was honest and raw. She had a good face for cameras and she was hungry for better choices.
"Can you teach me how to do makeup streams?" she asked, touching her cheap BB cream.
"Yes," I said. "And we will protect your boundaries. We don't sell people here."
Her eyes went wide. "You mean that?"
"I've seen enough of the other side," I said. "No arrangements. No favors."
She signed. I wired five thousand for travel. I lied and told myself the money was seed and not charity. On the flight home, I called Kingston.
"You're in Tang City?" His voice was light. "Good timing. My aunt runs the company that owns the platform."
I stared at the clouds, then answered, "Tonight? I can meet."
"Six. Redberry Garden. I will pick you up."
He showed up early and stayed for dinner. He introduced me to his aunt, Victoria Cash. She had bright cropped hair and a laugh like a bell. She listened and said, "You want Jaliyah? If Kingston asked, this is family business. I will help."
She did help. I signed the contracts. Jaliyah's platform was moved under the Rice group's umbrella and released from an exploitative deal. The paperwork slid across the table like a clean break.
"Thanks," Jaliyah texted when she arrived in my city. "I will work hard."
Kingston smiled when I told him. "Good job," he said. "You have a talent for rescuing people."
"Not rescue. Business," I corrected.
The following week at Longbridge, Kingston showed up in the stadium and announced something I'd always thought impossible: he had taken over the old LS club. He appeared on the big screen and the crowd went wild. He spoke about rebuilding the club, leading it to new heights, and the roar of approval made it clear—he was no longer just a player. He had become a force.
Watching him on that stage, standing tall with a gentleness I recognized in flashes, I asked myself why the past had been so full of venom. He had hurt me. He had hurt my family. Yet he saved us that day at the fire. He protected us from the smoke. He kept showing up.
After the game, Leonardo and I sat in the VIP seats. He looked at me with a soft, sad smile.
"About us," he began, fumbling.
I took his hand. "This was arranged. I told them my feelings. I told them everything."
He nodded. "Is it because of him?"
I looked out at the empty court and made a decision. "I'm sorry. I can't keep leading both of you on. I will be honest. I want us to be friends."
He was patient, the kind of man who could wait. I wanted him to have peace.
Then Kingston came. He took my hand in front of the stadium.
"Will you come to dinner?" he asked, like it was the simplest thing in the world.
I hesitated. He had been asking and demanding and softening. Maybe I had to choose.
That night he escorted me to meet his family at the Rice home. The Rices served a low-key dinner and in small gestures let me see the world Kingston came from. His aunt, Victoria, joked and said, "If Kingston asked for a favor on family business, I would do it."
"That's cheap grace," Kingston muttered, but his smile softened when he looked at me.
I began to let my defenses down. He had the tarnished edges I knew—anger and strategy—but there was a different side too, a person who kept a small kindness for me.
At the Rice family's request, Kingston gave me a tour of his house. He said, "I want to set up a drawer for you."
"I don't need drawers saved for me," I said, angry and absurd, because I had been burned before.
"You will," he said simply.
Then came a moment I didn't expect. At a midweek meeting, my client pushed too far. A man raised his hand and put a hand on my thigh. "You're pretty," he said. I slapped him across the face. Everyone froze.
"Apologize," I said.
He laughed and tried to touch me again.
Kingston had stepped in the door and seen it. He put his hand on my arm and didn't even raise his voice.
"If you want to be part of this world and say those things—" He leaned close, "—you will leave both of us alone."
The man blanched and backed away. Later he called our office and begged forgiveness. I felt a small bloom of something between us. It wasn't safety. It was recognition.
Soon after, word spread that we were engaged.
They had called it a formal request—a private meeting—and I had not been warned. Kingston's grandfather, Finbar Ludwig, a stern old man with white hair and gentle anger, sat us down and spoke plainly: "We think you are right for him. We want you two to be a family."
I had expected a fight in my chest, but the idea of marriage felt like a shield. Kingston's hand was there when I left the room. He touched my palm with his thumb.
"Will you be my wife?" he asked, in the slow, quiet way of men who did not demand.
"Not today," I said. "We aren't married because you want me to be. I need reasons."
He let the silence hold weight. "I will give you reasons," he promised.
We dressed together for the small engagement dinner. Kingston gave me a ring that was simple and shrewd. "It fits," he said.
I kept thinking of the life I had lost. Now he was in a different place. He was still dangerous, but he had power and a plan. That scared me as much as it drew me in.
We thought we could keep everything tidy. But the world has a way of showing its teeth.
In the shadow of the Rices something was moving—Greed had a name, and the name was Gustavo Monteiro. He was an uncle who smiled with too many teeth. He had once been poor and had clawed his way toward the family and kept the memory alive. He greeted me with a warmth that did not reach his eyes.
"You two are very suited," Gustavo said to Kingston with a voice like syrup. He wanted to be inside the family story and take its gold out for himself.
A few weeks later, anonymous raids and nasty accidents began to happen to people around us. Someone tripped Kingston at a construction site and he drowned for a moment in a lake near a new wing. Someone else sabotaged equipment. It looked random.
I found him at the hospital, pale and stubborn as ever. He said, "Don't worry. I will be fine."
I didn't trust the answers. I saw patterns I had seen a decade before. I felt a terrible pressure like an old knot tightening.
I asked my brother, Dawson Flowers—no, Finbar Ludwig—my family is Dawson Flowers (father) and Gwen Reed (mother). Sorry—names swirled. What mattered was trust.
"Don't forget who we are," my father said. "You're useful now. Don't throw it away."
Useful. My father's eyes kept slipping toward deals, toward the width of the marriage.
"Are you doing this for business?" I asked Kingston once, standing in the dark beside the river where the lights made a silver path on the water.
"What I do is my own," he said. "If anyone hurts you, I will find them."
That night Finbar suggested a public celebration for our engagement to seal the families. "Simple," he said. "Two families. Quiet." I feared open displays. We did a small dinner.
Then someone pulled a thread into a coil. At the celebration Gustavo watched with a smile that didn't meet his cheeks. He lingered around shadows and whispered to the wrong ears. In the days after the dinner, rumors spilled: a rival sold lies about Kingston's club, someone tampered with a car, whispers of a plan to ruin our names.
I told Kingston. He sat very still. "I will handle it."
He did. He set in motion quiet little traps, moved people, changed managers, and then the world erupted into proof of conspiracy.
We found evidence that implicated one man after another. A strange dossier leaked. Someone from an old rival firm was exposed as an agent who had been bribed. The climax came on a public day: a meeting where Gustavo put his head high and declared Kingston a fool, accusing him of lying about the club takeover.
"You have no claim!" Gustavo sneered. "You bought a bankrupt shell and called yourself a savior."
Kingston stood like a rock. He didn't shout. He placed a photo on the table—a receipt, a wire transfer, signatures. "You have been funneling funds and staging incidents. Arrest them," Kingston said.
The room stalled. He had proof. The men who had been smiling at Gustavo's jokes turned pale. Phones came out. Someone made calls.
When the truth landed, Gustavo's expression folded like paper into a child's horror. He scrambled through lies. "No! It's not like that—"
A guard led him out. Someone pulled out a phone and videoed. People murmured and then stared. "He is the one." The words spread.
In the days that followed, they were merciless. The press had a feast. People who had supported Gustavo turned on him. Videos of him flailing, hands pleading, begging for chance filled feeds.
"You can't—please—" Gustavo cried in the middle of the lobby as cameras gathered, "This is slander! I didn't do it!"
One social feed showed him stepping back into a boardroom and watching his businesses tumble. Investors pulled money. He lost partners overnight. The networks canceled the sponsorships. A video caught his wife walking out, luggage in hand, face set like stone.
At the courthouse he begged on camera, but the world was recording.
"I saw the videos," a woman whispered to me on the street. "He did it to our own company. He ruined them. He used us."
I stood outside the courtroom and felt everything inside me commeasurate. I didn't shout. I watched. The crowd's energy was a live current and I rode it. Gustavo knelt on the marble steps, mascara smeared down his face as the press circled.
"You did well," Kingston said beside me.
I had spent so long wanting revenge that I didn't know how it would feel to see ruin. I felt a small, clean light enter my chest. He had hurt my family, my life. He had abused power. He had been broken in public. That ache inside me unclenched.
But the rules of payback demanded more. Finbar wanted closure. "Make it public," he said. "Let him fall so the city knows."
I agreed. I told my side, told of the small cruel tugs he had made. The lawyers did the rest. The ordeal lasted days and nights as the city devoured the spectacle. Gustavo's business went bankrupt in headlines. His friends deleted him. The videos were a thousand merciless cuts.
At the end, he was dragged into a van by officers. He screamed and cried: "This can't be true! I didn't—"
The feed had people cheering. Some called for mercy. Most shouted disdain. You could see him shrink like a shadow pulled from light. "Don't follow me," he begged. People pelted him with truth.
I had thought, in a different life, I'd be kinder. I almost felt remorse. But his crimes had been public and wide. People had trusted him and been hurt.
After it was all done the city exhaled. Kingston and I were left to rebuild. We weren't the same people we had been at the start. We were closer, harder and more honest.
On the day we completed the divorce from old nastiness I found myself standing in the little library Kingston had turned into a shared room. He had refitted the gym and turned one side into an office for me with a cheap kettle and a lamp from my mother's house.
"You did this," I said, looking at a shelf he'd set up for my books.
"You did most," he said, fingers brushing mine. "It still feels wrong sometimes. But I like this room."
"Why?" I asked.
"Because you are here," he said.
We didn't talk much about the old ten years. Instead we focused on the small things. Night after night, he kept a watch over me when I worked too late. I taught Jaliyah how to do a simple eyeliner and she cried when a brand offered her a real deal. Kingston was proud and then jealous, and each feeling found its own time.
Once, when the rain came and the old hurt returned in the shape of a memory, Kingston told me the truth he had never wanted to say: "I lied to my grandfather the first time. I lied and I hid who I was because I wanted to choose my path. I blamed others when I had no right."
"I blamed you," I said.
He looked at me like a man cutting out a tumor. "You were right for being angry. I was wrong in how I hurt you. But I'm not wrong about what I feel now."
We promised to try. Not to pretend. Not to be clean and perfect. To hold each other accountable.
A year later, we married. It was small and full of off notes and honesty. Finbar gave a speech and cried, then laughed into his cuff.
At the reception, a woman walked up and touched my sleeve. Her eyes were raw. "You stood up for me," she whispered. "You taught me to say no."
That was the only reward I needed.
Kingston had grown into a man who could choose better. I had learned to make choices that looked like me, not my family or my past.
On our third wedding night, I found a plane ticket in the lining of my coat. It was for the night we had first met, ten years earlier.
I sat at the open window and asked, "Why did I get a second chance?"
Kingston put his hand over mine and said, "So we could choose right this time."
I smiled. The rain on the glass was like a slow applause.
We went to the island the next morning where the sunrise was honest and the air tasted of salt and newness. He held my hand. We both felt the quiet after something large had broken.
"Will you ever hate me again?" he asked.
"I might," I said. "But I'll tell you. And you'll either listen or you won't. That's the test."
"Good," he said. "Then I will do my best to be worth your words."
I leaned my head on his shoulder as the sun climbed. There were no cheap endings. There were only the small, hard choices we would make every day.
I had been given a road back. I had been allowed to do a different kind of damage control—to save what could be saved and to leave the rest documented and public. I had watched a man fall who deserved it. I had stood by a man who changed.
What I learned was not dramatic. It was the sum of small motions: a hand pulled out of a crowd, a truth spoken at the right time, doors closed, and doors opened.
"Promise me one thing," Kingston whispered.
"What?"
"Don't disappear again."
"I won't," I said.
He squeezed my fingers. Outside, gulls cried and a ferry blew its horn like a distant trumpet. The life we'd wanted—messy, honest, dangerous as the sea—unfurled like a map.
I put on the ring he had given me and felt, for the first time in years, like I could breathe without bracing.
The End
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