Chapter 1

When the runaway truck came barreling toward Ivy Edwards, my adopted sister, my brother didn't hesitate for a second before rushing in to save her.

In my last life, I threw my arms around his legs and clung on, refusing to let him throw his life away.

The result was that Ivy took the full hit. Every bone shattered. She would never hold a scalpel again.

After a week in the ICU, she quietly pulled out her own tubes.

Mom and Dad called me cold-blooded, and they beat me until both my ears went deaf.

My brother went on smoothly to become the finest surgeon at State General Hospital,

but when a car accident left me hanging by a thread, he stood there and watched me die on his operating table.

"This is what you owe Ivy. You deserve to go to hell and answer to her for it."

Before I died, the digital clock on the wall ticked over to midnight. I had only just turned twenty-five.

When I opened my eyes again, I heard that familiar screech of brakes.

Ivy was so terrified she screamed and couldn't move her feet, and my brother took off running straight at it.

I froze for half a second, then squeezed my eyes shut, crouched to the ground, and clamped my hands hard over my ears.

……

The sting in my eardrums hadn't faded yet

when the concrete underfoot shook like an earthquake with the pounding of frantic footsteps.

Every friend and relative there for Ivy's graduation party ran toward the spot.

I unclenched my hands and stood, looking past the dark crush of heads, and saw my brother lying on the lawn a few meters off,

a spread of crimson soaking through his white shirt, both hands twisted at a grotesque angle.

Ivy sat collapsed not far away, utterly wrecked, her lips trembling beyond control.

Aside from a few light scrapes, she was completely unharmed.

Someone in the crowd shouted, "Oh my God! There's been an accident!"

Only then did my mother come back to herself. The camera in her hands hit the ground with a thud,

the ten-thousand-dollar lens she'd bought just to photograph Ivy smashed to pieces.

She shoved through the crowd, screaming, throwing herself down, not even noticing her knees scraping bloody on the coarse concrete.

Her trembling fingers reached toward Roger Edwards's face, wanting to touch him and not daring to,

her pale lips opening twice before she tore the sound out of her throat:

"Rog— Roger… my son!"

In my last life, my mother had knelt on the ground just like this, helpless, wailing at the heavens, her tears crashing into the grass as if her life depended on it.

Only the name in her mouth was Ivy's.

Back then my brother had been the one I dragged down at any cost, and he'd walked away fine.

But Ivy had been thrown several meters by that truck.

The doctors said every bone in her body was shattered, that she would never hold a scalpel again in this life.

She lay in the ICU for seven days, then, in the gap while a nurse changed her dressings, quietly pulled out her tubes.

When my mother found out, she cried until her eyes nearly gave out,

and together with my father she cursed me for being cold-blooded and beat me until both my ears went deaf.

The last words I heard in my last life were the two of them jabbing fingers at my forehead:

"Why weren't you the one who got hit? You cold-blooded jinx!"

Jinx.

That was the nickname the kidnapper couple in the mountains, my foster parents, had given me.

I never thought that back in the Edwards house, my own flesh-and-blood parents would call me the same thing.

Roger was the cruelest.

After he graduated from Baltimore Medical University, he did become the youngest surgeon at State General Hospital, just as everyone expected.

But when I was in that car accident and wheeled into his operating room,

he called off the anesthesiologist, his face dark, and signed to me:

"This is what you owe Ivy. You deserve to go to hell and answer to her for it."

He set down the scalpel and watched, eyes open, while I bled out and died on the operating table.

When the line on the monitor went flat, the digital clock on the wall had just ticked over to midnight,

and I had only just turned twenty-five.

Right up until I died, I never knew what I'd done wrong.

All I'd wanted was for Roger not to go rushing off to his death.

In their eyes, that made me cold-blooded. That made me a jinx.

More and more onlookers were gathering at the scene.

Cold sweat soaked through me, and I didn't dare go near.

It was a long time before my heartbeat slowly crawled back out of the blank the crash had left behind.

I opened my numb, tingling palm, and with a shaking hand I dug my phone out of my pocket and dialed 911.

"911? There's been an accident at the Southgate Garden Hotel. The injured man is male, twenty-five years old."

After hanging up, I made my way through the panicked crowd and crouched down beside my mother.

She looked up at me, her eyes horribly red, her lips still trembling.

My gaze slid over Ivy, ashen-faced and shaking all over,

and settled on my mother's tear-streaked face. I said quietly,

"Mom, don't worry. The ambulance is coming."

My voice was so steady it sounded foreign even to me.

Didn't the Edwards family say I was a cold-blooded jinx?

Then in this life, I'll show them exactly how cold-blooded I can be.