Wait... I'm back. Before 6 hours before her car accident. I know how this ends this time

Julian Cross spun around with a high-pitched, terrified shriek, stumbling backward against the drafting table, knocking his teacup onto the floorboards where it shattered into twenty pieces.

I stepped through the shattered frame, heedless of the glass crunching beneath my heavy leather boots, the freezing rain dripping from my hair, my eyes burning with a dark, terrifying, absolute calm.

"Leo!" Clara screamed, slipping off her stool, scrambling across the floor toward me.

I caught her with my left arm, pulling her behind my back, feeling her trembling hands clutch the wet leather of my jacket like an anchor in a hurricane.

"Get behind me, Clara," I whispered, my voice as level as an iron plate, never taking my eyes off the man standing three feet away.

Julian’s face had completely, miraculously lost every drop of color.

The polished patrician, the golden boy of Sand Hill Road, the master manipulator who had spent ten years engineering my destruction—he looked like a corpse that had just been dragged from the bottom of an icy lake. His bespoke suit was dusted with powdered glass; his silk tie was pulled askew; and his hazel eyes were dilated with pure, unadulterated animal terror.

"Leo..." Julian stammered, holding up both hands in an instinctive, begging gesture, his voice cracking into a high-pitched, pathetic rasp. "Leo, buddy... thank God you're back! I was... I was just explaining to Clara that the merger documents needed her administrative clearance—"

I didn't speak.

I crossed the three feet of space between us in a single, fluid stride.

My right hand shot out like an iron piston, wrapping around his throat with the bone-cracking force of an industrial vice.

Julian gasped, his eyes bulging, his hands flying to my wrist, clawing frantically at my fingers as I drove his two-hundred-pound frame backward against the brick wall of the studio with a concussive BANG that rattled the framed architectural awards on the plaster.

"Leo, don't!" Captain Miller’s voice bellowed from the shattered doorway as two state troopers burst into the studio with their carbines raised. "Don't kill him! Stand down!"

I didn't drop him. I lifted him two inches off the floor, his feet kicking uselessly against the baseboards, his manicured fingernails scratching bloody furrows across the back of my hand.

I leaned in until my face was an inch from his dilated pupils.

I could smell the sandalwood cologne. I could smell the stale tea. I could smell the terrifying, sulfurous stench of his panic.

"The truck didn't hit the car, Julian," I whispered into his ear.

The words were barely louder than the drumming rain, but they hit Julian like an electrical shock that paralyzed his nervous system.

His eyes widened until the whites were completely bloodshot. A shudder of superstitious, unearthly horror rippled through his body. He stared at me as if he were looking at an apparition that had climbed out of an open grave.

"You..." Julian choked out through his crushed windpipe, his voice a suffocating wheeze. "How... how did you know about... the truck...?"

"Because in my first life, Julian," I murmured, my grip tightening until his face turned a mottled, bruised plum, "she died at seven-forty-two."

I checked my watch with my left eye: 7:43 PM.

The minute had passed.

The intersection on Main Street was empty.

The curse was broken.

"And you," I whispered, my voice dripping with the quiet, majestic finality of an executioner reading a royal decree, "are going to spend the next thirty years in a concrete box thinking about every single second of this night."

I hurled him sideways across the room.

Julian crashed into the heavy oak display table, sending reams of blueprint paper, drafting tools, and porcelain fragments scattering across the floor before collapsing into a pathetic, weeping heap in the corner.

Captain Miller moved like lightning.

The veteran trooper didn't ask questions. He dropped his knee into the center of Julian’s spine, twisted his arms behind his back, and slammed a pair of heavy, matte-black steel handcuffs around his manicured wrists with a concussive, double-ratchet CLACK.

"Julian Cross," Captain Miller barked, his voice thundering through the ruined studio. "You are under arrest for attempted capital murder, corporate sabotage, and conspiracy to commit vehicular homicide."

Julian didn't fight back.

He lay face-down in the puddle of spilled tea and shattered glass, sobbing hysterically, his bespoke suit ruined, his arrogance pulverized into dust, his teeth clicking together in a continuous, rhythmic rhythm of total, unmitigated ruin.

Clara wrapped her arms around my waist from behind, her face buried between my shoulder blades, weeping tears of pure, overwhelming shock.

I turned around slowly, catching her in my arms, lifting her off her feet, burying my face in her sweet, vanilla-scented hair.