Chapter 1: Isekai
"I was brilliant, exhausted, and unloved. Then I was reborn—helpless, soft, and wanted."
In her first life, Evangeline Claire Lioré died surrounded by glowing screens and surgical steel.
The machines hummed quietly in the sterile white room. Artificial light blared from the walls, buzzing like a tired breath. Eva's hands were still attached to her neural interface gloves, though her wrists had long stopped trembling. She hadn't moved in hours—her spine locked in an ergonomic chair, her pupils dull and light-starved. Sleep had become a faded myth, eaten by deadlines and data and endless designs.
The last thing she remembered before death was a sharp ache in her chest, the kind that felt less like pain and more like surrender. Her body had screamed in silence, a breath caught between exhale and eternity.
Eva had been twenty-nine. Rich. Respected. Alone.
And when the ache won, and her brain short-circuited beneath the weight of brilliance and neglect, she hadn't cried out. She had only whispered:
"I just wanted someone to tell me to stop."
She'd spent that first life sprinting on a treadmill made of platinum and code. Her world was made of algorithms, medical revolutions, and billion-dollar boardrooms filled with men who mistook her silence for obedience. Her work had saved lives—cancer diagnostics accelerated by predictive AI, prosthetics that responded like flesh, surgical drones precise enough to stitch neurons. They called her a miracle. A genius. A once-in-a-century mind.
No one asked if she was happy.
Her days bled into nights inside steel towers with windows that didn't open. Nutrition came in pills; sleep in 20-minute recharge cycles. She didn't remember her last vacation—didn't remember the last time someone touched her without needing something. Her last human moment was a hospital janitor who gave her a mint and said, "You look like you've been fighting wars."
She'd smiled then. Just for a second.
And then she went back to building empires with no one beside her.
The work had kept her upright. Until it didn't. Until the stress clotted in her chest and her blood forgot how to move. Until her heart, so well-trained to ignore its own needs, simply stopped.
No family had been called. No next of kin was listed. Her name trended on networks for 48 hours before vanishing beneath the churn of the news cycle. Another lost genius. Another quiet death.
And then—
Warmth. A cry.
Rebirth wasn't a tunnel of light. It was pressure and disorientation and the unbearable softness of a body too small, too weak, too new. When she opened her eyes again, the ceiling wasn't cold and white—it was carved stone, golden with lamplight. And the air smelled not of antiseptic, but of jasmine and warm cloth.
A woman's face hovered over her, eyes wet with joy. Hands she didn't recognize cradled her like she was something sacred.
She was no longer Evangeline Claire Lioré, the prodigy who died in silence.
She was now Evangeline Claire Maxwell—Lioré—the infant heir to the most powerful dynasty in a world that didn't know hers had ever existed.
Her second life began with names she didn't understand and languages that felt like silk against her ears. Her bones grew slow and sure. Her hair returned in darker strands, her skin paled to marble. And though she couldn't speak for nearly two years, her eyes never stopped watching.
She learned fast. She always had.
At four, she memorized the floor plans of her family's estate and understood why the guards changed shifts at seven and seven. At six, she could read trade agreements and eavesdrop on diplomatic guests. At nine, she asked why no one ever called her mother by her real name.
By twelve, she'd uncovered her inheritance—not just in wealth, but in power.
The Lioré Dynasty and Maxwell wasn't royalty. It didn't need thrones. It owned them. Their influence was built not on spectacle, but control: equity shares in the companies that shaped global markets, deep ties to private security firms, and strategic silence in industries where silence meant ownership.
And Eva? She would become their crown. Not publicly, of course. On paper, she was the only daughter of a respected medical lineage, enrolled in a prestigious university for biomedical science. She played her role to perfection: diligent, quiet, distant. Professors praised her discipline. Classmates thought she was cold. Men admired her without daring to speak. Women watched her with a hunger they couldn't name.
What no one saw was the girl who remembered another life. A girl who had died once from the weight of her own brilliance, and now lived with the ache of having no one to share it with.
But this time, she was not entirely alone.
She had caretakers who adored her—not for her intellect, but for the soft, strange things she did: the way she traced sunlight with her fingers, the way she refused to cry when injured, the way she stood still in the rain like it was an answer. She had a private tutor who called her "little moon" and baked her almond cakes when no one was watching. She had books, thousands of them, and she devoured each one like it might save her.
And then she met them.
Liora Esmé Ardent—Lio. The fox in the garden. A genius masked in softness, who watched Eva like a code she was desperate to decrypt.
Calista Inez Beaumont—Cali. A storm in silk, whose touch was chaos and clarity, who sketched Eva in margins and dreams.
And Seraphina Yue Langford—Ina. The heir of empires, who carried herself like war and kissed Eva like surrender.
Each of them would come later. Each of them would change her. But in the beginning, Eva simply learned how to exist.
She learned to walk barefoot through marble halls. To sit in silence and listen to power without speaking it. To smile in a way that disarmed, not revealed.
She learned how to be wanted.
Not for her mind. Not for her genius. But for the space she took up in a room. For the quiet gravity of her presence.
And slowly, painfully, she realized: maybe this life wasn't meant for invention. Maybe it was meant for something she'd never had in the first.
Connection.
Still, old instincts died hard. She kept the core of herself locked behind seven layers of calm. She never told anyone the full truth. Not about her past life. Not about the aching, endless brilliance that still hummed in her bones. Not about the fear that if she let herself be seen, truly seen, they'd run.
So she stayed untouchable. Elegant. Ghostlike.
Until one day, Lio touched her wrist and asked, "Do you ever feel like you're pretending to be someone smaller than you are?"
And Eva didn't answer.
Because yes. Yes, she did.
She was pretending every day. Pretending to be a student when she was attending underground summits. Pretending to be indifferent when every smile from Cali made her breath hitch. Pretending to be above it all when Ina tilted her chin up with two fingers and asked if she ever let herself be loved.
Eva had died once from overexposure. She would not die again from softness.
But she was starting to wonder if living without it was another kind of death.
So now, here she was.
Reborn. A living myth in a world that didn't know she used to be just a girl who coded until her hands bled.
Now she was someone who could be touched. Held. Kissed. Loved.
But only if she allowed it.
Only if she could let the gates down—one at a time.
Only if she dared.