Two Lifetimes to Betray

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Memories from five years in the future rushed into my mind. I woke with a gasp, realizing I had been sent back in time. The despair of my past life was seared into my soul. Thomas's broken body, the toys on bloody asphalt, the twisted faces of that woman and her son. It all played like a nightmare.

That day, I held a positive pregnancy test, waiting for Thomas. The police called instead. He was dead. At the crash scene, his hands still clutched small, expensive action figures. I was naive. I thought he had been rushing to buy a surprise for our baby.

Guilt swallowed me. I hated myself for not telling him sooner. The grief broke me. I hurt myself, lost the baby, and became a ghost. My only plan was to join him after the funeral.

But at the service, a four year old boy barged in. He screamed that it was my fault. He said his father had been sneaking out for his birthday.

I tried to grab him, but a woman stopped me. She smirked. She said she and Thomas had been together for five years. She asked if it was a crime to let his real child say goodbye.

Then she told me everything. She was the one who pushed me down the stairs years ago, killing my first baby. Thomas had fallen for her that night and paid someone to take the blame. While I was in surgery losing our child, she and Thomas conceived her son in the hospital bathroom.

Her words were a poisoned dagger. As my vision darkened, the boy shoved me violently. I fell backward through the chapel window.

I lost my first baby.

It was the exact same day Thomas and that woman fell in love at first sight.

When I finally came to, Thomas was kneeling beside my hospital bed, his eyes completely bloodshot.

"Gina, it's okay if we don't have a kid. I only need you."

He was crying so hard, looking so thoroughly heartbroken. I just stared at him, still hoping my memories were just a terrifying fever dream.

I opened my mouth a few times before I could force a raspy whisper past my lips.

"The person who pushed me. Did you call the cops?"

He froze for a fraction of a second, his eyes darting to the floor.

"Yeah. I called them. Don't worry."

In my past life, I believed him without a second thought.

But with the memory of my violent death still exploding behind my eyes, I stared at him, trying to see straight through his skin to the rotting core underneath.

Thomas couldn't handle my intense gaze. He hastily made an excuse about getting the doctor and practically fled the room, leaving his phone on the mattress.

We had been together for fifteen years. His passcode had always been my birthday.

Acting purely on instinct, I unlocked the screen. The moment I saw his messages, my entire body began to violently tremble.

The chat was open with an unsaved number.

"I pushed your wife on purpose tonight."

"It's so unfair. We finally have this incredible connection at first sight, and it's all your fault for being married. Why did you have to step up and fight those guys for me tonight? I was just so jealous."

"But I swear I didn't know she was pregnant."

Thomas's reply was right underneath.

"It's okay. I don't blame you. Don't be scared, sweetheart. I'll handle everything."

A deafening buzz filled my ears.

In my past life, he told me he was at a bar with a difficult client who was giving him a hard time.

Terrified he was going to get hurt, I rushed over. A drunk patron had thrown a heavy glass bottle his way, and I threw myself in front of him without thinking.

In the chaos, someone shoved me hard down a flight of stairs, killing my first child.

The woman's texts kept rolling in.

"Your wife is literally bleeding out getting surgery right now, and you just made my legs turn to jelly in the hospital bathroom. Are you a total bastard or what?"

He replied: "I'm a bastard. But I don't know what it is. The second I saw you... I just felt like you were different."

Different.

Thomas used to say those exact same words to me.

When I was seven, my family moved to a rough part of town. My dad would lose money at the poker tables and use me as a punching bag. Thomas was the one who always grabbed my hand and pulled me out of the house to hide.

He lived with his blind grandmother. They had nothing. But even when his stomach was rumbling, he would break his only piece of bread in half and give me the bigger piece.

I once asked him why he was so good to me.

He scratched the back of his neck and smiled. "I don't know. You're just different."

The phone slipped from my sweaty fingers and clattered onto the linoleum floor.

A sudden, agonizing cramp ripped through my abdomen. I curled into a tight ball, gasping in pain.

Just then, Thomas rushed back into the room.

Seeing his phone on the floor, his shoulders visibly relaxed. He quickly picked it up, but when he saw my pale, sweating face, his expression twisted into genuine panic. He grabbed my hand.

"Baby, does it hurt again?"

He sounded so incredibly gentle. For a second, it felt like the disgusting, adulterous texts I just read were nothing but a hallucination.

My stomach felt like it was being put through a meat grinder. The emotional shock triggered a secondary hemorrhage from my surgery.

Suddenly, his phone rang. The voice bleeding through the speaker was sickeningly sweet.

"I'm wearing that outfit you like. Why aren't you here yet?"

A flash of sheer panic crossed Thomas's face.

"Baby, there's a massive emergency at the office," he lied, kissing my forehead. "I'll be back as soon as I can to keep you company."

He turned around and walked briskly toward the door.

I used every ounce of strength I had to scream for him. "Thomas... get a doctor..."

He didn't hear me. Or he didn't want to.

As my vision began to blur from blood loss, I remembered the last text I saw on his screen.

"I know you didn't finish earlier. I'm waiting in our spot by the hospital stairwell."

Thomas had sent one last reply before he left.

"Someone's going to be crying and begging for mercy in ten minutes."

A single tear slipped out of the corner of my eye, tracking down my temple.

Just before I blacked out, I heard the nurses rushing in, screaming.

"Secondary hemorrhaging! Where is the husband?! He promised he wouldn't leave her side! How could he abandon a critical patient?!"

When I woke up again, I was entirely alone.

I let out a broken, hysterical laugh, wiping the tears from my face as I dialed my lawyer's number.

"Mr. Caldwell. I need you to draw up divorce papers. And tell me... is there any way to put the person who assaulted me behind bars?"

"Gina, to get a criminal conviction, chat logs aren't enough. We need an airtight chain of evidence."

Mr. Caldwell had already pulled the security footage from the bar. Conveniently, the cameras covering the stairs were "broken." Someone had obviously deleted the files.

It felt like someone had dumped a bucket of ice water over my head.

I couldn't wrap my mind around it. We had been together for a decade. How could Thomas go to such horrifying lengths to protect a woman he had literally just met?

I told Mr. Caldwell to give me a little more time.

I used Sienna's phone number to track down her social media accounts.

She felt absolutely zero guilt about being a homewrecker. Her entire feed was dedicated to Thomas.

And her most recent post made my blood run cold. Thomas had brought her into our home.

"Had the most intense time with my crush tonight. My throat is so sore from screaming his name. I wonder if his wife was screaming this much during her surgery?"

"His wife is stuck in the hospital for a few days, so my crush got super excited and took me five times in their marital bed."

I stared blankly at the photos attached to the posts.

The expensive silk sheets I had personally picked out were a wrinkled mess, stained with their disgusting activities. Shredded lingerie was tossed over my nightstand. Used condoms littered our hardwood floor.

A few commenters called her a shameless homewrecker, but Thomas was in the replies, defending her at every turn.

"Don't talk to her like that. Blame me. I'm just too obsessed with her."

Moving like a machine, I took screenshots of every single photo and saved them to a secure cloud folder.

Then I leaned over the side of the hospital bed and dry-heaved until my ribs ached.

I don't know how I survived the rest of my hospital stay.

Thomas came to pick me up the day I was discharged. He looked at me with deep, soulful eyes and handed me a velvet box.

"You've been through hell, sweetheart. I picked this out just for you. I swear on my life, I will never let anyone hurt you again."

It was an expensive, beautifully crafted necklace.

I might have even believed him if I hadn't checked Sienna's feed yesterday.

"I threw his cheap wedding ring in the trash. Looking at it felt like that ugly wife of his was mocking me."

"He ordered us a custom pair of diamond rings worth a fortune, engraved with our initials."

And this necklace? It was just the complimentary gift that came with his massive purchase.

I stared at his bare ring finger.

"Where is your wedding band?"

Our rings were cheap stainless steel. Back then, we had poured every dime into his startup. We used to share a single bowl of instant noodles for dinner.

I bought him a fifty-dollar ring when we got married to save money. He had held that cheap piece of metal to his chest, too excited to sleep all night.

"Gina, this ring is my love for you. I'm never taking it off until the day I die."

Now, his face tightened in panic, and he quickly tucked his hand into his pocket.

"I took it off to wash my hands before a client meeting and accidentally left it in my desk drawer."

I didn't have the energy to say another word.

I kept a close eye on both Thomas and Sienna.

A month later, I received a text from an unknown number.

"Wanna come down to the office and see what's really going on?"

I received this exact same text in my past life. Back then, I thought it was a malicious prank and ignored it.

This time, I grabbed my coat.

It was exactly what I expected.

Sienna was lounging across the leather sofa in Thomas's private office. Thomas, a notorious germaphobe, was happily letting her drop potato chip crumbs all over the expensive rug.

So this was how early he brought her into my orbit in the previous timeline. And I just sat at home like a blind idiot, trusting him completely.

Sienna looked me up and down with a smug, calculating smirk.

"So you're the wife?"

Thomas shot up from his desk, his face draining of color.

"Gina! What are you doing here? I..."

I looked at Sienna and gave a soft, condescending laugh.

"Is this your new secretary? She has absolutely no manners. I don't like her. Fire her."

I wanted to trigger her. When a mistress is provoked, she always tries to prove her dominance over the man. It was the fastest way to get her to slip up and give me evidence.

For the first time in fifteen years, Thomas's face hardened, and he snapped at me. "She's doing a great job. The company needs talent like hers."

"Gina, be good. Don't throw a tantrum over nothing. You're almost thirty. Acting like a spoiled brat isn't a good look for you."

The sheer hypocrisy of it pulled a bitter laugh from my throat.

When we were broke, I would stare at dresses through store windows, but I always told him I didn't like them because I wanted to save his hard-earned cash.

Back then, Thomas wore the same jacket for three years just so he could afford to take me to the amusement park, to the mall. He would buy me the nicest things he could possibly afford and place them in my hands like offerings.

Back then, he held me and said, "Gina, when you're with me, you can be a spoiled little kid forever."

I stared dead into his eyes, letting the heavy, suffocating silence stretch between us.

Right at that moment, the entire building shuddered.

An earthquake.

The floor violently pitched beneath our feet. The massive crystal chandelier above us let out a terrifying metallic groan, ripping free from the ceiling.

Thomas instinctively lunged toward me, reaching out to grab my arm and pull me to safety.

But Sienna suddenly let out a bloodcurdling scream. "Thomas! Help me! I'm scared!"

Without a single second of hesitation, he dropped my hand, spun around, and threw himself over her to shield her body.

"I've got you," he yelled to her.

In the violent shaking, his sudden movement shoved me backward. I crashed hard into the sharp corner of his mahogany desk.

A blinding agony ripped through my abdomen. I couldn't move. I couldn't run.

I lay there, staring wide-eyed as my husband wrapped his arms tightly around his mistress.

The chandelier slammed directly onto my back.

Through the sheer, bone-shattering agony, my mind drifted to the past.

Years ago, a gas line exploded in our cramped apartment building. Thomas had pinned me to the floor, covering my body entirely with his own, nearly going deaf from the blast to keep me safe.

I used to believe we loved each other so much we would gladly die for one another.

That was why, in my past life, when I identified his mangled body at the morgue, I went home and slit my own wrists, ready to join him in hell.

When I woke up in the hospital this time, I had three broken ribs.

Thomas sat by my bed, his eyes rimmed with red, making desperate promises.

"Gina, I swear to God, I only pushed you because my first instinct as a boss was to evacuate my employees... I already fired that assistant. I swear."

It was such a pathetic, insulting lie. I just smiled weakly.

While he stepped out to speak to the doctor, I grabbed my phone and fired off a text to Sienna.

"Getting fired is just a warning shot. We are never getting a divorce. Know your place, little girl. Stop acting like a desperate stray begging for scraps."

My phone blew up almost instantly.

"You old bitch, so you finally figured it out!"

"Don't act so smug! He literally told me he stopped loving you years ago! I'm the only one he cares about now!"

I replied with a simple, Then prove it, and tossed the phone onto the bedside table.

The pain in my chest was suffocating, wrapping around me like a tight corset.

Sienna's retaliation came fast and ruthless.

For the next few days, Thomas vanished entirely.

But Sienna made sure I knew exactly where he was, texting me live updates of their grand romance.

While I was paralyzed in a hospital bed with broken ribs, Thomas bought a luxury condo and moved her in.

He was deathly allergic to dog dander, but he bought her a Pomeranian and let it sleep on his chest.

The man who used to complain about not having enough time to eat lunch with me was suddenly taking her out to endless, boring indie movies.

"These are just the basics," she texted me. "You have no idea what he's really willing to do for me."

She stopped right there. No matter how much I provoked her, she refused to elaborate on the miscarriage.

I sent the mountain of screenshots and texts to Mr. Caldwell.

His response was frustratingly practical.

"This is great for securing a massive payout in the divorce settlement, but without a confession, we still can't press criminal charges for the miscarriage."

It felt like the air was being sucked out of my lungs.

This time, I was the one who called Thomas, forcing myself to sob hysterically into the receiver.

"Thomas, are you in love with someone else? Do you not want me anymore? If you do, let's just get a divorce."

Thomas rushed to the hospital in record time. His hair was damp with sweat, and his voice was raw as he pulled me into a tight embrace.

"Gina, stop saying that. I love you. Please, never say the word divorce again."

I squeezed my eyes shut.

In my past life, they slept together for five years, and he still refused to divorce me.

I knew he wouldn't let me go this time either.

Was I supposed to be happy?

I didn't know. The grief and absolute despair felt like a dark, endless ocean.

I gripped his sleeve, crying genuine tears.

"Then why weren't you here while I was hospitalized? I keep having nightmares about you pushing me away to save another woman. If you really love someone else, I'll step aside. I promise."

My words twisted the knife of guilt in his chest. He kissed my tears away, holding me so tightly my broken ribs throbbed.

"Only you. I only have you."

Driven by sheer guilt or cowardice, Thomas didn't leave my hospital room again. He even had his entire desktop setup moved in so he could work next to my bed.

Sienna's enraged texts started flooding my phone.

"You manipulative bitch! Don't think you've won just because he hasn't come back to me!"

I didn't reply to a single one.

The day I was finally cleared for discharge happened to be my birthday.

I asked Thomas to plan a massive, romantic birthday surprise for me, claiming I needed to wash away the bad luck of the hospital.

Desperate to make amends, he agreed instantly.

Candlelight dinners.

Thousands of imported roses.

"I'll hold you while we look at the stars tonight, and when dawn breaks, we'll watch the sunrise on the beach together," he promised, looking incredibly proud of his plan.

A wave of dizziness hit me. When Thomas first confessed his feelings to me, it was on a beach.

We had stayed up all night just to watch the sunrise. As the morning light hit the water, he handed me a tiny, wilted bouquet he bought for five bucks, his face burning bright red.

"Gina, I honestly don't know how I ended up loving you this much."

I turned my head, swallowing the lump in my throat and forcing the tears back. I gave him a bright, hollow smile.

"That sounds perfect. You treat me so well."

The second he turned his back, I took a screenshot of the entire itinerary and sent it straight to Sienna.

"Look at this. The wife is always the wife. Stop playing the clown and accept reality."

Sienna didn't text back.

But on the night of my birthday, I sat on the freezing beach for hours, and Thomas never showed up.

Instead, my phone pinged with an audio file.

"Let's see how smug you are now! Do you have the guts to listen to this?"

My hands shook violently as I tapped the play button.

The audio was crisp, amplified by the emptiness of the beach. It was Sienna, crying like a total victim.

"Are you regretting choosing me?! Back then, I pushed Gina down the stairs on purpose to kill her baby! Go ahead and call the cops! Once I'm in prison, I won't have to miss you anymore!"

Thomas let out a heavy sigh, his voice soft and coaxing.

"Don't be stupid, baby. How could I ever regret you? That was my child too, and I still covered it up for you, didn't I?"

The recording cut off.

I stared out at the pitch-black ocean, reaching up to touch my face. My fingers came away slick with tears.

What a joke. Why was I even crying?

I finally had the concrete evidence I needed to destroy them.

I forwarded the audio file directly to Mr. Caldwell.

I stood there frozen for a long time, letting the freezing ocean wind bite at my skin. Finally, I wiped my face and turned to walk back to the road.

Suddenly, a brutal force grabbed me by the hair and yanked me into the dark alley between two beachfront shops.

A heavy boot slammed squarely into my stomach.

"They hired me to mess up a cripple?" a gruff voice spat.

The man let out a sick, guttural laugh. "Whatever. Crippled or not, you've got a pretty face."

He stepped closer, pinning my waist to the concrete.

My ribs screamed in agony, and the pain radiating from my stomach made me dizzy. My attempts to fight him off were pathetically weak.

As he ripped my coat open, my fingers desperately scrambled behind my back, closing around my phone.

Fighting through the searing pain, I tried to dial 911 blindly, but my thumb slipped. The screen lit upI had accidentally called Thomas.

The call connected.

But before I could even scream for help, Sienna's breathy laughter echoed out of the speaker.

"You're so heartless... Your wife is out there waiting for you. What if a sick patient like her runs into trouble in the dark?"

Sienna was panting heavily.

"Don't bring her up right now," Thomas's voice growled. "You're the little menace who forced me to come here."

"Let her fend for herself. The only person I'm interested in punishing right now is you."

Sienna let out a sharp gasp.

"Careful! Don't go too hard, I'm pregnant!"

The blood in my veins turned to absolute ice.

So the little bastard who pushed me to my death in my past life had finally been conceived.

The thug above me finally noticed the glowing screen. He kicked the phone out of my hand, sending it smashing against the brick wall. The screen flickered and died.

I stared at the shattered glass, too numb to even react.

The man slapped me across the face, his ring cutting my cheek.

"Trying to call for help? Did you hear that, bitch? Nobody cares if you live or die!"

He raised his heavy boot, aiming a crushing blow right at my healing ribs.

I squeezed my eyes shut.

But the sickening crunch I expected never came.

The private security detail I had hired weeks ago finally stepped out of the shadows.

I slumped against the cold pavement, keeping myself conscious by a thread.

"Did you..." I gasped out. "Did you record everything?"

The security guard nodded grimly, holding up a camera.

A massive wave of relief washed over me. I let the darkness pull me under and completely collapsed onto the sand.

...

Hours later, the adrenaline of his affair faded, and Thomas finally remembered me.

He tried to call my phone to spin some elaborate lie about a car breaking down, but it went straight to voicemail.

Panic started to set in. He called his assistant, ordering him to check the beach.

The assistant's callback made his blood run cold.

"Mr. Thomas... The beach is empty. The police just left the scene. They said... they said there was a homicide attempt."

Thomas froze completely.

Suddenly, a blinding, agonizing pain ripped through his skull. Thousands of fragmented, terrifying memories flooded his brain.

Memories from five years in the future.

He saw himself dying in a mangled heap of metal.

He saw Sienna and her bastard son confronting me at his funeral.

And he saw exactly how I died.