Chapter 1
The city never noticed when Lucian Reyes died.
No headlines. No scandal. No mourning lover spilling secrets to the press.
Just a quiet memo circulated among Manila’s upper crust: “Chairman Reyes of Halcyon Capital passed peacefully in his home.”
Peacefully.
They even had the audacity to say that.
In truth, Lucian’s final hour was spent alone in a penthouse made of glass and silence, nursing a drink he hadn’t poured himself. The ice hadn’t melted. The poison worked quickly. A neat, engineered death. Efficient.
He had built an empire with hands that never shook, carved boardrooms into battlegrounds, reduced rivals to shadows with a word and a contract. But in the end, no one stood at his side.
Not the investors who once called him a visionary.
Not the enemies who quietly toasted his demise.
And certainly not her.
Celestine Tan hadn’t spoken to him in six years.
He remembered the last words she said to him.
Not with fury. Not with grief. Just precision.
“You don’t understand what you’ve lost, Lucian. You just know it’s gone.”
And she was right.
He didn’t understand—not the loneliness, not the silence, not the feeling that he had made a hundred wrong turns and had run out of road.
Until that final second.
When time folded in on itself.
The candle by the window flickered once.
His watch ticked backward.
And Lucian Reyes, king of capital, closed his eyes—
—and opened them in 2017,
twenty-two years old,
heart pounding,
hands clean.
