Chapter 1

Ottilie's POV

I accompanied my husband, Kieran, down to the Antarctic station’s underground quarantine zone to rescue an ice-bacteria sample at negative forty degrees. Halfway there, he asked me to fetch some data. I was gone for exactly three minutes. When I came back, he had vanished.

The institute staff told me I had gone insane, wandering the halls searching for a husband who had been dead for three years.

They called Kieran’s mentor, Dr. Reiner. Through the phone, the old man wept, swearing that Kieran had fallen into the deepest ice rift in Antarctica three years ago. Not even his bones were recovered.

Branded a lunatic, I was thrown into a sealed bio-containment pod twenty miles away. I became a human guinea pig. Under endless rounds of experimental drugs, my organs failed one by one until I died on that cold metal table.

Then, I blinked. Kieran was standing right in front of me, rushing me to the lab...

——

"Ottilie, get down to B3 right now! The 'Everlight' bacteria is deteriorating rapidly. If the mother strain dies, years of our work go down the drain!"

His frantic shouting, mixed with the biting cold, slammed against my eardrums.

My vision snapped into focus. I stared dead at the man in front of me.

Standard-issue arctic gear. A name tag clipped to his chest: Kieran Holt.

My husband.

"What are you spacing out for?" he growled impatiently, shoving a heavy liquid-nitrogen transport case into my arms.

In that fraction of a second, suffocating memories flooded my brain like a polar blizzard.

In my last life, I held this exact case. I went down with him to the sealed bio-bunker known as "B3 Backup Storage." I stepped away for three minutes to pull a data backup from the main control room. When I returned, it was as if Kieran had been erased from existence.

I triggered the highest-level alarm like a madwoman. But the security footage showed only me, talking to thin air. The airlock registered no second person. The top-secret sample manifest bore only my fingerprints.

"Ottilie, Kieran is dead! He fell into the Stillwind Rift three years ago!"

I would never forget the medical chief Dr. Krantz’s fake, pitying gaze. Nor could I forget Kieran’s mentor, Dr. Reiner, crying in front of the whole base, testifying that I had hallucinated my husband’s survival to cope with the grief.

Next came the accusations: mentally unstable, attempting to steal Everlight’s core data. I was shackled, dragged to the Greycape containment facility miles away from the main camp.

In that pitch-black pod, I became a lab rat for their immortality serum. Cycle after cycle of toxicity destroyed me until I took my last breath.

A sharp sting dragged me back to the present.

I looked down. My nails had dug so hard into my palms they were drawing blood.

I had been reborn. Back to where the hunting game began: Whitedome Station.

"Hold it steady! This case is worth more than your life. If you drop it, we’re both screwed!"

The harsh warning snapped my thoughts.

I looked up, tracing the features of his familiar face. His voice was laced with irritation—lacking even an ounce of the warmth a husband should have for his wife.

"The scanner’s beeping, we don’t have time." Annoyed by the countdown on the blast door, he turned to swipe his ID.

"Hold on," I called out, smoothly placing the heavy case on the inspection counter. "Protocol dictates we notify Dr. Reiner before entering the deep quarantine zone."

"To hell with protocol! The strain is dying!" He whipped his head around, his eyes terrifyingly dark.

"No notification means this blast door locks us both inside three minutes after you open it. Do you want to freeze to death down there, Kieran?" I stared right back, my voice unnervingly calm.

Before he could react, my hand slipped into my pocket. Muscle memory took over—unlocking the phone, swiping to the camera, hitting 'Record' blindly.

Then, right in front of him, I pulled the phone out and launched a video call to Dr. Reiner.

It only rang twice before a tired face appeared on the screen.

"Ottilie? Why are you calling my private line in the middle of the night?" Dr. Reiner’s voice carried a thin layer of panic.

My expression didn't shift. With a flick of my wrist, I spun the camera right.

Kieran’s tense face was framed perfectly in the center of the screen.

On the other end of the line, Dr. Reiner sucked in a sharp breath.

"Good evening, Dr. Reiner," I stated, enunciating every word. "Kieran is insisting we head down to B3 to test the Everlight strain right now. He says the decay is critical. I’m calling for your secondary authorization."

Kieran forced a smile at the camera. "Professor, it's me. The strain’s condition isn't looking good."

"You... you both... go ahead." Dr. Reiner’s voice was terribly hoarse. "It’s freezing down there. Kieran, take good care of Ottilie."

"Of course, Doctor." Kieran impatiently reached over and cut the call.

My finger tapped the screen, stopping the hidden recording. In the background, the file instantly routed to a secure offline backup drive I’d staged earlier. Nobody was touching that footage.

"Too many damn rules. Can we go now, Ottilie?" Kieran barked.