Reborn Surgeon: The Billionaire’s Secret Obsession

Rain did not wash things clean.

That was a lie people told themselves to make the storms bearable.

Here, on the edge of the limestone quarry, the rain only made things heavy. It soaked into Karly Lowe's oversized sweatshirt, dragging the cotton against her skin like a second, suffocating layer. It turned the dirt beneath her converse sneakers into a slick, treacherous paste.

She shivered. The cold was not just in the air. It was in her marrow.

Two meters away, Ardell Lowe stood with her back to the wind. She wasn't looking at the view. She was looking at a document in her hands. The paper was wet, the ink likely running, but Karly knew what it was.

A life insurance policy.

"You let it lapse," Ardell screamed over the wind. Her hair was plastered to her skull, making her face look skeletal. "The payment for the car! You let the insurance lapse before your father crashed!"

Karly took a step back. Her heel caught on a loose rock. The stone tumbled over the edge, clattering down into the abyss. It took a long time to hit the bottom.

"I didn't," Karly said. Her voice was a broken thing, raspy from crying, raspy from the screaming match that had started in the trailer and ended here. "I paid it. I showed you the receipt."

"Liar!"

Hakeem stepped out from behind Ardell. He cupped his hands around a lighter, the flame illuminating the hollows of his eyes. He lit a cigarette, took a drag, and exhaled smoke that was instantly snatched away by the gale.

"She's lying, Ma," Hakeem said. His voice was calm. Terrifyingly calm. "She kept the money. Probably spent it on books. Or stash."

"I paid it!" Karly shouted, the injustice burning her throat like acid. "And it wasn't an accident! The brakes lines were cut! I saw the shears in your truck, Hakeem!"

The air between them changed.

It stopped being about money. It stopped being about a family argument.

Hakeem dropped the cigarette. He ground it out with the toe of his boot. He looked at Ardell. Ardell looked at Karly. There was no love in that look. There wasn't even anger anymore.

There was only calculation.

"You know too much," Hakeem said. He took a step forward.

Karly turned. She tried to run toward the line of trees that marked the road, but her left leg gave way. Hakeem had kicked her in the shin back at the house. The pain flared hot and white, buckling her knee.

She scrambled, fingers clawing at the mud.

A hand shoved her back. Hard.

Gravity reversed.

The world tilted. The gray sky swapped places with the brown earth. For a second, Karly was flying.

Then she hit.

The impact was a thunderclap inside her own skull.

She landed on a ledge of jagged shale, thirty feet down. The sound of her spine snapping was louder than the rain. It was a dry, crisp crack, like a dead branch stepping on a winter morning.

She tried to scream, but her lungs refused to expand.

Pain didn't come immediately. It waited, hovering, letting the shock settle in first. Then it arrived, a tidal wave of agony that started at her waist and obliterated everything else.

She couldn't move her legs. She couldn't feel her feet.

Above her, on the lip of the cliff, a flashlight beam cut through the gloom. It danced over her broken body.

"Is she dead?" Ardell's voice drifted down, distorted by the distance.

Hakeem whistled. A low, sharp sound.

From the shadows of the quarry floor, movement. Low shapes. Growls that vibrated in the wet air. Wild dogs. They lived in the scrap heaps, starving and vicious.

They smelled the blood before Karly felt it leaving her body.

"Let's go, Ma," Hakeem called out. "Nature will clean up the mess."

Karly watched the flashlight beam retreat. She watched the darkness close in.

The first set of teeth sank into her calf. She felt the pressure, the tearing of muscle, but the pain was distant now. Her body was shutting down.

Rage.

It was the only thing keeping her heart beating. It wasn't fear. It wasn't sadness for the daughter she would never see grow up. Not just sadness, anyway. It was a white-hot, hollow grief for Hope, a name she'd only had the chance to whisper for three years. A face she could barely recall through the agony. It was a pure, nuclear hatred.

If I come back, she thought, as a set of jaws clamped around her throat. I will burn you all.

The darkness swallowed her whole.

...

Gasp.

Air rushed into her lungs so violently her ribs cracked.

Karly sat bolt upright. Her hands flew to her throat, clawing at intact skin. No blood. No teeth marks.

Her heart hammered against her sternum, a frantic bird trapped in a cage. Thump-thump-thump.

She looked around.

Wood paneling. Peeling beige wallpaper. A water stain on the ceiling shaped like a Rorschach test.

The trailer. Her old room.

She looked at her hands. They were small. Thin. The knuckles weren't scarred yet.

She turned her head to the calendar on the wall. A picture of a kitten in a basket.

May 12, 2014.

Outside the thin aluminum walls, a voice screeched.

"Shut that damn dog up or I'll poison it myself!"

Ardell.

Karly swung her legs over the side of the narrow mattress. Her feet hit the linoleum floor. It was cold. Solid.

She stood up and walked to the cracked mirror taped to the back of the door.

A seventeen-year-old girl stared back. Hollow cheeks. Dark circles under eyes that looked too old for her face.

Karly Lowe touched the glass.

She wasn't the victim anymore. She wasn't the girl who died in the quarry.

Inside this malnourished teenage body was the mind of a thirty-year-old trauma surgeon. A hacker known only as 'Phantom'. A woman who had advised billionaires.

She picked up a chipped utility knife from the desk. She slid the blade out. Click. Click.

The sound was the only music she needed.