A man’s anxious voice echoed in the room. “Dora Southwell, what the hell are you trying to do?”
Holding a glass of red wine, Dora slowly walked toward the tall, well-built man tied up in front of her.
Then, a wave of dizziness suddenly hit her. Dora shut her eyes and slightly staggered. She pressed one hand against her forehead and dropped onto the sofa across from the man.
When she opened her eyes again, the wine glass was still in her hand.
She rubbed her temples out of habit, took a small sip of the wine, and raised her brows. “Oh, this is kinda good.”
Then she looked at the man. His wrists were chained to the headboard with heavy metal cuffs. His shirt looked like it’d been ripped open by force, the front hanging in tatters and exposing his chest and sharply defined abs.
His ankles were locked to the two bedposts. He was glaring at her with open fury.
A suspicious yet amused look flickered through Dora’s eyes. She clicked her tongue. “Tsk…”
She thought, ‘Wow, that must be exciting.’
The guy in front of her was definitely handsome, and his body was top-tier too, but there were schemes hidden in his eyes. For some reason, she felt an instinctive disgust toward him, the kind that crawled up from deep in her gut.
Dora had spent over ten years fighting her way through the business world. She’d gone from broke to leading a publicly listed company, and she’d seen all kinds of people.
Most of the time, a tiny shift in someone’s expression was enough for her to figure out what they were thinking.
But she’d never felt this level of rejection toward someone she’d just met.
Yesterday, the research team she led had finally solved the last major problem with the Universal Spacetime Barter System: cross-time trading and storage with suspended temporal flow.
The project had taken ten years of painstaking effort. Everyone in the industry thought Dora was dreaming too big. A system like that was supposed to be impossible. But yesterday, her team had actually pulled it off.
The system marketplace launched globally, and user registrations broke a hundred million within the first day. It was an absolute smash hit.
Last night, she’d taken the whole development team to a luxury club to celebrate. Now, looking around, she mused, ‘Wait, is this some surprise my assistant arranged for me?’
She then shook her head and drained the rest of the wine in one go with a faint smile.
“Sorry, handsome,” Dora said while sizing the man up from head to toe. Her hand even gestured along with her gaze, like she genuinely appreciated what she saw. “Gotta admit, this is pretty impressive, but I’m sorry.”
As she spoke, she grabbed the black leather handbag beside her, planning to pull out some cash and send him on his way.
But after opening it, all she found were random odds and ends, no stacks of bills.
Dora lightly patted her forehead and muttered, “Geeze, what am I doing? Who even carries cash anymore? I’ve seriously watched too many trashy dramas.”
Then she started looking around for her phone.
The man tied to the bed shouted again, “Dora, y-you’re shameless! The Southwells already kicked you out. How dare you kidnap me?
“I’m warning you, don’t do anything reckless to me. Or I swear you won’t get away with it.”
His face twisted with rage, and his eyes were bloodshot, like he wanted to tear her apart.
Dora shivered on instinct and stamemred, “Y-You know me?”
Suddenly, a name appeared in her mind—Cassian.
Then, a massive flood of memories rushed back.
It didn’t feel like someone had forced foreign memories into her head. It felt more like forgotten pieces of her own past returning all at once, as if she’d actually lived through every single moment.
Before she could even process the memories, a strange heat began spreading through her body.
Dora fanned herself with one hand and turned toward the empty wine glass on the coffee table.
Then another memory slammed into her head at the worst possible time, a memory of her drugging the wine. Her eyes shifted toward the table, landing on the small piece of wrapping paper from the drug packet.
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