He Loved The Wrong One

In my past life, I didn't realize Vincent Sinclair loved the wrong person until our wedding day. When my twin sister returned from abroad and appeared at the venue, the ruthless heir to the Sinclair empire froze. His eyes turned bloodshot as he stared dead at her. That was the moment I finally understood. He had spent the last two years showering me with money, resources, and a borderline obsessive pursuit, all because I shared a face with her. Given a second chance, I stood by my second-floor window and looked down at the man who had been standing in the snow all night waiting for me to cave. Without a shred of hesitation, I texted him my sister's flight details. 1 Since his true love was back, this stand-in was officially retiring. The text had barely gone through when the man downstairs reacted. I hid in the dark bedroom, watching him pull his phone from his overcoat. He glanced at the screen. Then his head snapped up. His piercing gaze locked straight onto my window. Even with the thick blackout curtains drawn, I instinctively shrank back against the wall. My screen lit up. Vincent's text arrived instantly. "Where did you go? When are you leaving?" I could feel his suffocating presence bleeding through the screen. I tossed the phone onto the mattress and ignored him. 2 Ever since he cornered me at the hospital two years ago, this man had forced his way into my life. Armed with the brutal lessons of my past life, I knew exactly what his so-called devotion really was. It all belonged to my sister. I had suffered enough. Since I couldn't expose my sister's existence, my only option in this life was to avoid him like the plague. But arrogant elites like Vincent never understood the concept of backing down. His method of courting was aggressive and raw. Designer bags, limited edition sports cars, showing up to chauffeur me everywhere. He wanted the whole world to know I belonged to him. My friends told me to accept my good fortune before I drained the patience of this untouchable billionaire. After all, this was Vincent Sinclair. He had the wealth, the looks, and the power to make anyone lose their mind. My phone buzzed twice. Him again. "Playing dead?" Snowflakes began to drift outside the window. Vincent cast one final, lingering look at my apartment before pulling open the door of his black SUV and sliding in. He didn't start the engine right away. The car sat idling in the winter cold for over ten minutes before finally creeping away into the night. I rubbed my aching temples. When Vincent placed someone on a pedestal, he was the perfect lover. That was exactly how I fell so hard for him in my previous life. But when he turned ruthless, he knew exactly how to drive a knife straight into your heart. I refused to relive a single day of that hollow, suffocating marriage. 3 For the past few days, my sister had been packing her bags for her return to the States, and I had been quietly arranging my visa. Stella and I were identical twins. Apart from our personalities, we shared every physical trait down to a strand of hair. Swapping identities was basically second nature to us. Years ago, our mother was the secret mistress of a wealthy man. When the scandal threatened to ruin him, she hid in a rural town to give birth to us in secret. Nobody knew she had twins. Eventually, that wealthy man found his conscience and brought our mother back to his mansion. But his strict condition was that she could only bring one child. So I was taken into the Hastings estate, and Stella was shipped off to Europe. For twenty years, to keep the secret buried, we operated like shift workers, constantly rotating between domestic life in New York and our hidden life abroad. To maintain the illusion, we even majored in the same subject at university and seamlessly shared the same social circles. So naturally, Stella knew a guy named Vincent was relentlessly pursuing "me." 4 In my past life, I was in too deep. I couldn't bear to share Vincent with anyone. Even knowing my twin existed, I selfishly kept her a secret from him. It wasn't until I stood at the altar in my white gown that I became the ultimate punchline. But this time around, the second Vincent showed up, I snapped a photo and sent it straight to Stella. "A romantic debt you left behind five years ago?" Stella, always the optimist, instantly replied with a string of laughing emojis. "I barely just turned eighteen five years ago! Be serious." She had absolutely no memory of this gorgeous billionaire. Even after I sent a zoomed in, candid shot of Vincent's face, she swore she had never seen him in her life. I could only reply in helpless frustration. "But five years ago I was living in London. The girl he knew couldn't possibly have been me." 5 My visa paperwork was almost finalized. I thought I could shake Vincent off completely before leaving the country, but fate had other plans. Two in the morning, inpatient ward. I had just finished assisting my attending physician with a grueling marathon surgery. I collapsed onto the concrete steps of the stairwell, dozing off from pure exhaustion. In my hazy state, a heavy cashmere overcoat carrying a faint scent of cedar was draped over my shoulders. I snapped my eyes open and met Vincent's dark, piercing gaze. This billionaire heir, a man notorious for his clinical germaphobia, was sitting casually next to me on the filthy stairwell floor. "If it exhausts you this much, why did you insist on clinical surgery?" he asked, turning his head to look at me. I stayed quiet. When our mother gave birth to us, she suffered a massive hemorrhage. It was a surgeon who dragged the three of us back from the brink of death. That was the reason we both chose medicine, but I had no intention of sharing my trauma with him. I turned my face away. "What are you doing here? I thought we agreed to meet directly at the airport this weekend." The stairwell was dead quiet, making his voice sound impossibly clear. "You are a terrible liar." "I asked your department head. He said you are following him to a medical symposium in Chicago on Wednesday." He paused, his tone absolute. "So the other night, you never left your apartment. You were hiding upstairs from me." Before I could react, he leaned in. His chin rested naturally against my shoulder. "Rina," he whispered my name into the dim light, his voice laced with a heavy, helpless sigh. "What exactly do I have to do to make you say yes?" His presence completely enveloped me. My eyes burned with unshed tears. It wasn't that I was playing hard to get. I had simply been broken so thoroughly by his coldness in our past life. This time, I just wanted to stay as far away from him as possible. I forced myself to give him a vague brush off. "Just give me a few more days." Wait for Stella to return. Wait for the real destined lovers to reunite. This was always their love story. I was just going to step aside and let my sister make her own choice. 6 Friday night, JFK Airport. Stella and I stood in the second-floor restrooms, both wearing identical khaki trench coats and gripping matching silver suitcases. She pulled me into a bone crushing hug. "See you in five years! We'll swap back then." I gave her a quiet smile, ignoring the promise. If she met someone she loved here and built a stable family, I would be perfectly happy staying in Europe forever. After a hurried exchange, we went our separate ways. She rolled her suitcase toward Dr. Harrison's academic team, and I turned my back, heading straight for International Departures. Sitting in the departure lounge, watching the planes idle on the tarmac, my phone vibrated. A text from Stella. "Your billionaire prince actually came to the airport to pick me up." Just as I reached to power off my phone, a second message popped up. "But he stared at me for a solid minute, and his very first question was demanding to know who I really was." 7 Staring at that line of text, a cold shiver crawled up my spine. Vincent went to pick her up? Not only did he go, but he instantly recognized that she wasn't me? That was impossible. Stella and I even had a matching birthmark behind our left ears. For twenty years, even our own mother mixed us up occasionally. Vincent and I had only been entangled for two years. We had barely even held hands properly. How could he possibly see through the perfect illusion? Before I could process the panic, the airport intercom chimed. Boarding for the flight to London was beginning. I shot up from my seat, shoved my powered down phone into my coat pocket, grabbed my boarding pass, and marched toward the final security checkpoint. It didn't matter if he recognized Stella. As long as I got on this plane and crossed the border, the tragic mess of my past life could never catch up to me. The line was agonizingly long. I kept my head down, shuffling forward inch by inch. Finally, it was my turn. I handed my passport and ticket to the TSA agent. The agent flipped it open to verify my details. Suddenly, a large hand reached over from the side, crossing the security tape, and slammed down flat over my passport. The veins on the back of his hand bulged. With an undeniable, terrifying force, he ripped my passport right out of the agent's grip. My stomach dropped to the floor. I whipped my head around. Vincent stood there in a long, charcoal wool coat, the freezing winter air still clinging to his shoulders. He stood right outside the security barrier, glaring down at me with lethal intensity. People around us began to stare. The agent frowned, clearly annoyed. "Sir, please do not interfere with the screening process. What are you doing with her passport?" Vincent completely ignored the agent. His gaze was nailed to my face. "Rina Hastings." He said my full name. His voice wasn't loud, but it carried a crushing, absolute authority. "You think you're clever? Trying to pull a disappearing act?" 8 I swallowed hard, forcing my racing heart to steady, and plastered a look of absolute confusion onto my face. "Sir, you have the wrong person." I deliberately mimicked Stella's lighter, slightly innocent tone. "My name isn't Rina. I think you are looking for someone else." Vincent let out a dark, furious laugh. He flipped the passport open to my photo page and shoved it right in front of my eyes. "Is that right? Then please, Miss Stella, explain to me why this passport has your sister's name printed on it?" I stared at the bold letters spelling out 'Rina Hastings' and choked on my own words. To escape him, I had told Stella to use her real identity in New York to take over my life, while I took my own passport to flee the country. The handoff had been flawless, yet he had caught me right at the finish line. "This... this is my sister's passport. I grabbed the wrong one by mistake." I forced myself to keep spinning the lie. "Please give it back. I am going to miss my flight." Vincent wasn't buying a single word of it. Without another word, his hand shot out, wrapping like an iron shackle around my wrist. He physically yanked me out of the security line. His strength was terrifying. I stumbled a few steps before catching my balance. "Vincent! Have you lost your mind? Let me go!" I couldn't keep the act up anymore, dropping my voice into an angry, desperate hiss. Hearing me use my actual tone to say his name, he stopped in his tracks and threw a freezing glare over his shoulder. "Done pretending to be your sister?" He dragged me toward the terminal exit, his strides massive and relentless. I thrashed against his grip, yelling, "Since you already know she's my twin, you should know the real girl you want is back! Go find her! Why are you dragging me away?" Vincent stopped dead. He spun around, his fingers gripping my chin, forcing me to look up into eyes burning with the rage of a man who had been played for a fool. "Who the hell told you she was the one I was looking for?" 9 He shoved me into the passenger seat of a black SUV parked at the curb. The doors locked with a heavy, metallic click. Vincent stalked around the hood, slid into the driver's seat, and slammed on the gas. The massive vehicle tore out of the airport loading zone. The heat blasted through the cabin, but my hands and feet were like ice. "Where are you taking me?" I shrank back against the door, watching him like a trapped animal. Vincent stared at the road ahead, his jaw locked tight, refusing to say a single word. This cold, merciless demeanor was a perfect mirror of our broken marriage in my past life. Back then, he used to look at me with this exact same ice, cutting off all my escape routes with a single sentence. Fear and a deep, aching injustice twisted together in my chest. I gritted my teeth and decided to burn it all down. "Vincent, what exactly do you want from me? The girl you met five years ago wasn't me! You spent the last two years hovering over me, buying me things, playing the devoted suitor, all because I share a face with her!" I unleashed two lifetimes worth of suffocating secrets in one breath. "Now she is back. She's single, she's beautiful, and she is right there ready to pick up where you two left off. Why are you so obsessed with holding onto the cheap stand-in?" The deafening shriek of burning rubber filled the air. Vincent violently jerked the steering wheel, slamming the SUV onto the highway shoulder. He turned his head, looking at me as if I had completely lost my mind. "Rina, what exactly is rattling around inside that head of yours?" He unbuckled his seatbelt, leaning heavily into my space, his words slipping through clenched teeth. "Who told you I met her here five years ago?" 10 I froze. "Didn't you?" I fired back instinctively. "Five years ago I was in Boston, and she was here in New York. You couldn't possibly have met me in Boston." Vincent stared a hole through me. Suddenly, he reached up and tore at the collar of his expensive dress shirt. He popped the top three buttons, yanking the fabric aside to expose the skin just below his left collarbone. There was a deep, jagged scar there. It looked like an ugly centipede fused to his flesh. "Five years ago. Boston. A back alley in the South End." He spoke slowly, enunciating every single syllable. With every word, my heart violently stuttered in my chest. "I was ambushed. They slashed my artery. I was bleeding out against a dumpster, waiting to die." "A Chinese girl walked by wearing a gray beanie and a thick winter scarf. She didn't call the cops, because I told her if she called them, my enemies would find me and I would be dead." Vincent watched my eyes widen in absolute horror, a dark, mocking smirk curling his lips. "She used a pocket suturing kit to stitch my artery closed with her bare hands. And when she finished, she tied off the thread using a highly unusual modified double loop surgeon's knot." He let go of his shirt and leaned back into his seat. "Three years later, I was standing in the surgical observation deck at Manhattan General. I watched a young intern close up a patient, tying that exact same modified double loop knot." The silence in the car was deafening. I felt a violent ringing in my ears. Something massive inside my reality just shattered into dust. That modified knot was a technique my mother invented when she was working as a rural barefoot doctor. She only ever taught it to me. Stella hated the sight of blood and refused to even hold a needle. The person who saved him in Boston five years ago... was me. 11 "You..." I opened my mouth, but my throat was so dry I couldn't make a sound. If the girl from five years ago was me. Then his relentless pursuit over the past two years, all the resources he poured into my career, the nights he spent standing in the snow waiting for me... all of it was meant for me? I was never a stand-in? Then what the hell was my past life all about?! In my previous life, at our wedding ceremony, Vincent's eyes had turned bloodshot as he stared dead at Stella. The moment that turned me into the laughingstock of high society... was that all a misunderstanding too? I felt like a rat trapped in a maze, finally seeing a sliver of light, only to smash headfirst into a solid brick wall. "If you recognized me, why didn't you ever mention Boston?" I clenched my jaw, desperately hunting for a flaw in his story. Vincent let out a bitter scoff. "How the hell was I supposed to bring it up?" He shifted the car back into drive, his tone dripping with self-deprecating irony. "I tested the waters countless times. I asked if you had ever lived in Boston. I asked if you had ever saved anyone on the streets." "And what did you tell me? You looked me dead in the eye and said you were so squeamish you couldn't even swat a fly, that blood made you faint, and that your only trip to Boston was a quick vacation." Vincent shot me a complicated sideways glance. "You guarded yourself against me like I was a serial killer. If I had walked up and confessed that I was the bleeding mob heir you patched up in an alley, you would have bought a one-way ticket to Antarctica that very afternoon." I was completely speechless. Because he was absolutely right. I had spent every waking moment hiding from him. In my past life out of crippling inferiority, and in this life out of pure terror. The SUV merged seamlessly back into the speeding traffic. I pressed my forehead against the cold glass of the window, watching the city lights blur together, my mind in absolute chaos. If the person he loved was truly me, then what exactly caused the tragedy in my previous life? I had to figure this out, or I would never find peace. Just as I opened my mouth to probe into the events of our past life, the phone in my pocket began vibrating violently.