Reborn To Save My Broken Lover

“I was dying in a cold hospital bed, listening to the monitor count down my final seconds. As a ghost, I watched my own funeral. My popular friends and wealthy family soon moved on, but one person stayed. Cas Riley. The invisible outcast from the back of my history class. He brought a white rose to my grave every single day, withering away until he collapsed on the frozen ground, dying of a broken heart for a girl who barely knew his name. Opening my eyes again, the hospital smell was gone. I was reborn back in my high school classroom. I immediately tracked him down, only to witness the brutal hell he was trapped in. He was humiliated by a cruel foreman for pennies, violently slapped by his uncle over his sick mother's medical money, and forced into bloody street fights. He was starving, covered in bruises, and completely alone. When I tried to buy him medicine and step into his life to protect him, he violently pushed me away in the pouring rain. "Stay out of my life! To protect you, I have to fight, and when I fight, I lose everything!" He wasn't rejecting me out of hate. He was terrified that his dark, violent reality would drag me down with him. Standing soaked in the rain, my resolve hardened like steel. Gentle kindness wasn't going to save him from this hell. To protect the boy who died for me, I had to become ruthless enough to tear down his entire rotten world and build him a new one.”