The Billionaire Who Forgot How to Love
Chapter 7: The Men Who Woke Up Twice
Rome — The Arrival
The rain in Rome didn't fall—it whispered. Soft, persistent, like the memories Elias couldn't erase. The jet touched down at Fiumicino just past midnight. No entourage. No press.
Only him, Liv, and a sealed envelope marked with a sigil he didn't recognize. The location had been passed to him by a voice on a scrambled call—deep, deliberate, and wrong.
The compound was buried beneath an ancient vineyard, guarded by nothing but silence and the weight of secrecy. As they approached the gates, Elias spoke low.
"If we walk in there, we don't walk out unchanged."
Liv nodded. "We never do."
Inside, the architecture was old Roman, but the tech was bleeding-edge. Hidden servers. AI surveillance. Facial scanners. The kind of place where wealth wasn't displayed—it was weaponized.
The man who greeted them wasn't armed, but he didn't need to be.
"Welcome to Oblivion," he said.
Oblivion
Oblivion wasn't a group. It was a philosophy: control the past, and the future surrenders.
Within its walls were men who had died, and then reawakened in their pasts with all their regrets intact. But unlike Elias, they didn't seek redemption.
They sought dominion.
"You've met Axel," said the man in charge. His name was Alaric Vale. No known record. No fingerprints. No nationality. Just a reputation in whispers.
Elias didn't shake his hand.
"What is this really about?"
Alaric gestured to a table.
On it sat a photo—an aerial view of the White House. Another: a crater in rural China. Then a third—Liv.
"Reborns. You're not unique, Elias. You're just loud. But what if we stopped trying to fix broken timelines… and built a better one?"
Liv leaned forward. "You mean rewrite history?"
"We mean upgrade it. Remove variables. Predict the future by planting the right people at the right time in the right lives."
Elias looked around the room. Dozens of screens showed simulations: war, peace, economy, surveillance.
"You want to be gods."
"No," Alaric said. "We want to erase God. And replace him with certainty."
Rome — The Escape
That night, Elias didn't sleep.
He and Liv argued for hours. About fate. About free will. About the line between control and corruption.
"Why don't we just walk away?" Liv whispered, lying beside him.
"Because they won't let us. They've already mapped our exits. They know what we eat, how we think, who we protect. You think I built a shadow empire, Liv? These people… they built the map I used to build it."
They fled just after dawn. Not through the front gates—but underground, through the cellar tunnel used by monks during the plague.
By the time Alaric knew they were gone, they were already in the air.
Moscow — Gathering Storms
They followed the trail of anomalies: men with sudden success, no childhood records, and an eerie consistency in their moves.
In Moscow, they found Viktor Barinov—an orphan who had "invented" quantum transmutation and sold it to China's black market for $900 million.
Elias didn't confront him with anger. He confronted him with truth.
"You remember dying, don't you?" Elias asked him.
Viktor didn't answer. But his hand trembled.
"Why do you follow them?"
"Because I don't want to die again," Viktor whispered.
Liv stepped forward. "You already did. You just didn't notice."
Tokyo — The Lost One
In Tokyo, they tracked down Hana Takeda—a former neurologist who'd predicted seven suicides before they happened. Elias suspected she was reborn too.
But when they found her, she was already gone—leaving behind only a note:
I couldn't carry both my memories and my heart. One had to go.
Liv didn't speak for hours.
Elias knew why.
Sometimes the past doesn't come back to haunt you. It comes back to ask you to die with it.
Dubai — The Black Auction
In a skyscraper wrapped in gold and lies, Elias entered the Black Auction—a private gathering of the world's richest criminals. The prize?
Time.
Not metaphorical.
An actual device said to track time folds. Possibly alien. Possibly myth.
But Alaric was there too.
The auction turned into a bloodbath before the third item. Shots. Screams. The floor bathed in red.
Elias and Liv barely escaped through an elevator shaft, covered in someone else's blood.
"We're not saving the world," Elias panted.
"No," Liv said. "We're surviving it."
Lisbon — The Question
In a quiet Lisbon café, after two weeks of fleeing, Elias asked her:
"If we lose, will you forget me in the next life?"
Liv smiled.
"I remembered you in this one."
And that, somehow, was enough to keep going.
Athens — The Oracle Code
A coded message embedded in Hana's suicide note led them to Athens. Not to ruins, but to a startup lab hidden beneath the Acropolis. There, a woman named Petra—the only known reborn hacker—had uncovered part of Oblivion's true aim:
A neural map of every known reborn. Every future deviation calculated and stored.
"They don't just predict us," Petra said. "They replicate us."
"You mean clones?" Elias asked.
"No. Behavioral mimicry. They can take what makes you you and sell it to the highest bidder."
Liv stared at a wall covered in holographic graphs. Her profile was there. So was Elias's.
"If they know us that well," she said, "how do we win?"
"We don't," Petra replied. "We vanish."
But Elias didn't run.
He stayed.
He stole the servers.
And by the time Oblivion traced the breach, the data was already uploaded to a private satellite over the South Pacific.
Berlin — A Ghost Reborn
In Berlin, they found one of the original architects of Oblivion. A man once thought dead in the Cold War: Niklas Vinter.
He lived under a false name, in a nursing home for veterans, playing chess against himself.
When Elias walked in, Niklas smiled.
"You came too late," he rasped.
"For what?"
"For prevention. This was never about a few reborn men, Elias. It was about inevitability. Death is a correction. And we undid it."
Niklas handed him a flash drive.
"What is it?"
"Your real death. The one you avoided. The price is catching up.
Iceland — The Cold Rebirth
The snowstorm howled like a wounded animal. Elias stood at the edge of the volcanic plain, watching the facility blink with life beneath a sheet of white. It was known only as The Drift—an experimental site where Oblivion once tested neural memory compression on dying patients. Reborns had walked out. Others had not.
One of them—an engineer named Solas Yurek—had escaped, vanished, and begun feeding whistleblower evidence into encrypted dead drops across the globe. It had taken Elias three weeks and a bribe to a Finnish intelligence officer to track him here.
Inside, they found Solas muttering into a heat lamp, drawing circles on the walls with ash.
"You don't get it," he whispered to Elias. "Time is a mind. And we poked it. Now it wants revenge."
"What did they do to you?" Liv asked softly.
"They made me forget love. That was the first test. Strip emotion. Leave knowledge. I knew everything… but I didn't care anymore. My mother died and I didn't cry. I just filed it away. That's the price, you see? You lose your heart before your soul."
Elias helped him up. "Come with us."
Solas looked into Elias's eyes. "You still have yours. That means you haven't lost yet."
Cape Town — Echoes in the Sand
Liv's contact in South Africa arranged a meeting with a black-market neuroscientist known only as Kalari, who claimed to have deciphered the Oblivion Signal—the pulse of data that tracked reborns across the globe.
"Everyone has a signature," Kalari said. "A psychic residue. Yours burns hot."
He showed Elias the scans: flashes of pain, grief, betrayal… and something else. Repetition. The same emotional patterns surfacing over and over, like scars that never fully healed.
"You're not just reborn," Kalari said. "You're tethered. To someone."
Elias turned to Liv, who stared back in silence.
"Who?" Elias asked.
Kalari smiled, grim. "That's what you came here to find out, isn't it?"
Vienna — The Betrayal
They met a woman named Isla Kessner, former lover of Alaric, and once the brightest AI programmer in Europe. She agreed to help decode the drive Niklas had given Elias. In a candlelit opera house turned data center, she played Beethoven while running quantum simulations.
But Isla was lying.
She hadn't betrayed Oblivion.
She was Oblivion.
When the power failed and Liv went missing, Elias tore the place apart. He found her in a soundproof room, strapped to a feedback chair pulsing with synthetic memories.
Isla stood behind him with a gun.
"She was rewriting herself," she said. "Willingly. She was tired of remembering you."
Elias disarmed her with rage. Bound her to her own machine. And downloaded everything.
When Liv woke up hours later, her voice cracked.
"I didn't ask to forget. But a part of me wanted to."
He held her.
"We'll build new memories," he whispered. "One honest lie at a time."
Back to Zurich — Final Transmission
The satellite Petra had used was failing. Elias sent out one final burst—a message embedded with every name, every location, every reborn.
The message ended with one line:
We are not gods. We are broken clocks trying to love again.
Oblivion didn't respond with silence.
They responded with war.
Madrid — Countdown to Collapse
In an abandoned observatory in Madrid, Elias and Liv coordinated with former intelligence agents who'd defected from Oblivion. They decoded timefold anomalies to predict global instability events, tracking cities marked for chaos: Lagos, São Paulo, Manila, Montreal.
"What happens if they pull it off?" Liv asked.
"The world forgets how to choose," Elias said. "And only remembers how to obey."
A young hacker named Nuno broke through the predictive core and whispered, "They've moved the countdown. It's not global anymore. It's personal."
"What does that mean?"
"It means you're the target now, Elias. You, and the woman tethered to your thread."
Liv stared at the map. Her photo flickered, coded red.
"They're going to erase us."
"No," Elias said. "They're going to try."
Berlin Again — A Choice Between Two Lives
Back in Berlin, Elias stood on the rooftop of a museum as dawn bled into the skyline. He held two photos. One of his daughter from his forgotten first life. One of Liv, asleep next to a fireplace.
Niklas's flash drive had contained more than memory. It contained a choice: Elias could correct the thread. Return fully to his first life. Undo everything. Be with his family. A man who never broke.
But Liv would vanish. She never existed in that thread.
He stood there for hours.
Then he burned the flash drive.
And turned to face the future.