And she wasn't even subtle about it. She screamed his name in surprise then joy then took his hand and literally drag him away and locked them together inside the kitchen.

Well, not really locked since the door uses a sliding mechanism but the symbolism was the same. They were locked inside the kitchen. The two of them. After she literally kicked the cook and his wife outside.

"Why the kitchen?" he asked in a sort of OCD way.

"Are you nuts? Of course it has to be the kitchen. We have lots to talk about and I don't want us getting hungry."

He looked at her and didn't even point out that they might not get hungry but the emperor and the rest of the people inside the palace surely will if they stay here and exchange pleasantries the rest of the night.

"Will you stop thinking of mundane things? I can literally read what you're thinking."

"What am I thinking?" he dared her.

"Why the kitchen? We might stay here the entire night. What about the emperor? Won't he get hungry? That's it, right? You see how stupid that sounds?"

He stared at her, honestly surprised.

"But isn't that important, too?" he asked.

"Stop! Jesus Christ, Du Lu! We're living out of our timeline and all you worry about is appearances? What the heck, man?"

Du Lu looked like a deflated balloon. He sat down and stared at An Ning.

"What?"

"What are we doing here, An Ning? Why are we here?"

"What was the last thing you remembered?"

"We were inside the maze when something suddenly appeared, a wind perhaps, and it carried you away. I ran after you. We were inside your house where the wind carried you and there was a blinding light. The light spun faster and faster and started to suck you in. I tried to pull you back but it was stronger. Instead, it pulled me in along with you. The next thing I knew, everybody was calling me General Chen Lou. I thought at first I was in a movie set shooting a scene. Am I right in a.s.suming that it was a time machine that took us to this era? But why you? And who has the power to do that anyway?"

"It was Richard," An Ning said after a while.

Du Lu looked at her like she was a two-headed beast who entered his tent asking where the bathroom was. It was not only incongruous but totally insane.

"Richard is back there in L City f.u.c.king his mistress Valerie. Are you insane?"

An Ning sighed.

"I think I need to tell you everything starting from the very beginning."

And that's exactly what she did, starting from the moment Richard fell in love with Valerie, their subsequent divorce, and her fateful meeting with Richard's brother Han.

An Ning told her story in a very calm voice. She was not feeling the events that had happened, not even seeing them. She was narrating them from the point of view of someone who had been told what her life had been before she was born. She didn't remember what really happened. She only remembered what others had told her happened. It was not her truth but others who had helped her arrived at the truth.

Du Lu listened to her first in complete shock but as the story unfolded, grudging acceptance. It was inconceivable that such fantastical things could happen but he did remember a monster attacking them in Moira's store. At that time, he had been intrigued yet very unwilling to get involved in her and Richard's lives because unless he got hurt and was personally affected by the attack, he didn't really care.

But after all that and still find himself involved up to his neck....Du Lu sighed.

"But why is Richard doing this? What's his motive?"

An Ning shrugged.

"No idea."

Du Lu stared at her, studying her as if she was an unpleasant worm put under his microscope.

"Do you think he might still be in love with you?"

An Ning met his probing gaze and laughed.

"Richard, in all the years we've known each other, have never felt feelings of love for me. Never. Oh, he liked me, cared about me, protected me but deeper feelings of love? He wasn't into me, Du Lu. I get that. I don't even know why he asked me to marry him."

"How do you know? You have amnesia, remember?"

"You don't need to have all your brain cells working to know when a man is not in love with you. If he had, he wouldn't have fallen in love with Valerie."

"But what about your feelings for him? Surely, you would have known by now what it is you feel about him after living with Han? They're basically the same person since they look so much alike."

An Ning didn't answer. She stood up and put a kettle on the stove. It was after she served the tea that she finally answered Du Lu's question.

"How can you love a person when you've forgotten who he was in the first place? I know it happens in movies but this is reality for G.o.d's sake. I woke up to find myself pregnant. Richard told me that he was the father. Richard looked like a nice guy, very considerate and pa.s.sionate until I learned he was actually his dead brother Han in Richard's body. Then this guy who told me how much he loved me threw me over, again, for his brother's mistress Valerie. Then I found out Richard and not Han was the real father of the twins. How did I know? Because I had someone check their DNA. And while all these was happening, I had only one reaction: what do all these Richard, Han and Valerie thingies have anything to do with me? I know each one by name but not the person. I don't remember them so why are they still here in the present, playing an important role in my new life? When I finally realized that, I just let go and never once looked back.

"You tell me that Richard is doing all these because he still loves me. I don't even know what that means because I don't know this person. I have never met him. We didn't even exchanged one word since I had the amnesia. Love? How can I love someone I don't even know?"

"Do you hate him that much?" Du Lu whispered, aghast.

"I feel nothing for him except unwilling hatred because he took me away from my children. You say he still loves me? Then that's his choice. It has absolutely nothing to do with me other than the fact that his selfishness caused me to leave my kids when they need me the most."

"If he brought you here then where is he?"

"Don't know. Don't care. What I want to do now is find that time machine and go back to my life and my kids. Look at me, Du Lu. I don't even look the same. I'm younger and stronger. Isn't that insane?"

"You're the only woman I know who dislikes going back in time to find herself younger and fresher. Are you for real?" Du Lu mocked.

"My kids are twelve and you expect them to call me mom at this age?"

"Those kids were yours?" Du Lu was rocked by the realization. The twins were in their early teens. How could An Ning be their mother? In this life or the previous, she was still too young to have given birth to teenagers.

An Ning sighed.

"Turns out, I'm not normal either. My grandmother is an Amazon, my grandfather is a warlock and my mom is half and half. Given my bloodline, of course my kids would age fast and stop aging once they reach their twenties. We are immortals, Du Lu."

Du Lu didn't answer, just looked at her with this big expression of surprise on his face.

"So that's why Saravia is off limits to strangers," he said, finally making the connection.

"Not off limits just cautious. We're on our way to becoming extinct if I didn't make some hard decisions to prevent it. So far, the tribe is with me. They're tired of hiding in the shadows and just want to rejoin the human world, you know?"

Du Lu sipped at his tea and fell into his own thoughts. He obviously had a lot on his mind because it took him nearly fifteen minutes to resurface from it.

"If Richard meant you to come here, then where is here and where is he? He must have been planning this although I don't understand in the least how he could pull this off?"

"He's no longer the Richard you once knew, Du Lu. He's a ghost who willed himself to come to life doing G.o.d knows what. He must have followed me to Saravia and heard us talking about the time machine. It's kind of an urban legend with us, you know. My grandparents disappeared when the machine took them somewhere but we don't know where. Richard was not a stupid man. With the kind of power he probably has in his hands, it would have been easy for him to figure out what of us didn't and made the machine work to his advantage."

"So you think he's in this world looking for us?"

"Of course. He brought us here, of course he'll be here. But I think he miscalculated and the machine brought us to a place he wasn't expecting."

"So, he's basically combing this land looking for us?"

"Looking for me," An Ning corrected. "You just came for the ride, remember?"

"An Ning, I'm beginning to have an uneasy feeling about this. If Richard finds us, you, what then?"

"He'll probably kill me or worse," An Ning said, her expression calm.

Du Lu didn't have any words to counter this.

"What are you going to do?"

"Fight him of course. What do you think I'll do?"

"What if he only wants to talk, reconcile with you?"

"It's too late," An Ning shrugged. "I'd rather fight him than talk with him about reconciliation and stuff. My priority is getting back to my kids. A ghost with an axe to grind against me, I don't need to fear him. Just letting you know, killing me won't be easy."

Du Lu felt a cold hand running down his clammy back. An Ning was not being flippant. She was dead serious. Everybody had a bottom line and hers had just been crossed by her ex-husband. It won't be that easy to defeat her.

"What about you? Tell me about what happened to you after you and I separated?" An Ning asked, quirking an eyebrow at Du Lu's attire. "The great movie actor playing general...how does it feel to live out your imaginary scripts in real life?"

"Scary," Du Lu grimaced. "I've been dancing with death a couple of times but so far I've won every encounter."

"Who is this General Chen, Lu?"

Du Lu uncharacteristically shook his head.

"Well?" asked An Ning, suddenly intrigued.

"You'll think I'm being stupid and you might be right."

"What are you talking about?"

"Promise not to laugh?"

An Ning's brows quirked upward.

Du Lu sighed.

"I can't explain it but he feels just like me," he said with a frown. "Like this life...I've lived this before. Is this precognition?"

"No. I think you and I are both reliving a past life in another dimension. When I came to in this ident.i.ty, I didn't feel different. I remembered marrying the emperor. I remembered the first time we met. I remembered the pain I felt when he died. I remembered that I loved him. Those were not memories. Those were real feelings. The sense of loss, the grief has remained constant."

"You were married to the emperor?" Du Lu's voice sounded surprised.

"Honestly, Du Lu. What the heck were we talking about since this conversation started? You don't think I'm married to Gu Sheng, don't you?"

Du Lu evaded her penetrating gaze.

"Honestly, don't you know anything about this world you're currently living in? Talk about thick."

Du Lu flushed angrily.

"Well, you and that kid seem lovely dovey to me. And you're about the same age as him. When Sei Sei told me about a stepmother, I thought she'll be a hag with a wart on her face."

An Ning looked at him in surprise then ended up laughing delightedly when he reddened and refused to meet her teasing eyes.

"Did you just give me a back-handed compliment?" she teased.

"Shut up," he said, glaring ineffectually at her.

"I love you, too, Lu," she said, grinning.

He looked at her then reluctantly smiled at the mischievous glint in her eyes.

"Come on," she said. "We'd better start cooking. I'm hungry."

The two of them companionably moved about the kitchen preparing their meal. An Ning found eggs, slices of thick ham, and dried fish. Du Lu cooked the rice then when it was done, he expertly fried it along with the eggs and ham.

An Ning prepared the fish and cooked mushroom soup.

The meal was not fancy but looked appetizing. They were about to sit down and start eating when a growling noise suddenly sounded outside.

An Ning frowned and signaled to Du Lu, who stayed quiet and waited as she tiptoed to the door. An Ning put her ear on one side and tried to hear the noise. It was quiet but she could hear rustling sounds.

In a surprise move, she slid open the door and watched open mouthed as a wall of bodies toppled and fell to the ground with a loud thud.

Screams of anger and anguish filled the suddenly quiet kitchen.

"Will you get off me, you big toad," Sei Sei cried angrily.

"It wasn't my fault. You were in the way."

"Oh my G.o.d! I think I killed his majesty!"

"You did not," said the m.u.f.fled voice of the emperor.

"I think I broke my back," groaned Min Ling.

When the voices finally quieted down, the tension that followed was almost palpable.

From his position on the floor, the emperor looked up at his fuming stepmother and saucily raised a hand in greeting.

"Oh, hi An Ning. I wondered where you were. What's for dinner?"