1 The night the yacht blew apart off the coast of Montauk, my boyfriend burned alive. There was nothing left of him to bury—no body, no ashes, just a slick of fuel on the black Atlantic. Everyone in New York knew who had done it: Dominic Pierce. He and his wife, Candice, were Manhattan’s favorite bloodsport—a toxic, gilded power couple whose marriage was built entirely on mutual sabotage. Candice, furious over Dominic’s latest public infidelity, had abducted my boyfriend, Jesse, taking him aboard their private vessel as her retaliatory lover. Dominic, driven mad with jealousy, didn’t bother with lawyers or scandals. He detonated the entire ship. By morning, the tabloids ran photos of the two of them on a Coast Guard cutter, wrapped in the same emergency blanket, kissing beneath the flashing red beacons. Reconciled. Whole. Only my Jesse had died. For three years, I threw away every shred of who I was. I stripped off my pride, my dignity, my humanity, crawling through the city’s darkest gutters like a stray dog, letting powerful men grind me under their boots. All of it was for one purpose: to get close enough to Dominic Pierce to slide a blade between his ribs. Tonight, at their private penthouse gala at the Baccarat Hotel, my chance finally came. I managed to slip past security and turn the handle of the master suite. The door swung open. A man was standing by the floor-to-ceiling windows, holding a glass of Scotch. When he turned, the breath vanished from my lungs. The ruthless, untouchable Dominic Pierce had the exact same face as my dead boyfriend. The dark, hooded eyes. The sharp slope of his nose. Even the faint, pale speck of a mole along the left curve of his jawline—it was Jesse. Identical down to the marrow. Candice drifted out from the adjoining dressing room in a backless silk gown, laughing softly as she draped her arms around his neck. “Well, look at that,” she purred, looking past his shoulder at me. “Your little toy actually tracked you down. You’re not going to pretend you don’t know her, are you, darling?” Dominic didn’t startle. He reached up, casually pinching Candice’s chin between his fingers with effortless adoration, before turning his gaze toward me. His eyes were completely devoid of warmth. They were the eyes of a man looking at a cockroach on polished marble. “Just a little foreplay between husband and wife,” he said, his voice a low, gravelly drawl. “You didn’t honestly think someone like me could ever fall for someone like you, did you?” A glacial numbness ripped through my veins. My grip failed. The ceramic dagger clattered against the floor. Blood welled in the back of my throat, thick and metallic, spilling over my lips before I could choke it back. All of it. The three years of unspeakable agony. The blood, the bruises, the broken bones I endured to avenge the love of my life. It was never a tragedy. It was marital theater. It was the sadistic foreplay of two bored billionaires who needed a disposable body to rekindle their sex life. From beginning to end, I was nothing more than their clown. “What’s with that face? Are you claiming the buyout wasn’t enough?” Dominic looked down at me from where he stood. He drew a cream silk handkerchief from his breast pocket and began, with agonizing slowness, to wipe down the lapel of his Tom Ford tuxedo where my sleeve had grazed it. The movement was deliberate. He looked at me with visceral disgust. I pressed a trembling hand against my sternum, the spasms in my chest so violent that every inhale tasted of copper. The dark stain of blood on the ivory wool rug gleamed under the crystal chandelier. I couldn’t tear my eyes away from his face. “What did you just call me?” I wheezed, the syllables dragging through my raw throat like broken glass. Dominic looked at me as if I were a defective appliance. “Hannah, the game is over. Playing dumb at this stage is just embarrassing.” He said my name as if it were a foreign word that tasted bad in his mouth. This was the man who used to tuck my freezing feet into his sweater on December nights in our damp studio. The man who had run through a driving rainstorm across four neighborhoods just to bring me a slice of strawberry shortcake from the 24-hour bakery because I’d cried from exhaustion. Now, he looked at me like garbage waiting on a curb. Candice stepped closer, her manicured fingers trailing down the silk of his necktie. “Careful, honey,” she whispered, her voice dripping with mock pity. “I think your ex-girlfriend is going into shock. I told you, women dredged up from the outer boroughs don’t know how to play the game.” Dominic slid his arm around her waist, pulling her flush against him. “My fault,” he murmured, his tone dripping with indulgent affection. “You wanted to file for divorce, and I lost my temper. I figured I’d try slumming it for a while to see how the other half lived.” Slumming it. The words detonated inside my skull, leaving a high-pitched ring. “So…” I scrambled, trying to haul myself off the floor, but my knees buckled, sending me crashing back down onto the bloodied carpet. “Those three years… when we were together… that was just an experiment to you? A sociological tour?” Dominic didn’t answer. He didn’t even bother looking at me anymore. Candice smiled, taking the burden of explaining off his hands. “What else would it be? Did you genuinely believe an heir to Pierce Enterprises was going to marry a scholarship girl who worked graveyard shifts at a bodega? Dominic just wanted to make me jealous. I have to admit, you were a wonderfully convincing prop.” I bit my lip so hard the skin broke, my vision swimming in tears. “And the explosion?” I rasped, looking up at them like a drowning dog reaching for driftwood. “The bomb on the yacht… the Coast Guard report… Jesse’s remains… all of it was fake?” “Of course it was fake,” Dominic said. He sounded bored, as if he were explaining the weather. “A decommissioned hull due for the scrapyard. The body in the morgue was an unidentified John Doe Derek bought off the black market. Candice wanted to see how far I’d go to get her back, so I burned a ship for her.” He leaned down and kissed Candice’s temple. “If it makes my wife happy, I’d burn a city block. A boat is nothing.” Another mouthful of blood rose in my throat. I swallowed it down, my fingernails digging into the plush carpet until they cracked. “Then what about me?” I pointed a shaking hand at my own chest. The sound that came out of me was so shrill, so hollow, it didn’t even sound human. “What about the last three years of my life? I spent three years on my knees, letting people spit on me, letting animals walk all over me, just to track down the man who killed you!” I violently yanked up the left sleeve of my dress, exposing the crisscrossed, mottled cigarette burns covering my forearm. “I took these in the basement of an illegal poker den in Chinatown, letting loan sharks burn me just to get a single alias tied to the Pierce family!” I tore open the collar of my dress, revealing the jagged, purple scar running beneath my collarbone. “I took a shank to the chest when I infiltrated the high-roller yacht parties to find where Candice hid her shell companies!” I sat there on the floor, panting, displaying my mutilations like war medals. I thought—stupidly, childishly—that seeing them would crack their armor. That somewhere beneath the custom tailoring and the diamond chokers, a sliver of human guilt might flicker. Even a fraction of an inch. Candice pinched her nose, leaning away and pressing her face into Dominic’s shoulder. “God, Dominic, it’s sickening. Does she have Hepatitis or something? Get her out of here.” Dominic’s brow furrowed into a tight, impatient crease. He raised two fingers, and the double doors opened immediately. Two private security guards in charcoal suits stepped into the room. “Drag her out,” Dominic commanded. “And call the staff to cut this section of the carpet out and burn it. It’s filthy.” The guards moved forward, grabbing me by the armpits like a sack of trash. “Wait,” Dominic said suddenly. A tiny, pathetic spark of hope flared in my dead eyes. I thought, for one insane second, that the ghost of the man who loved me had finally surfaced. Dominic reached into his coat, pulled out a gold Montblanc pen, and scribbled his signature across a slip of paper. He tore it from the book and tossed it at my face. The sharp edge of the cashier’s check clipped my cheekbone, slicing a thin red line through the skin before fluttering down into the pool of blood on the floor. “Five million dollars,” he said coldly. “Consider it compensation for your time. It’s enough to buy yourself a decent house far away from the city. Don’t ever let me or my wife see your face again. You make me sick.” I stared blankly at the paper soaking in my blood. Five million. Three years of devotion. The love I had carried like a sacred relic. The absolute destruction of my soul, my body, my pride. All of it had been appraised at five million dollars. The heavy mahogany doors slammed shut behind me. As the guards dragged my heels down the carpeted corridor, Candice’s soft, melodic laughter drifted through the seam of the wood. “Now, darling… how are you going to make this up to me tonight?” “Whatever you want, Mrs. Pierce.” That low, possessive murmur. It had once belonged only to me. 2 They dumped me at the bottom of the granite steps outside the hotel. It was late October, and the rain was coming down in freezing sheets. The water soaked through my thin silk dress within seconds, sinking into my pores and wrapping around my bones like frost. I lay there in the gutter, every joint in my body screaming, unable to gather enough strength to sit up. A black umbrella appeared above me, blotting out the rain. It was Derek Mills, Dominic’s executive fixer. For the last three years, Derek had been my anonymous informant. He was the shadow who sent me encrypted emails, dropping breadcrumbs that led me straight into the most dangerous back-alleys in the city, pointing me toward the monsters who supposedly murdered my lover. “Miss Hayes,” Derek said, pushing his wire-rimmed glasses up the bridge of his nose. “You really should be thanking Mr. Pierce.” I pressed my palms against the wet asphalt, slowly dragging my eyes up to meet his. “Thanking him?” “Of course.” Derek withdrew a thick manila folder from his leather briefcase. “Mr. Pierce is generous. Not only did he grant you five million dollars, but he also instructed me to give you the complete dossier. He thought you deserved closure.” He dropped the folder into my lap. With trembling, numb fingers, I broke the wax seal. The contents spilled out across the wet pavement. Glossy surveillance photographs. Dozens of them. Every single one documented my descent into hell over the past three years. The first was from an underground bare-knuckle fight club in Queens. I was lying against the chain-link fence, my face battered black and blue, coughing blood onto the canvas, enduring three rounds of abuse just to get a phone number for a smuggler tied to the Pierce docks. The second was from a private lounge in Tribeca. I was kneeling on a floor covered in shattered glass, forced to drink straight gin until I vomited, all to eavesdrop on Candice’s former business partners. The third was from an unlicensed clinic. I was emaciated, my skin gray, my inner elbows covered in dark purple track marks from selling my plasma twice a week to fund my private investigators. And in the top corner of every single photograph, half-hidden behind air ducts or mirrored glass, was the clear red light of a high-definition surveillance camera. “These leads…” I whispered, my teeth grinding together until my gums bled. “Every clue…” Derek smiled. His tone was polite, professional, and entirely devoid of mercy. “All orchestrated by Mr. Pierce,” he said. “Mr. Pierce found your devotion… deeply entertaining. Mrs. Pierce was suffering from post-separation depression at the time, so Mr. Pierce turned your search for vengeance into a private reality show. Every week, he pulled the surveillance feeds and screened them for his wife to cheer her up.” The words felt like a rusted saw dragging across my heart. “Mrs. Pierce remarked several times that watching a loyal stray dog bleed for a dead man was significantly more captivating than anything on HBO.” My stomach heaved violently. I rolled onto my hands and knees, retching against the curb, but nothing came up except bile and dark streaks of blood. “How could he…” I clawed at the sodden fabric over my chest, gasping for air that wouldn’t come. “Jesse promised me… he told me I was the light of his life…” “Those were lines from a script, Miss Hayes,” Derek interrupted smoothly. “If you want a performance to be convincing, you have to commit to the part. How else would he have kept you so thoroughly devoted?” He stood tall, looking down at me as if I were a discarded piece of packaging. “The production is officially wrapped. Mr. and Mrs. Pierce have renewed their vows. You were an extra, Miss Hayes, and your scene is over. Take your payout and disappear. If you attempt to contact them again, well… you know what Mr. Pierce is capable of.” Derek turned on his heel and stepped into the idling town car. The red taillights smeared into the rain and vanished down Park Avenue. I sat alone in the downpour, gathering the soaked photographs one by one with shaking hands. In every picture, the look in my eyes was so fierce, so painfully certain of my purpose. I thought I was an avenging angel. I was just an evening’s entertainment for a sociopath and his wife. I dragged my ruined body back to my basement apartment in Bushwick. I pushed open the swollen wooden door. The walls were covered in red yarn, maps, and newspaper clippings. Dominic Pierce’s face was pinned at the center, crossed out with thick strokes of crimson marker. The monster who took my Jesse. The monster who was my Jesse. I walked over to the laminate desk and picked up the crudely whittled wooden rabbit resting near the edge. He had carved it for me three years ago with a cheap utility knife. He had slipped, slicing his thumb, and as he wrapped a paper towel around the cut, he had smiled at me and said: “Hannah, whenever I’m not here, keep this close. It means I’m watching over you.” I pressed the rough wood against my sternum and screamed until my vocal cords shredded, until no sound came out at all, only dry, shuddering gasps. My fingers fumbled for my phone. I dialed my mother’s number. For three years, I had stayed away from my family, terrified that the enemies I was hunting would find them. I had severed every tie to keep them safe. Now, stripped of everything, I just needed to hear my mother’s voice. I needed to know there was still something real in this world. The phone rang seven times before the line clicked open. “Mom…” I choked out. “Mom, it’s me—” “How dare you call this house!” My mother’s voice tore through the receiver, high and hysterical. “You shameless, ungrateful little wretch! Do you have any idea what kind of people you brought down on us?” I froze, the air leaving my lungs. “Mom… what are you talking about?” “Don’t play dumb with me! Mrs. Pierce’s attorneys were here two hours ago!” Her words hit me like physical blows. “They brought a settlement agreement, Hannah! Mrs. Pierce said you’ve been stalking her husband, trying to extort their family! They gave us three million dollars to sign an NDA and legally sever our relation to you. Three million! We finally paid off the mortgage, we got your brother into private school—and all we had to do was erase you from our lives!” “Mom…” “Don’t you ever call here again! If you drop dead in the street, don’t you dare have my name on your emergency contact! You’re dead to this family!” Click. The line went dead. I sat in the dark, the phone still pressed to my ear, feeling the cold damp seep through the floorboards. Dominic hadn’t just bought my dignity. He had bought my bloodline. He had paid three million dollars to ensure that if I died tonight, there wouldn’t even be a mother to claim my body from the morgue. He had taken my past, my present, and burned every bridge to my future. 3 The fever hit around three in the morning. I curled into a ball on the damp mattress, shivering violently while my skin burned. In the delirium of the infection, memory folded in on itself, dragging me back to that summer three years ago. I was nineteen, carrying a bag of day-old sandwiches from the deli where I worked, when three men cornered me in the alley behind my building. A boy named Jesse had materialized out of the shadows, taking an iron pipe across the shoulder to pull me behind him. Blood had poured down his temple, but he had looked back at me and grinned through the pain. “Don’t be scared, Hannah. I’ve got you.” Later, we had shared this ten-square-foot room. He used the cash from his first week handing out flyers to buy a small strawberry shortcake from the corner bakery. “Happy birthday, Hannah,” he had whispered, kissing my cheek. It was the sweetest thing I had ever tasted in my entire life. Now, that memory fractured like brittle glass. The strawberry cake dissolved into the five-million-dollar check floating in the gutter. The blood on his forehead transformed into the red silk pocket square he used to wipe away the stain of my existence. I bolted upright, gasping, my shirt drenched in cold sweat. It was past noon. I dragged myself off the mattress, walked to the wall, and began tearing down the maps, the yarn, the photographs. I ripped them into shreds until the drywall was bare, save for one single piece of cardstock pinned near the light switch. An invitation. It had cost me months of favors and every favor I had left with an underground scalper to obtain. In two days, Dominic and Candice Pierce were hosting their third wedding anniversary gala aboard The Grand Victoria—a two-hundred-foot private superyacht currently docked at the Chelsea Piers. It was the exact sister ship to the one he had blown up three years ago. My eyes drifted to the rusty utility knife lying on the desk. I knew my limits. My body was failing, the sepsis from my reopened wounds creeping into my blood. If I didn’t finish this now, I wouldn’t survive the winter anyway. Two days later. The Hudson River was pitch-black beneath the autumn sky, but The Grand Victoria was ablaze with light, looking like a floating palace of gold and crystal. I wore an ivory slip dress. It was the only nice thing I owned—Jesse had bought it for me with his first “bonus,” back when he claimed to be working dispatch for a trucking company. I brushed my hair until it was smooth, using cheap drugstore foundation to hide the hollows under my eyes and the fading bruises along my jawline. Clutching the invitation in my palm, I walked up the gangway and blended into the glittering crowd. The ballroom smelled of tuberose, vintage champagne, and old money. Women in haute couture drifted past men in bespoke tuxedos, diamonds catching the light of the tiered chandeliers. Dominic stood in the center of the salon, a flute of Cristal in his hand, looking like an emperor in his midnight-blue tuxedo. Candice was tucked under his arm, draped in a gown encrusted with thousands of micro-diamonds, looking radiant and victorious. A circle of socialites surrounded them, laughing at their jokes, hanging on their every breath. “You two are truly Manhattan’s golden couple,” someone said with an obsequious laugh. “And that story from three years ago—Dominic, blowing up an entire yacht just to make a statement to your wife? It’s legendary. Pure romance.” Romance. My three years of crawling through glass and blood was reduced to a charming dinner-party anecdote for the East Coast elite. I took a breath, parted the crowd, and walked straight toward them. The laughter near the center of the room stuttered. One by one, the guests went quiet, their eyes drifting toward the pale, thin girl in the simple white dress who looked entirely out of place in their world of silk and gold. Dominic turned. The moment his eyes found mine, the easy, aristocratic smile vanished from his face, replaced by an expression of profound irritation. “How did you get on this boat?” His voice was low, cutting through the silence like a scalpel. Two deck security guards immediately flanked me. Candice reached out, lightly placing her fingers on the guard’s arm to hold him back. She looked at me, her red lips curving into a delighted smirk. “Well, if it isn’t our favorite little stray,” she said, projecting her voice just loud enough for the circle to hear. “What’s the matter, Hannah? Burned through five million dollars already? Come back to beg Dominic for an allowance?” A ripple of cruel chuckles moved through the crowd. “Ah, one of Dominic’s charity cases from the foundation.” “They’re always so greedy. Give them an inch, they want the whole trust fund.” I didn’t look at Candice. I didn’t look at the crowd. I kept my eyes fixed on Dominic’s face. I reached into my pocket, pulled out the small, whittled wooden rabbit, and held it up between us. “Dominic,” I said softly. My voice wasn’t loud, but in the dead quiet of the salon, it rang out with brutal clarity. “When you carved this, the blade slipped. You cut your thumb so deep you couldn’t use your hand for three days.” His jaw tightened, but he didn’t speak. “You held me that night,” I continued, my fingers trembling around the wood. “You told me that as long as it made me smile, losing a little blood didn’t matter. You told me you would bleed dry before you let the world hurt me.” I took half a step forward. “Was that in the script, too?” 4 Dominic stared at the cheap, rough-hewn piece of pine. The line between his brows deepened, not with regret, but with acute embarrassment. To have a girl from the slums produce a piece of whittled garbage in front of the board members of Pierce Global was an unforgivable breach of etiquette. He didn’t answer my question. He simply turned his head toward the chief of security. “Escort this woman off the vessel,” he said, his voice flat and dismissive. “Take that piece of junk and throw it in the incinerator. Don’t let her track filth across the teak.” Junk. The talisman I had slept with pressed to my cheek for a thousand nights. The only proof that Jesse had ever existed. Now it was junk that threatened to soil his deck. Candice pressed her hand to her mouth, letting out a musical giggle. “Oh, Dominic, darling, your taste back then was dreadful. Honestly, giving a girl a block of wood? You should be arrested by the fashion police.” Dominic turned back to his wife, his expression softening into effortless charm. “I was going through a phase. From now on, you get Harry Winston and nothing else.” I looked at the two of them, and suddenly, a strange, hysterical lightness bubbled up in my chest. It was ridiculous. The whole thing was an absurd, tragic comedy. The guards reached out to grab my shoulders, but I stepped backward, evading their hands. “Don’t touch me,” I said evenly. “I know the way out.” I turned my back on the chandeliers, on the diamonds, on the man wearing my dead lover’s face, and walked toward the double doors leading to the aft deck. The wind off the bay was ferocious, whipping my white slip dress against my legs like a shroud. The open deck was empty, the dark water churning fifty feet below where the twin propellers tore through the Hudson. The layout of this ship was identical to the one that burned three years ago. Even the height of the stainless-steel railing was exactly thirty-six inches. I walked to the stern, gripping the cold metal, and looked down into the black void. The water was foaming white where the wake met the dark current—deep, bottomless, like the jaws of an ancient beast waiting to be fed. Footsteps clicked against the wet wood behind me. Dominic had followed me out, flanked by half a dozen guests who had stepped onto the deck with their highballs to watch the spectacle. “Hannah, what is this pathetic little stunt?” Dominic’s voice carried over the wind, laced with patronizing boredom. “Threatening to jump? You flatter yourself if you think your death would mean anything to me.” Candice joined him, shivering delicately as Dominic draped his tuxedo jacket over her bare shoulders. “Honey, she’s going to jump,” Candice laughed, adjusting the lapels. “Should we call the Harbor Patrol? It would be such an inconvenience if her corpse floated up against our slip.” Dominic let out a dry, dismissive breath. “Let her jump. People like her are cockroaches—they cling to life harder than anyone. She just wants to leverage another check.” He looked at me, his eyes entirely dead. “I’m going to count to three, Hannah. If you’re not off the railing, my men will tie you to a stanchion until we dock. One.” I turned my head, looking back at the face I had loved more than my own life. “Dominic, do you know how I survived these three years?” “Two,” he droned, checking his platinum Patek Philippe. “Every night, I had nightmares of you screaming inside that burning hull. I starved myself because I felt guilty every time I swallowed food. I thought if I felt even a second of happiness, it was a betrayal to your memory.” “Three.” “But I get it now,” I whispered. I pulled the wooden rabbit from my pocket and held it against my heart. “I don’t owe you anything. I don’t owe any of you a single breath.” I looked Dominic dead in the eye. “I spent half my youth living like a dog for a lie.” My voice dropped, steady and clear beneath the roar of the engines. “Now, I’m giving the life back.” Dominic’s jaw tightened. For a fraction of a second, something shifted behind his eyes—a sudden, primal realization that the script had slipped out of his control. He took a violent step forward. “Hannah, don’t you dare—” I didn’t let him finish. I leaned back and vaulted the rail. Weightlessness hit me first—the sudden, breathtaking rush of the autumn night tearing through my hair. In that suspended second between the deck and the sea, I heard the sharp, distant crack of a woman screaming, followed by the sound of crystal shattering against the deck. Then, the ocean slammed into me like concrete. The cold was absolute, knocking the breath from my chest, flooding my mouth and sinuses with salt and diesel fuel. It was freezing. Colder than the rain, colder than the basement, colder than his voice. I closed my eyes. I didn’t kick. I didn’t claw for the surface. I let the weight of my soaked dress pull me down into the deep, quiet dark. May the two of you rot together in this life, and burn together in the next.
🌟 Continue the story here 👉🏻 📲 Download the “MotoNovel” app 🔍 search for “566323”, and watch the full series ✨! #MotoNovel
Leave a Reply