Category: English

1 The day I was brought back to the Carmichael estate, I realized I had been dropped into a family of doomed villains. My older brother was a ruthless, cold-hearted workaholic destined to become dangerously obsessed with a girl he couldn’t have. My younger sister was the textbook mean-girl sidekick, slated for a tragic, humiliating end. And our parents? They were the oblivious collateral damage, destined to bankrupt the family by crossing the wrong Old Money heir. Honestly, it was a lot to process. But I had finally crawled my way out of rural poverty into a life of Egyptian cotton and central heating. There was absolutely no way I was going to let this gilded ship sink. To save this family, I was going to have to fix them. Walking into the Carmichael mansion in Connecticut, I had deliberately worn my nicest dress—a blue floral sundress I’d ironed twice that morning. The moment I stepped into the foyer, the girl on the velvet sofa—dressed in a pristine white tulle skirt, looking like a porcelain doll—pinched her nose. “What is that… smell on her?” This was the fake daughter. Serena Carmichael. I lifted my arm and took a whiff. “It’s not that bad, is it? Just a little topsoil and engine grease. I was fixing the tractor before the lawyer picked me up. If it bothers you, I can go scrub down now.” Serena’s eyes instantly brimmed with tears. Her voice trembled. “Mom, is she… is she mad at me? Does she hate me for taking her place all these years?” The elegant woman standing nearby—Eleanor, my biological mother—frowned immediately. “Harper, your sister was just making an observation. There is no need for that attitude.” A young man sitting in the leather armchair, typing furiously on a MacBook, snapped his laptop shut. He leveled a glacial glare at me. “Serena, come here.” Serena rushed over, burying her face in his cashmere shoulder, her shoulders shaking with delicate sobs. He patted her back, his eyes cutting into me like shattered glass. “Let’s get one thing straight. In this house, if you ever make her cry again, you will answer to me. I am Preston Carmichael. And I only recognize Serena as my sister.” I scratched the back of my neck, utterly bewildered. What did I even say? The butler escorted me to the second floor, pushing open double mahogany doors to reveal a bedroom larger than my entire farmhouse back in Montana. Downstairs, Serena was still weeping softly. “Preston, it’s not fair to put Harper in the guest wing. I should pack up my room and give it to her…” She didn’t finish her sentence, because at that exact moment, I dropped my canvas duffel bag and launched myself face-first onto the mattress. “Holy hell! Is this memory foam? Are these goose-down pillows?!” I rolled across the massive bed, sinking into the plush duvet, practically screaming with joy. “This is absolute heaven. I’m going to sleep until I forget what my own name is!” Downstairs, the crying abruptly stopped. 2 By dinnertime, my mood had only improved. Rich people really knew how to live. A casual Tuesday dinner looked like a Thanksgiving feast. At the long mahogany table, Richard, Eleanor, and Preston were all busy peeling shrimp and cutting the prime rib for Serena, making sure her plate was perfect. I didn’t care about the optics. I grabbed the bowl of garlic mashed potatoes, scooped a mountain onto my plate, grabbed three rolls, and absolutely inhaled my food. When I set down my water glass, a long, rumbling burp slipped out of me. All three of them froze, their silverware suspended in mid-air as they stared at me in horror. I quickly slapped a hand over my mouth. “My bad. I forgot. Do people on the East Coast not do the digestion burp?” Serena, whose eyes were still a little puffy from her afternoon crying session, stared at me blankly. “Mom, Dad, and Preston have been doting on me all night. Aren’t you angry? Aren’t you jealous?” “Jealous of what?” I patted my comfortably full stomach, grinning so wide my cheeks ached. “I’m full, it’s warm in here, and the food is incredible. Why would I be mad?” I pushed my chair back. “If there are no chores to do, I’m gonna head up to bed.” The three of them nodded mechanically, too stunned to speak. I happily jogged up the stairs, threw myself onto my cloud of a bed, and fell asleep in seconds. That night, I had a vivid, terrifying dream. It was a revelation, really. It showed me that the world I was living in was the exact plot of one of those dramatic, trope-heavy romance novels. Serena was the spiteful, jealous secondary character harboring a toxic crush on the male lead. My parents, blinded by their love for her, would eventually offend the male lead and drive the Carmichael family into utter bankruptcy. Preston would develop a dark, pathological obsession with the female lead, pulling dirty tricks to ruin the male lead, only to end up rotting in federal prison. And me? After the Carmichaels lost everything, I’d be shipped right back to the dirt-poor farm in Montana. Absolutely not. I woke up in a cold sweat. I had just gotten my hands on this luxury, and nobody—not my dramatic new family, and certainly not some fictional plotline—was going to rip it away from me. 3 To protect my newfound wealth, I drafted a comprehensive rescue plan. Step one: Sever Serena’s toxic crush on the male lead, preventing her from ever triggering the female lead’s wrath. Shortly after my arrival, the family enrolled me in Serena’s elite private school, St. Jude’s Academy. On my first morning, I stepped out the front door just as Preston’s Range Rover was pulling out of the driveway. I sprinted across the gravel, cutting right in front of the hood. “Hey, hold your horses! I’m not in yet!” Preston rolled down the window, his jaw clenched. “I told you. I only have one sister.” “Don’t worry, I won’t call you my brother,” I said, looking perfectly reasonable. “Where I’m from, calling a guy ‘brother’ when you aren’t related usually means he’s either in a cult or a motorcycle gang…” “It’s fine, Preston,” Serena murmured from the passenger seat, tugging at his sleeve. “She just got here from the country. It’s natural she wants to ride with us.” And just like that, I was in the backseat. I unzipped my backpack and pulled out a foil-wrapped, greasy sausage and pepper hero I’d scored from the estate’s groundskeeper. I took a massive bite. Instantly, the heavy, pungent smell of fried onions and meat filled the leather interior. Preston slammed on the brakes, turning around to glare at me, his voice shaking. “What in God’s name are you eating?!” “Hector’s secret recipe. It’s a masterpiece.” I generously tore off a piece and held it out. “You want some? I share.” Normally, billionaire heirs didn’t eat breakfast like this. But since the kitchen staff kept conveniently “forgetting” to prepare a plate for me, I’d befriended Hector the groundskeeper. “I’m telling you, it’s incredible. You want a bite, Preston?” His face darkened like a thundercloud. “Have you no manners? Who gave you permission to use my first name?” I blinked, eyes wide. “You just told me not to call you brother!” “…From now on, I permit it.” “Awesome.” I chewed happily. “So, you want a bite of the sandwich, brother?” “EAT IT YOURSELF!” Preston rolled down all four windows to air out the car. Beside him, Serena began to dab at her eyes. “Oh my god… Preston isn’t just my brother anymore…” Preston pressed his lips into a thin line, ignoring her tears, and slammed his foot on the gas. I leaned forward and patted her shoulder. “Hey, look on the bright side. Now you have a sister, too.” Serena cried even harder. 4 When we arrived at St. Jude’s, Preston dumped us at the curb and immediately drove off to get his car detailed. I followed a red-eyed Serena into our first-period classroom. Within ten minutes, I was completely lost. This elite prep school taught its honors literature class entirely in French. I poked Serena’s arm. “Where the hell are we? Did we cross a border? Why is she speaking cursive?” “You don’t understand it?” Serena batted her eyelashes, looking the picture of innocence. “I heard you had perfect grades at your public school. How can you not understand basic conversational French?” “Honey, you gotta understand. My French teacher in Montana was the JV wrestling coach. Our curriculum was entirely silent.” I sighed, grabbing her hand. “Be a pal and translate for me?” Serena almost smiled, but then she looked down at my hand and recoiled. “Did you wash your hands after eating that greasy onion sandwich?!” “Didn’t have time, but I wiped them on a napkin…” Serena yanked her hand away, shrieking, “Harper!” The teacher, furious at the disruption, kicked us both out into the hallway. I leaned against the lockers, sighing. “She’s yelling at us in English, but she teaches in French. What is the point of that?” Serena crossed her arms, refusing to look at me. I mentally reviewed the novel’s plotline. “Hey, doesn’t Tristan have a lacrosse game today?” Serena’s head snapped toward me, her face pale. “You know about Tristan Kensington? I knew it. You did your research.” She let out a cold laugh. “Don’t tell me you think the golden boy of New York’s oldest money is going to look twice at a dirt-poor farm girl like you?” I nodded solemnly. “You never know.” After all, in the original book, the female lead was a working-class girl, and Tristan fell so madly in love with her that he destroyed our entire family. “Delusional,” Serena spat. “The game isn’t over till it’s over,” I reasoned. “Don’t be too confident.” “You are impossible to talk to.” “Hey, maybe the Kensington heir just likes a girl with calluses.” “Talking to you is like playing the harp to a cow.” “And you’re a peach,” I replied cheerfully. She looked like she was going to spontaneously combust. 5 Tristan Kensington was the sole heir to the Kensington empire, the undisputed king of St. Jude’s. The bleachers by the lacrosse field were packed with girls holding up signs for him. At some point, Serena had slipped away and changed into her pristine cheerleader uniform, blending into the crowd near the front. Every time Tristan scored, she jumped up, cheering loudly. But after a few jumps, Serena’s face suddenly drained of color. The people around her began to whisper, pointing. On the field, distracted by the commotion, Tristan missed a pass. A player from the opposing team shoulder-checked him, taunting him. Furious, Tristan ripped off his helmet and glared at the sidelines, his eyes locking onto Serena. “Who told you to come down here?” Serena was ghostly pale, forcing a trembling smile. “Tristan, I just wanted to cheer for you…” I shoved my way through the crowd. Instantly, I saw it: a bright red stain blooming on the back of Serena’s white skirt. Tristan saw it too. He stepped back, his face twisting in visceral disgust. “Gross. Get her out of here.” A hot spike of anger shot through me. I didn’t care if he was the male lead of this universe. “Do you know how to speak to human beings?” I yelled, stepping in front of Serena. “You think a girl’s period is gross? Newsflash, Kensington, if it wasn’t for this ‘gross’ biology, you wouldn’t even exist. You’d still be a floating atom.” Tristan sneered. “She’s ruining my focus.” “Your focus sucks because you play like garbage. Don’t blame gravity just because you can’t catch a ball.” I reached down, scooped up a stray lacrosse ball, and without even using a stick, chucked it across the field with my bare hand. It sailed in a perfect, aggressive arc and smashed directly into the center of the practice net. I whistled sharply, raising an eyebrow at him. “See? Just takes a little elbow grease.” Tristan’s face turned an ugly shade of puce. Serena was staring at me, dumbfounded. I stripped off my uniform jacket, tied it tightly around her waist, and scooped her up bridal style. I didn’t wait for a reaction; I just carried her straight off the field, heading for the nurse’s office. The novel mentioned that Serena suffered from debilitating cramps. Once we got to the clinic, I poured her a cup of hot water and handed her a painkiller from the nurse. “Take this and go to sleep.” Serena silently swallowed the pill and pulled the thin blanket up to her chin. I waved. “Rest up. I gotta go back to class.” Just as I reached the door, Serena’s voice stopped me. “Harper.” I popped my head back in. “What’s up? Need more water?” She looked at me, a storm of complicated emotions in her eyes, and slowly shook her head. 6 When school let out, Preston was waiting in the Range Rover. As I walked up, my heart stopped. I saw him staring down at a tangerine in his hand, his eyes uncharacteristically soft and distant. Oh, no. In the plot, the female lead got lost on campus, stopped Preston’s car for directions, and gave him a tangerine as thanks. That piece of fruit was the catalyst. He became pathologically obsessed with her, treating that tangerine like a holy relic until the day he died. I immediately slapped a hand over my mouth, leaning heavily against the car door, groaning. “Brother… I feel so carsick. I think I’m gonna throw up. I just need something tart to settle my stomach…” Preston, a massive germaphobe, looked at me in sheer terror, terrified I was going to vomit on his leather seats. Without a second thought, he shoved the tangerine into my hands. “Eat this! Hurry!” I didn’t hesitate. I peeled it in one motion and shoved the female lead’s token of destiny into my mouth, swallowing it in three aggressive bites. Delicious. But to make sure he didn’t have any idle time to sit around pining over whoever gave it to him, I knocked on his bedroom door later that night, clutching my French textbook. “Brother, the school teaches entirely in French and I am dying. Tutor me?” Preston looked supremely annoyed, but he let me in. His bedroom was freezing and sterile, like a model home in a modern art museum. I sat at his desk, opened the book, and started reading aloud. “Mercy bow-coop.” “A-ban-don-er.” Preston’s face turned the color of ash. The fingers gripping the edge of his desk trembled. “Who taught you to pronounce it like that?” “Coach Miller. He said phonetic spelling builds character.” I scratched my head sheepishly. “Brother, do you think I just lack the gene for romance languages?” Preston took a deep, shuddering breath. His Type-A perfectionism took over. For the next three hours, he forced me to drill phonetics, aggressively correcting my tongue placement. By the time I stood up to leave, his eyes were glazed over in exhaustion. I tested the waters. “Hey, brother. Do you remember that tangerine from today?” “It’s a mandarine! Watch your nasal vowels!” he roared. I threw up a peace sign. “Got it! Bon sewer, brother!” I sprinted to the door and glanced back. Preston was standing in the middle of his room, teeth gritted. “It’s Bonsoir! Harper, get back here and repeat it ten times!” 7 The next morning, there was finally a breakfast plate set for me at the dining table. I had just taken a bite of my smoked salmon bagel when Eleanor asked, her tone dripping with passive-aggression, “Is it to your liking? Or do you prefer the groundskeeper’s greasy sandwiches?” “It’s okay. A little dry compared to Hector’s, to be honest.” I took a sip of orange juice. “Oh, Mom, you know about Hector’s sandwiches? Next time I’ll ask him to make an extra one for you. You’ll love it.” Eleanor dropped her silver spoon, the clatter echoing in the quiet room. “You call the gardener by his first name and treat him like family, but you talk to me as if we’re strangers at a diner. Do you think I’m on the same level as the hired help?” “No, of course not. You’re my biological mother.” I looked at her with wide, innocent eyes. “But didn’t you tell me on my first day to keep my distance so Serena wouldn’t feel threatened?” She choked on her words, and immediately, tears welled in her eyes. Beside her, Serena’s eyes grew shiny too. “Harper, I didn’t mean for you to feel…” One sentence, and I had silenced them both. Just then, Preston trudged down the stairs. He had massive, purple bags under his eyes. He walked over to me and dropped a three-inch-thick binder onto the table with a heavy thud. “You have two weeks to memorize these conjugations. I will be testing you personally.” I opened it. It was hundreds of pages of French grammar basics, meticulously annotated in his sharp handwriting. I stared at him in awe. “Brother, did you sleep at all last night?” He let out a dark, hollow laugh. “After hearing your accent, who could possibly sleep?” 8 That weekend, the Carmichaels hosted a lavish gala. Tristan Kensington was on the guest list. Eleanor pulled me aside early. “You embarrassed the Kensington boy at school. Tonight, I expect you to seek him out and formally apologize.” “Understood, Mom,” I said with a nod. Per her strict instructions, I had dropped the casual country talk. Serena walked up and linked her arm through mine. “Harper, you don’t have a gown yet, do you? It’s too late to get one tailored. Come to my room and pick one of mine.” She smiled sweetly. “I have a whole closet full of them.” I felt a pang of genuine warmth. “Serena, that’s actually really nice of you.” How could a sister this sweet be the villain? I wondered. Serena looked at me, her expression flickering with something unreadable, but she stayed quiet. In her massive walk-in closet, I bypassed the glittering ballgowns and picked the simplest, most understated black dress. “I’ll take this one. I’ll run it through the wash before I give it back.” Serena fell silent for a moment. “Harper, couture cannot be put in a washing machine.” “Really? Learn something new every day.” I realized the logistics were too complicated. “Never mind, I’ll just wear something of mine.” Serena’s jaw tightened. She looked like she was grinding her teeth. “It’s fine. Keep the dress. I’m gifting it to you.” I suddenly remembered the plot. At tonight’s gala, Serena was supposed to pull a stunt to humiliate the female lead, only for Tristan to publicly destroy her for it. And tonight was the night Preston, triggered by the memory of the tangerine, would fully spiral into his obsession with the female lead. Looking at Serena now, I noticed she seemed deeply distracted. As we walked out of her room and approached the top of the grand marble staircase, she suddenly unhooked her arm from mine. With a deliberate, dramatic motion, she threw her weight backward, falling toward the steep drop. “Harper, why would you push me—!” 9 In that fraction of a second, the entire gala fell dead silent. Every eye in the grand foyer snapped up to the staircase. Serena was leaning backward, her face a mask of beautiful, tragic despair, perfectly poised to tumble down twenty marble steps and crack her skull open. According to the original plot, this fall would give Serena a mild concussion. I would be blamed, branded a monster by New York society, and exiled from the family. But I had spent my entire life wrestling runaway hogs and fixing heavy machinery in the mud. My reflexes were not normal. I dropped my center of gravity, lunged forward, and grabbed Serena by the ankle. “Get back up here!” The momentum was fierce. We both slid down two steps. But my footing held. With one arm, I hoisted her entirely off the ground, suspending her upside down in mid-air. Serena’s tragic, beautiful expression instantly vanished. She was dangling by one leg, her layers of expensive tulle and silk falling downward, completely enveloping her head like a collapsed parachute. “Ahhhh—!!!” Her muffled shriek echoed through the cavernous foyer. I calmly adjusted my grip, hauled her upright like I was lifting a sack of feed, and casually smoothed down her skirt. At the bottom of the stairs, the elite guests stood with their jaws unhinged. Tristan, who had just rushed to the foot of the stairs with his arms outstretched to catch her, froze mid-lunge, looking utterly ridiculous.

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1 Stewart swore a woman’s love was measured by how fast she texted back. At dinner, his girl wired him a hundred bucks within three seconds. I sat there until the plates were cleared for Annie’s brief “In a meeting.” In a downpour, he texted about forgetting his umbrella and a sedan arrived ten minutes later. I stood in the freezing rain for an hour before she told me to call an Uber. He’d clap my shoulder, shaking his head. “Someone could steal your girl right under your nose.” I always defended her. “She’s just swamped with work.” I thought I had my best bro covering my back. That illusion shattered at my bachelor party. Our drinks were spiked and we were being dragged toward a VIP suite. Stewart held up his phone, eyes frantic. “If she doesn’t show tonight, you call off the wedding. Deal?” I fired off an SOS to Annie. Ten minutes later, the door slammed open. She ran right past me and dropped to her knees, pulling Stewart into a tight embrace. “I got you, baby. I’m so sorry I’m late.” I froze in the shadows as she helped my best friend out the door. The mystery girl who’d been at his beck and call for five years was my fiancée, Annie. … A heavy hand clamped over my mouth, suffocating my screams. It wasn’t until the nightmare was over that Annie finally got Stewart settled into the empty private booth next door. Muffled pants and soft moans drifted through the crack of their unlatched door. Dragging my battered, exhausted body into the hallway, I stopped dead in my tracks. A platinum credit card slid across the floor, stopping at my bruised feet. From the dark booth, Annie’s voice dripped with a sultry heat I rarely heard. “Hey, waiter. Bring a box of ultra-thins in here. And make it quick.” Numbness washed over me. I slowly bent down, picked up the card, and limped my way to the bar to buy the condoms. I pushed the door open and dropped the small box onto the glass table. “Here is what you asked for.” The two figures tangled on the leather sofa went completely rigid. The moment Annie’s eyes adjusted to the dim light and recognized my face, the heavy lust in her gaze fractured into pure panic. “Roger… What are you doing here?” “I texted you.” My voice sounded dead, completely devoid of life, as my eyes traced the messy tangle of their half-dressed bodies. Annie finally snapped out of her daze. She shoved Stewart away and scrambled to pull her blouse up, her hands shaking violently. Taking advantage of the chaos, I snatched her phone from her coat pocket and typed in my birthday. The screen unlocked. The first thing I saw was Stewart’s chat, pinned to the very top. Right below it was my profile picture, muted, with a little gray bell crossed out. Ninety-nine unread messages glared back at me, mocking my devotion. She wasn’t too busy to reply. She just couldn’t be bothered to look. Staring at the undeniable proof of her favoritism, I swallowed the bitter lump of grievances that had been building in my throat for years. Annie grabbed my wrist. Her voice trembled with a rare, desperate fear. “Roger, please. I can explain.” I did not say a word. I just stared unblinking at her collarbone. Annie was a notorious germaphobe. In the bedroom, she was always cold, calculated, and strictly in control. She absolutely forbade me from leaving any marks on her skin. Once, I accidentally left a faint bruise on her neck, and she locked me out of her apartment for three months. Yet right now, her chest and neck were painted with a chaotic mess of dark, angry hickeys. Seeing my unnatural silence, Annie’s panic deepened. She rambled, desperate to justify it. “Roger, someone slipped Stewart a drug. This was just an accident. It means nothing.” Stewart took his time sitting up. He casually draped his own dress shirt over Annie’s shoulders right in front of me, wrapping an arm around her waist. He looked at me and smirked. “Well, since you’ve seen it all, there’s no point pretending anymore.” He tilted his head. “Let’s reintroduce ourselves. Roger, meet Annie. My girlfriend.” Annie snapped at him, her voice cracking. “Shut your mouth!” Stewart ignored her. He picked up the box of condoms I brought, glanced at it, and let out a sharp, mocking laugh. “Man, she really hasn’t slept with you much, has she? You bought a size way too small. Trying to strangle me to death?” “Stewart, I told you to shut up!” Annie’s eyes were bloodshot. She slammed her hand over his mouth. Stewart let out a low chuckle, his fingers tracing the back of her hand. “Don’t be so mean, babe. You sounded a lot sweeter when you were gripping my hair five minutes ago.” “Get out!” Annie lost it, shoving him violently out the door. She spun around and grabbed both of my hands. “Roger, you have to believe me. I just lost my mind for a second, it was the drugs…” Her words died in her throat. The neon light from the hallway spilled over me, finally illuminating the torn fabric and the dried blood staining my clothes. Annie’s pupils shrank. Raw horror flooded her eyes. “Roger, my god. Why are you bleeding? What happened?” I flinched away from her touch. My tone was utterly hollow. “I slipped and fell.” “Sit right here. Do not move. I am going to find a first aid kit.” Tears welled in her eyes as she carefully guided me to the sofa before sprinting out of the room. I don’t know how much time passed. The adrenaline faded, and the physical agony of the assault finally caught up to me, hitting in brutal waves. When she still hadn’t returned, I curled up on the leather cushions, feverish and disoriented. My trembling fingers accidentally hit redial on Annie’s number. She picked up on the first ring. Her voice floated through the speaker, soft, gentle, and dripping with affection. But it wasn’t meant for me. “I was too excited just now. I scratched you. Be a good boy and sit still, let me put this ointment on you.” Stewart’s deep, lazy voice responded. “Why are you bothering with me? Your fiancé is still waiting for you in that room.” Annie let out a dismissive little scoff. “Roger has a good temper. Waiting is what he does best. He’s not exactly a spoiled brat like you.” Bile rose in my throat. I hit the end button so hard my thumb ached. The screen faded to black. Looking at the disgusting mess around me, I forced a smile that felt worse than crying. She was right. I was excellent at waiting for her. But a rotten love could never be salvaged. I was done waiting for an echo that would never come. I picked up my phone, dialed three numbers, and spoke with terrifying calm. “Hello, 911? I need to report an assault.” The harsh fluorescent lights of the police precinct beat down on me, chilling me to the bone. The detective tapped his pen against the metal desk. “This is a severe case, son. Where is your family? You need someone here.” I opened my mouth, about to tell him I didn’t have any family left. Before I could speak, the precinct doors swung open. Stewart strolled in, his leather shoes clicking sharply against the tile. “I’m his best friend. I was at the scene too. You can ask me anything you need to know.” The detective looked at my bruised, bloodied state, then glanced at Stewart’s pristine, unwrinkled clothes. “If you were at the scene, how did you walk away without a scratch?” Stewart looked at me, a cryptic, cruel smile playing on his lips. “Because my girlfriend got there right on time and pulled me out.” The precinct fell dead silent for a second. When the detective looked back at me, his eyes were heavy with a sickening amount of pity. The draft in the lobby was freezing. Stewart took off his expensive jacket and draped it over my shivering shoulders, playing the role of the perfect, caring best friend as he ran around signing paperwork for me. A passing female officer handed me a paper cup of hot water, smiling softly. “You’ve got a really good friend there.” I gripped the paper cup, watching Stewart through the rising steam. I remembered when we were in college. I caught a terrible flu, and he stayed awake for two days straight, running back and forth to the pharmacy just to keep my fever down. When things were at their worst and my tuition wiped out my food budget, he would silently slide half his lunch onto my plate every single day. We had sworn an oath to be each other’s anchor for life. How did we end up in this twisted, rotten hell? Stewart finished the paperwork and walked back, naturally reaching out to adjust the jacket slipping off my shoulders. I stared dead into his eyes. My voice came out like gravel. “Why did you do it?” His hands paused. A flicker of genuine disappointment crossed his face, like a father scolding a foolish son. “Because you love her too much, Roger. You love her so much you’ve lost your damn mind.” He leaned in closer. “I warned you years ago. A woman like Annie, surrounded by rich guys and dripping with ambition, is way out of your league. You’re too pure for her. You could never control her.” “As your best friend, you think I was just going to watch you walk into a fire? I just wanted to test her for you. How was I supposed to know she’d open her legs the second I gave her a little attention?” Stewart always said Annie had wandering eyes. Annie always said Stewart was toxic and told me to keep my distance. Every time they were in the same room, the tension was unbearable. And like an absolute idiot, I spent years playing the peacemaker, begging Annie to be nice to him, begging Stewart to accept the love of my life. Stewart clearly remembered those days too. He couldn’t hold back a laugh. “Remember the day you introduced us at that dinner? I slid my foot under the table and brushed it against her leg. You know what happened? She reacted instantly.” “That same night, after she dropped you off at home, she drove straight to my condo. You never told me your fiancée was so talented in bed, man.” That night had been my birthday. My stomach violently heaved. Stewart watched my face drain of color and continued, his voice painfully casual. “Oh, and you know why it always took her hours to text you back? It’s because she was busy riding me. Blame her for being so thirsty. If she wasn’t, maybe you would’ve gotten a text back sooner.” “Stop talking.” I clamped my hands over my ears, my whole body shaking uncontrollably. It all made sense now. The way Annie’s complaints about him morphed from “Your friend is so annoying” to “Is Stewart coming out with us tonight?” The times I caught the faint, lingering scent of his signature cologne on her clothes. The memories crashed into me like a tidal wave. Every little clue, every red flag I had blindly ignored, was now screaming in my face, mocking my stupidity. Right on cue, Annie’s name lit up my phone screen. Stewart leaned into my ear, his breath hot against my skin. “Wanna bet? Even if you tell her right now that you were assaulted, all I have to do is send her one text, and she will hang up on you and come running to me. Deal?” Silence hung heavy in the air. Clinging to the very last shred of hope I had left in this world, I swiped to answer. “Annie, I was assaul—” Before I could finish the word, Stewart tapped his screen, sending a single, solitary period to her chat. Ding. The notification echoed clearly through my speaker. The next second, the line went dead. She hung up on me without a moment of hesitation. The dial tone pierced through my chest like a jagged knife. Then, Stewart’s phone rang. He flashed me a triumphant, wicked grin, slowly swiping to answer and putting it on speaker. Annie’s voice flooded the quiet lobby, vibrating with absolute ecstasy. “Stewart… I’m pregnant.” Thirty minutes later, Annie practically sprinted into the precinct, throwing herself into Stewart’s arms. Her face was flushed with overwhelming, uncontainable joy. It took her a solid minute to realize I was sitting right there. A flash of guilt crossed her face, and she nervously walked over to grab my hand. “Roger… you heard it too. I’m having Stewart’s baby.” She swallowed hard. “He is the father of my child. Under those circumstances at the club, how could you expect me not to save him first?” Just as the words left her mouth, two officers walked past us, chatting in low voices. “Did you hear about the guy from the downtown club? Drugged and jumped by a group of predators in the VIP room. Detectives just brought him in…” Annie’s face drained of color. She instinctively pulled Stewart closer to her, shooting me a defensive glare. “Do you hear that? If I hadn’t gotten there in time, Stewart would have been the one going through that hell! You’re a man, Roger. You should be able to understand why I had to make that choice.” Watching her guard him like he was made of glass, a cold, hollow laugh clawed its way up my throat. I looked at her with dead eyes, my voice barely a whisper. “Annie. What if I told you that the guy who got dragged into that room… was me?” The air in the precinct seemed to freeze. Annie stared at me for a split second before her brow furrowed into a deep, irritated scowl. “Enough, Roger!” She let out a frustrated breath. “Look, I know my pregnancy is a hard pill for you to swallow. But making up a sickening lie like that just to get back at me? You’re being completely irrational!” Seeing her bare her teeth at me to defend another man broke whatever was left of my spirit. I couldn’t breathe. I spun around and bolted out the double doors into the freezing night. My mind was a chaotic storm of memories. My parents died when I was young. Stewart had been the only family I had left in this world. Back in college, when a group of thugs cornered me in an alley, Stewart was the one who grabbed a brick and stood in front of me, taking a heavy blow to the head without taking a single step back. I had held his bleeding body that night, crying until I couldn’t breathe, while he just laughed and patted my cheek. “Nobody touches my brother unless they walk over my dead body.” But today, the man who once offered his life for mine was the exact same man who knocked up my fiancée. A fierce gust of wind hit my face. Before I even realized what I was doing, I had wandered to the very edge of an eight-story parking garage roof. “Roger!” Stewart’s panicked voice cracked through the wind. He rushed forward and yanked me back from the ledge, his eyes red and frantic. “Are you insane?! Throwing your life away over a piece of trash woman who can’t keep her legs shut?” I just looked at him. My chest felt like it was caving in. I couldn’t form a single word. Stewart pulled out a cigarette, his hands shaking as he lit it. He took a massive drag, then locked eyes with me, his tone dead serious. “Listen to me. If you don’t want this baby, I’ll make Annie get rid of it. I’ll make sure she never has another kid with me ever again.” He grabbed my shoulders. “I promised you years ago. No one gets to make you suffer. Not even me.” When I didn’t respond, Stewart tossed the cigarette away. Without a moment of hesitation, he bent down, picked up a rusted steel pipe from the construction debris, and smashed it brutally against his own left arm. A sickening crack echoed through the night. Stewart’s face went chalk-white as he collapsed straight to his knees. “Stewart!” The heavy roof access door flew open. Annie rushed out, her eyes immediately locking onto Stewart kneeling in agony, and the bloody steel pipe resting near my boots. Her eyes turned murderous. She lunged at me, delivering a brutal, full-force kick to my side. “How dare you touch him, Roger!” I was already weak. The impact sent me flying backward, slamming hard against the concrete. A jagged piece of exposed rebar tore straight through the back of my right calf. She didn’t ask a single question. She didn’t hesitate. She instantly assumed I was the monster and didn’t care if she killed me in the process. The pain was so blinding that I could taste iron in my mouth. Using every last drop of energy I had, I looked up at her. “The wedding is off, Annie.” I gasped for air. “We’re done.” Annie was already kneeling, carefully pulling Stewart’s head into her lap. She shot me a look of pure venom. “Stop using a breakup to manipulate me, Roger. I don’t have time for your childish tantrums!” “This time… I mean it…” Before I could finish, Stewart’s eyes rolled back, and he passed out from the pain. Annie panicked, hauling him over her shoulder and dragging him toward the stairwell, rushing like her life depended on it. She never looked back at me. Not once. I lay curled on the frozen concrete like a dying animal, a terrifying puddle of dark red pooling beneath my leg. I stared blankly at the sterile white ceiling of the hospital room. Annie sat by my bed, her face painted with heavy guilt as she gripped my freezing hand. “Roger… your leg. The doctors said there’s a surgery. We will fix this, I promise.” My eyes drifted past her to Stewart, who was standing by the window with red, teary eyes. I looked back at her. My voice was as light as ash. “Annie. This is the second time this leg has been ruined.” Annie froze completely. Three years ago, during a massive blizzard, Stewart forced me to play his instant reply game for the first time to test her. Ten minutes later, a Maybach pulled up to the curb and took Stewart home. I was left standing in that blizzard. I called Annie thirty times. Not a single one went through. I eventually collapsed in the negative-degree weather and lay in the snowbank all night. When I finally woke up, my right leg was so severely frostbitten they almost amputated it. And now, three years later, Annie had personally crippled that same leg to protect my best friend. The memory of that blizzard clearly hit them both. A crushing wave of remorse visibly washed over their faces. Stewart began hitting himself in the head, acting like a man possessed by grief. “It’s my fault, Roger! It’s all my fault! I’ll pay you back with my life, I swear to God I’ll make it right!” Annie’s face dropped. She immediately rushed over, wrapping her arms around him to stop his hands, kissing his tears away. “Stop it, baby. It’s not your fault, please stop.” Watching this tragic soap opera play out in front of me, I felt absolutely nothing. The well of my emotions had completely dried up. I reached down, ripped the IV needle out of the back of my hand, and walked out of the room. When I got back to our apartment, I quietly started packing a duffel bag. I walked into the walk-in closet and pulled out a garment bag from the very back. Inside was a vintage-inspired, hand-tailored tuxedo I had spent countless sleepless nights designing and stitching together for our big day. I took it out, ready to throw it in the dumpster. The front door clicked open. Annie walked in. When she saw the tuxedo resting on the bed, the guilt in her eyes deepened into a desperate panic. “Roger, look. I know you’re terrified that me having Stewart’s baby will push you out of the picture.” She stepped closer. “I swear to you, my husband will always be you. I don’t care whose blood runs in the baby’s veins. You will be the only father it ever knows.” She reached out to hug me. I slightly shifted my shoulder, letting her grasp at empty air. Her hands hovered awkwardly before slowly falling to her sides. She took a deep breath, forcing a patient, coaxing tone, like she was humoring a stubborn child. “Okay, look. I promise you, we are getting married tomorrow exactly as planned. And the second the reception ends, I will fly you straight to Norway to see the Northern Lights. Just like you always wanted. Can you please stop being mad now?” The wedding. The Northern Lights. These were the promises I used to pray for in my sleep. But hearing them now, my heart didn’t skip a single beat. My phone buzzed on the nightstand. An automated text from the District Attorney’s office. [Mr. Gallagher, the three suspects in your felony assault case have been apprehended. The preliminary hearing is scheduled for 10:00 AM tomorrow at the Superior Courthouse. Please ensure your attendance.] [During interrogation, suspects indicated they may have been directed by a third party.] Before I could even process the text, a custom ringtone blared through the room. Annie snatched her phone instantly. She grabbed her coat and practically ran toward the door. “Stewart isn’t feeling well, his arm is throbbing. I have to get him to the clinic.” She paused in the doorway. “Get some sleep tonight. I’ll send the driver to pick you up bright and early for the ceremony tomorrow.” The door slammed shut. My words—”My court hearing is tomorrow morning”—died silently in my throat. I let out a dry, exhausted chuckle. I gathered the legal files into a manila folder and set them neatly on the entryway console table. … The next morning, a massive convoy of luxury wedding cars lined up outside my house. Annie stepped out, looking radiant in her designer bridal gown. She smiled warmly and punched my birthday into the smart lock. Passcode Incorrect. Her smile faltered. A sudden, irrational chill crawled up her spine. Stewart stood behind her, chuckling and hyping up the crowd of groomsmen. “Looks like the groom changed the passcode to test our dedication! You really think marrying our boy Roger is gonna be that easy?” Annie forced down the rising panic in her chest. She stepped back and gestured for the security team to force the door open. The moment she stepped inside, her eyes locked onto the entryway console. Her blood ran cold. Heavy footsteps sounded behind them. Two uniformed police officers walked up the driveway, looking directly at Stewart. “Mr. Stewart? You need to come with us.”

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1 In the fifth year of my marriage to Harrison, I told his parents I wanted a divorce. Eleanor, my mother-in-law, went pale, her fine porcelain teacup trembling against its saucer. “Darling, Harrison carries the weight of the entire firm on his shoulders right now. You’re exhausted. You’re letting the pressure get the better of you.” Arthur, Harrison’s father, leaned back against the deep mahogany armchair, his tone smooth, practiced, patriarchal. “A marriage isn’t a straight line, Nora. It requires endurance. You weather the rough seasons, you give each other grace.” I looked at the two of them—seated under the gilded chandelier of their lakefront home, sheltered by generational wealth and the comforting fiction that their only son was a paragon of virtue. A sudden, quiet laugh broke from my throat. It tasted like ash. “Let’s play a game,” I said, leaning over the low coffee table. Arthur frowned slightly. “A game?” “I’m going to call him right now,” I said, laying my phone face-up between our saucers. “I’ll ask him to wire me fifteen hundred dollars. If he sends it, we forget this conversation ever happened. I will stay, I will try, and I won’t utter the word divorce again.” Arthur exchanged an amused, slightly patronizing look with his wife, then nodded. “Done.” To him, fifteen hundred dollars was pocket change—a rounding error on Harrison’s corporate card. The request seemed childish to them, an insecure young wife testing her husband’s devotion over petty cash. I took a slow breath, looking into their calm, expectant faces. “On one condition. Whatever happens, whatever you hear, do not make a sound.” They both gave slight, solemn nods. I tapped the screen, dialed Harrison’s direct line, and switched on the speakerphone. The ringtone chimed three times before the line clicked open. “Yeah? Nora, what is it?” Harrison’s voice was crisp, background noise humming with the low chatter of a boutique restaurant or an upscale lounge. I kept my voice completely neutral. “I need to talk to you.” A pause lingered on the line. When Harrison spoke again, his voice dropped an octave, tightened with an instinctive, ugly vigilance. “Are you alone? Are my parents there?” “No,” I lied smoothly. “Just me.” The shift in his demeanor was instantaneous, like grease catching fire. The guarded chill evaporated into raw, venomous impatience. “Then make it fast. I’m busy.” Arthur’s relaxed posture vanished. He sat bolt upright, his eyebrows knitting together. Eleanor stared at the glowing rectangle on the table as if it were a foreign, venomous insect. In thirty-two years, they had never once heard their son speak with that kind of contempt. “I need you to send me fifteen hundred dollars,” I said evenly. “What the hell do you need that kind of money for—” Before he could finish his reflexive interrogation, another voice slipped through the receiver. Young, bright, dripping with performative innocence: “Harrison, sweetie, if she’s running low, why doesn’t she just get a job? You work so hard to carry everything already.” Mackenzie. The bright-eyed college junior from the disadvantaged-youth initiative Harrison had supposedly taken under his wing as an act of noble corporate charity. Shatter. The crystal glass slipped from Eleanor’s hand, fracturing across the hardwood floor into a dozen bright, jagged shards. Harrison’s snarl exploded through the tiny speaker. “What the hell was that? Are you smashing plates again just to get my attention? God, you are pathetic. Do you ever stop?” Eleanor gasped, instinctively bending to clean up the mess, but Arthur’s hand shot out, gripping her wrist like a vice. His face had gone from confusion to a deep, suffused purple, his chest heaving behind his tailored sweater. I didn’t blink. I kept my eyes on the carpet and spoke into the phone. “Your parents are coming over for Christmas Eve dinner in an hour. Send me the money so I can finish setting things up.” “Here we go again,” he sneered. “A couple hundred bucks from the grocery account isn’t enough? What are you buying, gold-leaf napkins?” “Not enough,” I said, my tone flat, immovable. “Today, it has to be fifteen hundred.” “Have you completely lost your mind? Who the hell do you think you are? You live under my roof, you eat my food, you haven’t contributed a single dime in five years, and you can’t even give this family a child. You’re completely useless!” A suffocating, dead silence dropped over the living room. Arthur’s knuckles went white where he gripped his wife’s hand. Eleanor’s lips were trembling violently, both hands flying to her mouth to smother a sob. And me? The fragile, brittle veneer of composure I had worn for months finally cracked down the center. A hot, silent tear spilled over my lashes, dropping straight onto the illuminated screen. Even when you believe your heart is already dead, the blunt force of the cruelty can still break through the numbness. I swallowed past the sharp ache in my throat and asked, my voice barely above a whisper: “Harrison… do you even remember the night we met?” 2 “Why would anyone care about that ancient history?” Mackenzie’s voice chimed in again, smug and syrupy, dripping with the petty triumph of a mistress who believed she held all the cards. “Besides, my first time was with Harrison. He already promised he’s going to marry me anyway.” Arthur surged out of his chair, a raw groan tearing from Eleanor’s throat. I looked up with burning, bloodshot eyes, lifting a hand to shake my head at them with what little strength I had left. Don’t. Stay quiet. Let me finish. I dragged my sleeve across my wet cheeks. Beside me, Eleanor’s trembling fingers pulled a tissue from her purse, dabbing at my jaw with a touch so impossibly gentle it nearly undid me completely. Five years ago, on a sub-zero December night, I was walking home after finishing an exhausting double shift at the diner near the university campus. Harrison’s sedan was pulled over on the icy shoulder, hazard lights blinking uselessly into the swirling snow, hood propped open. He was pacing in the sleet, frantic, muttering that he had an acquisition contract that had to be hand-delivered across town within thirty minutes. My late father had run an auto-body shop; I grew up with grease under my fingernails. I walked over, diagnosed the loose alternator belt, tightened it with a wrench from his trunk kit, and got the engine roaring again. He took my number right there on the frozen asphalt, typing my name into his contacts as Snow Angel Mechanic. A few hours later, he called. His voice had been giddy, breathless, laced with nervous adoration. “I made the meeting. We closed the deal… Can I take you out? Please?” At that tiny Italian bistro, I had been so intimidated by his linen shirts and prep-school polish that I barely dared look up from my bread plate. But he had been endlessly gentle, drawing me out, laughing at my dry jokes, never letting a single awkward silence settle. When he walked me to my apartment door in the freezing wind, he unwound his soft cashmere scarf and wrapped it around my neck, tucking my hair behind my ear. The calls became daily. Then came the golden afternoon in the park, when he showed up with an armful of white daisies, his hands shaking so hard he could barely hold the stems. “I want to wake up next to you for every ordinary, boring day for the rest of my life. Will you marry me, Nora?” When he brought me home to meet Arthur and Eleanor, I had been terrified, clutching my purse, confessing in a small voice that I had grown up in foster care, that I had no family to bring to the table. Harrison had interlaced his fingers with mine, looked his wealthy, traditional parents straight in the eye, and swore: “I will spend my whole life cherishing her. Our family is her family now.” In that moment, I truly believed the cold, wandering part of my life was over. I thought I had finally come home. “Oh, wrap it up, Nora!” Harrison snapped through the phone, pure irritation bleeding into the line. “What is this, a soap opera monologue? Nobody cares about some college-era nostalgia. It’s over. It’s dead!” Mackenzie let out an airy, derisive giggle in the background. My tears dried up. The well was empty. Eleanor sat beside me, clutching a fistful of soaked tissues, her chest hitching silently. “Yeah,” I said, staring up at the plaster crown molding above, as if I could still see the snow falling through the headlights from five years ago. “It’s over. I was foolish enough to believe we’d stay that way.” My voice dropped into a steady, flat cadence. “Then came our second year. When I didn’t get pregnant right away, you decided the defect had to be mine. Soon after that, you started sponsoring your ‘underprivileged students.’ You stopped coming home for dinner. Then you stopped coming home at all.” Across the table, Arthur and Eleanor froze, the color draining from their faces until they looked like marble statues. For the first time, the full timeline slammed into them: this wasn’t a sudden rough patch. This was a slow, deliberate erosion that had been rotting their son from the inside out for years. 3 A bitter little smile pulled at the corner of my mouth. “Do you know, Harrison, the exact moment I realized we were never going to make it? It wasn’t a scream. It was something tiny.” On the other end of the line, Harrison’s patience was fraying thin. I could hear the faint, rhythmic tap of his fingernails against the table. Before he could hang up, I spoke with total clarity. “Let me finish what I have to say, Harrison. And the moment I hang up this phone, I will sign whatever papers you put in front of me. We’ll be done.” The tapping stopped. The prospect of an easy, unresisted exit appealed to him. “Fine. Go on.” “It was our third anniversary,” I said quietly. “I made beef bourguignon. I set the table with the good silver. I waited from six in the evening until one in the morning, reheating the pot three separate times. When you finally turned the key in the lock, you reeked of bourbon.” He had seen me sitting there in the dark, and his face hadn’t softened with guilt; his brow had twisted into an ugly scowl. “You looked at me like I was an intruder,” I continued. “You barked, ‘What are you doing sitting in the dark like a ghost?’ I told you it was our anniversary. You didn’t apologize. You didn’t even flinch. You just rolled your eyes and said, ‘Jesus, Nora, you stayed up until one in the morning for that? Are you out of your mind?’” I paused, remembering the heavy thud of his Italian leather briefcase dropping onto the floor. “You took off your coat, tossed it onto the armchair, and didn’t even notice that the silk collar had folded back. There was a bright, fresh smear of magenta lipstick on the crisp white fabric of your dress shirt. And do you remember what you said to me right after?” I didn’t wait for his answer. “You said: ‘I work seventy hours a week, I don’t have time for this hallmark garbage. Besides, it was Mackenzie’s twenty-first birthday tonight. The kids from the foundation dragged me out to celebrate and wouldn’t let me leave. My head is splitting, so do me a favor and stop suffocating me.’” Beside me, Eleanor couldn’t hold it back anymore; a choked, broken sob slipped through her fingers. Through the speaker, there was only Mackenzie’s bored, theatrical sigh, and Harrison murmuring softly to her, “Hold on a second, babe, she’s almost done.”

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1 I suffer from severe social phobia. Yet on our wedding day, my fiancé Bill was busy washing his female friend Roxie’s underwear. Standing near the crowded venue, heart hammering, I called him, begging him to hurry. His voice was irritated. “Roxie’s always careless. I’ve washed her laundry since we were kids. It takes five minutes, Lynda. Can’t you just wait? Do you really think nobody else would ever marry you?” I choked back tears. “Today is our wedding. Can’t you prioritize me once?” Roxie cut in, fake-sweet. “Oh, come on, Lynda. Don’t be dramatic. This is the last time. Once you’re hitched, I won’t bother him. Stop making things hard.” The line went dead. I called Bill’s mother, Aunt Eleanor, abroad. “He’s still doing her laundry. Could you talk to him? The ceremony’s about to start.” She snorted. “What’s the big deal? He gave her baths as a kid. They grew up together. Just wait.” Dizzy, panic clawing my chest, my brother Marcus pulled me into a firm embrace. “Lynda,” he whispered, rubbing my back. “What if Gary marries you instead? If Bill loves playing maid so much, I’ll get you a man who knows how to treat his bride.” I stared in shock. Gary, Bill’s older cousin, the man who’d raised him, whose gentle smile melted any heart. He was the only person besides Bill who didn’t trigger my phobia. Marcus saw my dazed nod and pulled out his phone. “Gary. I’m giving you the chance to marry my sister. Get here right now.” … The wedding went on as scheduled. Gary held my hand throughout the ceremony, his firm grip grounding my frayed nerves. Bill’s parents accepted the sudden turn of events without batting an eye, even offering us their warmest blessings. As soon as the ceremony ended, I noticed dozens of missed calls from Bill on my phone. I dialed his number back. I wanted to tell him not to bother coming. The moment the call connected, he barked into the receiver before I could speak. “I called you a million times and you ignored me! Now you finally remember I exist?” “Realized nobody else wants you, didn’t you? You couldn’t even give me five minutes.” “Roxie and I were already driving over, but you had to throw a tantrum over a few minutes.” “Fine. Cool off on your own. The wedding is postponed.” I was already sitting in the backseat of the bridal car, hot tears spilling onto my dress. Gary reached over and gently patted my head, soothing me the way one comforts a fragile child. Under his quiet reassurance, Bill’s harsh words lost their sting. Our motorcade continued toward the family estate. Halfway there, a red convertible sped up beside us. Bill was at the wheel, with Roxie lounging in the passenger seat. Recognizing Gary’s custom car at the lead, Bill executed a flashy maneuver and cut us off. He stepped out, slouched against our car door, and tapped on the window with a smirk. It was as if he was saying, Hey big brother, what are you up to? How could you get married without telling me? He grinned lazily, making it clear he wouldn’t leave until we acknowledged him. I sat in the back, trembling under my veil. Gary turned around from the front passenger seat, his eyes soft and reassuring. “Don’t be scared. I’ll handle him.” I nodded. Gary rolled down the window, his expression cold as ice. “What are you doing, Bill?” “Come on, Gary, that’s not fair,” Bill laughed. “How could you hide your wedding from your own brother?” Roxie squeezed herself into view, giggling. “Yeah, Gary! We just wanted to share the joy.” She thrust her hand through the window, poking her tongue out playfully. “Where’s our toll money? Give us a wedding blessing envelope!” Gary frowned. Bill chuckled and chimed in. “It’s tradition to demand toll money when blocking the wedding car, brother. Giving it ensures a happy marriage.” Gary patted his pockets, only to realize he wasn’t carrying cash. “I don’t have cash on me,” he said calmly. “I’ll give it to you when we get back.” Bill acted like a brat. “No way! You can’t pass without paying.” Roxie suggested, “Gary, there are so many people around. Borrow some from someone else. Or ask your bride!” Seeing Gary put on the spot, I hurriedly reached into my purse, pulled out six hundred dollars, and handed it to him. Bill leaned his head inside the window to grab it, catching a glimpse of me. “Wow, your bride is stunning, brother.” Gary immediately pushed Bill’s head back out. From Bill’s casual tone, I knew he hadn’t recognized me through the veil. He was just tossing out generic compliments. “Tsk, haven’t even had the wedding night yet and you’re already so protective,” Bill teased. Gary ignored the banter, handing over the six hundred dollars. “Take it and get out of here.” Bill took the cash but shook his head with a smirk. “Wait, this is from you. The bride hasn’t given her share yet.” Before Gary could snap, I pulled another six hundred dollars from my bag and handed it through the window. Bill grinned as he took it. “Thanks! Wish you and my brother a long and happy life together. May you have a baby soon!” “Here’s to a long, loving marriage!” Hearing those words felt like a cruel joke. Fate truly had a twisted sense of humor. With the ridiculous road prank over, our car started moving again. A moment later, I saw that Bill had posted a video on his story, raising a glass to congratulate his brother’s wedding. His friends left comments beneath it: Wait, isn’t today your wedding day? Why are you filming congratulations for your older brother instead? Don’t tell me your socially anxious bride got stolen by your brother like in some trashy soap opera? Bill replied: Shut up. My brother’s wife is way out of Lynda’s league. By the way, my wedding is postponed. I’ll let you guys know when we reschedule. Having a socially anxious girlfriend has its perks, though. She doesn’t cry or throw scenes. Before I got out of the car at the estate, Gary had already instructed the butler to clear the area. Not a single maid or servant was in sight when I stepped out, which instantly eased the knot of tension in my chest. Gary held my hand tightly and led me upstairs to his master suite. Because of the rushed arrangements, the room hadn’t been decorated for a wedding. I sat on the edge of the bed, my body rigid as my mind raced with anxious thoughts about what usually happens on a wedding night. The most intimate contact I had ever comfortably tolerated was a simple embrace. Gary noticed my paleness and panic. He offered a tender smile, gently pinching my cheek. “Lynda, you can sleep here tonight. I’ll take the guest room.” A massive weight lifted off my chest, though a faint pang of guilt crept in. When the room fell quiet, I began exploring my new surroundings. The decor was minimalist, dominated by muted greys and whites, impeccably tidy. Suddenly, a display case caught my eye. Inside sat a glittering gemstone necklace. I stepped closer and froze. It was my first piece of jewelry design, auctioned off when I was eighteen through my brother. I had never asked who bought it back then. I never dreamed it had been Gary. While I was staring at it, noisy chatter echoed from the hallway outside. “Gary, how could you get married without telling anyone? Who’s the bride? Let me see her!” “Yeah, Gary, this is way too sudden! We want to see her!” It was Bill and Roxie. I heard the door handle jiggle, but the door stayed locked. Gary was blocking them in the hallway. “Your sister-in-law is already asleep,” Gary said firmly. “Don’t cause a scene.” “Come on, brother, don’t lie to me. You’re not even asleep yet!” Bill laughed. “Besides, we haven’t crashed the wedding suite yet.” “I need to see if this new bride of yours is an angel from heaven to melt a cold stone like you.” “She doesn’t like meeting strangers,” Gary’s voice turned stern. “Leave her alone.” Roxie scoffed in the hallway. “Gosh, she sounds just like that high-maintenance Lynda. Is social anxiety contagious or something?” Bill chimed in with a mock groan. “Brother, you really shouldn’t marry a girl like that. You have no idea how much of a headache Lynda has been since we started dating.” “Silence,” Gary cut him off coldly. “Go back to your room. If you step out of line again, I will cut off every single card under your name.” “Whoa, okay, okay! Fine, I won’t look. I’ll see her eventually anyway.” “We were just joking, Gary, don’t get mad!” A door slammed down the hall. Only then did I realize Bill’s room was right next to Gary’s. A moment later, two soft knocks sounded at my door. Gary’s warm voice drifted through. “Lynda? Are you awake?” Instead of answering, I walked over and pulled the door open. Worry lingered in his eyes. I forced a reassuring smile to let him know I was fine. “Gary… can you… stay with me tonight?” I tugged at my hemline, looking down, sweat prickling my palms. Silence stretched for three seconds before a low, melodic chuckle broke above me. “Of course, Lynda. But… stop calling me like I’m just your elder brother.” The lingering sweetness in his tone sent a rush of heat straight to my cheeks. With the lights turned off, the room plunged into pitch darkness. Surprisingly, I felt a deep sense of security. I no longer feared his proximity. He wrapped his arms around me, drawing me close to his chest. In the silence, the steady thump of a heartbeat resonated between us, so close I couldn’t tell if it was his or mine. Just as drowsiness began to pull me under, faint voices drifted through the wall. Roxie’s playful whisper vibrated through the shared partition. “Bill… if you had rushed to the venue today, tonight would have been your wedding night.” “Aren’t you worried your rich little girlfriend might run off with someone else?” Bill answered with absolute confidence. “Please. That girl has severe social phobia. She’s stuck with me for life.” “For some strange reason, I’m the only person she isn’t terrified of. She barely even sees her own brother.” “Love conquers all, I guess. Her symptoms have been getting so much better lately.” “I can guarantee nobody else could ever marry her. She’s hooked on me forever.” Gary suddenly murmured softly in my ear, “I’m sorry.” “When the house was renovated, the designer used a shared decorative wall between these two suites to keep the layout symmetrical. It’s not as thick as a solid wall. When it’s quiet at night, every whisper carries over.” I shook my head in the dark, mouthing, It’s fine. The conversation next door continued, taking a disturbing turn. “Bill… do you… want to try what a wedding night feels like?” “Even if I wanted to, Lynda can’t even handle kissing.” “Oh, come on! Since you’ve washed my underwear for so many years, I don’t mind letting you get a little perk.” “Are you… serious?” “Don’t be so dramatic. It’s just a normal physical need. You’re twenty-three and still a virgin. Aren’t you embarrassed to tell anyone?” “Besides, haven’t you heard that women care a lot about experience? If you don’t practice beforehand, I’m afraid you won’t even find the right spot on your actual wedding night!” “Well… if you say so. But just this once. And don’t you dare tell Lynda.” My face burned with shame, while my heart felt as if a thousand needles were piercing it. Bill never knew why I wasn’t afraid of him, but I remembered every detail. During the scorching summer when I was fifteen, a young boy had walked into my home behind a twenty-four-year-old Gary. His glib, bright eyes had looked around with such goofy curiosity that I couldn’t help laughing from the second-floor landing. My laughter drew their attention, but by the time he looked up, I had already scampered back into my room. After that day, he learned about my crippling social anxiety. From then on, whenever he visited my house, he wore a cartoon fox mask. Magically, because of that mask, I didn’t hide from him. My brother was overjoyed that I didn’t fear Bill. Since we were close in age, he encouraged Bill to visit often. Bill never complained. He came over frequently, always wearing that silly fox mask. Eventually, I gathered the courage to go outdoors with him for the very first time. My brother was so thrilled that he bought Bill a pair of limited-edition sneakers as a reward. Later, even when his friends mocked me as a freak during our outings, Bill never abandoned me. He even got into fights for my sake when someone called me a monster. He had used a simple mask to bridge the distance between us, stealing my young heart in the process. Yet after his childhood friend, Roxie, transferred to our school, I was no longer his priority. Restless sounds echoed through the wall from the adjacent room. Gary gently reached over, covering my ears with his hands. “Hang in there,” he whispered, his voice thick with emotion. “This will never happen again.” I gripped his sleeve tightly. The clean, soothing scent of his cologne filled my senses, and I instinctively wrapped my arms around his waist. The next morning, I still couldn’t bring myself to go downstairs for breakfast. Gary thoughtfully had the staff bring a tray up to the room. My brother called to check on me. “How are you holding up, Lynda?” I smiled into the receiver. “Everything is wonderful.” He spoke for only a few minutes before hanging up. I knew he was afraid he would break down in tears if we talked any longer. Our parents died in an accident when I was three. Marcus was only thirteen at the time. Still a child himself, he stepped up to raise me. He studied during the day, fed me dinner at night, and by seventeen, he was already learning to manage the family business alongside our grandfather. In the middle of those overwhelming years, his fragile little sister developed a severe psychological disorder. I contracted a phobia of people so intense that I couldn’t even look at the brother who had raised me. All these years, he must have suffered so much. After breakfast, Gary didn’t leave for the office. Instead, he mysteriously asked me to go somewhere with him. Bill was nowhere to be seen, and the servants deliberately stayed out of sight as we walked out. Wearing a mask and a baseball cap, I followed Gary into his private car. He had given his driver the day off, taking the wheel himself. Sitting in the passenger seat, I felt a deep sense of peace I hadn’t experienced in years. After a thirty-minute drive, the car pulled up in front of a secluded, beautiful estate. Gary held my hand as we walked through the gates, introducing the grounds to me. “Lynda, I spent five years building this estate. I designed every single detail myself. Most importantly, no one will ever disturb you here.” He stopped, his striking dark eyes looking down at me, his voice smooth and mesmerizing. “Do you like it, Lynda? This is my gift to you.” I nodded eagerly. It was absolute perfection. Gary saw the joy in my eyes and pulled me upstairs to the second-floor master suite. Standing outside the heavy wooden door, he gave me a mysterious smile. “Close your eyes, Lynda. I have a surprise for you.” I dutifully closed my eyes, my heart thumping with anticipation. With a soft, heavy creak, the door swung open. “Open them,” Gary whispered gently. I opened my eyes, and my breath caught in my throat. Before me stood a room I knew intimately. The familiar furniture, the exact layout, my childhood bed, every single detail. “How… how did you…” I stammered, looking up at him in utter shock. Gary smiled softly, pulling me into the room. “I recreated the room you lived in for twenty years. Do you mind?” I shook my head vigorously. “I love it.” Suddenly, a dog barked from the courtyard below.

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1 “Baby, you taste too sweet right here. I can’t stop…” Nobody would ever believe that the man tangled in the sheets with me wasn’t my husband. Across the entire base, from the command tents to the officers’ club, everyone knew the truth: Colonel Garret Mercer would rather rack out on a cot in the tactical field compound than spend a single night in the marital bed with his lawful wife. Every single week, the whispers rippled through the officers’ row like wildfire. When is poor Mrs. Mercer going to break her streak as the base’s most dutiful celibate widow? Whenever those rumors reached his ears, Garret never flinched. He simply swept his cold, hooded eyes over me, his voice stripped of anything resembling warmth. “If you really can’t stomach it, go find someone on the outside. We can each play our own games.” The words barely had time to settle before he adjusted his dress uniform and strode out the door. That very night, intimate photos of him and his newest conquest were leaked across the base’s private intranet. Everyone on the post assumed I would sit in the dark, crying my eyes out until sunrise. Instead, I picked up my phone and dialed an old contact over in base public affairs, telling him I had an exclusive scoop. After I hung up, I pulled my collar askew, ruffled the duvet into a knot of feverish disarray, and snapped a suggestive, shadowed shot from a third-person angle. I sent it straight to Garret’s personal number from a burner: [Colonel Mercer, your wife tastes incredible. Be sure to let me know the second the divorce goes through.] Knowing the story had already gone live across the base network, I pulled the covers up, ready to get some sleep. Less than twenty minutes later, the hall floorboards groaned under heavy, furious combat boots. “Nora Miller! Is this how you get your petty revenge? Who the hell is the man in that photo!” A stack of glossy prints slammed onto the mattress in front of me, scattering across the sheets. Half of them were blurry, sweat-dampened snapshots of my unmade bed. The other half showed Garret, his back pinned against the corridor wall of the tactical headquarters, kissing Ivy Miller like he was starving. It was the exact piece I’d asked my contact to run. Headline: The Mercers Reach an Understanding: An Open Marriage, Zero Interference. I sat up on the edge of the mattress, casually drawing the loose lapels of my robe together. “Isn’t this the exact arrangement you asked for?” I looked straight into his dark, bloodshot eyes. “Your only mistake was dragging my dignity through the mud just to sleep with my father’s bastard daughter.” Garret’s breath hitched. For a second, his jaw tightened so hard I could hear his molars grind, but he sidestepped the accusation entirely. “Who is he?” he snarled through clenched teeth. “You don’t need to know,” I said smoothly. “That’s what makes it fair.” Once upon a time, I was the kind of woman who hired private investigators to track down every single female aide and contractor who stepped into his orbit. I was young, sharp-edged, and proud; I couldn’t bear a single grain of dirt in my marriage. Then reality caught up with me. Before I could even finish vetting one woman, another two had already taken her place in his bed. Eventually, I grew too exhausted to keep playing the warden. A low, sinister laugh rumbled in Garret’s chest. “You really think you’re brave, don’t you?” Before the words left his lips, his gaze caught the purple bruise blooming beneath my collarbone. His pupils dilated. In an instant, his heavy frame came crashing down, pinning me flat against the mattress. I fought him with everything I had, scratching and thrashing, screaming into his face. The cold edge of a tactical folding knife flashed in the lamplight, slicing a shallow, searing line straight through the skin of my collarbone. Warm blood welled immediately, washing over that faint purple shadow. “You’re out of your goddamn mind! Get off me!” Garret held me pinned beneath his deadweight, veins bulging along his temples, his eyes feral and crimson. “This is the first time, and it’s the last time,” he hissed, his hot breath stinging my cheek. “I’m having the post taken down. Before I lose what’s left of my control, Nora, you’d better learn your place.” Learning my place. To him, that meant sitting quietly while explicit photos of him and his mistresses circulated among the brass. It meant opening anonymous packages delivered to our front porch—packages containing stained lace thongs and used, sticky prophylactics—and filing them away without a whisper of complaint. Garret’s venomous gaze bore into mine for what felt like hours. It wasn’t until he saw the silent, involuntary tears spilling down my temples from the raw sting of the cut that his grip finally loosened. He pushed off me, moved to the nightstand, and yanked open the drawer to grab the trauma kit. The moment his fingers touched my skin, I shoved him back with all my strength. “Don’t you touch me!” Garret straightened up from the bed, his expression shuttering into pure ice. “You staged this whole damn circus just to get a rise out of me, didn’t you? And now you want to play the martyr?” His lip curled with absolute disdain. “Humiliating yourself just to get my attention—is that really all you’re capable of?” In his careless rage, the blade still gripped in his fingers grazed the soft underside of my forearm. Blood welled instantly, soaking into the olive-drab military sheets beneath me. Cold sweat broke out across my forehead from the sharp flare of pain. Yet the ache tearing through my ribcage was a thousand times more brutal than anything metal could do to flesh. Garret stared down at me, his eyes dead and unreadable. “My mother was right about you,” he said, each syllable dropping like lead. “A girl from a nobody background is always going to pull cheap, back-alley stunts. If you actually have the spine for it, divorce me. Stop hiring actors to make me jealous. Your sister has ten times the class you’ll ever have.” He threw the knife onto the side table and slammed the bedroom door behind him. Less than twenty minutes later, my phone lit up on the nightstand with an email notification: a digital divorce decree, already signed with Garret Mercer’s bold, angular signature. The asset division was startling. Seventy percent to me, thirty percent to him. He was still entirely convinced that I was bluffing—that no woman like me would ever willingly walk away from the prestige of being a Colonel’s wife. Without a second’s hesitation, I applied my digital signature to the line, hit submit, and dialed a number I had memorized weeks ago. “It’s done,” I whispered into the receiver. “Confirm the flight time.” Garret, I thought as the line clicked dead, what made you so certain the man in that photograph wasn’t real? Once the call ended, the tears I had swallowed down finally broke through, hot and silent against the blood-stained pillow. Five years ago, when Garret Mercer insisted on putting a ring on my finger, the entire world stood against us. His old-money military family sneered at my civilian roots, and the brass nearly stalled his promotion to full colonel over the optics. But he weathered every bit of blowback. He gave me a picture-perfect ceremony at the post chapel, swords arched overhead, white lilies lining every pew. Back then, every officer’s wife whispered that Nora Miller was the luckiest girl on the eastern seaboard. The trouble was, I wasn’t the only woman who coveted the base’s golden boy. On our wedding night, an emergency scramble order dragged him away before we could even uncork the champagne. He never came back to our quarters that night. I sat alone on the edge of our pristine king bed, watching the darkness give way to pale gray dawn. Around sunrise, he returned smelling of stale smoke and cordite. He walked into the bedroom, patted my head like I was a loyal retriever, and said calmly, “What’s rare about you, Nora, is that you’re sensible. You don’t cause problems. The Mercer family needs a woman who knows how to hold the fort.” In that single breath, the romantic fire I had nurtured for years was doused in freezing water. So, I learned how to be sensible. I didn’t nag. I didn’t complain. I became the quiet, decorative ghost of the Mercer residence. And now, of all the women in the world, he had chosen Ivy Miller. The one person on this earth I truly hated. Years ago, my father had brought Ivy through our front door, demanding that my mother accept his illegitimate daughter under our roof. My mother, a woman who carried herself with quiet, aristocratic grace, held me tightly against her side. She didn’t yell. She didn’t cry. She simply gave my father two clear options: either he sent Ivy away immediately, or she would take me and walk out of his life forever. My father said nothing. He walked out onto the high-rise balcony and stood in the cold night air until dawn. When he finally stepped back inside, my mother was already gone. She had stepped off the ledge into the empty air. It was pouring rain that morning. The deluge washed the dark red streaks from the concrete below before the coroner even arrived. Garret had rushed to the scene in uniform. He pulled me into his arms while I broke down, letting me hammer my fists against his chest until my knuckles bruised, repeating the same words over and over: “It’s okay, Nora. I’ve got you. It’s okay…” And now, he had made that very same girl the center of his universe. What dignity did Mrs. Mercer have left? Garret didn’t come home that night. True to his word, the headline I had leaked vanished from the base’s servers before midnight, scrubbed clean by administrative command. Instead, he escorted Ivy to the annual officers’ gala on his arm, seating her squarely in the chair reserved for his wife. He even took the podium to announce a lavish birthday bash for Ivy the following evening, extending an open invitation to every officer and spouse on post. He knew damn well that Ivy’s birthday was the exact anniversary of my mother’s death. He was sending a message. He wanted to rub my nose in the dirt—to remind me that a girl from my station could never truly stand as his equal. Around noon the next day, a medic from the base clinic knocked on my door to dress the gouge on my collarbone. “The Colonel personally signed the requisition for these advanced tissue-healing ointments, ma’am,” the young specialist murmured, keeping his eyes on the bandages. “He knows your skin scars easily. He really does care about you.” A dry, bitter laugh escaped my throat. I didn’t say a word. The moment the medic packed his kit and left, my phone buzzed with an incoming video file from an unknown sender. On the screen, Ivy was sobbing hysterically in my father’s living room: “I only went to the balcony to beg her to accept me! But she grabbed me, Dad, she screamed that I was dirty, that I didn’t deserve to step foot in this house! We got into a fight, and I shoved her… it was an accident, I swear it was self-defense! Dad… Garret… what am I going to do?” On the screen, Ivy slapped herself violently across the face, weeping apologies to my mother’s memory. My ears rang with a deafening, metallic pitch. The room tilted. In the frame, my father’s hand swung out, catching Ivy across the cheek. He doubled over, clutching his chest, gasping for breath. “How could I raise a monster like you! That was my wife!” Ivy raised her swollen face, staring desperately past my father toward a tall figure standing near the window. Toward Garret’s back. “You’ll help me, won’t you, Garret? You care about me… you told me you did.” A long, suffocating silence hung over the recording. My heart climbed into my throat, beating so hard it bruised my ribs. Then, Garret turned. His expression was shadowed, impenetrable, but his tone was steady as steel: “Get your passport ready. Lay low in Europe for a few months. I’ll handle the detectives at the precinct.” Every syllable struck me like a hollow-point bullet. The entire world had conspired to lie to me about how my mother died. My father. And the man I had trusted with my entire life. Five years ago, when I had run out into the storm to file a formal homicide report, Garret had sped through the rain to intercept me. His truck had hydroplaned, rolling into the ditch. He had crawled out of the shattered windshield, covered in blood, his hand locking onto my ankle in the mud. “Nora, go home. Leave this to me. I’ll make sure justice is served.” I had been stupid enough to believe him. I had clung to the belief that my mother would never leave me so cruelly of her own free will. And all this time, my father and my husband had been guarding her killer. That evening, hollowed out and pale as a ghost, I walked into the ballroom for Ivy’s birthday celebration. Ivy stood under the crystal chandeliers, draped in an emerald evening gown, her hand resting casually on Garret’s forearm. She was intentionally catching the light on a rare jade bangle he had clearly bought for her—acting as if she were already the undisputed mistress of the Mercer name. The second I crossed the threshold, the room fell dead silent. Hundreds of eyes turned toward me, thick with condescension, pity, and thinly veiled disgust. Only Garret looked relaxed. A smug, proprietary smirk touched the corners of his mouth. He assumed I had finally broken—that I was arriving to grovel and sue for peace, just like I always did. He even shifted his stance, opening his arms slightly to receive me. He was about to be sorely disappointed. I walked straight to the center of the floor, my voice carrying clearly over the muted strings of the quartet: “Garret Mercer. Ivy pushed my mother off that balcony, didn’t she? And you covered it up like an accomplice.” The air was sucked out of the room. Garret’s chest hitched. A flicker of naked panic flicked across his features, gone in a fraction of a second, replaced by iron authority. “Nora, this is Ivy’s birthday. Don’t make an embarrassment of yourself.” Before I could breathe, my father lunged forward from the VIP table, his palm cracking violently across my cheek. The sting flared hot on my skin, but it was the silent, warning look my father exchanged with Garret that gutted me completely. The video was real. Every horrific second of it. At that moment, Ivy threw herself toward me, tears spilling down her cheeks in a practiced torrent. “Nora… I know Eleanor never liked me, but we’re sisters! We’re all the family each other has left! Please stop punishing me like this… I won’t hold anything you did to me in the past against you, I swear! I’ll do whatever you say!” As she whimpered, she pulled back her silk sleeve, deliberately exposing a cluster of faint, jagged scars along her forearm for the room to see. Garret’s brow furrowed in acute protective rage. He looked down at me as if I were vermin. “Nora Miller, she’s your sister! How could you be so vicious to your own blood?” Gasps rippled through the gathering of wives and junior officers. “I knew Eleanor Miller was unhinged, but to raise a daughter this cruel? She probably slipped trying to attack the poor girl.” “Shameless. Fabricating a murder charge just to keep the Colonel on a leash? Five years without a kid—she’s completely warped in the head.” “What do you expect from white-trash stock? You can dress them up, but the rot always comes out.” The venom poured over me in waves. In my mind, all I could see was my mother’s body broken on the rainy asphalt, her blood washing down the storm drain while these two men looked away. The red haze took over. Before anyone could register my movement, I lunged forward, my fingers locking around Ivy’s delicate throat. “You give my mother her life back!” Ivy choked, clawing at my wrists, her eyes bulging with theatrical terror. A split second later, a massive, unyielding force slammed into my shoulder, tearing me away and knocking me to the polished parquet floor. Garret stood over me, his hand still trembling from the backhand he had just delivered across my face. “Have you lost your goddamn mind, Nora?” He leaned down, his voice dropping into a register meant only for my ears—a tone that sounded terrifyingly calm, but dripped with pure arsenic. “You will stand up right now and tell this room that you lied. You will apologize to Ivy for years of abuse. Or so help me…” His eyes darkened into bottomless pits. “Or I will have your mother’s remains removed from the National Memorial Cemetery. Today is her anniversary, isn’t it?” I looked up from the floor, my jaw trembling with disbelief. His jawline was still striking, his posture commanding, but there wasn’t a trace left of the boy who once held me in the rain. I glared up at him, my eyes burning with broken capillaries. “Try it.” Garret reached slowly into his dress jacket and pulled out a small, heavy plastic transmitter. “There are demolition charges set beneath the foundation of her memorial plot right now, Nora. Be a good girl. Don’t force my hand.” He called me by my name like a lover, but his voice sounded like a demon whispering from the dark. He had planned this. To shield Ivy from the consequences of a murder charge, he had laid siege to the only sacred ground I had left in this world. That plot was earned through my mother’s lifetime of civil service and military honors. It was the only reason I had kept breathing through five years of isolation. I swallowed the metallic taste of blood rising in my throat. Slowly, I pushed myself up from the hardwood, turned toward Ivy, and sank down onto my knees. “Ivy Miller,” I whispered, every syllable feeling like broken glass. “My mother and I were wrong. I am… deeply… sorry.” I lifted my chin. Ivy’s tear-stained face was already curving into a victorious, triumphant sneer. I turned my eyes back to Garret. “Are you satisfied, Colonel?” Garret’s chest rose and fell sharply. He swallowed hard, adjusting his tie to hide his unease. “Good,” he muttered, his voice strained. “You know your place. Now go. Lay some flowers at her stone for me while you’re at it.” Having delivered his performance for the crowd, he wrapped his arm firmly around Ivy’s waist and turned back toward the buffet, rejoining the celebration. Laughter and clinking champagne flutes resumed behind me, along with the vicious murmurs of the guests. “No wonder he never touched her. A soul that twisted… those leaked bedroom photos were probably a cry for help from some poor enlisted boy she trapped.” “Stole her sister’s fiancé, tried to play the victim… disgusting.” I pushed myself up from the cold floor, completely numb to the noise. The vows, the promises, the heroic young officer who swore to protect me—it was all a grotesque farce. Just as I reached the heavy double doors of the banquet hall, a sharp, electronic chirp caught my ear. A few yards away, sheltered behind a floral arch where no one else was looking, Ivy gave me a bright, vicious smile. In her manicured hand, she held a secondary transmitter. The small red LED display was already counting down. 00:45… 00:44… Every hair on my arms stood on end. I broke into a dead sprint, bursting through the double doors and crashing into the rainy night outside. Behind me, Garret caught the sudden flurry of movement and half-turned to call out my name, but Ivy’s fingers caught his lapel. “Garret, honey, come toast with the General’s family…” He hesitated, forced a thin smile, and let himself be pulled away. At the National Memorial Cemetery, the rain turned the manicured lawn into a slick morass of mud. I dropped to my knees before my mother’s polished marble headstone, using my bare hands to tear through the sod, weeping, scraping frantically at the wet earth until my fingernails cracked and blood coated my knuckles. “Mom… Mom, get up, please…” A deafening roar ripped through the silence of the valley. The shockwave knocked me backward into the mud. Granite shattered into thousands of jagged shards, slicing through the air like shrapnel. The heavy concrete vault ruptured, and the silver urn containing her ashes burst open into the storm. A cloud of pale, sacred dust swirled into the rain, scattered across the churned mud in seconds. With it went the last living piece of my heart. Before the heatwave from the blast could dissipate, a shower of heavy debris struck the side of my skull. The world went violently, blessedly black. Back at the banquet, Garret Mercer never stayed to cut the birthday cake. Unease had gnawed through his gut until he could no longer stand the sound of Ivy’s voice. Excusing himself abruptly, he bought a bouquet of white lilies at a late-night florist and drove through the downpour toward the cemetery gates. He told himself he just wanted to make sure Nora had laid the flowers. He wanted to make sure she was safe. But the moment his headlights washed over the family plot, his pupils contracted into pinpricks.

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1 I was right in the middle of a high-level executive board meeting when I got the call. My husband, Garry, had fallen from the thirteenth floor while filming a stunt on set. I abandoned everything and rushed home in an absolute panic, only to find him and his entire entourage perfectly fine, drinking and singing karaoke in our living room. Garry shot me a sideways glance, his tone dripping with sheer annoyance. “I told you to come home last night, and you refused. What the hell are you doing here now?” “Why didn’t you just die outside?” Before I could even process his venom, that sickeningly familiar inner voice echoed in my head. Hmph. I knew my wife still loves me. The second she heard I was hurt, she came running back. Hurry up, babe. Come jump into my arms and act spoiled like you always do. Tell me you love me and that you can’t live without me. I looked down at the blood seeping through my sleeve, an injury from a minor car accident I got into because I was driving so fast to get to him. For the first time in ten years, I did not cater to the secret desires in his head. Instead, I slowly reached into my bag, pulled out a thick envelope, and placed it on the table. “Since you hate me that much, let’s get a divorce.” … Garry’s brow furrowed tightly. He stared at me like his brain hadn’t quite processed the words. Sensing the sudden shift in the atmosphere, his entourage immediately scrambled to do damage control. “Sister-in-law, you must be exhausted from work. You are just talking crazy.” “Yeah, Scarlett, Garry was just joking. Don’t take it seriously.” They probably assumed I was just throwing a tantrum to get Garry’s attention. I couldn’t blame them for thinking that. After all, for the ten years I had been with Garry, I had acted like his perfect, completely obedient marionette. If Garry told me to go east, I would never dare step west. Because I could hear his true inner voice, I always treated his violent outbursts and cruel words as a twisted form of affection. I broke my own back trying to be perfect for him. But today, I was done being a puppet on a string. “You are right. I am exhausted,” I said, my voice completely devoid of emotion as I looked directly at the man sitting in the center of the couch. “So, Garry, let’s get a divorce.” The moment Garry realized I wasn’t joking, the glass tumbler in his hand shattered under the sudden pressure of his grip. He let out a cold, mocking scoff. “Scarlett, do you really think you are that important?” “A divorce? I have been waiting for this day.” “If you hadn’t begged me to marry you back then, I wouldn’t have even looked at you!” His spoken words were vicious and biting. But beneath them, his inner voice was a pathetic, frantic prayer. What is wrong with my wife? Why does she suddenly want a divorce? Do you not love me anymore?! No, no, no! Please, babe, take it back! Tell me you don’t want to leave me! I want to be with you forever! This was the incredibly toxic duality I had lived with for ten years. Garry suffered from severe paranoid personality disorder. The less he cared about someone, the kinder and more patient he was to them. But to the person he supposedly loved? He held impossibly high expectations. The second I failed to meet whatever ridiculous standard he set in his head, he would express his dissatisfaction by screaming, throwing things, and being completely vile. When I first started hearing his inner voice, I was foolishly moved by it. I thought he was just a broken man who couldn’t express his love. From that point on, whenever we fought, Garry didn’t have to do a single thing to fix it. All I had to do was listen to his cheap, pathetic inner monologue, and I would instantly forgive him and coax myself back into his arms. Over the years, I tried desperately to teach him how to verbally express his affection. But he always pushed me away with deep annoyance, only to scream internally right after. Babe, babe, I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to push you! Hurry up and hug me! Why aren’t you coming over?! Come kiss me right now so we can make up! When Garry’s assistant accidentally fell asleep during a massive promotional live stream, causing a catastrophic PR disaster, Garry didn’t say a single harsh word to her. He just smiled and gave her a month of paid leave. But when I didn’t hear him call my name from the other room, he handcuffed my wrist to the headboard and locked me in the bedroom for three days. When his assistant mixed up wardrobe shipments and cost him three million dollars in breach of contract fees, he patted her on the head and told her it was fine. But when my mother was diagnosed with a critical illness and I desperately needed thirty grand for her emergency surgery, he completely ignored my pleas all because I had forgotten to kiss him before leaving the house that morning. Because the surgery was delayed, my mother would never be able to get out of bed again. Garry, this time, I am no longer cleaning up the mess of your hypocrisy. Ignoring the judgmental stares of everyone in the room, I calmly pushed the divorce papers across the table. “Sign it. I will see you at the courthouse tomorrow at 10 AM.” Garry stared at my elegant, resolute signature on the document. The corner of his eye twitched violently. Why did she even prepare something like this? She is just trying to get my attention, right? That has to be it. Be a good girl, babe, stop throwing a fit. You know my heart belongs entirely to you. Just come hug me. You haven’t slept in the same bed as me for two days. I am going to kiss you to death tonight. The voices assaulted my mind from all directions, suffocating me. Right at that moment, his assistant, Chloe, peeked her head out from behind Garry’s shoulder. “Scarlett, his manager said a lot of crazy fans have been forging his signature lately.” “If you want Garry to sign anything, you need to sign a strict NDA first, and we have to record the entire process on video.” Garry clenched his fists, leaning back into the couch as he spoke with absolute ruthlessness. “Scarlett, if you walk out that door today, you are not taking a single thing that belongs to me.” “That includes the clothes on your back. Take them off.” Good girl, this is so insulting! Hurry up and refuse! I am giving you the perfect excuse to back down! If I didn’t just want you to come home, I wouldn’t have even let these losers in our house. I want to kick them all out. I just want to cuddle with my wife. I had known Garry for ten years. We dated for eight, and we had been married for six. He had an extreme, suffocating need for control. Where I worked, who I interacted with every day, the very clothes I wore everything had to be meticulously curated by him. If I didn’t let him control those things, it meant I didn’t love him. My entire closet consisted solely of clothes he had bought. Even my underwear. In the past, I actually thought this was his twisted way of proving his love. Now? It was just humiliating evidence that after ten years, I owned absolutely nothing of my own. Looking at Garry’s smug, triumphant expression, I slowly exhaled. “Fine. I will sign.” A flash of malicious victory crossed Chloe’s face as she quickly scrambled to prepare the NDA forms. Garry stared at me, completely unable to mask his absolute shock. I offered him a polite, hollow smile. “Don’t worry. I won’t take a single thing that belongs to you.” The room fell dead silent. Everyone exchanged nervous glances, but no one dared to speak. I walked into our massive walk-in closet, dug through the storage boxes in the back, and finally found the cheap puffer jacket and denim shorts I had bought for myself ten years ago. As I was changing, Garry’s frantic inner voice bled through the walls. What is she doing?! Is she actually divorcing me?! No! I don’t want a home without my wife! If she leaves, I’ll die! I’ll literally die! The softest corner of my heart trembled slightly, but I did not stop moving. When I pushed open the bedroom door, Garry was sitting on the edge of the bed, aggressively puffing on a cigarette. Seeing me, he instinctively crushed it out in the ashtray. When his eyes finally landed on my old, faded clothes, he completely lost his composure. His inner voice started blaring like a broken smoke alarm. Why did she actually change out of the clothes I bought her?! I promise I’ll never make a joke like this again! Babe, please don’t take it seriously! It is nearly a hundred degrees outside! If she wears a puffer jacket, she’s going to get heatstroke! I ignored the pathetic whining in his head. I dropped his expensive clothes onto the bed in front of him and turned toward the stairs. “Scarlett, are you absolutely sure you want to do this?” Garry’s voice was dark and menacing from behind me. I didn’t turn around. “I thought I made myself perfectly clear downstairs.” Just as I took my first step, Garry spoke again. “If you walk out today, tomorrow morning, I will hand your Generation II AI Robotics blueprints over to Maya and have her patent it under her name.” Despite the blistering summer heat outside, I felt like I had been plunged into arctic waters. Every drop of blood in my body ran cold. Babe, I’m sorry! I just don’t know what else to do! I can’t let you leave me! You care about this project more than anything. If I use it as leverage, you won’t leave, right? Right?! The Generation II Robotics project was a highly specialized emotional-support AI I had designed specifically for people with paranoid personality disorders like Garry. The core philosophy was simple: to let people like him know they weren’t alone in the world, and that there were people who loved them. The woman he mentioned Maya had blatantly stolen my prototype during a global robotics competition right after I graduated college. Before I could even gather the evidence to expose her, she filed a formal complaint with the judging panel, completely reversing the narrative and accusing me of plagiarizing her. During that horrific period, I fell into a deep, crippling depression and was medically diagnosed. And now, all of that trauma had become nothing more than leverage for Garry to control me. It was a shame. Because Garry, this time, I am not backing down. Garry cared about his pride more than his life. With his entire entourage watching, there was no way he could refuse to sign the divorce papers without looking weak. Sure enough, when I walked downstairs, the signed agreement was sitting on the coffee table. The moment the ink was dry, Garry had ordered everyone out of the house. Except for his precious assistant, Chloe. Under the cold, mechanical lens of a professional video camera, I signed the NDA. Chloe held the signed document, her eyes gleaming with barely concealed excitement. Garry sat in the darkest corner of the sectional sofa, completely silent. After living in this massive mansion for years, the only things I owned didn’t even fill half of a cheap canvas tote bag. As I grabbed my bag and reached for the front door, Garry’s inner voice echoed one last time. Babe, you don’t actually think you can escape me, do you? The next second, a suffocating, violent force crashed over me like a hurricane. His voice was the last thing ringing in my ears. Babe, you promised you would love me forever. Why are you running away so fast? Babe… I am a coward. But I love you. You cannot leave me. When I opened my eyes again, I was back in the master bedroom. And exactly as I expected, my wrist was heavily handcuffed to the steel frame of the bed. Chloe walked into the room, holding a steaming bowl of congee. “Oh, you’re awake, Scarlett. Drink this.” I stared at her with dead eyes and didn’t move. Without warning, she violently grabbed my jaw, forcing my mouth open, and shoved the edge of the bowl against my lips. Boiling hot congee spilled down my chin and seeped under my collar. I broke out in a cold sweat from the agonizing burn and forcefully shoved her away. Chloe lazily brushed off her clothes, flashing her usual punchable smirk. “Don’t give me that look, Scarlett. This was Garry’s explicit order. There is no need to make things difficult for me.” “He said if you refused to cooperate, I have full permission to use physical force to make you behave.” I swallowed the raging fury in my throat, grinding the words out through clenched teeth. “Get out. Tell Garry to come see me himself.” Hearing that, Chloe reached into her pocket and pulled out a ring of keys. “Garry left on a business trip. He won’t be back for a week.” “I’ll be taking very good care of you while he’s gone.” I stared at the keys in her hand, my mind going completely blank for a second. Hanging from the ring was a small, woven tassel charm. Garry and I had made it together with our own hands. The night we finished it, he sat on the edge of the bed holding the keys, grinning like an absolute idiot for an hour. I made this with my wife. No one else is ever allowed to touch it. I really want to fire all the maids. I just want this house to be empty, so it’s only me and my wife. No one is allowed to even look at her. But now? Not only had he invited countless strangers into our private sanctuary, he had handed the keys to our home to another woman. Noticing my reaction, Chloe dangled the keys in front of my face like she was teasing a dog. “Surprised? I told Garry I liked this keychain, and he just gave it to me.” “Honestly, I don’t even need the keys. My fingerprint is already registered on every single digital lock in the house.” “But this charm is incredibly ugly.” She unhooked the woven tassel and casually tossed it out the open window. The small glass pendant attached to it slammed against the pavement outside, shattering into dozens of pieces. Just like Garry and me. I refused to look at her anymore. I turned my head and closed my eyes. Chloe leaned down, whispering directly into my ear like a venomous snake. “Scarlett, your mother is lying in a hospital bed wishing she was dead. How do you have the peace of mind to sleep?” My eyes snapped open. I instantly grabbed her by the collar of her shirt. “What did you just say?” “What happened to my mother?!” Chloe threw her hands up, feigning complete innocence. She pulled out her phone and showed me a call log a conversation she had with my mother’s attending physician thirty minutes ago. “They’ve issued three critical condition notices today. You really are a devoted daughter, aren’t you?” The moment I verified the information, I didn’t even put on my shoes. I bolted for the door and sprinted down the stairs. But when I reached the grand entrance, the heavy reinforced door was completely locked down. It wouldn’t budge. Chloe sauntered down the stairs at a leisurely pace. “It isn’t that I don’t want you to see your mother for the last time.” “Garry made it very clear. Until he gets back, you are not allowed to take a single step outside this house.” I ignored her completely. All I knew was that my mother didn’t have time to wait. My phone and all my electronics had already been confiscated. I had to figure this out myself. I knew the internal security schematics of this house. Garry had designed it himself. In the event of a lockdown, the doors would magnetically seal from the inside. They could only be bypassed by emergency personnel opening them from the outside. Which meant, all I needed was for someone on the outside to trigger the release mechanism. Realizing this, I slammed my fists against the heavy oak door, screaming at the top of my lungs. “Is anyone out there?! Help! Somebody help me!” Chloe sat at the kitchen island, calmly sipping a cup of tea. “Save your breath, Scarlett.” I glared at her with pure hatred. “Are you not afraid I will tell Garry about this?” Chloe looked at me like I had just told the funniest joke in the world. “Scarlett, do you actually still think you are the lady of this house?” “Tell Garry? So he can just humiliate you all over again?” “Don’t worry. I’ll be taking over your position as Mrs. Sinclair very soon.” “And you? You’ll be crawling on the floor like a stray dog, begging me to spare you and your pathetic mother.” I could hear my own voice trembling as I demanded to know why she was doing this. When she first moved to the city, she was completely broke. She couldn’t even afford to eat. I was the one who personally introduced her to Garry and got her her first high-paying job. “Do you have no conscience at all?” Her face instantly twisted with rage. “Why should I have a conscience?!” “We are both women! Why do you get to be born into a perfect life and marry a billionaire movie star?!” “And me? I have to work myself to the bone to pay for my brother’s tuition, buy him a house, and pay for his wedding!” “I’ve lived that life for twenty years! You can’t even handle it for two days?!” My body began to shake with mild tremors. I had arms and legs, yet I was completely imprisoned in this massive concrete cage. I couldn’t even make it to the hospital to look at my mother’s face one last time. Right at that moment, the electronic lock on the front door beeped. It clicked open. It was the cleaning lady who came every three days. The older woman gave me a polite nod. Seizing the only chance I had, I shoved past her and sprinted out the door. But I didn’t even make it across the front garden. Four private security guards materialized from all directions and tackled me to the grass. They bound my wrists with zip ties like I was a piece of trash and dragged me back inside, dumping me at Chloe’s feet. “Scarlett, Garry was very clear.” “If you refuse to behave, I have to punish you.” Without another word, she picked up a high-voltage stun baton from the floor, pressed the metal prongs directly against my chest, and pulled the trigger without an ounce of hesitation. The cleaning lady gasped, pulling out her phone to call Garry for instructions. Chloe offered a sweet, gentle smile. “Ma’am, Ms. Scarlett and Mr. Sinclair are officially divorced. She has no authority in this house anymore.” “Mr. Sinclair is on a business trip, and I am following his direct orders to keep her contained.” “Please, don’t make my job difficult, okay?” The electricity fried my nervous system. My vision blurred, and my mind started shutting down. Through sheer willpower, I managed to twitch my fingers, weakly begging the cleaning lady to call my uncle. But after a long moment of hesitation, the older woman quietly put her phone back in her pocket. Acting like nothing had happened, she picked up her supplies and started cleaning the living room. I weakly slammed my forehead against the marble floor, trying to use the physical pain to stay conscious. “Look at this, Scarlett. This might cheer you up.” Chloe squatted down next to me and held her phone in front of my face. It was playing a live security feed from the hospital. My mother was covered in tubes. Thick white foam was bubbling from her mouth as she desperately tried to make a sound to alert the nurses. But the hallway was empty. No one noticed. She kept throwing her head back, suffocating, fighting wildly for a single breath, letting out horrific, gurgling whimpers. And then, in absolute, agonizing despair, she stopped moving. I broke down into a hysterical, guttural scream. I violently thrashed against the zip ties, lunging upward, ready to bite Chloe’s throat out and die with her. But before I could even touch her, the guards pinned me back down. This time, Chloe jammed the stun baton directly into my stomach. A massive surge of electricity tore through my entire body. In the final seconds before I completely blacked out, I felt a warm, thick liquid sliding down the inside of my thighs. The unborn child I didn’t even know I was carrying was erased from existence in a matter of seconds. And Garry? He was standing in the garden right outside the window, holding a box of blueberry mousse cake.

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1 After I was released from prison, I took a job as a per diem nursing aide at Saint Jude’s Memorial, emptying bedpans and wiping soiled skin just to scrape together enough for cochlear implant surgery. That was where I ran into Eleanor Montgomery. She froze in the doorway of room 412, paralyzed by the sight of me. To her, I was still the haughty, brittle heiress who once shattered crystal flutes when crossed; she clearly couldn’t reconcile that ghost with the woman now kneeling on institutional linoleum, smiling politely while emptying a paraplegic man’s catheter bag. “Nora?” Her voice caught, thin and incredulous. “What… what are you doing here? Doing this?” I gave her a flat, unhurried glance, then went back to securing the drainage valve with gloved hands. I didn’t flinch. I didn’t speak. It wasn’t until I stripped off my latex gloves and stepped into the corridor that she hurried after me, her low heels clicking against the waxed floor. Her eyes were rimmed with red. “Nora, please. Why aren’t you painting anymore?” She reached toward me, her manicured fingers trembling in midair. “Do you… do you still hate me that much?” My knuckles tightened against the clipboard. Facing away from her, I shook my head in silence. The day Eleanor Montgomery had her attorneys walk into the precinct and hand over statements that sealed my indictment, I learned a simple truth: hatred is a luxury reserved for people with trust funds and social standing. Now, I had neither. I was a convicted felon with sixty-two dollars in my checking account and a ruined body. All I wanted was to stay as far away from the Montgomery family as humanly possible. By the time my shift ended, an early winter blizzard had blanketed the city in wet, heavy slush. A miserable queue snaked along the curb at the crosstown bus stop. I stood near the rusted shelter, stamping my feet in thin canvas boots, tucking my raw red hands under my armpits while straining my neck to watch for headlights through the blinding flurries. My breath bloomed in ragged clouds. A sleek black Rolls-Royce Ghost pulled smoothly to the curb, its tires cutting through the gray sludge. The tinted rear passenger window slid down with a faint mechanical purr, releasing a draft of rich leather and warm, climate-controlled cedar. Eleanor Montgomery sat in the back, wrapped in a plush shearling coat, her sculpted, elegant face framed by diamond studs. “Nora, get in,” she urged, her voice tight with strain. “Let me take you home.” I glanced down at my prepaid phone. The freezing temperatures had drained the remaining battery; the screen went pitch-black. Without a second thought, I pulled open the front passenger door and climbed in. The penitentiary had cured me of pride years ago. Pride doesn’t keep frostbite out of your toes, and it doesn’t quiet the gnawing ache in your stomach. The two dollars and seventy-five cents I saved on bus fare tonight meant I could buy a hot deli sandwich and two eggs for breakfast. Behind the wheel, Arthur, the family’s longtime chauffeur, offered me a tentative, mournful smile in the rearview mirror. He immediately cranked the blower, directing the vent right at my shivering knees. “Miss Nora,” he murmured, his voice thick with nostalgia. “You used to love the snow. You and Master Patrick would spend hours in the back gardens, building an entire army of snowmen until your mittens were soaked through.” My hands paused on the cheap wool scarf wrapped around my neck. I looked out at the grimy snow piling against the highway guardrails, feeling a dull ache behind my temples. I hated snow now. Snow meant dampness leaking through the paper-thin drywall of my basement studio apartment. Snow meant transit delays, and transit delays meant a docked attendance bonus on my paycheck. When I didn’t reply, Arthur let out a heavy sigh. “If Master Patrick woke up and saw how grounded and poised you’ve become… he’d be so proud.” The interior of the car fell dead silent. Even Eleanor, who had been leaning forward as if searching for words, closed her eyes and sank back into the upholstery, turning her head toward the darkened glass. Patrick’s vegetative state was an unhealed, jagged wound in the Montgomery household. And I was the one who had paid the blood price for it. The city thinned out, the glittering commercial avenues giving way to cracked asphalt, shuttered bodegas, and flickering streetlights. When the neon sign of the twenty-four-hour laundromat came into view, I tapped the dashboard. “Drop me at the corner, Arthur.” Arthur pulled over next to a row of derelict, pre-war walk-ups. Through the window, Eleanor stared in horror at the narrow alleyway, the overflowing dumpsters, and the peeling paint of the tenements. “Nora…” Her breath caught, trembling with disbelief. “You… you live here? In a place like this?” I pulled my thin puffer coat tightly across my chest and kept my tone matter-of-fact. “The rent is cheap.” Eleanor choked back a sound, her composure splintering. When she spoke again, her voice shook. “Why didn’t you come home after you were released? Why didn’t you come find me?” I pushed the door open, stepped into the slush, and turned back to shut it with practiced care. “Mrs. Montgomery,” I said quietly, “I stopped being a Montgomery a very long time ago.” Her face went entirely bloodless. Before I could take three steps into the falling snow, the rear door swung open. Eleanor scrambled out into the bitter gale, heedless of the freezing slush ruining her designer pumps. “Nora!” she cried out desperately. “The day after tomorrow is my birthday. Would you… could you just have dinner with me? Just one dinner?” I didn’t turn around. I pulled my hood low and kept walking into the squall, though my mind involuntarily drifted back ten years, to my fifteenth birthday. That had been my first birthday after being brought back into the Montgomery estate. With naive, pathetic yearning, I had asked Eleanor that morning if she might stay home and share a cake with me. She had merely nodded with distracted indifference—and an hour later, she swept out the front doors to take Hailey on a whirlwind shopping spree to Manhattan. I had sat alone in that cavernous, marble dining hall from noon until dusk, and from midnight until sunrise. The candles melted down into deformed lumps of wax over a grocery-store sponge cake while the housekeepers whispered and smirked in the pantry, their snide mockery drifting through the cracked doors. When Eleanor finally returned the next morning, laughing softly as she draped a designer cashmere wrap over Hailey’s shoulders, the humiliation inside me shattered like glass. I broke down. I screamed. I wept until I choked, asking Eleanor why Hailey was the only daughter she ever saw, why Hailey got everything while I got nothing. Eleanor had recoiled in absolute disgust, ripping her sleeve from my grip. “Nora Montgomery,” she had snapped coldly, “you don’t deserve it.” I had stood frozen, struck dumb, unable to fathom what monstrous sin I had committed to make my own mother despise me so thoroughly. When Patrick caught wind of the scene, he took the next red-eye flight back from his prep school abroad. He had sat on the edge of my bed, jet-lagged and hollow-eyed with guilt, speaking in that gentle, appeasing cadence he always used when trying to mend impossible things. “Nora, listen to me,” he had pleaded softly. “When you were taken from that playground at four years old, Mom suffered a complete psychiatric collapse from the guilt. She spent two years in an inpatient facility. When she finally visited that state orphanage and saw Hailey, she convinced herself Hailey was her lost little Brooke. It was the only thing that brought her back to reality.” He had rubbed his tired eyes, sighing. “Dad legally adopted Hailey and gave her your birth name, Brooke. For eleven years, Mom poured her entire soul into her. If we abruptly told her the truth, the doctors said she’d relapse. Can you… can you try to understand what Mom and I are dealing with? In her mind, loving Hailey is loving you.” And so, my identity was stripped away. I wasn’t allowed to be Brooke Montgomery anymore; I was rechristened Nora, shoved into the guest wing under the legal guise of an “adopted daughter.” Nora. An afterthought. A polite visitor who was explicitly warned never to disturb the fragile domestic bliss of their manufactured family. Seeing my fingernails biting crescent moons into my palms, Patrick had sighed, reaching into his carry-on bag to pull out a silver-wrapped box with a satin bow. “Happy birthday, Nora.” I hadn’t taken it. My eyes had locked onto the identical silver package resting right beside it in his bag. Patrick’s expression had grown awkward. “That one… is for Brooke. You’re both my sisters. I have to treat you equally.” He wanted to be fair. But in a house built on theft, his brand of fairness was the cruellest injustice imaginable. While I was being beaten with electrical cords by child traffickers in the rural backwoods, scavenging for scraps and clawing my way through nightmares just to escape, Hailey Barnes was sleeping on Egyptian cotton sheets under my name, eating off silver spoons, and inheriting my mother’s devotion. While I fought to find my way home, they had already replaced me with a shiny, unbroken substitute. Yet, back then, I had been so starved for affection that even Patrick’s diluted, compromised warmth felt like water in a desert. I clung to it like a lifeline, terrified that if I let go, I would drown in the dark. A stray gust blew ice crystals against my burning cheeks. I shook myself from the past and hurried up the freezing concrete stairwell to my third-floor room. Inside, I plugged my phone into the wall charger. The screen flickered to life, immediately buzzing with an incoming contact notification. The screen read: [New message request from: Mom.] I stared at the glowing letters for two seconds, then swiped thumb across the screen and hit Decline. It didn’t surprise me that she had my private number. With the Montgomery resources, a private investigator could track down my burner phone in twenty minutes. What puzzled me was the performance. For years, she had looked at me as though she wished I had rotted in a ditch; why play the penitent mother now? Aside from a ruined right wrist and a pair of broken ears, I had nothing left for her to strip away and hand to Hailey. I told myself Eleanor Montgomery no longer had the power to hurt me, but my subconscious betrayed me. That night, I plunged headlong into the old nightmares. In the dream, I was seven again, locked in a windowless toolshed in the Appalachians, fighting a feral hound for a crust of moldy cornbread. My skin was a roadmap of purple contusions and weeping burns. Every time the pain pushed me toward unconsciousness, only one thought kept my heart beating: I have to go home. Mom and Dad are waiting for me. Patrick is looking for me. If I die here, they’ll die of heartbreak. I can’t break their hearts. But when I finally crawled back to the gates of the suburban estate, dirt caked under my skin, there was no room left at the table. Eleanor stood at the top of the grand spiral staircase, looking down at my ragged thrift-store clothes with an expression of visceral recoil that cut deeper than any belt. Beside her stood Hailey, glowing in a cream velvet dress, diamond studs gleaming in her small ears. Hailey had tilted her head, whining playfully against Eleanor’s arm. “Mom, look at what Patrick dragged in from the street. Is he seriously keeping that stray here to play with me?” I had looked up in fury, but the moment my eyes fell on Hailey’s pristine, buffed manicure, shame had flooded my throat. I had shoved my own hands—gnarled, raw, with half the fingernails torn away from picking locks—deep into my pockets. Life at the estate had been a slow, quiet suffocation. Eleanor’s cold neglect, Hailey’s calculated cruelty, and the domestic staff’s open contempt wore away at my sanity like acid. I swallowed the venom until the summer of my senior year, when I overheard Hailey laughing with her prep-school clique in the conservatory, claiming I was the filthy illegitimate daughter of Eleanor’s deceased brother, a pathetic charity case living off scraps. Something inside me snapped. In front of fifty prominent socialites gathered for high tea, I charged across the lawn and tackled Hailey into the rose bushes, screaming the truth at the top of my lungs—that Hailey was nothing but an orphan from a county shelter, a fraud living a stolen life. Humiliated before the entire country club set, Hailey staged a theatrical swoon, collapsing onto the grass. Eleanor had rushed forward, cradling Hailey against her designer silk blouse, and turned on me with eyes so full of murderous venom I thought she might tear me apart with her bare hands. “Nora Montgomery, you are no daughter of mine!” Eleanor had shrieked, her voice echoing across the manicured lawn. “I have only one daughter, and her name is Brooke!” She had swept away with Hailey in her arms, leaving me standing in the center of the terrace while fifty pairs of aristocratic eyes watched in disgust, whispering, laughing behind linen napkins. I had stood there, remembering how, when I was four years old, Eleanor used to rock me by the nursery fireplace, whispering that I was her greatest treasure, promising that even if the world tore us apart, she would recognize her baby girl anywhere. You didn’t recognize me, I thought in the dark of my freezing room. You didn’t even want to look. After that disastrous garden party, high society branded me an uncontrollable delinquent, while Hailey was celebrated as a gracious, long-suffering saint. I stopped attending family dinners. I retreated to the attic studio, locking the heavy oak door and painting eighteen hours a day until my fingers cramped around the brushes. Patrick had returned from Oxford, had a series of screaming arguments with Eleanor behind closed mahogany doors, and then brought me professional-grade Belgian canvases, Kolinsky sable brushes, and an unlimited Centurion card. “Don’t hold it against Mom, Nora,” he had pleaded, his hands resting on my shoulders. “She’s fragile. Her mind isn’t right. Just be patient. Be good. Once she sees how talented and obedient you are, she’ll come around.” So I tried. I forced down my fury, stayed quiet, and tried to earn Eleanor’s love. But Eleanor only saw my quietness as cold calculation. She accused me of playing mind games to drive a wedge between her and her son. The stricter she became, the more she shut me out. I only opened the studio door when Patrick came home. He tried his best, but he was ascending the ranks of the family enterprise, buried in corporate takeovers. His hurried visits could not patch the yawning crater in my chest. I knew I had to get out. My only salvation lay in the Prix de Jeunesse, an international fine arts competition. The grand prize was a two-hundred-thousand-dollar grant and a four-year fellowship at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. For four months, I barely slept. I poured every drop of grief, rage, and survival onto a massive six-foot canvas, producing a masterpiece of haunting, fractured realism. On the day of the regional submission, I arrived at the gallery only to find my painting already hanging beneath the spotlights—credited exclusively to Brooke Montgomery. I pulled out my phone and played the studio’s cloud-synced security feed right in front of the board of jurors, exposing Hailey as a thief who had broken into my workspace at midnight to forge her signature over mine. Hailey’s face morphed into frantic terror. When the jurors began murmuring in disgust, she buried her face in her hands, hyperventilating until she dropped dramatically to the parquet floor. Eleanor dropped to her knees, gathering Hailey against her chest, and swung her arm back to deliver a crack across my jaw that sent me stumbling into the gallery partition. “If anything happens to Brooke,” Eleanor hissed through gritted teeth, “I swear to God I will destroy you!” By the following morning, the Montgomery legal team had issued a sweeping press release claiming the video footage was an AI-generated deepfake orchestrated by an emotionally unstable ward of the family. Hailey rallied her social media following, unleashing a wave of doxxing and digital harassment that painted me as a deranged stalker. I refused to roll over. I compiled the hard-drive metadata, the security logs, and the original sketches, stuffing them into a leather folio to take to the central police precinct. I never made it past the driveway. Four private security guards hired by Eleanor intercepted me at the iron gates, their orders explicit: transport me involuntarily to an inpatient psychiatric facility upstate to protect Hailey’s burgeoning career. When I fought back, clawing and kicking like an animal, one of the guards twisted my right arm behind my back and slammed my wrist against the stone balustrade with a sickening crack. Agony like liquid fire tore through my arm. I looked up through blinding tears, screaming for Eleanor. She stood on the grand front portico, wrapped in her cashmere coat, her arms folded, watching with stone-cold detachment as they dragged me across the gravel toward the black van. The van doors were about to slam shut when Patrick’s Porsche tore through the gates, skidding sideways across the drive. He leaped out, throwing his body between me and the guards. He had spent the last twenty-four hours digging through city archives and hospital records. He didn’t just fire the guards on the spot; he marched into the foyer and threw the original missing-person police report from twelve years ago, alongside the state adoption decree for Hailey Barnes, right onto the marble console in front of Eleanor. “She isn’t an impostor, Mom!” Patrick roared, his voice cracking with fury. “Nora is Brooke! She is your biological daughter!” Eleanor stared at the documents, her eyes wide with shock, refusing to accept the reality staring her in the face. Then Patrick dropped a flash drive containing phone recordings onto the table. “And this is Hailey bribing your security detail to snap Nora’s painting wrist. If you ever lay a hand on my sister again, Hailey, you are out of this family.” Hailey broke down in theatrical hysterics, throwing herself at Eleanor’s knees, sobbing like an injured child. “Mom, I’m sorry! I was just so terrified… I thought you’d throw me away once you found out… I thought you didn’t love me anymore…” Watching Hailey weep, Eleanor looked as though her heart had been ripped from her ribs. She turned on Patrick, her voice rising into an unhinged scream. “If there was a mistake, then let it stay a mistake! If I am only allowed to have one daughter in this life, it will be Brooke! If you throw her out of this house, Patrick, I walk out with her!” Eleanor cast one final, venomous glare in my direction. In that freezing foyer, cradling my mangled, broken wrist against my ribs, the physical agony couldn’t compare to the cold, dead hollow opening inside my chest. I woke with a violent jolt, my right wrist throbbing with phantom electricity. A glance at the alarm clock sent cold panic through my veins. It was the final day of the month; if I clocked in even three minutes late, my entire monthly punctuality bonus would vanish. I threw on my scrubs, grabbed my winter coat, and bolted down the rickety stairs into the biting wind. At the curb, the black Rolls-Royce was idling, exhaust pluming white into the freezing air. Eleanor stood beside the rear fender, a dusting of snow clinging to the dark fur of her mink coat. Her skin was pale, her lips chapped from the cold. The moment she saw me, she hurried forward, her gloved hands reaching out. “Nora, the roads are iced over. Please, let me drive you to the hospital.” I slid my hand away from her grip, murmuring a curt, neutral “Thank you,” and opened the front passenger door as if getting into an Uber. Arthur greeted me with an anxious, solicitous smile, immediately handing me an insulated travel mug. “Miss Nora, the Madam had the kitchen prepare this fresh. She was worried you wouldn’t have time for breakfast.” The scalding metal stung against my frostbitten fingers. I looked down at the embossed gold crest on the lid, but didn’t open it. Eleanor leaned forward from the backseat, her brows furrowed in timid concern. “Nora, you always loved hot vanilla milk. Why aren’t you drinking it?” I stared at the steam venting through the lid and replied evenly, “I’m lactose intolerant. And vanilla milk was Hailey’s preference, not mine.” Eleanor opened her mouth to protest. “That’s not true. When you lived at the house, you drank a cup every single night before bed—” She cut herself off. The blood drained from her face. Memory struck her like a slap. She remembered. One night, around two in the morning, I had knocked frantically on her master suite door, my lips purple, my throat closing, my face covered in severe hives, gasping for her to call 911. Assuming I had brought some contagious, low-class filth into her clean house, Eleanor had shoved me into the hallway, locked her door, and packed Hailey into an SUV at three in the morning to decamp to their country estate, terrified I would infect her precious child. I had dialed 911 myself from the kitchen floor. During my four-day stay in the ICU, Eleanor never once called. The remainder of the ride was suffocatingly quiet. It was only when Arthur pulled into the hospital’s circular ambulance bay that Eleanor found her voice again, fragile and pleading. “Nora… Patrick’s neurologist called this morning. His recent EEGs show increased cortical activity. He might wake up. Won’t you please come up to the private wing with me to see him?” She leaned closer, tears welling in her eyes. “Your brother… he loved you more than anyone. If he hears your voice, if you talk to him, it might bring him back. Please.” My hand froze on the chrome door handle. Patrick’s final, fading words before the abyss flashed across my memory, leaving an acrid taste in my mouth. “I can’t,” I said rasply. “I have a shift to cover.” “Then let me hire you!” Eleanor cried, completely shedding her aristocratic poise. She lunged forward, grabbing my forearm with both hands, her voice breaking into a ragged sob. “Be his private nurse. Name your rate. Ten thousand a week? Twenty thousand? Whatever you want, Nora, just come!” “Let go of me, Mrs. Montgomery.” “Do you hate us that much?” she wept, clutching my sleeve like a drowning woman. “You won’t call me Mom, you won’t step foot in the house… are you really going to abandon your own brother, too?” I twisted around to pry her fingers off my coat, desperate to tell her that I had no energy left for hate, that staying alive took every scrap of breath I had. But she pulled back in panic, her manicured nails catching against the side of my head. A tiny piece of molded beige plastic tore free and bounced off the pavement with a sharp, hollow clatter. The sound cut off instantly. The world plunged into a muffled, watery silence. Eleanor stared down at the small hearing aid lying in the dirty slush, her jaw trembling in absolute horror. “Nora…” Her voice reached me as a distorted, low-frequency hum. “Why are you wearing a hearing aid? What… what did they do to you in prison?” I looked at her, my expression completely flat. She was the one who had instructed her legal team to “make an example” of me, ensuring I was assigned to a maximum-security state facility known for its brutal yard culture. What was the point of this sudden, weeping innocence? I refused to give her an audience. Crouching down, I picked the hearing aid out of the gray sludge, wiped the receiver dry against my scrubs, and fitted it back into my ear canal. The shrill hum of feedback screeched before stabilizing into the dull hum of morning traffic. Without looking back, I pushed through the emergency sliding glass doors. Behind me, the muffled sound of Eleanor’s choked sobs dissolved into the wail of approaching sirens. I spent five minutes in the locker room splashing cold water on my face, straightened my smock, and headed up to the third-floor orthopedics ward. When I opened the door to room 314, my previous bedbound patient was gone. Sitting comfortably on the private suite’s leather recliner was Hailey Barnes, one slender leg crossed over the other, sipping an iced matcha latte. The moment she saw me turn to leave, she set the cup down with a light, mocking snicker. “Well, well. Look at the little Montgomery princess,” Hailey purred, her voice dripping with venom. “Down to scrubbing toilets and wiping strangers’ asses for a living. I told you, Nora. You cross me, and you end up in the sewer.” My face showed nothing. Hailey’s eyes flashed with annoyance at my lack of reaction, but her lips curled into a smirk. “Don’t bother looking for your supervisor. I just signed an exclusive private-duty care agreement with the agency. As of ten minutes ago, I am your primary client. You do whatever I tell you to do. Understand?” My phone buzzed in my scrub pocket. I glanced down. It was a text from the agency coordinator: Montgomery client requested you specifically. Rate is double standard per diem. Bonus already deposited to your account. Double pay. I locked the phone, smoothed down my apron, and assumed a posture of neutral, deferential professionalism. “What do you need, Miss Montgomery?” Hailey’s smile widened, triumphant. For the next four hours, she ran me ragged. She made me take a paring knife and pick every individual black seed out of two pints of fresh strawberries. She made me haul steaming water in a washbasin to scrub her pedicured feet, then complained the water was too hot and kicked the basin, spilling soapy water all over my scrub pants. Through it all, I didn’t utter a single complaint. I dried the floor, picked the seeds, and emptied the basin. Seeing that her petty cruelties couldn’t break my dead-eyed composure, Hailey’s frustration curdled into raw, twitching malice. During the busy lunch rush, she casually brushed past me near the linen cart, slipping something heavy and metallic into the deep front pocket of my smock. Two seconds later, she lunged out into the bustling hallway, pointing a trembling, manicured finger at me and screaming at the top of her lungs. “Security! She stole it! Nora Montgomery stole my bracelet!” Visitors, doctors, and nurses froze in their tracks. A crowd formed in seconds, circling the doorway. Hailey fell against the doorframe, tears spilling down her cheeks in a masterclass of wounded innocence. “Nora, I know you served time!” Hailey wept, loud enough for the entire wing to hear. “I thought you had reformed. I hired you specifically to help you get back on your feet! How could you do this to me? If you needed money, you could have just asked! But that Cartier bracelet was a custom birthday gift from my mother! Please, just give it back!” Murmurs rippled through the onlookers like wildfire. “A felon? They hired an ex-con to work the private suites?” “I know her, she took care of my uncle last month. She seemed so quiet and hardworking… you really can never tell with criminals.” “Once a thief, always a thief.” Hailey watched me with veiled triumph, expecting the old Nora—the Nora who would scream, throw things, and look like an unhinged maniac to everyone in the room. Instead, I reached into my pocket, pulled out the heavy gold cuff, and held it up by two fingers. Then, with my other hand, I brought out my smartphone. The red recording indicator on the top corner was blinking steadily. “I didn’t steal your bracelet, Miss Montgomery,” I said, my voice cutting through the corridor with cool clarity. “And if you want to file a police report, please do. My phone has been recording continuously from the front pocket of my scrub top since I clocked in. The camera angle captures everything within a hundred and eighty degrees, including the exact moment your right hand slipped this into my pocket.” Hailey’s face went rigid. The color drained from her cheeks in a single breath. She looked at the phone, then at the gathered crowd, who were already whispering in a very different tone. “I… well,” Hailey stammered, waving her hand with forced carelessness. “Since the bracelet has been recovered, I won’t waste the police’s time. We’ll drop it.” She turned on her heel to retreat into the suite. “Apologize, Hailey.” Hailey stopped dead. She spun back around, her voice shrill with outrage. “What did you say?” “You just publicly accused an employee of felony grand larceny,” I said, stepping forward. “Apologize to me.” Hailey’s face flushed an ugly, mottled crimson. “Apologize to you? Do you know who I am? Do you want me to call Eleanor right now and have you blacklisted from every hospital in the state?” I tilted my head, letting a cold, razor-thin smile touch my lips. “You should definitely call her,” I said softly. “Considering she spent the last forty-eight hours begging me on her knees to move back to the estate… what do you think would happen if I told her my only condition was having you thrown out on the street?”

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1 On the day of my wedding, I discovered my bridal makeup artist had been swapped with my bridesmaid’s. Lifting the heavy, beaded skirt of my wedding gown, I went looking for my groom, James. Instead, I found him leaning over a vanity chair, wrapping his arms possessively around my bridesmaid, Ivy. Ivy’s face was flawlessly painted with the exact bridal look the celebrity makeup artist had spent weeks designing exclusively for me. When she saw me, her voice dropped into a timid, trembling whisper. “Scarlett, please don’t be mad at James. I just thought it would be fun to try the bridal look. I will go wash it off right now. I am so sorry, I promise I won’t do it again…” James pressed a firm hand onto her shoulder, stepping in to take the heat. “Do not blame Ivy. I insisted on letting her experience a piece of the wedding.” He looked at me, his tone laced with absolute entitlement. “Scarlett, you already have me completely. Don’t be so petty about the ceremony details, okay?” I stared at them. Then, I nodded, unzipping the garment bag and tossing the custom wedding gown directly into his arms. “Since her bridal makeup is already done, she can have the dress, too. Let her have the whole ceremony. Make it perfect for her.” James’s eyes softened, mistaking my numbness for grace. “Scarlett, I promise you, after today, my heart and my body belong entirely to you. Only you.” I didn’t answer him. I simply reached out and took the bridesmaid dress from the rack. James had no idea that earlier this morning, I had received a phone call from myself three years in the future. This toxic, suffocating wedding? I was officially checking out. … “Wait.” I turned to leave, but Ivy called out to me. Her eyes darted nervously before settling into a stubborn glare. “I am sorry, Scarlett, but that bridesmaid dress was custom tailored for my measurements. I really don’t want…” She trailed off, biting her lip and casting a pitiful, helpless look up at James. Without a second of hesitation, James closed the distance between us and snatched the dress right out of my hands. “I will have someone find you another outfit. Stop trying to take things from Ivy.” I slowly uncurled my empty fingers. My eyes stung, rimmed with a faint red as I forced myself to ask the question. “You think I am the one taking things from her?” “She is wearing my bridal makeup. She is about to walk down the aisle with my groom. What do you call that?” A flicker of guilt crossed James’s face. He opened his mouth to speak, but Ivy quickly stepped between us, shielding him. “Scarlett, if you are angry, take it out on me! It is all my fault.” Tears welled up in her large, innocent eyes. “If I hadn’t loved him since we were kids, if I hadn’t taken our childhood marriage pact so seriously, if I hadn’t tried to end my own life over the pain of losing him… he wouldn’t pity me. He wouldn’t keep me around.” “It is all my fault! I shouldn’t have survived that day. Why didn’t I just die?” Ivy broke down into hysterical sobs, spiraling into a theatrical display of absolute despair. James instantly pulled her into a tight embrace, pressing frantic kisses to her forehead. “It is not your fault, Ivy. You did nothing wrong.” Ivy continued to hyperventilate until her eyes rolled back, and she collapsed against his chest, pretending to faint. James shot me a venomous glare. “Scarlett, if anything happens to Ivy, this wedding is permanently canceled!” My chest tightened. I was about to step forward and call out her pathetic acting, but my feet felt glued to the floor. “What are you standing there for? Go get a doctor!” James barked. “Forget it! Just stay out of my way.” He scooped Ivy up into his arms and shoved violently past me. I watched them rush down the hallway. As her head rested on James’s shoulder, Ivy opened her eyes, looked straight at me, and flashed a triumphant, mocking smile. My mind dragged me back to last night. James and I were supposed to do the final walkthrough of the banquet hall. Ivy had tagged along. She completely overturned the catering menu I had spent months curating. She even demanded the venue’s signature champagne roses be replaced with her favorite pink peonies. The event manager looked at me awkwardly, unsure whose orders to follow. James just waved his hand dismissively. “Do whatever Ivy wants.” By the time the walkthrough finished, it was nearly midnight. Ivy whispered that she was scared to take a cab alone. James instantly offered to drive her home. As for me, his fiancé? James didn’t even blink. “The venue is only a few blocks from our new penthouse. You can just walk back, Scarlett.” On that walk home, I was cornered in a dark alley by three aggressive thugs. Terrified, I dialed James’s number. Ivy answered the phone. “Scarlett? James is in the middle of changing his clothes.” “He promised to spend his final night as a bachelor with me,” she whispered into the receiver. “Oh, and as a thank you, I arranged a little bachelorette surprise for you in that alley. Have fun.” After that, James’s phone was turned off. Facing the advancing men, I fought like a feral animal. I kicked, I bit, I gouged with my nails. I barely managed to break through their circle and run for my life. During the struggle, my right arm was severely fractured. But because I didn’t want James to worry, and because I was so desperate to preserve our “perfect” wedding, I refused to get a cast. In reality, every passing second was a blinding, agonizing physical torment. When James shoved past me just now with Ivy in his arms, his shoulder slammed directly into my fractured arm. The pain was so intense my muscles spasmed. Involuntary tears spilled over my lashes, hot and bitter. Using my good left hand, I pulled out my phone and dialed the patriarch of the Sinclair family. “Arthur,” I said, keeping my voice dead level. “The expansion project in the volatile Eastern European sector. I will take it.” The line went dead silent for a long moment before the old man replied. “Are you absolutely sure about this, Scarlett?” “If you take this post, you and James will be living on opposite sides of the world. You will not be permitted to return for at least five years.” Tears continued to fall, blurring my vision. In my mind, I pictured James running back to me, grabbing my shoulders, and begging me to stay. But I blinked the tears away. James did eventually come back into the room, but the words out of his mouth were pure ice. “This is the only way you can atone for what you did to her.” “I am sure,” I told Arthur Sinclair over the phone. “I won’t regret it.” I ended the call and looked at James with absolute calm. “What does Ivy want now?” James’s brow furrowed in deep annoyance. “What is with that attitude, Scarlett?” “Ivy could have been happy today, but you had to trigger her! You almost caused her to have a psychological breakdown!” “She just wanted you to participate in a little game to warm up the crowd. Stop acting like she is making unreasonable demands!” I lost all remaining energy to defend myself. I stared at him for a few seconds. “Fine.” James froze, clearly caught off guard by my sudden compliance. The violent irritation in his eyes slowly melted into a patronizing tenderness. He reached out to touch my cheek. “Scarlett…” I turned my head, dodging his hand completely. “We are running out of time. I need to find a bridesmaid dress.” His voice grew thick and awkward. “You don’t need to.” “Ivy already prepared an outfit for you. If… if you don’t like it, just tell me, and I will have my assistant buy something else.” I treated his second sentence like white noise. Ever since Ivy attempted suicide over him, she had become his absolute priority. If Ivy and I ever clashed, the solution was always the same. I was expected to step back and satisfy her. I used to fight it. I used to scream and demand answers. James would just look at me with exhausted, judgmental eyes, treating me like a sinner on trial. “Scarlett, you owe her.” “If you hadn’t tempted me, if you hadn’t made me fall in love with you, I would have married Ivy. She was my destiny first.” So, it was my fault for being loved? I never understood his twisted logic, but the invisible ropes of guilt had always kept me bound. I always bowed my head to her. Yet, every time I yielded, James would shower me with overwhelming compensation. I was an orphan with only a high school diploma. James spent a fortune on elite private tutors and pulled strings to get me into a prestigious Ivy League business program. The moment I graduated, he convinced his grandfather to let me enter the Sinclair Group. He groomed me to be the heir. I still remembered the day I secured my first massive corporate acquisition. He lifted me off the ground, his eyes shining with pride. “Keep climbing, Scarlett. Once you are the CEO, I can just sit back and let my brilliant wife take care of me.” James genuinely wanted me to be more powerful than him. He meticulously paved the road, giving me the corporate throne that was supposed to be his by bloodright. I was deeply moved. I truly believed he was pushing me to the top because he loved me beyond reason. To repay his devotion, I sacrificed my youth and health, pouring every ounce of my soul into the company. James played the perfect supportive partner. But the reality was, every single act of kindness he showed me always had Ivy’s shadow lurking right behind it. I once asked him how long the three of us were going to stay trapped in this twisted dynamic. He kissed my hair and whispered gently into my ear. “Just wait until we are married. Once the rings are on, Ivy will finally let go.” I believed him. I waited. But today, on the very day of my wedding, I finally realized the only person who needed to let go was me. … “This is the dress Ivy prepared for me?” I stared at the garment. It was held together by two razor-thin straps, with a plunging, heavily exposed back. The fabric was a gaudy, cheap metallic gold. It looked like something a nightclub dancer would wear to a cheap gig. My expression turned ice cold. The young assistant holding the hanger kept her head bowed, terrified to look me in the eye. “Y-yes. Mr. Sinclair approved it.” “Understood.” I swallowed the surging waves of rage and disgust. Hooking my pinky finger under one of the flimsy straps, I walked into the fitting room. The wedding reception was massive. The guest list was a who’s who of the city’s elite. Over twenty media outlets had been invited to livestream the event. I knew exactly what would happen when I walked out in a trashy, revealing dress. I would be ripped apart by the press. If I were still the old Scarlett, the woman desperate to marry James, I would have refused to wear it. I would have marched up to Ivy and demanded an explanation. And James, swayed by a few fake tears, would have humiliated me in front of everyone to protect her. There was no point anymore. I was done playing their game. I put on the gold dress. The hem barely covered my upper thighs, threatening to expose me with every step. The thin straps dug into my skin, feeling like they would snap under the slightest pressure. My face remained an emotionless mask. Barefoot, I walked out onto the grand stage in the center of the ballroom. Ivy was standing there in my wedding gown. The bridal veil obscured her features, leaving only her smug, bright red lips visible. Seeing me, her smile widened. She grabbed James’s arm, pulling him toward the edge of the stage. “Look, Scarlett is coming out!” Then, Ivy let out a theatrical gasp. “Oh my god!” There were five other people on the stage with me. Five heavily muscled men wearing nothing but leather harnesses and tight shorts. They immediately surrounded me. After a few highly suggestive, aggressive dance moves, they started reaching out, attempting to tear the flimsy straps off my dress. James finally hit his breaking point. He lunged toward the stage. “Scarlett! That is enough!” Ivy wrapped her arms tightly around his waist, sobbing violently. “James, why is she doing this? She won’t even let me have a fake wedding? She…” Ivy began to hyperventilate, clutching her chest. James immediately held her, rubbing her back while shooting daggers at me. “Scarlett, get down here right now, and I will pretend this never happened! If you don’t…” “I will turn this fake wedding into a real one! I will marry Ivy today!” I didn’t respond. I was a little busy. Those five men were hired by Ivy specifically to strip me bare and destroy my dignity in front of the entire city. But hidden in the palm of my hand was a tiny, razor-sharp sewing blade. As they reached for me, I moved. Every time a hand came close, my blade found skin. Men are made of flesh and blood. They bleed. They feel pain. They feel fear. Seeing the absolute, feral lack of hesitation in my eyes, the five men panicked. Within seconds, they backed off and practically fled the stage. I wasn’t humiliated. Instead, I channeled the adrenaline of the fight into a sharp, commanding solo routine. The guests below couldn’t see the blood or the blade. They only saw a fierce, untouchable performance. The ballroom erupted into applause. Hearing the cheering, Ivy’s face twisted into an ugly sneer. She glared at me with pure, unadulterated hatred. James, however, was completely mesmerized. He unconsciously let go of Ivy, shrugged off his suit jacket, and walked onto the stage to drape it over my bare shoulders. “Scarlett, go back to the dressing room and put your bridal makeup back on.” “When it is time to exchange the rings, you will be the one on stage.” “You are the woman I am marrying. Ivy can play around, but she doesn’t get to take your place.” “Of course,” I smiled sweetly, acting as though his betrayal had never bothered me at all. He stared at me with intense reluctance as I walked off the stage, even taking a few steps to follow me. Panic flashed across Ivy’s face. She clutched her chest again, preparing for another fake medical emergency, but James had lost his patience. “I am not a doctor, Ivy. If you are really sick, go to the hospital.” “And give Scarlett her dress back.” … Humiliated and furious, Ivy stormed into my private dressing room. Before she could even open her mouth, I spoke. “Do you know why James loves me?” “Because you are a cheap wh*re!” Ivy spat bitterly. “He loves me because I am wild. I am a challenge he cannot fully conquer,” I said coldly. “But you? He doesn’t even have to lift a finger, and you are already crawling on your knees for him.” “You can never beat me, Ivy. Never.” “Smack!” I anticipated her raised hand and slapped her across the face before she could even strike. The impact left her completely stunned. It wasn’t enough. Nowhere near enough. I looked at her with pure disdain. “I only let you win in the past because I didn’t care enough to fight. But now…” Feeling the absolute icy resolve in the room, Ivy lost her mind, screaming hysterically. “No! That is impossible! He loves me! He will always have a place for me in his heart!” “Want to make a bet?” I asked softly. “What kind of bet?” A few minutes later. James walked into my dressing room. Seeing the figure sitting with her back to the door, the tension in his face vanished. A gentle, loving smile spread across his lips as he approached. “Scarlett, why haven’t you changed into your gown yet?” The woman turned around. It was Ivy. She looked up at him timidly. “James.” James’s face hardened instantly. “Where is Scarlett?” Ivy stood up and wrapped her arms around him, stopping him from turning around. Like a desperate stray cat, she pressed her body against his back, her hands trailing provocatively down his chest. “James, take me right here. Right now.” “Since I can’t have a real wedding with you, let me have the one thing only a real husband and wife can do.” “Scarlett…” Ivy whispered against his neck. “She refused to wear the dress after I touched it. She went to get a backup gown from the designers.” James forcefully grabbed her wrists, trying to pull her off. “I need to go find her!” Ivy trembled. “James!” She mimicked my exact tone of voice, striking a commanding, seductive pose. James stopped dead in his tracks. He turned his head, his eyes slowly darkening with a twisted, obsessive lust. Ivy curled her finger, kicked the vanity stool out of the way, and sat up on the makeup counter. “Come here,” she ordered. James’s face was a mask of violent internal struggle. Ivy scoffed. “What are you so afraid of? Scarlett won’t be back for a while. Are you really telling me you don’t want a taste of me?” “Don’t worry. After today, I will never bother you again.” The woman sitting on the counter was no longer the pathetic, crying Ivy that James was used to. She was cold. She was arrogant. She was incredibly alluring. James slowly loosened his silk tie and stepped between her legs. “Ivy, if you become my woman, it is for life. You don’t get to leave until I give you permission.” “Watch me,” Ivy challenged, turning her head away. James grabbed her jaw, forcing her to look at him, and crashed his lips down onto hers. Ivy responded with frantic, desperate passion. They tangled together, completely lost to the world, tearing at each other’s clothes in the middle of the room. I stood silently behind the heavy velvet curtain of the fitting room, watching the entire scene unfold with dead, emotionless eyes. At the same time, I was broadcasting the live security feed directly to the massive projector screens in the main banquet hall. Just as Ivy locked her legs around him to stop him from pulling away for round two, I stepped out from behind the curtain and walked right past them. My social media account updated with a single post. Relationship status: Over. No going back. … It wasn’t until late that night that James finally found out I was leaving the country to take over the Eastern European sector. He drove like a madman back to our penthouse. I was standing by the door, suitcase in hand, when he burst through the entrance. “Scarlett, please, don’t leave!” His eyes were bloodshot, pleading with absolute desperation. His arrogance was completely shattered. “What happened with Ivy was a mistake! It was just lust! You are the only woman I actually love!” His phone started vibrating furiously in his pocket. He glanced at the caller ID and immediately moved to decline it. “Answer it,” I said calmly. “You wouldn’t want to live with any regrets.” James declined the call anyway and powered the phone off entirely. “It is just her usual suicide threats. I am sick of it. Scarlett, listen to me, we can start over…” I looked down, pulled out my phone, and pulled up a photo. I turned the screen toward him. “Ivy just accepted a proposal from a college classmate who has been in love with her for ten years.” “What?” James snatched the phone from my hand, staring in utter disbelief at the picture of Ivy holding a massive bouquet of red roses, pressed intimately against another man. He shoved the phone back into my chest. “Wait for me,” he ordered frantically, sprinting out the door and speeding off into the night. I didn’t wait. I grabbed my suitcase and got into my waiting car. Sitting in the backseat, I opened my airline app and canceled the flight to Eastern Europe. I opened my photo gallery and permanently deleted the badly photoshopped image of Ivy I had just shown him. Finally, I popped the SIM card out of my phone, snapped it in half, and tossed the pieces out the window into the dark streets. Goodbye, James. I am going to start a new life. And you can rot in the hell of your own regret.

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1 Every time I came back from Harrison Mercer’s bed, I would fill the clawfoot tub with cold water and sit in it until my skin turned numb. I scrubbed with a stiff loofah, scouring away the faint scent of cedar and expensive tobacco, scouring away the dark, mottled bruises he left on my collarbone. The gentler he was to me, the harder I had to remind myself: Don’t you dare love him. For five years, I followed that rule like scripture. Until the night Harrison dropped to one knee. He was the golden boy of Manhattan’s old money, kneeling on the parquet floor of his penthouse, looking up at me with an easy, boyish smile that made my chest ache. The diamond he slipped onto my finger was four carats of flawless platinum-set emerald cut, brilliant enough to make every society column in the city choke on its morning coffee. I was pathetic. I let myself waver. Then came the wedding day. The glass-walled conservatory in the Hudson Valley was filled with two hundred of New York’s most elite guests, but the altar was empty. Harrison was nowhere to be found. The officiant hovered near the archway, adjusting his collar with nervous, sweating hands. Across the room, a cluster of Harrison’s prep-school friends huddled together, nursing tumblers of bourbon and laughing behind their hands, taking blatant pleasure in watching me drown. They had always thought I was reaching too high. They expected a spectacle. They expected me to throw a hysterics-laced fit, to rip the lace, to demand answers and stain the marble with mascara. Instead, I gave them a faint, polite smile. I took the millions Harrison had funneled into my accounts over the past five years, and I walked out. I had known the truth from the very beginning. There was never any room for me in Harrison Mercer’s heart. Five years ago, the first night he ever brought me up to his apartment, I stood outside the half-open door of his study and listened to him scream into the receiver: “You’re ruthless, Sienna! You decide it’s over, and that’s it? What the hell was I to you? You really think I can’t survive without you?” “I got on my knees for you! I drank myself into the ER with bleeding stomach ulcers, and you didn’t even look back! Fine. Let’s see who caves first. I just found a girl who listens to me, someone a hundred times more compliant than you’ll ever be. Let’s see who suffocates first!” By the time he finished, his voice had cracked into a raw, jagged sob. Standing in the dim hallway, I had touched my own ribs and told myself: A broken bone takes a hundred days to knit. Keep your heart out of it, and you won’t even need that long. Three hours had passed since the ceremony was supposed to begin. Harrison still hadn’t shown up. Ignoring the glances darting between pity and mockery, I looked into the gilded vanity mirror and quietly reached behind my head. With two steady tugs, I unpinned the cathedral veil. Trevor Mercer, Harrison’s older brother, lounged against the doorframe of the bridal suite, an amused smirk playing on his lips. “Giving up already, Hazel?” he drawled, rattling the ice in his scotch. “Harrison’s just running late. If you want to be the next Mrs. Mercer, you’re going to need thicker skin than that.” I didn’t look at him. I reached for my lobes and unclipped the diamond earrings, setting them gently onto the velvet tray. Harrison’s cousin Brooke drifted over, her silk gown rustling against the carpet. Her tone was wrapped in sweet, honeyed poison. “Don’t take it to heart, Hazel. Harrison is always so punctual. If he isn’t here… well, maybe Sienna had another one of her episodes. Maybe she needed him.” She lingered over Sienna’s name, drawing it out like a slow strike of a match, her eyes gleaming with anticipation. I caught her reflection in the mirror and let out a soft laugh. “Take it to heart?” I repeated, setting the last pearl pin back into its velvet slot. “Why would I take it to heart?” The air in the room thinned out instantly. I turned around, my gaze skimming over their waiting faces. “Did you honestly think I sat in this chair for three hours because I was waiting for him?” Trevor’s smile vanished. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?” I stood up, reached around to the nape of my neck, and pulled the zipper of the custom Vera Wang gown down to my waist. “This dress cost sixty thousand dollars. It would have been a waste not to take a few photos first.” My voice was entirely even, as though I were remarking on the humidity outside. “Hazel, know your place!” one of the groomsmen snapped from the corridor. “Harrison giving you his name was charity! You think you can pull a runaway bride routine on a Mercer? You step foot out of this venue, and there won’t be an inch of this town left for you!” The zipper reached the base of my spine. The heavy silk and hand-sewn lace slid down my hips, pooling uselessly around my ankles. Underneath, I was already wearing a plain linen button-down and a pair of dark slacks. I bent down, sifted through the sea of platinum and diamonds scattered on the vanity, and picked up my battered, five-year-old iPhone. I looked at every pair of eyes locked on me, and smiled. “I never belonged here to begin with,” I said. “Which means I don’t have a single thing to lose.” Without waiting for their reactions, I stepped over the ruined silk and walked out. Harrison was the sole heir to the Mercer maritime and real estate empire. The people in his orbit had grown up with private jets and summer estates in Newport. To them, my modest background made me look like a plastic bead someone had mistakenly strung onto a strand of Mikimoto pearls. No one understood why Harrison had picked me. Even when he put an engagement ring on my finger, the quiet condescension in their eyes never softened. He was the one who had abandoned his own wedding. Yet I was the one they expected to endure the public humiliation. I could have stayed. I could have screamed at them, hurled five years of accumulated slights back into their smug faces. But I didn’t have the time. My flight was scheduled for tonight. I had an apartment to pack up. Besides, I wasn’t surprised that Harrison had vanished. The night before the wedding, I had lain awake in the king-sized bed, staring at the ceiling until my eyes burned. Around three in the morning, I unlocked my phone and, out of some morbid impulse, opened Sienna Blake’s livestream. She was selling discounted skincare from a cramped, poorly lit studio. In the five years since she had walked away from Harrison, life had clearly taken its toll on her. The viewer count was unusually high, but nobody was asking about the serums. The chat was moving at lightning speed, drowned out by animated gift banners from the channel’s top donor—an anonymous account with an avatar I recognized instantly. The comments rolled across the screen in bold, icy blocks of text: End the stream. Go to bed. Your stomach can’t handle late nights. If you pass out again, I’m not coming to the hospital. Unblock my number. Send me your routing details, and I’ll wire you the money. I’m getting married tomorrow. Stop reaching out, and wipe that miserable look off your face. With every cold command, the screen exploded in digital fireworks—thousands of dollars dropped in seconds. Harrison was generous to a fault; even with the woman he claimed to despise, he threw money around like dirt. Sienna’s sales pitch faltered. She wiped the corner of her eye with a trembling thumb, her voice dropping to a fragile whisper. “Harrison… don’t use your money to insult what we had.” What we had? his reply flashed across the screen. Sienna, I nearly died for you. I tore my family apart for you. And tomorrow, I am marrying a woman I don’t give a damn about just to scrub the memory of you out of my skull. I’ve lived like a madman trying to erase you. You let go first. You’re the one who burned us down. I stared at the words a woman I don’t give a damn about, feeling a strange, quiet pause settle into my chest. The comment section erupted, a chorus of strangers begging them to reunite, screaming for him to call off the wedding. Sienna bit her lower lip until it lost color, staring directly into the lens with tears spilling over her lashes. “Harrison,” she whispered. “If I said I’d come back… if I said I’d do whatever it takes to fix this… would you please not marry her?” 2 I didn’t stay on the stream long enough to see his answer. His empty spot at the altar was answer enough. Harrison’s inability to let Sienna go was never a secret. Two years ago, a recurring lumbar injury flared up, leaving me barely able to stand. New York had some of the finest orthopedic surgeons in the country, but Harrison insisted on flying me hundreds of miles north to a private clinic in Montreal. Predictably, we ran into Sienna in the lobby. She looked just as she did in the cracked photograph he kept hidden in the inner sleeve of his leather wallet—young, delicate, entirely unguarded. Harrison had his hand resting on the small of my back. When Sienna appeared, his face went rigid, his eyes shuttering into something unreadable. Only I felt it: the instant she stepped into view, his fingers clamped around my waist with such sudden, bruising force that I had to bite my tongue to keep from flinching. “I’m sorry,” she whispered, taking an awkward step back toward the automatic doors. “I didn’t know you’d be here… I’ll go. I swore I wouldn’t bother you.” The muscle in Harrison’s jaw twitched. I stood beside him in silence, my gaze drifting to her collarbone. She had a tiny, faded tattoo there: a line-art sketch of a golden retriever. It was an exact match for the black cat inked beneath Harrison’s left collarbone. “Move,” Harrison said, his voice like dry ice. Yet when we stepped into the elevator, his eyes never left the glass doors until they slid completely shut. “Keep a hold of that,” I told Sienna quietly as we passed her. “Don’t lose it.” She was clutching a black titanium card in her hand—an authorized user card tied directly to Harrison’s primary account. In business, Harrison destroyed anyone who crossed him without a second thought. That unlimited line of credit was the only mercy he had ever shown an enemy. A lifeline thrown to a woman he claimed he never wanted to see again. On our drive back across the border, the skies opened into a torrential downpour. Harrison drove with one hand on the wheel, his mind visibly elsewhere. When his phone screen lit up with an unsaved number, he glanced down and slammed his foot on the brake. The seatbelt caught, but the force hurled me forward anyway. My forehead slammed hard against the windshield. Warm blood immediately welled up, dripping down my temple. “Harrison…” Sienna’s voice came through the car speakers, choked with tears. “I know I shouldn’t call… but my mom’s vitals crashed. The doctors said it’s critical, and I don’t know who else to turn to… I’m so scared…” Harrison turned to look at me, the panic in his eyes spilling over. “Hazel, get out here and call an Uber. I have an emergency.” I had never seen him look like that. Not during hostile takeovers, not when the markets plummeted and his board threatened a revolt. He was so panicked that he made me get out on the shoulder of an unlit highway in freezing rain. He was so panicked that he floored the accelerator, sending spray across my shins as he sped off into the dark. He was so panicked that he completely forgot it was twenty-five degrees outside, and I was wearing nothing but a thin cotton sweater. He left. I stood on the gravel shoulder, shivering so violently my teeth clicked together. It was a dead stretch of road; no ride-share app would dispatch a car out there. I stood under the howling sleet for nearly four hours before I saw the twin amber beams of his hazard lights cutting through the fog. When he stepped out, his face was lined with exhaustion. “Sienna passed out,” he said, not meeting my eyes. I looked down at the slush soaking my flats. “I got to the clinic and found out her mother had just been admitted for observation,” he continued, taking my frozen, raw hands into his warm ones. “She panicked and exaggerated. I turned around to leave, and she hyperventilated and collapsed. She’s stable now.” He blew warm air onto my knuckles. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have left you out here so long… Her mental state has been fragile lately. I was afraid she’d do something stupid.” A dry ache settled in the back of my throat. “Have you really let her go?” I heard myself ask. If he was still this tangled up in her, I didn’t want to stand in the way. I had no interest in being a placeholder in a tragic romance. We drove in silence for miles before he finally spoke, his voice barely above a murmur. “There’s nothing to let go of. I’m not an idiot, Hazel. I don’t cling to dead things.” He paused, gripping the leather of the steering wheel. “She’s completely alone out there. I just… I felt sorry for her.” Right. He hadn’t let her go at all. After that night, Harrison made a conscious effort to scrub every mention of Sienna from my presence. I knew what he was doing, but I never pressed him. Whenever he crossed paths with her, he would quietly compensate me: a deed to a brownstone in Brooklyn, a pair of sapphire drop earrings from Harry Winston, an equity portfolio in my name. Gifts that would take a normal person two lifetimes of grinding to acquire. So what did it matter? A girl like me couldn’t afford to sacrifice generational wealth on the altar of petty pride. 3 Because everyone in his circle knew how deep the rot of his first love went, nobody believed I would last. When Harrison announced our engagement, the disbelief in their world was almost comical. A week before the wedding, Trevor hosted a lavish bachelor party for him at an exclusive subterranean club in SoHo. He booked the entire VIP mezzanine and invited a dozen models and socialites. Naturally, he invited Sienna, too. I showed up without a word of complaint. Harrison, however, seemed unsettled. He pulled me close by the elbow and murmured, “These people don’t know when to draw the line. If it gets loud, make an excuse and take the car home.” Before we could take two steps, Trevor stepped in front of us, wearing an unbuttoned silk shirt and holding two flutes of vintage Dom Pérignon. “Little sister-in-law,” Trevor smirked, handing me a glass. “You don’t usually run in our circles, so don’t feel bad if you can’t keep up. We play a little rougher than you’re used to.” I smiled, took the flute, and took a small, polite sip. Smoothing down the skirt of my dress, I kept my tone mild. “It’s fine. You guys have fun, just don’t keep him out too late. Keep an eye on Harrison for me, Trevor. Don’t let him drink too much scotch.” Harrison stiffened beside me, clearly caught off guard by how effortlessly I had dismissed it. Trevor didn’t notice his brother’s expression. He threw an arm over Harrison’s shoulder, grinning. “Look at that, Harrison! The lady gave you a hall pass. What are you waiting for? Come on in. I personally texted Sienna to make sure she came. Last night of freedom, man. Don’t waste it.” I was long past caring about Trevor’s juvenile provocations. I gave Harrison a small wave, signaling that I was heading toward the coat check. Suddenly, Harrison’s hand shot out, his fingers locking around my wrist. His brows knit together in a sharp, frustrated line. “Hazel. What is this? You’re pushing me into a room with her?” Pushing you? I thought. When were you ever mine to hold? I looked into his dark eyes, keeping my voice quiet. “If I asked you not to go in there… if I asked you never to speak to Sienna again… would you actually listen to me?” The bass from the club vibrated through the floorboards. The neon lights washed over his sharp features. Before Harrison could answer, Trevor pulled hard on his shoulder. “Harrison! Everyone’s waiting on you!” Harrison’s throat moved. His grip on my wrist loosened, his fingers sliding away inch by inch. “Wait for me at home, Hazel,” he muttered. Before he could finish the sentence, Trevor hauled him through the double doors. I stood in the dim corridor for a second, glanced through the narrow glass pane of the door, and turned toward the exit. As I passed the private lounges near the back, a loud crash echoed from inside room four, followed by the sound of glass shattering and a woman’s stifled sob. The voice was unmistakable. Before I could walk past, the door was shoved open. A man stumbled out, clutching a bleeding gash on his temple, reeking of tequila. “Who the hell do you think you are?” he slurred, spitting onto the carpet. “You hit me with a bottle? You’re not leaving until this is settled!” Inside, Sienna stood against the velvet banquette, her chest heaving, tears streaming down her pale cheeks. “I don’t know you!” she cried out. “You wouldn’t keep your hands to yourself!” The man sneered, wiping the blood with the back of his sleeve. “Quit playing the innocent virgin, Blake. Either pay for the suit and the stitches, or you’re coming back inside.” Sienna’s reddened eyes darted to the doorway, landing straight on me. “Go ahead and stare, Hazel,” she said, her voice shaking with humiliation. “Laugh all you want. I might not have a billionaire backing me, but I’m not beneath you. Don’t you dare look down on me!” She spoke as if I were the one who had cornered her. The man grabbed her by the wrist. “Five grand for the jacket, five for the clinic. Hand it over.” “I don’t have it!” “Then finish every bottle on that table, and maybe I’ll let it slide.” The man’s eyes caught the corner of the black Amex peeking out of her clutch. “You’re carrying a Centurion card and crying broke?” “No!” Sienna screamed, clutching the purse to her ribs. “I can’t touch this! I won’t use his card!” She dropped to her knees by the low table, grabbing an open bottle of vodka and shoving the neck into her mouth. “I’ll drink it!” She swallowed desperately, coughing violently as the liquor burned her throat, but she refused to let go of the glass. It was exhausting to watch. “How much?” I asked, pulling out my wallet. “I’ll pay it.” “I don’t want your damn charity!” Sienna shrieked, swinging her arm back. The slap cracked across my face before I could step back. “It’s your fault!” she sobbed, completely unhinged. “You stole him from me! You had Trevor invite me tonight just so you could parade your ring in front of my face, didn’t you? And now you want to buy my dignity? Keep your dirty money!” My ears rang. The room tilted for a fraction of a second. As I braced my hand against the wall, the corridor doors flew open. Harrison charged into the room, brushing past me so fast the wind of his coat caught my hair. He didn’t look at my swollen cheek. He dropped to his knees, pulling Sienna into his chest, wrapping his heavy arms around her shaking frame. “Stop being so pathetic, Sienna!” he growled, his voice thick with fury. “Hit back! Why the hell aren’t you using the card I gave you?!” The stinging burn on my face radiated down to my jaw. Harrison lifted his head. When his gaze landed on me, his eyes were colder than ice. “Hazel,” he breathed, venom lacing every syllable. “You told me you were heading home. You came back here just to corner her?” I opened my mouth, but no sound came out. I didn’t bother defending myself. I just turned and walked away. He didn’t understand: I wanted him to think the worst of me. The more he hated me, the easier it would be to sever the cord when the time came. Harrison didn’t make it home until three in the morning. He smelled of heavy smoke and stale whiskey. I was still awake, sitting at the mahogany desk in the study, reviewing real estate listings and logistics for an overseas relocation. He came up behind my chair, leaning down to bury his face in my hair, his hot breath washing over my ear. “Why aren’t you in bed? Were you waiting for me?” “Yes,” I lied gently. “Is Sienna alright?” He went still for a second. “I’m sorry. I misjudged the situation. That guy was out of line. I handled it, saw her safely home, and came straight back.” He nuzzled the hollow beneath my jaw, his tone dropping into an uncharacteristic, coaxing whine. “I kept checking my phone all night. You didn’t send a single text. Are you still mad at me?” I didn’t have the energy to play along, but Harrison was relentlessly persistent tonight. He reached out, cupping my chin, forcing my face toward his. “Are you jealous, Hazel? I swear to God, I didn’t lay a finger on her. Trevor can swear to it. I didn’t touch anyone else either. Didn’t even take a number.” I looked into his dark, bloodshot eyes for a long moment, then let out a quiet sigh. “Come on,” I said, taking his arm. “Let’s get you to bed.” 4 I first met Harrison Mercer behind the northern gates of Columbia University, beside a weathered folding table where an old man sold used paperbacks. It was an October afternoon, and the sky was pouring gray sheets of rain. Harrison had just walked out of a private lounge across the street, shielded beneath a large black golf umbrella. His expression was pitch-black, like a man who had just finished tearing someone’s life apart. As he reached the curb to wait for his town car, the bookseller grabbed the sleeve of my damp trench coat, yanking back the medical dictionary I was about to replace on the shelf. “Hold on! You creased the corner of the plate! You break it, you buy it!” “I was only checking the publication year,” I pleaded, the cold wind whipping rain into my collar. “The dog-ear was already there.” “Bullshit! Thirty bucks, kid. You’re not walking away until I see thirty bucks!” In the scuffle, the frayed strap of my canvas tote finally snapped. My notebooks and textbooks spilled across the asphalt, into the greasy puddles. Tucked inside my anatomy syllabus, an overdue tuition notice with red ink stamped across the header fluttered out, instantly soaking through. As I dropped to my knees to gather the papers, a wide black umbrella tilted over my head, blocking the rain. “How much?” Harrison’s voice was low, cutting through the storm with effortless authority. The vendor froze, taking in Harrison’s custom wool coat and the black Maybach idling with its hazards flashing. His bravado vanished instantly. “Thirty… thirty dollars, sir.” Harrison didn’t reach into his pocket. His assistant stepped forward, peeled a crisp hundred-dollar bill from a leather clip, and handed it over. The old man snatched it and retreated behind his plastic tarps without another word. Harrison looked down at me. His eyes traveled over my dripping hair, down to the waterlogged tuition notice clutched in my raw, red hands. “Which school?” he asked. “…Columbia. Pre-med.” He gave a slight nod, handed me the umbrella, and crouched down into the dirty puddle beside me. Without hesitating, his tailored sleeves brushed the filthy asphalt as he gathered my soaked notebooks one by one, stacking them neatly. I stood there holding the heavy umbrella, stunned, watching as he slipped off his cashmere overcoat and draped it firmly over my shivering shoulders. “Get in the car,” he said. “I’ll drive you back to your dorm.” Inside the Maybach, the heat was set to seventy-two degrees, and the air smelled faintly of leather and amber. “You need money?” he asked, looking straight ahead at the rhythmic sweep of the windshield wipers. “Yes.” “Your name?” “…Hazel Davies.” He tapped two fingers against the stitched leather steering wheel, seeming to turn something over in his mind. “Stay with me,” he said, as casually as if he were ordering coffee. “I’ll cover your tuition, your living costs, and I’ll transfer fifty thousand dollars into your account on the first of every month.” Common sense screamed at me to refuse. It was grotesque, transactional, and entirely absurd. There was no such thing as a clean gift from a man like him. Yet out of the corner of my eye, I saw the discarded envelopes on the back seat—notices from high-end jewelers, stacks of hundred-dollar bills casually tossed beside a carbon-fiber briefcase. I wavered. I was drowning in debt. My mother had died leaving behind medical bills that seemed designed to crush me, and my part-time shift at the campus library barely paid for groceries. I needed the money. I needed to breathe. The car pulled up to the curb outside my run-down student housing. The rain had slowed to a drizzle. Harrison didn’t push me to get out. He just waited. “Why?” I asked, my voice small. He turned his head to look at me, his eyes entirely devoid of warmth. “You look like someone who doesn’t cause trouble.” He paused, then added, “And to me, that kind of money is nothing.” He was right. It was nothing. My desperation, my late-night tears over unpaid bills, my entire existence was a rounding error in his universe. I looked down at the soaked textbooks in my lap. “…Thank you,” I whispered. “I’ll pack my things.” Back then, I didn’t know why he had chosen me. It wasn’t until weeks later, when I heard him shouting into the phone about Sienna, that the puzzle pieces clicked into place. I was never a lover to him. I was a spiteful prop, a piece of living furniture he had purchased to prove to his ex-girlfriend that she was replaceable. Perhaps it was the lure of the money. Or perhaps it was that first flicker of foolish gratitude I had felt when he knelt in the rain to pick up my books. Whatever it was, I chose silence. I knew the terms of the arrangement. Anything was fine—so long as I never asked for his heart. Back in the Hudson Valley dressing room, Harrison’s friends had finally realized that I wasn’t bluffing. Unnerved by my quiet departure, Trevor had stepped into the hallway to dial Harrison’s private line. “Harrison! Hazel just walked out. She’s heading back to the city to pack—it looks like she’s leaving for good!” Over the speakerphone, I could hear the faint sound of music and a woman’s light, teasing laughter. Harrison’s voice came through, heavy with the lazy irritation of someone who had been disturbed during a pleasant afternoon. “Leaving? What kind of tantrum is she throwing now?” “Harrison, it’s your wedding day,” Trevor said, his tone strained. “Every seat in the house is filled.” “So what?” Harrison let out a soft, dismissive chuckle. “Tell her to stop acting like a child. Tell her I’ll be there as soon as I wrap things up here.” “Harrison, she isn’t throwing a tantrum. She—” Harrison cut him off, his voice drifting into casual indifference. “She has that pair of south sea pearl earrings I bought her in Paris last month. Tell her to put them on. They match the veil.” There was a long pause on Trevor’s end. “…I don’t think earrings are going to fix this, man. She looked serious.” “What is there to fix?” Harrison sighed, the sound of ice clinking against glass audible through the line. “She stayed with me for five years because of the money, Trevor. The brownstones, the stock portfolios, the jewelry—did I ever shortchange her on anything? Putting on an act like this… she’s overestimating her leverage.” He took a slow sip of his drink. “Tell her I’ll wire another million to her Chase account. Tell her to sit tight. If she’s still sulking when I get back, I’ll say a few nice things. She’s a woman, Trevor. Give her a little attention, and she’ll come around.” The line went dead. The corridor outside the bridal suite fell into absolute, suffocating silence. The friends who had spent the last three hours sneering at me now stood frozen, their expressions complicated and faintly uneasy. Because of the money. Give her a little attention, and she’ll come around. I looked at the four-carat emerald-cut diamond sitting alone on the marble vanity. A dry, humorless smile touched my lips. Then I pushed open the heavy oak doors, walked past their stunned faces, and stepped out into the crisp, clean afternoon air. Let him keep his money. And let him keep his love for Sienna Blake.

🌟 Continue the story here 👉🏻 📲 Download the “MotoNovel” app 🔍 search for “620846”, and watch the full series ✨! #MotoNovel

Every time my husband beats me on his livestream, I have to secretly touch up my fake bruises on the floor. If I am even a second too slow, the cuts and gashes heal right in front of the camera. Honestly, this godforsaken healing factor is a nightmare. But during today’s stream, a highly annoying comment floated across the screen. “Bro, stop hitting her. Your wife isn’t human. She is a Reaper Butterfly. Once the pupa breaks, it feeds on human flesh!” I fluttered my invisible, innocent wings. Oh my. Looks like someone finally figured it out. Too bad it is already way too late. 1 Just because I said “thank you” to the delivery guy, my husband, Dexter, grabbed me by the hair and threw me across the room in front of thousands of viewers. “You shameless sl*t! Are you that desperate for male attention? If you do not talk to another man for a single day, do you just lose your mind?” Instead of getting angry, I kept apologizing to him. I even dropped to my knees, hugging his leg, swearing I would never do it again. The viewers were absolutely furious, flooding the chat to curse out our completely twisted dynamic. “Does this woman have some kind of abuse kink? She is gorgeous. Why the hell is she staying with this worthless piece of trash just to get beaten every day?” “Any OG fans here? Is this a scripted bit? Because that hit looked way too real.” “Everyone just mind your own business. The neighbors called the cops on them multiple times. Last time, she was beaten so badly she ended up in the ICU. But she literally told the cops it was a private marital issue. Stop wasting your pity on her!” Dexter watched the superchats and digital gifts flooding the screen. The money made him manic. “Keep the gifts coming, boys! I am going to show you what a real man looks like!” “A good wife is molded by discipline! Women are wired to submit. The harder you hit her, the more she begs you to stay!” Dexter’s entire channel revolved around him abusing and “training” me. Every time my face was swollen and bruised, he raked in a massive wave of donations from toxic viewers. To keep the hype going, Dexter pinned me to the floor and rained heavy punches down on me. He did not stop until I lay there, my eyes rolling back into my head. But before I could carefully act out my recovery and crawl back up, I realized the severe lacerations from his knuckles were already closing. Speechless. This absurd healing factor was going to blow my cover. I discreetly reached into my pocket, smearing a fresh layer of FX makeup and fake blood over my face. When the camera finally caught me again, my eyes were blackened, my cheeks were swollen, and terrifying gashes lined my jaw. I looked absolutely pathetic. Coupled with my continued gentle, subservient behavior, I looked like the perfect, broken maid. This made a bunch of jealous male viewers completely lose their minds. They kept spamming the chat, demanding to know how Dexter managed to bag a woman like me. Dexter was visibly out of breath. He panted heavily before smirking at the camera. “My wife is just naturally built for this. The more I discipline her, the better she behaves. If I skip a day, she practically begs for it!” The comment section was completely polarized. Half the people were violently criticizing him, and the other half were praising his “alpha” control over his household. Suddenly, a bizarre comment popped up out of nowhere. A user named CryptidWatcher typed a message in bold red text. “Your wife is not a human being. Only a Reaper Butterfly possesses a skin suit that flawless.” 2 “You playing fantasy RPGs in the chat, bro? If my wife is a killer butterfly, then I am the God of War!” Being mocked by the entire chat did not deter CryptidWatcher at all. He started dropping biological lore. “The Reaper Butterfly, also known as the Tiger-Banded Flesh-Eater, is infamous for its terrifying carnivorous nature. In 1966, a boy collecting insect specimens accidentally stumbled into a swarm of them. He was picked completely clean down to his skeleton in minutes. That is why they are called Reaper Butterflies.” He probably thought he was helping, but his warning only drew more insults. “Even if you are jealous that his wife is hot, you do not have to make up schizo conspiracy theories! Has she not suffered enough?” “Exactly! How the hell does a butterfly turn into a person? Wake up, buddy, this is not a sci-fi movie!” Some viewers even accused CryptidWatcher of being a paid actor, claiming this was just a new script Dexter wrote for views. Dexter started to panic. He was terrified that this weirdo was going to ruin his cash flow. He reached for his mouse to ban the user. But then another message popped up. “Has your wife ever been pronounced dead by doctors, only to mysteriously come back to life?” “And ever since then, you have been having night terrors, right? The scales on a Reaper Butterfly carry a potent, hallucinogenic neurotoxin. The more you beat her, the more of that dust you inhale. Eventually, you will just become her food.” Reading those words, Dexter froze. He never used to dream. But ever since we got together, he was plagued by suffocating nightmares every single night. Sometimes, he could not even tell the difference between reality and his dreams. Three months ago, he got blackout drunk and hit me way too hard. He practically beat me to death. When they rushed me to the hospital, the doctors pronounced me dead on arrival. But an hour after the time of death, I crawled right out of the morgue. The story of the dead woman coming back to life had dominated the local news for a week. Most importantly, he suddenly realized I never seemed to sweat. Even in the dead of summer, my skin was always cool and dry. Cold sweat began to bead on Dexter’s forehead. The more he thought about it, the more terrified he became. He shot a highly unnatural, paranoid glance in my direction. “So what do I do?” Dexter typed back quietly on his phone. “If you do not believe me, sneak in on her while she is taking a shower. I guarantee you she never lets a single drop of water touch her skin. If I am wrong, I will gift you ten superchats right now!” The live chat exploded again. “Are you that down bad, dude? You are trying to trick this guy into streaming his wife in the shower?” “Streamer, you are not actually going to force your wife to bathe on camera to prove a point, right?” “Yo, do it! If you stream her in the bathroom, I will drop a thousand bucks right now!” The endless stream of donations and hype made Dexter’s eyes light up. Right at this moment, his concurrent viewer count broke one million. His subscriber count was skyrocketing. Sure, most of them were cursing him and the CryptidWatcher guy out, but traffic was traffic. Dexter’s eyes shifted. He made a split-second decision. “Keep the donations coming, boys! Tonight, we are going myth-busting. We are going to see if this CryptidWatcher is full of crap!” 3 Whether his wife was human or not, shouldn’t a husband know best? In Dexter’s mind, he had already labeled this user as a troll. The guy just saw that beating women generated traffic and wanted to create a viral gimmick to piggyback off the clout. Dexter figured he might as well play along and scam the guy out of his ten superchats first. He grabbed me by the hair and dragged me across the hallway, throwing me onto the bathroom tiles. He slammed the door shut, locking us inside, and gave the camera a contemptuous smirk. “Look at this. Have you ever seen a man-eating butterfly look this pathetic?” The chat was spamming laughing emojis. They started a countdown, waiting for Dexter to force me under the water. I looked up at my battered, bruised reflection in the mirror. Ever since Dexter became a millionaire streamer off the back of domestic abuse, I made sure to encourage him. Every time he hit me, I would cry and tell him to hit me harder. With every impact, invisible scales fluttering with a pearlescent glow fell from my body. He inhaled every single speck of it into his lungs. The more he breathed in, the closer he got to becoming my personal puppet. I was squatting on the floor, pretending to scrub the tiles, just like normal. Suddenly, a sharp pain shot through my scalp. Dexter was dragging me toward the tub. His phone screen was completely covered in notifications. Digital cars, yachts, and diamond rings were flashing endlessly, as if money meant nothing. He was completely blinded by the viral fame. He grabbed my wrists and shoved me hard against the cold porcelain. “Hurry up! Take a shower for the camera!” 4 My knee slammed into the edge of the cabinet. I curled into a tight ball, acting as though I was in agonizing pain. The viewers were starting to feel sick. The chat flooded with people begging Dexter to stop. This killer butterfly thing was obvious bullshit! Dexter ignored them. He aggressively grabbed the showerhead, turned the cold water on full blast, and sprayed me from head to toe. The icy water plastered my hair to my face and soaked right through my clothes. I looked utterly helpless and broken. My species absolutely despises water. When moisture clings to our bodies, it feels thick and suffocating. In the wild, if a butterfly falls into a puddle, the heavy water droplets weigh down its fragile wings, stripping away its ability to fly. Once we lose our mobility, it basically means a death sentence. I grabbed the hem of Dexter’s shirt, crying helplessly, begging him to stop being angry. But even after ten minutes of being drenched in cold water, my body did not change at all. I did not lose control of my mind. I just stayed exactly as I was a weeping, terrified woman. Seeing my fragile, shivering frame, the audience completely turned on CryptidWatcher. They spammed the chat with death threats aimed at him. It took a long time before CryptidWatcher finally sent another message. “I understand now. The Reaper Butterfly did not shapeshift into your wife. It is parasitically attached to your wife’s nervous system. That is why the body does not react to water.” I looked directly at the camera lens and offered a sweet, innocent, terrified smile. Well, well. Who knew there was actually someone left in this world who understood the parasitic secrets of the Reaper Butterfly? 5 My kind has one highly specialized ability. We can sever our consciousness from our physical form and parasitize a host. It is a shame that recognizing it will not save him. “Get out of here, you scammer! First you say my wife is a bug that hates water. I just proved you wrong. She is a living, breathing human being.” “Now you are starting rumors that she is infected with a parasite? You are just trying to get out of paying up!” Dexter was genuinely furious. This CryptidWatcher guy had not sent the ten superchats he promised! “Streamer, listen to me. The day the butterfly breaks out of its cocoon is the day you die. Run. Run right now!” CryptidWatcher added dozens of exclamation points at the end of his message. It looked incredibly eerie on the screen. Dexter glared at the text. Furious, he instantly banned CryptidWatcher from the channel, cursing him out for being a psycho. A sinister, dark glint flashed in Dexter’s eyes. It was chilling to watch. The viewers were still riled up. They felt scammed by the lack of a supernatural reveal and started threatening to unfollow the channel. Seeing his numbers drop, Dexter panicked. He immediately grabbed me by the throat and slammed me against the bathroom wall. His massive fists crashed down onto my body. I trembled like a leaf in the wind, helplessly wrapping my arms around my head. My screams and desperate begging filled the room. Instantly, the viewer engagement spiked again. The digital gifts resumed their endless flow. About ten minutes later, Dexter stood over me, panting heavily. He looked at the screen with absolute satisfaction. “Alright boys, that is enough discipline for today. Do not want some white knight calling the cops again. If you are new here, hit that follow button so you do not miss the next stream!” The chat went wild. “Honestly curious. Are you not worried you are going to accidentally beat her to death one day?” Dexter let out a cruel sneer and spat on the floor next to me. “My wife is cheap trash. She is practically immortal. Do not worry about it. If she dies, I will take the charge! Just drop a follow for your boy Dexter!” Watching his follower count surge by another hundred thousand, Dexter smugly ended the stream. He grabbed his jacket and walked out the front door to go drinking, completely unbothered. Once his footsteps faded away, I stretched my stiffened limbs. I reached up and casually snapped several dislocated bones back into place. The cracking sound echoed through the empty house. I adjusted my slightly fractured jaw. This man really did hit hard. It was a shame that this level of pain felt like an absolute tickle to me. Dexter was right about one thing. I really could not be beaten to death. Because the person he actually killed was already gone. 6 I am the very last Reaper Butterfly in this world. Three months ago, I watched with my own eyes as Dexter slowly, brutally murdered a gentle, kindhearted girl. I had been severely burned in a forest fire. That girl found me and saved me. She kept me in her room, carefully nursing me back to health. I still remember her smile. It was so pure. It was blindingly bright. Every beautiful word in the human language would not be enough to describe her. She called me Little Wing. She told me I was her precious treasure. It was a tragedy that such a perfect girl was trapped in a living hell. Her husband, Dexter, was not just a domestic abuser. He was a violent poacher. He made his living slaughtering endangered animals deep in the mountains. The moment he saw me, he recognized my rare, stunning wing patterns. He knew I would fetch a massive price from black-market specimen collectors. To stop him from selling me, the girl secretly opened the window and set me free. When Dexter realized his payday was gone, he lost his mind. Fueled by cheap liquor, he completely stripped away his own humanity. He slammed his fists into her fragile body over and over again. “You stupid b*tch! You ruined my money! I am going to kill you!” Stab after stab. Bright crimson blood poured from her body, soaking entirely through the living room rug. Such a beautiful, selfless girl, stabbed to death by her own husband all to protect a tiny, insignificant butterfly. In the very last second before she stopped breathing, I swooped down and pierced her skin with my parasitic stinger. But this kind of parasitism comes at a devastating cost. I had to sacrifice my original body. A Reaper Butterfly can live for three hundred years. Humans barely live to see a century. But for the sake of revenge, I was willing to sacrifice everything. When I opened my eyes again, I was her. My powerful regenerative abilities rapidly glued her shattered body back together. Her fading life force flared back into existence. People online always asked why I refused to leave Dexter after being beaten so mercilessly. I would never leave. This was a grand, meticulously planned feast, and I was just getting started.

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