Category: English

I was the finest falconer the high plains had ever seen. Out there, the wind howled like a hungry wolf, and I rode through it, my crimson silks snapping against the sky like a wildfire. It was that raw, untamed spirit that made Camilla Beaumont—Manhattan’s golden princess—fall for me with a desperation that bordered on insanity. To win my hand, she leveled half a mountainside just to capture a pure white Gyrfalcon as a betrothal gift. She knelt before me in the dust for three days and three nights, defying her billionaire father to write my name into the Beaumont family registry. I fell for it. I believed in the heart she offered, backed by all that terrifying power. I tucked away my hunting knife, folded my wings, and walked willingly into her gilded cage. We hadn’t been married a year before he showed up: Sebastian Montgomery. He was “old money,” refined, a scholar from a lineage that matched hers perfectly. He came to our penthouse one afternoon, smelling of sandalwood and arrogance, his voice a soft, cultured purr. “A Beaumont husband shouldn’t just know how to whistle at birds, Kaelen,” he said, smoothing his perfectly tailored suit. “Camilla asked me to teach you how to behave in high society.” He looked at me with a thin, condescending smile. “Since you’re essentially a trophy, you’ll learn the protocols of the house. From now on, you’ll greet me on your knees when I arrive. If your posture is lacking, I’ve been authorized to use a switch to correct you.” I didn’t argue. I simply nodded. Then, I lunged forward, grabbing a fistful of his meticulously styled hair, and let out a sharp, piercing whistle. My falcon plummeted from her perch, a streak of white lightning. She struck with surgical precision, her talons tearing into his eyes. “Teaching me the rules, are you?” I laughed as the blood sprayed, bright and hot against the marble floor. “Let me teach you the only rule we have on the plains. You insult the master of a hawk, you pay in blood.” 1 The screams hadn’t even stopped before the butler was on the phone with Camilla. Thirty minutes later, she slammed through the front door. Her voice cut through the foyer before I even saw her face. “Kaelen! He’s a Montgomery! How could you be so reckless?” “So what?” I stood my ground, the falcon back on my leather-clad shoulder. “He insulted me. He earned his scars.” Camilla’s striking eyes narrowed, her jaw tight as she stared me down. I didn’t flinch. The Gyrfalcon shifted, her golden eyes locked onto Camilla, waiting for my signal to strike again. In the background, Sebastian’s wails were pathetic. “He’s a savage! An animal! Camilla, look what he did to me! My family will ruin you for this!” Camilla knelt to inspect his wound. When she saw the jagged, deep tear near his right eye, the temperature in the room plummeted to sub-zero. “You went too far, Kaelen.” She stood up, her gaze sweeping coldly over the white predator on my shoulder. “He is the heir to a dynasty. He’s never even had a bruise, and you’ve marked him for life. You owe the Montgomerys a debt. Either I give them one of your eyes…” She took a step closer, her voice dropping to a lethal whisper. “…or I give them the life of that beast.” My fingers trembled slightly as I stroked the falcon’s thick, soft feathers. A pure white Gyrfalcon. The King of Birds. This was the creature she had nearly died for, the one she presented to me while bleeding from her own climb up a frozen cliff. She had knelt in the dirt and sworn she would be like this bird—loyal to me and me alone, until the end of time. It had been five years. Now, she wanted its life. The betrayal felt like an ice pick through the heart, cold and sharp, but the pain was quickly drowned by a rising tide of fury. I looked her in the eyes—eyes that were now a scorched, angry red. “I don’t like multiple-choice questions, Camilla. And I’m not picking either of those.” Her face turned to stone. She stepped toward me, closing the distance. “This is New York, Kaelen. You don’t get to make the rules here.” The moment she moved, I reached for the decorative recurve bow hanging on the wall display behind me. In one fluid motion, I notched an arrow and drew the string taut, the broadhead pointed directly at her heart. “You know my aim,” I said, my voice steady. “One more step, and this goes through your shoulder.” The security detail huddled outside the lounge surged inward, a dozen black muzzles of handguns aiming at my chest. In the suffocating tension, Camilla suddenly raised her hand, signaling them to stand down. A flicker of something—an obsessed, sickly fascination—danced in her eyes. “That’s it,” she whispered. “That wild, untamable streak. It’s why I can’t let you go.” Then, her tone turned glacial. “But the plains are a long way away. Put the bow down, apologize, and maybe we can find a way out of this.” My heart gave a dull, numb thud. Five years ago, on the windswept grasslands of the North, she had chased the horizon on horseback just to catch me. She had grabbed my hand—the hand that held the hawk—and pleaded. “Come to the city with me,” she had whispered. “I swear on my life, Kaelen, you will always be a hawk soaring in the sky. I will never make you a bird in a cage.” The words were still echoing in my mind, yet here she was, demanding I learn to be “tame.” It was pathetic. “What? Now Miss Beaumont wants to talk about rules?” I let out a jagged laugh. “Five years, and you’ve already forgotten how you begged like a dog to marry me?” Before Camilla could react, Sebastian shrieked from the sofa, “What are you talking about? Camilla is a princess! She would never beg for a savage like you! You probably drugged her—you’re just a parasite who won’t let go!” Camilla didn’t say a word. She stared at me for a long, heavy minute, then turned on her heel and led her people out. “Kaelen,” she said over her shoulder, “this isn’t over.” The Montgomerys’ retaliation came faster than I expected. 2 That night, a harrowing, guttural shriek echoed from the terrace garden. My heart dropped into my stomach. I ran out, barefoot, my lungs burning. The moonlight was a sickly pale. My falcon lay in a pool of dark, spreading red. Her white feathers were matted and stained crimson, a jagged hole in her chest still pulsing with the last of her life’s blood. She was twitching, her golden eyes finding mine, slowly losing their spark until they went dull. Camilla stood nearby, her back to me, her silhouette cold and unyielding. “You killed her?” I whispered. She turned around, her face a mask of indifference. “Sebastian’s eye couldn’t be saved. His family wanted one of yours. This was the only way to settle the score.” I began to shake, a violent, soul-deep tremor. I turned to go back inside to get my knife, but she caught my wrist in a grip of iron. “It was just an animal, Kaelen. Stop being so dramatic.” “An animal?” My eyes were burning, my voice cracking. “Is that all she was? What did you call her when you brought her to me, covered in your own blood? What did you say she represented?” Her throat bobbed. For a split second, her eyes flickered with guilt. But then, Sebastian stepped out from the shadows. His right eye was bandaged, but his white shirt was pristine. He kicked the falcon’s cooling body with the tip of his Italian leather shoe. “I’ve never had hawk meat,” he sneered. “Maybe it’ll make a decent stew.” The blood rushed to my head, a deafening roar. “Sebastian,” I said, my voice dropping to a low, dangerous vibration. “I took one eye. I can easily take the second.” Before the sentence was finished, I whipped the hunting knife from the sheath at the small of my back. A flash of steel. I didn’t go for his eye—I went for the hand Camilla was using to hold me back. I sliced clean through her pinky finger. Camilla let out a muffled grunt of pain and released me. The severed finger hit the floor, wet and limp. I didn’t stop. The tip of my blade lunged for Sebastian’s remaining eye. “No!” He froze, his scream breaking into a high-pitched sob. Camilla reacted with the speed of a viper. Ignoring the agony in her hand, she kicked my wrist with her heel, sending the knife flying across the marble. “Security! Lock him down!” The guards swarmed me, pinning my arms behind my back with brutal force. I was dragged down to the basement, into the cold, dark confines of the wine cellar. In the darkness, I sat on the floor, cradling the ghost of my bird. My love had burned to ash, leaving nothing but a furnace of hatred. Camilla. You swore on your life you wouldn’t cage me. You broke the vow. Now, you pay with your life. The next day, I was “released,” though it was house arrest in all but name. Every sharp object in the penthouse had been removed. Even the decorative bows were gone. Four guards followed my every shadow, and more patrolled the perimeter outside. Sebastian couldn’t help himself. He came to gloat. He wore an expensive silk eye patch, his remaining eye gleaming with triumph. “Thought you should know the good news. Camilla and I are getting married.” He chuckled, a dry, irritating sound. “I should actually thank that bird. If it hadn’t blinded me, this merger between our families wouldn’t have been fast-tracked.” I looked up, stunned. “We aren’t even divorced. How could the Montgomerys allow a Beaumont husband to take a ‘consort’?” Sebastian laughed, covering his mouth daintily. “Oh, you poor, deluded fool. Did you really think that piece of paper you signed five years ago was real?” “The whole city knows Camilla gave you a fake certificate. You were a phase, Kaelen. A wild little toy she picked up on vacation. You don’t actually think a woman of her stature would legally marry a nomad, do you?” My mind went blank. The “marriage.” The “defiance” against her family. The nights she spent “kneeling” in the ancestral hall to earn their approval… it was all a scripted play. A meticulously designed lie. She never intended to give me a name. She lured me into this cage, clipped my wings, and watched with amusement as I tried to maintain my dignity and my love. Camilla Beaumont. You’re already dead. You just don’t know it yet. 3 Camilla returned late that night, smelling of expensive gin and the cold city air. The living room was cast in shadows, lit only by a single amber wall sconce. I hadn’t moved from the sofa for hours. She sat across from me, studying me in the gloom. Half her face was lost to the dark. “Kaelen,” she finally said, her voice carrying a trace of hesitation. “You know, don’t you?” I didn’t answer. I kept my eyes fixed on a point in the distance. Suddenly, she leaned forward and tossed my hunting knife and my bow onto the coffee table. “I didn’t mean to keep it from you… at least not at first. Eventually, I just didn’t know how to explain.” She reached out, her voice softening into that manipulative purr. “I know you’re hurting. Here. Do whatever you want to me.” She grabbed my hand, forcing my fingers around the hilt of the knife. Then, she pressed the blade firmly against her chest, right over her heart. I could feel the frantic, rhythmic thrum of her heartbeat through the silk of her blouse. “You think I won’t?” I asked. She let out a soft, melodic laugh. And then, she pushed. She forced my hand forward, driving the blade into her own chest. Warm blood splashed across my face instantly. Camilla kept smiling, even as her breath hitched. “Kaelen… I lied to you. But I do love you. I told you once… if my life could make you happy, I’d give it. I meant that.” The metallic tang of blood filled the room, dragging me back to that rain-slicked cliff in Montana. The smell was the same. She had been soaked to the bone then, her designer gear shredded by rocks and talons, holding that struggling white falcon out to me like a holy relic. “I did it, Kaelen!” she had shouted over the thunder, her eyes bright with a terrifying fever. “Am I a real mountain woman now? Am I yours?” The memory was a dull blade sawing through my soul. We had ridden across the plains until the wind felt like it belonged to us. We had huddled under overhangs during storms, kissing until the world vanished. My tribe had said the strongest eagle on the plains had been tamed by a city woman. But it was because I had loved her so truly that this betrayal felt so grotesque. My grip tightened on the hilt. Rage, hot as molten lead, flooded my veins. Kill her. End it now. I pushed the blade deeper. Camilla gasped, breaking into a cold sweat, but her eyes remained locked on mine with a sickening, pathological devotion. No. Death was too easy for her. I wrenched the knife out, a fresh spray of red hitting the floor. I stumbled back and bolted from the room. Camilla was rushed to the hospital for emergency surgery. The next afternoon, Sebastian showed up again. He stood in the doorway, afraid to come closer, his voice shrill with cowardice. “You lunatic! You tried to murder her! If anything happens to Camilla, the Beaumonts and the Montgomerys will have you hunted down like the animal you are!” I stared out the window, deaf to his threats. Finding me unresponsive, he eventually grew bored and led his men to the rooftop conservatory. That conservatory was Camilla’s masterpiece—a simulated prairie landscape she had built for me, planted with thousands of wild cosmos flowers shipped from my homeland. She used to say, “I took the hawk from the plains, so I brought the plains to him.” She tended those flowers herself. Only she and I had the key. But now, I watched as Sebastian took a key from his pocket and opened the glass doors. I watched as he ordered the men to rip the flowers out by the roots. I watched as the symbols of my “beautiful cage” were trampled into the dirt. I felt nothing. Not a spark. Not a tear. When the heart dies, even grief becomes a luxury you can no longer afford. 4 The days became a stagnant pool. I was a ghost in the penthouse, shadowed by guards. Meanwhile, the news of the “Wedding of the Century” between Camilla and Sebastian saturated every screen in the city. The headlines were relentless: the multi-million dollar dowry, the custom Vera Wang gown, the private island rented for the pre-wedding gala. Every detail was exactly what Camilla had once whispered to me in the dark, describing her dream wedding. The only thing that had changed was the groom. Sebastian, emboldened by my silence, began sending me taunting texts. [Camilla bought me ten limited-edition watches today. Which one should I wear for the ceremony?] [Look at our menu. One course costs more than your entire village makes in a year.] [Camilla says you’re crude. A gutter rat compared to me. Did you really think a nomad could marry into a dynasty?] I never replied. Instead, I took screenshots of every single message. I packaged them with the photos of Camilla’s “private” moments in the basement and sent them to every high-society gossip rag and investigative journalist in the city. The headline I suggested was simple: “MONTGOMERY HEIR EXPOSED: THE PREMEDITATED SABOTAGE OF THE BEAUMONT PRINCESS’S MARRIAGE.” I knew how deep the waters ran in this city. I knew the Beaumonts could squash a scandal before it even broke. And indeed, within hours, the articles vanished. The social media threads were scrubbed. But the seeds were sown. Beaumont stock began to dip. The whispers began. A call came into the penthouse from Sebastian’s father. Even through the closed door, I could hear his muffled, vibrating roar of fury. He was warning Camilla to keep her “pet” on a shorter leash. The guards took my phone immediately after. I was officially cut off from the world. The penthouse was silent, save for Mrs. Gable, the housekeeper who had always been kind to me. “Sir,” she whispered, leaning in as she set down my tea. “She didn’t even give you a real wedding. Now she’s throwing this circus for him. It’s a knife to the heart.” She glanced at the guards. “If I were you, I’d run. Go back to the mountains. Somewhere she can’t find you. Let her taste the regret of what she threw away.” “Mrs. Gable,” I said with a faint, sharp smile. “Don’t believe everything you read in romance novels.” I stood and walked to the floor-to-ceiling window. In the distance, the silhouette of the Beaumont Grand Hotel loomed through the smog—the site of the wedding. “I’m not a bird waiting for a woman to regret her choices.” A hawk circled high above the skyscrapers. My eyes sharpened, locking onto the horizon. “I am a hunter. And a hunter doesn’t wait for an apology. He waits for the kill.” … The day of the wedding arrived. The ballroom was a sea of silk and diamonds, the air thick with the scent of a thousand lilies. But the “Golden Hour” passed, and the groom was nowhere to be found. Camilla’s patience was fraying. Her eyes were dark with a burgeoning rage. Just as she was about to snap at her coordinator, the massive oak doors swung open. Every head turned. It wasn’t the groom. It was a courier in a simple uniform, carrying a large, white gift box. “A gift for Miss Camilla Beaumont,” he announced. Camilla waved him off. “I don’t have time for this!” The courier held his ground. “The sender said it was vital you open it yourself. He said you would regret it for the rest of your life if you didn’t.” Camilla froze. Just as I had planned, she stepped forward and tore the lid off the box. As she saw what was inside, the color drained from her face, leaving her as pale as the lilies surrounding her.

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The fake heiress recorded a video, weeping to the camera about my supposed abuse. My parents and my fiancé stood right behind her, nodding in solemn agreement, testifying to my cruelty. Overnight, the internet became a tidal wave of vitriol, drowning my name in curses and death threats. If that wasn’t enough, my father cornered me in the hallway, his face flushed with righteous indignation, demanding I issue a public apology to my “sister.” What he didn’t know was that his real daughter was already dead. The thing breathing inside her body right now? Just a wandering, damned soul. With all of them watching, I shoved her down the sweeping marble staircase. “An apology? Sure,” I said, leaning over the banister. “But only if she actually breaks her leg.” …… I am a damned thing. A revenant. A ghost who learned the hard way that if you don’t bare your teeth, the world will swallow you whole. And somehow, I have woken up inside the body of Caroline Stanford. Caroline’s luck was truly tragic. She was the biological daughter of the Stanford dynasty, stolen away and lost for years. When she finally clawed her way back home, she found no warmth, no tears of joy. Just a cold house and parents who couldn’t look her in the eye. Instead, all their love had been siphoned off by the imposter—the cheap, surrogate sister who had occupied Caroline’s rightful place. This girl survived entirely on weaponized pity, playing the eternal victim, bewitching everyone around her. It culminated on Caroline’s eighteenth birthday. The entire family—including Caroline’s own fiancé—abandoned her to attend the fake sister’s prestigious conservatory piano showcase. Left alone in a sprawling, empty mansion, suffocating under the weight of her own insignificance, Caroline drew a blade across her wrists and bled out in the porcelain tub. The moment her heart stopped, my unfortunate soul slipped right in. Sifting through the shattered fragments of Caroline’s memories, I found myself thoroughly fascinated by this sister of hers, Belinda. I hadn’t realized the living could be so exquisitely, ruthlessly selfish, caring for absolutely nothing but their own survival. It was almost touching. It meant my kind had heirs in the mortal world. I pulled myself up from the cold, blood-stained water of the bathtub. I wrapped a haphazard towel around the jagged cuts on my wrists, threw on a hoodie, and called an Uber to the Stanford estate in Greenwich. The Stanfords possessed generational, obscene wealth. Yet, they had forced Caroline to take up menial part-time jobs, dressing up their neglect under the guise of “building her independence.” I immediately pulled out her phone and quit the diner job. Was it a joke? Why on earth would a trust-fund kid clock in for minimum wage? I wasn’t out of my mind. When I pushed open the heavy mahogany doors of the estate, the shock on the housekeeper’s face was palpable. I strolled past her, unimpeded, straight into the grand living room. There, nestled on the velvet sofa, was Belinda, her arms wrapped tightly around my fiancé, Carlton. Seeing me, Belinda didn’t pull away. She pressed herself even closer against his chest. The polite smiles on Richard and Margaret Stanford’s faces vanished the second they saw me. “Caroline? What are you doing here?” Richard demanded. I didn’t answer him. My eyes were locked dead onto Belinda. Sensing my gaze, her lower lip quivered. She instantly slipped into her pathetic, wounded-fawn routine. “Sister, you have everything now. I just wanted Mom, Dad, and Carlton to come see my performance. You’re not mad at me, are you?” “Why would she be mad? Hasn’t she taken enough of your things and your place in this family already?” Carlton let out a cold, derisive scoff, the disgust in his voice thick and unfiltered. Ah. I had miscalculated. It wasn’t just Belinda who was rotted through. This entire house was a cesspool. Not a single decent human being among them. I slowly raised my arm, letting the blood-soaked towel around my wrist dangle in the light. “Sister. You have Mom. You have Dad. You have my fiancé. All I wanted was to breathe, to stay alive. You wouldn’t force me to die, would you?” Belinda’s expression froze. A flicker of genuine panic crossed her eyes, but she was a professional. In a blink, the tears spilled over her lashes, fat and perfectly timed. Richard couldn’t stand to see his precious girl cry. He lunged forward, his hand cracking sharply across my cheek. “What kind of sick thing is that to say?!” he roared. “Are you trying to make Belinda feel guilty to death?!” I let the momentum of the slap carry me. I collapsed onto the Persian rug. Before I even had to fake a sob, Belinda’s trembling voice filled the room. “It’s fine, Dad. Let it go. I know my sister hates me. It’s okay. I’ll… I’ll just pack my things and move out.” She sobbed, her voice cracking beautifully. Yet, I noticed, she didn’t make a single move to stand up from the couch. Lying there on the floor, looking up at her, I felt a strange sense of awe. She was practically glowing in my eyes. I had an epiphany. The absolute zenith of selfishness is the ability to convince the world that you are a saint. “Listen to your sister!” Richard practically shoved his finger into my eye. “Look at the grace she has! Do you think everyone in the world is as vile and self-centered as you?!” I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to conjure a single tear, but as a ghost, I simply didn’t have the hardware for it. Crying was impossible. Giving up, I pushed myself off the rug, dusted off my cheap jeans, and plopped down onto a plush armchair, casually crossing one leg over the other. “Yeah, yeah, you’re right,” I said, waving a hand dismissively. “She has the heart of an angel. She’s obedient and sweet. I’m selfish and greedy. Therefore, I’m moving back in.” Richard’s mouth dropped open. He stared at me like I had sprouted horns. When Caroline had originally moved out, it had technically been her own suggestion. But she had only fled because she was suffocating under the toxic atmosphere and Belinda’s daily, insidious gaslighting. I, however, was built differently. As long as I was comfortable, I couldn’t care less how much they hated me. “Enough!” Carlton’s shout echoed off the vaulted ceiling, so loud it nearly rattled my soul loose from Caroline’s body. He stood up, shielding Belinda behind his broad shoulders, glaring at me like I was vermin. “Caroline, I am not going to let you bully Belinda anymore. What gives you the right to stay in this house?!” I stared at him. The sheer, unadulterated audacity. Even when I was alive, I had never heard a man speak with such shameless entitlement. I was beginning to realize that the only reason I had become a formidable ghost back in my day was simply a lack of modern competition. “It’s okay, Carlton,” Belinda whimpered, clutching his shirt. “She is Mom and Dad’s biological daughter, after all. I…” She offered a brave, wobbly smile that was uglier than a frown. It was a masterclass. I almost wanted to applaud. So, I did. The sharp, rhythmic clapping of my hands cut through the tension. Everyone froze, looking at me with absolute bewilderment. “Beautifully said,” I grinned. “So forgiving. You see, Dad? Since my sweet sister says it’s fine, I’ll be staying. After all, like she said, I am your actual blood.” Without waiting for Richard’s brain to reboot, I turned on my heel and headed for the stairs, following the layout from Caroline’s memories. Carlton’s curses faded behind me as I hummed a light tune, my steps bouncing. But when I pushed open the door to Caroline’s old room, I stopped dead in my tracks. My nose wrinkled in disgust. This cramped, sunless, depressing little box? Did they really expect someone of my elegant, refined stature to sleep in a closet? Without a second thought, I slammed the door shut and began pacing the hallway, inspecting the other rooms. I stopped in front of a heavy, ornate double door. It smelled like expensive perfume and privilege. I reached for the handle, but a roar echoed up the staircase. “Stop right there! Don’t you dare touch that door!” It was Richard. He was storming up the stairs, Margaret right on his heels, her face twisted in rage. “Caroline! That is your sister’s room!” Margaret shrieked. I raised an eyebrow. Oh, really? Beginner’s luck. I had picked the best suite in the house on the first try. “Is it?” I murmured, casually turning the knob and pushing the doors open. The contrast was staggering. The space was massive, bathed in natural light, with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the manicured gardens. It was a sanctuary of custom silk drapery and plush velvet. Behind her parents, Belinda began to weep, playing her part flawlessly. “Sister, I know you resent me. But… but Mom and Dad designed this room specifically for me. I’ll give you anything else, I swear. Please, sister, give me my room back.” It was a touching monologue, but I could read the panic in her eyes. She was terrified of losing her territory. Predictably, Richard and Margaret ate it up. They swarmed her, cooing and hugging her as if she’d just been diagnosed with a terminal illness. I leaned against the doorframe, crossing my arms. “Are you done? Because the answer is no.” Belinda choked on her sob, completely blindsided. She clearly hadn’t anticipated a flat, emotionless rejection. Moral kidnapping was her specialty; she wasn’t used to a victim without morals. Taking advantage of her shock, I stepped inside and moved to shut the door, but Richard lunged forward, grabbing my wrist in a vice grip. His fingers dug perfectly, entirely by chance, into my freshly sliced veins. He didn’t notice, or simply didn’t care. His face was red with fury. “Caroline Stanford! This belongs to Belinda! Can’t you, for once in your miserable life, be the bigger person and let your sister have something?!” Fortunately, a ghost feels no physical pain. I slowly wrenched my arm out of his grasp. The hastily wrapped cuts tore open again, fresh blood seeping through the white terrycloth, dripping onto the hardwood floor. Richard glanced at the blood, his eyes cold. Not a flicker of remorse. “Sorry, no can do,” I chirped, giving him a dead-eyed smile. “And if you keep harassing me, be careful. I might just leak a few secrets to the press.” Before he could unleash whatever curse was building in his throat, I slammed the heavy door in his face and locked it. The Stanfords had never publicly acknowledged Caroline as their biological daughter. Back then, they had gagged her with excuses about “protecting the company’s stock” and “maintaining family stability.” But what did the Stanford dynasty’s PR mean to me? If they pushed me, I was more than happy to drag us all straight to hell. I threw myself onto Belinda’s massive, cloud-like bed and pulled out the phone. Over the years, the real Caroline had been so beaten down, so painfully insecure, that she didn’t have a single close friend. When I opened Instagram, her feed was a wasteland. But the trending pages? They were plastered with glowing reviews of Belinda’s piano recital, interspersed with nauseatingly perfect paparazzi shots of Belinda and Carlton—the “childhood sweethearts.” Timing is everything. A notification popped up: Belinda had just posted. I clicked on it. It was a highly filtered, carefully angled selfie, her eyes looking tragically glassy. Caption: My big sister finally came home today. I gave her my bedroom. Even though Mom and Dad built this room just for me, it doesn’t matter. As long as she’s happy, I’m happy. As expected, the comments were a bloodbath of hatred aimed at Caroline. To the public, Caroline was just an ungrateful, adopted charity case. How could she ever compare to the delicate, talented biological heiress? I smirked. I went into the settings, changed the handle to my real, full name, and cracked my knuckles. Time to go unhinged. I replied to her post: “Gave it to me? Or did I have to pry it from your cold, manipulative hands?” Then another: “Wow, guys. Are there actually people out there who sob to their parents in the hallway and then immediately run to Instagram to play Mother Teresa?” My comments were instantly flooded by Belinda’s rabid fan base. With her “piano prodigy” label and her old-money aesthetic, she had the online pull of an A-list celebrity. “You are disgusting! A stray dog taking the real daughter’s room!” one user wrote. Is that what they thought? In a stellar mood, I replied to that comment. “I think you make a great point. She really is just a stray.” Because of the sheer controversy, my reply was algorithmically boosted to the top of the comment section. Within three minutes, Belinda deleted the entire post. Free from having to look at her curated, teary face, I bounced off the mattress and opened the walk-in closet. It was packed with Belinda’s clothes. An endless sea of pastel pinks, ruffled tulle, and infantile innocence. Absolutely nothing in my aesthetic. I had finally possessed a rich girl. I wasn’t going to sit around in rags. It was time to swipe some plastic. I swung the bedroom door open, entirely intending to go shopping, only to find Belinda marching down the hall toward me. We were alone. The mask was completely gone. Her face was contorted in sheer, unadulterated rage. She closed the distance and grabbed me by the collar of my cheap hoodie. “Caroline, what the fuck are you doing online?! Didn’t you learn your lesson the last time?!” God, I wished her little internet fans could see her now. The high-class, untouchable goddess, snarling like a rabid dog. I raised a single brow, keeping my face infuriatingly serene. “What’s wrong? I was just telling the truth.” Belinda ground her teeth so hard I legitimately worried her veneers would crack. She shoved me backward, lifting her chin with that familiar, sickening arrogance. “Listen to me, you pathetic bitch. Don’t think for a second that just because you have their blood, you’ve won. I forced you out of this house once. I can easily throw you out again.” And then, without breaking eye contact, Belinda reached over to the console table, grabbed a heavy porcelain vase, and smashed it directly against her own forehead. She let out a blood-curdling scream as the porcelain shattered. Dark red blood immediately began pouring down her face. Footsteps thundered up the stairs. Margaret appeared at the end of the hall, her face draining of color. “Belinda! Oh my god, what happened?!” She dropped to her knees, pulling Belinda’s bleeding head into her lap, frantically inspecting the wound. But when Margaret looked up at me, her panic crystallized into pure hatred. “Mom, I’m fine,” Belinda whimpered, her voice frail and shaking. “Don’t be mad at my sister. She… she just wants to be a part of this family so badly…” I had to hand it to her; Belinda was ruthless. The gash on her forehead was deep. Just looking at it gave me a phantom headache. Margaret carefully helped Belinda to her feet, unleashing a torrent of venom in my direction. “How did I give birth to something as vile as you?! Hasn’t Belinda been kind enough to you?! Why must you destroy everything she touches?!” “You never should have come back! You should have just died in the gutter where you belonged!” This was Caroline’s biological mother. She finished screaming at me and turned, supporting Belinda’s weight, ready to rush her to the hospital. But why would I let myself get cursed out for free? “Did I say you could leave?” I asked, my voice dangerously soft. Margaret whipped her head around. “What more could you possibly want?! Caroline, I swear to God—” She never finished the sentence. Because I had already picked up the matching vase from the other side of the console table and smashed it across the other side of Belinda’s head. This time, the scream was real. She was genuinely terrified. I looked down at the blood streaming symmetrically down both sides of her face and finally gave them a bright, sunny smile. “You see?” I said. “Now it’s a matching set. Much prettier.”

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The rescue scene at the edge of the cliff was a circus of sirens and blinding floodlights. A reporter shoved a microphone toward me the second I was pulled up, her eyes gleaming with the hunger for a viral headline. “Mrs. Steven, your husband just chose to save Miss Vance first, claiming that as a police captain’s daughter, you’re ‘built tougher.’ How do you feel about that?” I clutched the scratchy wool of the rescue blanket around my shoulders, trying to hide the blood soaking through my leggings. My gaze drifted to Hudson, who was across the perimeter, cradling his childhood sweetheart in his arms as if she were made of spun glass. I forced a jagged smile for the camera. “He’s right. I guess I’m tough enough to survive a cliffside fall with a baby in my womb.” The reporter gasped, the air whistling through her teeth. She froze for a beat before her voice trembled. “So… Mr. Steven knew you were pregnant?” 1 Hudson finally tore his eyes away from Melody and looked at me. I was shivering, huddled under the emergency blanket, a stark contrast to the girl he was protecting. He walked over, his brow furrowed in a sharp line of irritation. “Jade, I know you’re upset, but this isn’t the time for a tantrum,” he hissed, his voice low and dangerous. “The cameras are everywhere. Don’t drag Melody into a scandal.” The reporter was still hovering, waiting for a comment. Hudson turned to the lens, instantly regaining that effortless, commanding composure that made him the darling of the business world. “My wife is just shaken up and talking nonsense. Please, don’t take it seriously.” He looked back at his security detail, his voice turning to ice. “Take my wife to the hospital. Make sure she doesn’t say anything else to the press.” Without another word, he turned back, scooped Melody into his arms, and headed for the lead ambulance. Melody clung to his neck, her voice thin and wavering. “Hudson… is Jade mad? Maybe you should go with her. I’ll be fine, really…” Hudson leaned down, his voice softening into a murmur I hadn’t heard in months. “Shh, don’t think like that. She’s fine. She used to pop her own shoulder back into place when we were kids—this is nothing to her. But your heart condition… we need to get you to the ER now.” The ambulance doors slammed shut, cutting off the world. I sat there on the frozen dirt, clutching my lower abdomen as a dull, rhythmic throb began to pulse through my gut. My world was turning cold, inch by agonizing inch. A paramedic looked at me with a pained, awkward expression. “Mrs. Steven, the ambulances are at capacity. We’re waiting on another unit, or…” I swallowed hard, fighting the black spots dancing in my vision. “It’s fine. I’ll find my own way.” At the hospital, I navigated the fluorescent-lit hallways alone. I stood in line, filled out the forms, and waited. When the ultrasound tech finally handed me the results, the words felt like lead on the paper: Threatened miscarriage. Immediate bed rest recommended. My heart twisted into a knot. As I rounded the corner toward the pharmacy, I saw them. Hudson was half-kneeling in front of Melody in a private waiting area, holding a cup of lukewarm water with focused intensity. “Slowly,” he whispered. “It’s still hot.” Melody looked at him, her eyes wide and watery. “You’re so good to me, Hudson. If Jade saw this, she’d just misunderstand again, wouldn’t she?” Hudson offered a faint, tired smile. “She’s not that petty. Besides, we grew up together. She knows how things are. She should understand.” I stood there, a wave of nausea rolling over me that had nothing to do with the pregnancy. I looked down at the ultrasound printout in my hand. Without thinking, I crumpled it into a ball. I turned to leave, but my hip caught a metal trash can, sending it clattering across the linoleum. Both of them looked up. The moment Hudson saw it was me, the tenderness vanished from his face. He stood up and walked toward me. Seeing that I was standing upright and looking “fine,” his expression relaxed into a mask of professional annoyance. “Since you’re okay, I’ll have PR draft a statement.” He reached out to brush a stray hair from my face, but I flinched away. He didn’t look angry, just sighed with the weary patience of a man dealing with a difficult child. “The online narrative is already turning ugly, Jade. People are saying I abandoned my pregnant wife for another woman. I need you to go on record. Tell them the pregnancy thing was just something you said in the heat of the moment to get attention.” He adjusted his cufflink. “You’re the wife of the CEO. Be the bigger person here. It helps her, and it protects the company’s image.” I looked at this man—the man I had loved for five years—and he felt like a stranger speaking a dead language. “Hudson,” I said, my voice sounding like it was coming from underwater. “What if I told you the baby isn’t going to make it?” Hudson’s jaw tightened. “Jade, enough. Melody has a heart condition; she can’t handle this kind of stress. Do you want her to live with that guilt forever? You were a damn war correspondent—you’ve stared down mortars without blinking. Now you’re acting like a spoiled brat because of a pregnancy scare?” A spoiled brat. Because I was strong, I deserved to be abandoned. Because she was fragile, I had to bleed in silence. I looked at him and felt a laugh bubbling up—a sharp, jagged thing. “Understood. If you’re so worried about Miss Vance’s conscience, maybe you should just give her my title. It would be cleaner.” Hudson’s face darkened. “Don’t be ridiculous. She’s like a sister to me. I thought you were better than this, Jade. I didn’t think you’d stoop to being this manipulative.” Manipulative. I took a shaky breath and, without a word, tossed the crumpled ultrasound report into the trash can beside us. “Right. I’m the difficult one. Go back to her, Hudson. Don’t waste your precious time here.” I turned and walked toward the elevator. “Jade!” he called out, his voice vibrating with suppressed rage. “You want to go cool off? Fine. But remember this: if you walk out that door, don’t expect to come crawling back until you’ve learned to drop the attitude and lose the thorns!” As the elevator doors slid shut, I saw Melody slip her hand into his. He looked down at her, his expression melting back into that soft, protective glow. I leaned against the cold metal wall, and the tears finally came. He was right about one thing. I did need to reflect. I needed to reflect on how I could have been so blind to love a man who would watch me drown just to keep someone else’s feet dry. 2 The doctor’s warning echoed in my head: Stay in bed, or you lose the baby. I dragged my exhausted body back to our penthouse, only to stop dead at the foyer. There was a pair of designer stilettos by the door. I’d been wearing nothing but flats lately because of the swelling. Those weren’t mine. My heart hammered against my ribs. I pushed the door open. In the living room, the TV was humming. Melody was curled up on our sofa, wearing one of Hudson’s oversized white dress shirts, her pale legs tucked under her as she ate fruit from a bowl. Hudson was sitting right beside her, a laptop balanced on his knees. At the sound of the door, Melody turned, a sweet, practiced smile on her lips. “Jade! You’re back. Hudson was so worried about me after everything today, he insisted I stay the night. You don’t mind, do you?” Hudson set his laptop aside and stood up, reaching for my bag. “How was the doctor? Everything okay?” I stood frozen. My eyes weren’t on him. They were locked onto the silver whistle hanging around Melody’s neck. It was an old, tarnished police whistle. My father’s whistle. Before he died in the line of duty, he had placed that whistle in Hudson’s hand. He told Hudson it was a symbol—that Hudson was taking over the watch. That he was responsible for my safety now. Hudson had sworn back then: As long as I have this, I will protect her with my life. I lunged forward, grabbing the cold metal. “Why are you touching this?” I choked out. Melody let out a startled cry, and the tears were instant. “I—I’ve been having nightmares since the cliff. Hudson said this was a lucky charm… that it was meant to keep people safe. I just wanted to feel safe for one night…” Hudson immediately stepped between us, shoving me back and pulling Melody behind him. He checked the biometric monitor on her wrist, and seeing no alert, he turned on me with a face full of loathing. “Jade! What the hell is wrong with you? It’s an old trinket. If it gives her peace of mind, let her have it for a few days. You’re a cop’s daughter, for god’s sake. You’re the strongest woman I know. Do you really need a piece of silver to feel secure?” It wasn’t about security. It was the only piece of my father I had left. The light inside me, the last flickering ember of my love for him, went out. “Hudson,” I said, my voice dead. “Do you even remember what that whistle represents?” Hudson groaned, his impatience flared. “I know your dad gave it to me. But a dead object isn’t more important than a living person. Melody needs it right now. Can’t you just be the bigger person for once?” I looked at the whistle clutched in Melody’s hand. Suddenly, both the object and the man felt tainted. Filthy. I turned and walked into the study. I sat at the desk, opened a new document, and typed out a divorce settlement. I hit print. Hudson, if this baby doesn’t survive, we are done. I went into the bedroom, tucked the papers into the hidden lining of my suitcase, and started throwing clothes inside. Hudson walked in a moment later, his bravado wavering when he saw the suitcase. “It’s the middle of the night. Where are you going?” “This house feels dirty,” I said, not looking at him as I zipped the bag. “I’m going to the hospital to save my child.” Hudson froze, then his face turned a deep, ugly red. “Save the child? You can do that here. You’re just using this pregnancy to hold me hostage, aren’t you?” “Because I chose her over you at the cliff? It was an emergency, Jade! She has a condition!” I slammed the suitcase shut, the sound echoing like a gunshot. “Hudson, do you remember what you told my father at his funeral?” “You said you’d spend the rest of your life being my shield.” “Now, you’ve given my shield to someone else. It’s poetic, really.” I brushed past him, dragging my suitcase through the living room without a single glance at Melody. Hudson chased me to the door, grabbing my wrist. “Jade! If you walk out this door over a stupid piece of jewelry, don’t you dare think about coming back! I mean it!” I looked back at him, my eyes as calm as a graveyard. “That’s the plan.” I wrenched my arm free, opened the door, and stepped out into the black, rain-slicked night. Behind me, I heard Hudson’s muffled roar of frustration and the sound of something expensive shattering against a wall. I touched my stomach and whispered, “Don’t be scared, little one. It’s just us now.” 3 I spent three days in a hospital bed. Hudson didn’t call once. Instead, my mother-in-law called. Her tone was, as always, brittle and condescending. “Jade, you are expected at the charity gala tonight.” “The press is having a field day with Hudson’s ‘choice’ at the cliff. The Steven Group’s stock is dipping. As Hudson’s wife, you will show up, you will smile, and you will put these rumors to bed.” I stared out the window at the gray Seattle sky. “I’m in the hospital, Beatrice. I’m at risk of a miscarriage.” “Miscarriage?” she scoffed. “Please. You’re a cop’s daughter; you’re not that fragile. Don’t use a phantom pregnancy to play for sympathy. If you aren’t at that gala, don’t bother ever showing your face at a family function again.” The line went dead. That afternoon, an assistant delivered a garment bag. It was a loose-fitting black silk gown and a pair of designer flats. The note from Hudson read: I told them you weren’t feeling well. Wear this. It’s comfortable. Touching the soft fabric, a pathetic, tiny part of me wondered… Does he care? A little? I put on the dress. I did my makeup to hide the ghostly pallor of my skin. The gala was a sea of glittering diamonds and forced laughter. Hudson was there, looking dashing in a custom tuxedo, with Melody on his arm. Melody was also in black, but her dress was a shimmering, tight-fitting mermaid gown encrusted with crystals. She looked like a star. I, in my loose silk and flats, looked like a bloated shadow beside them. The whispers started the moment I walked in. “Is that the wife? Why is she dressed like that?” “Well, she’s a cop’s daughter. I guess she doesn’t understand high fashion.” “Look at how Hudson looks at Miss Vance. He just peeled a shrimp for her. The marriage is clearly a sham.” Hudson gave me a cursory glance. “You made it. If you’re tired, go sit in the corner. Don’t make a scene.” Then he turned to Melody, his voice dropping into that tender register. “Mel, are you hungry? I’ll go get you some of those crab cakes you like.” I stood alone in the center of the room, my fingers digging into my palms. The climax of the night was the silent auction. The showpiece was a ruby necklace called “The Eternal Heart.” Starting bid: five million. Melody’s eyes lit up when she saw it. Hudson smiled, that indulgent, protective smile, and raised his paddle. “Ten million.” The room erupted in murmurs. “Twelve million,” someone countered. Hudson didn’t blink. “Fifteen million.” People began to whisper, “It must be an anniversary gift for his wife. How romantic.” I sat in my corner, hearing the compliments, feeling like I was made of ice. Our anniversary. He actually remembered. “Twenty million!” Hudson shouted. The room went silent. Hudson stood up, took the velvet box from the presenter, and turned. But he didn’t turn toward me. He turned toward Melody. “Stop crying,” he whispered. He lifted the breathtaking rubies and, in front of everyone, fastened them around Melody’s neck. “Rubies are supposed to be good for the heart,” he said loud enough for the front rows to hear. “They suit you much better than a tattered silver whistle.” Melody beamed, touching the gems with trembling fingers. “Oh, Hudson… it’s beautiful. So much better than that old thing. Thank you!” Every eye in the room pivoted to me. Pity. Scorn. Schaudenfreude. The stares felt like slaps across my face, stinging and hot. And then, a white-hot spike of pain lanced through my abdomen. I felt a sudden, warm rush of fluid down my legs. My face went translucent. Cold sweat broke out across my brow. I reached for my bag to find my medication, but my hand shook so violently I knocked over a glass of red wine. Hudson looked over, his eyes snapping with irritation. My phone buzzed. A text from him: I just spent twenty million to get that whistle back for you. Are you satisfied? I know you’re still throwing a fit, but stop acting like someone died. Put a smile on your face and stop embarrassing the family. I looked at the screen until the words blurred into a gray smear. I didn’t have the strength to reply. I braced myself against the table and stood up, inching toward the restroom. Hudson… is this your anniversary gift to me? 4 The restroom mirror showed a woman who looked like a corpse. I gripped the sink, gasping for air. The black silk of my dress was soaked, blood trailing down my legs and onto the white marble floor. “Oh my god! Are you okay? Someone help! She’s bleeding!” A passing waitress screamed. “Ambulance…” I managed to choke out. “Call an ambulance…” Darkness rushed in to meet me, and I collapsed. When I woke, I was on a gurney. The lights above were blinding. A doctor, his gown stained with red, leaned over me. “We have massive hemorrhaging! We need to get her into surgery now! Where is the family? I need a signature!” Family? I wanted to laugh, but I couldn’t move my lips. “I… I’ll sign…” “No! We need a next of kin! This is critical—you might not make it off the table!” the doctor roared. A nurse handed me my phone. “Call your husband! Now!” With trembling fingers, I dialed the number I knew by heart. Ring… ring… ring… Each tone was a serrated blade. On the third call, he picked up. “Jade? What kind of stunt are you pulling now? Why did you leave the gala? Do you have any idea how that looks to my mother? To the board?” “Melody was just asking for you. She wants to give the whistle back. Where the hell are you?” His voice was a barrage of accusations. “Hudson,” I whispered, my voice a thread of silk. “I’m at the hospital… the baby…” CRACK! A massive thunderclap shook the hospital windows as a storm broke over the city. Hudson’s voice immediately shifted—soft, protective. “It’s okay, Mel. I’ve got you.” Then, over the line, I heard him begin to hum. It was Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. On every stormy night for five years, he had held me and hummed that song until I fell asleep. He called it “our song for the dark.” Now, he was singing it to her. “Jade, I have to go. Melody has always been terrified of thunder. I’ll call you later.” Click. I let the phone slip from my fingers. I looked at the blood on my hands and felt my soul turn to ash. “Doctor,” I said, my voice suddenly steady. “Give me the pen.” I gripped his hand. “I’m signing for myself. Save me. Forget the baby… it’s already gone.” The pen scratched across the paper. Jade Steven. Two words. Shaky, but final. A goodbye to the woman I used to be. Under the cold surgical lights, the instruments moved inside me, scraping away the last remnants of our life together. I refused the general anesthesia. I wanted to feel the pain. I wanted to remember the exact moment I killed my own heart. And the moment Hudson killed the woman who loved him. As the pain peaked and my consciousness frayed, I remembered the day we found out I was pregnant. Hudson had rubbed my belly and laughed like a boy. “Jade, I’m going to spend the rest of my life making sure you’re the happiest woman on earth.” Hudson, you’re a liar. When they wheeled me out of surgery, I heard frantic footsteps at the end of the hall. Hudson was there, drenched from the rain, hair disheveled, clutching that silver whistle in his hand. He saw me and stopped dead. “Jade…” his voice cracked. “What happened?” His eyes fell on the blood-stained consent form on the clipboard at the foot of my bed. His pupils dilated. “Miscarriage? …The baby?” He lunged forward, but the nurse shoved him back with a glare. “The patient just had an emergency D&C. She’s extremely weak. Keep your voice down.” Hudson staggered back as if he’d been punched. “D&C? No… that can’t be…” The pain was a dull roar now. I lay there, drenched in sweat. Looking at his shattered expression, I felt… nothing. Not even hate. “Jade,” he whispered, his eyes red. “This isn’t funny. If you’re doing this to punish me for the cliff… you win. Okay? You win. Just tell me the baby is okay.” He pressed the silver whistle into my hand, his voice a pathetic plea. “Look! I got it back! I took it back from her! Please, don’t scare me like this. Tell me he’s okay.” The silver was cold against my palm. It would never be warm again. I forced my eyes open and looked at him. I gave him a small, tired smile. “The baby is dead, Hudson.” “And I want a divorce.”

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The golden child threw herself out the window, screaming that I pushed her. What she didn’t know was that I had just been tethered to the Loop System. A digital parasite in my brain that allowed me to select any single action she made and force her to repeat it. One hundred times. By the time the golden child had crawled back up to the second floor like a reanimated corpse, hurling herself out the window for the hundredth consecutive time, our biased parents and our darling brother had completely lost their minds. 1. “Helen, you are so dead. Mom and Dad are never going to forgive you for this.” Beverly flashed me a wicked, gleeful smile. Then, without missing a beat, she tipped backward and plummeted out the second-story window. She landed squarely in the thick hydrangea bushes lining the estate’s foundation. The landscaper, who had been watering the beds, let out a bloodcurdling scream. My parents and my brother, Brooks, practically tore the patio doors off their hinges as they sprinted from the sunroom into the yard. The moment they saw Beverly lying there, the air was sucked right out of the world. Panic, raw and suffocating, took over. My mother immediately broke into a wailing sob. My father was frantically punching 911 into his phone. Brooks dropped to his knees in the dirt beside Beverly, his voice cracking in absolute devastation. “Beverly… oh my god, how did this happen?! Who? Who did this to you?!” Trembling, Beverly raised a pale arm, strategically scratched by the thorny branches, stark and beautifully tragic against the pristine white tulle of her dress. She pointed a shaking finger up at the second-floor window. Up at me. “Brooks…” she whimpered, her voice a masterclass in fragile innocence. “I don’t know what I did wrong… My sister, she… it hurts so much…” Instantly, three pairs of eyes snapped upward, glaring at me. Whatever thin, polite veneer we had maintained since I moved in was gone. There was no biological affection here, no familial bond. The pure, unadulterated hatred radiating from them was reserved solely for me—the sudden intruder, the biological anomaly who had dared to harm their carefully cultivated, deeply cherished daughter and sister. Perhaps in my past life, the naked cruelty in their stares would have pierced right through my chest. But right now? My blood was singing. System, I thought, the command cold and precise in my mind. That exact jumping motion. Lock it in. Repeat one hundred times. 2. In my last life, Beverly’s little stunt worked flawlessly. She walked away with a few cosmetic scrapes, but it was enough to ignite a blinding fury in the Prescott family. They rushed upstairs, dragged me to the floor, and kicked and beat me until my ribs splintered and my organs ruptured. While they were speeding in the back of an ambulance to get Beverly a designer band-aid, I bled to death on the hardwood floor alone. After I died, my soul floated untethered, and the sky above me filled with lines of glowing, scrolling text: [The real daughter is so pathetic!! The Prescott family are absolute trash, they all deserve to die!!!] [If the author wanted to write a villainous fake-sister trope, fine, but don’t do the innocent girl dirty like this! Using a helpless side character’s brutal death just to establish the fake sister’s ‘mean girl’ status is crossing a massive line. This isn’t satisfying at all!] [This family is just a bunch of soulless NPCs like in every other switched-at-birth trope! If the plot doesn’t change and they don’t get what’s coming to them, I’m reporting this entire book!] [Resurrect the real daughter!! Let her get revenge!!] Revenge revenge revenge revenge revenge revenge revenge revenge… The glitching, manic text entirely consumed my vision. That was the moment I realized I wasn’t a real person. I was cannon fodder. The tragic, biological daughter in a melodramatic web novel where Beverly was the twisted, untouchable female lead. [The readers are review-bombing this to hell. It’s getting too unhinged. You know what? Take this Loop System. I’m dropping this manuscript. You handle the rest! I’m out!] A voice—presumably the author’s—echoed in the void before vanishing completely. And then, I woke up. Reborn, mere seconds before Beverly’s theatrical leap, with the [Loop System] humming quietly in my temporal lobe. Looking at her smug, artificially playful face, the phantom aches of a hundred kicks from my past life rushed through my veins, hot and demanding. In my last life, I was slaughtered by the plot. In this life, I was going to let this family experience the sheer, unrelenting terror of a protagonist with a cheat code. “Helen Prescott!! Are you out of your damn mind?! You pushed Beverly?! Get down here right now!!” Just like before, Brooks thundered up the stairs. He didn’t care that I was a hundred-pound girl who had grown up malnourished in foster care. He raised his fist, ready to strike— “Ahhh!!!!! Beverly!!! Beverly, where are you going?!” This time, however, my mother’s hysterical shriek from the yard stopped his fist in mid-air. He instinctively looked down out the window. Down in the flowerbed, Beverly had suddenly snapped upright, stiff as a wooden plank. Her head hung low, chin touching her chest, and her legs began to move in a rapid, inhuman blur, sprinting toward the house with the jerky, terrifying cadence of a malfunctioning animatronic. She scurried up the stairs so fast she practically blurred, slamming her shoulder into Brooks and knocking him entirely out of the doorway. She marched straight to the window in front of me and hoisted herself onto the sill, perching there. Her eyes were completely glazed over, dead and vacant, but her mouth moved perfectly to deliver her opening line: “Helen, you are so dead. Mom and Dad are never going to forgive you for this.” Then, she tipped backward. CRACK. She hit the bushes again. “Ahhhhhhhhhh!!!” Downstairs, my mother and the landscaper shrieked in unison. My father stood frozen, his jaw slack. His phone slipped from his fingers and shattered on the patio stones. “Beverly!!!” Brooks screamed, a sound tearing his throat raw, and he bolted down the stairs. He didn’t even make it to the front door. Beverly was already coming back up. BANG! She plowed into him again, knocking the breath from his lungs, and scrambled onto the windowsill. “Helen, you are so dead. Mom and Dad are never going to forgive you for this.” Over she went. “Grab her!! Stop her!!” my parents finally snapped out of their stupor, bellowing at the top of their lungs. Brooks lunged. “Beverly!!” BANG!! Smashed aside again. And over she went. “Beverly!” THUD. “Beverly!!” THUD. “Watch her face—oh my god, her face!!!!” THUD. By the tenth repetition, Beverly’s speed had exponentially increased, defying all laws of physics. She was moving five times faster than a normal human. When she hit Brooks this time, she launched him into the air. He crashed hard onto the first-floor landing, his designer glasses splintering across the hardwood. That was the beauty of the Loop. The speed compounded, and with speed came terrifying, unnatural momentum. My parents threw themselves at her, tackling her around the waist in a desperate double-team to pin her down. Instead, her momentum simply dragged them across fifteen feet of manicured lawn. The abrasive patio stones sheared a layer of skin right off their arms, chests, and backs. They howled in agony. “Are you insane?! You’re running over your own parents?!” “Stop! Stop right now! Do you hear me?!!” They screamed the words, but the truth was, none of them dared to touch her again. They scrambled backward, pressing themselves into the corner of the patio, leaving a wide, terrified berth between the doorway and the stairs. All they could do was watch, eyes bulging with pure horror, as Beverly sprinted up the stairs again, and again, and again. Every single loop was punctuated by my mother’s agonizing wails. And this was only loop twenty-five. 3. By the time Beverly executed her fifty-fifth jump, the sun had set. She had entered the peak of her glitching state. She was moving so fast she left afterimages in the twilight. My mother had entirely run out of tears. The grief had been hollowed out, replaced by a suffocating, primal terror. And how could it not? When Beverly planned her little stunt, she had calculated the trajectory perfectly to ensure only superficial cuts. A little pain for a lot of sympathy. But no human body is meant to endure a second-story drop fifty times in a row. No body is meant to have the same scratches ripped open half a hundred times. The Beverly that was currently looping was a shredded, bloody mess. Her dress was in tatters, painted in dark crimson strokes, her limbs operating solely on the mechanical willpower of the System. When she scurried out from the pitch-black doorway of the ground floor, she looked like a charred, skittering spider. Up close, it was straight out of a horror movie. Who wouldn’t be trembling? “Mom! Dad! Do something!!! If she keeps jumping like this, she’s going to break into pieces!” Only Brooks was still trying to save her. Ignorance was bliss. Without his glasses, he couldn’t actually see the gruesome, twitching entity that was currently crawling across the floorboards. My mother’s vocal cords had ruptured; she was slumped against my father’s shoulder, completely unresponsive. My father had collapsed into a lotus position on the grass, muttering feverish prayers. He was a ruthless venture capitalist, but right now, he was bargaining with whatever god was listening. At loop ninety, the sky began to bleed a pale morning gray. Brooks was kneeling on the floor beside the long, dark-red smear Beverly had dragged across the carpet, rocking back and forth like a mental patient. My parents were huddled together, drenched in cold sweat, utterly mute. At loop one hundred, the ambulance—which had been stalled by the System’s interference—finally wailed up the driveway. The paramedics had to literally dig Beverly’s pulverized, barely-breathing body out of the crater she had formed in the earth. “Where is the family?! We need a guardian to ride with us!!” the EMT yelled over the flashing lights. Brooks crawled toward the door. “Me! Me!!! I’m coming with her!!!” Only then did I take my time walking down from the second floor. I arranged my features into a mask of identical, traumatized shock, rushing over to help my parents up. “Mom! Dad! Get up… Beverly’s condition, it was so… unnatural! Are you really going to let Brooks go to the hospital alone with her?!” The spell broke. An adopted daughter was just a daughter, but their son? Their heir? He was their lifeline. The two old hypocrites scrambled to their feet, their legs shaking violently. “We… we have to go. We have to follow them.” Yes, go, I thought. The best acts of the play were yet to come. I wouldn’t miss it for the world. 4. Beverly was the protagonist of the original plot, and it showed. She actually survived. Plot armor is a hell of a drug; she was remarkably hard to kill. Even so, she was a symphony of fractured bones and severe contusions. She wouldn’t be walking for at least three to five months. “It hurts!!!! What happened?!!! Why can’t I move?!” “My face… my face is burning!!! Make it stop!!!” “Mom!! Dad!! Brooks!! Why aren’t you helping me?!!!” Beverly had never experienced true pain in her life. With absolutely no memory of her glitching marathon, she woke up screaming, thrashing against her restraints, sobbing hysterically. The family of three desperately wanted to rush to her bedside to comfort her, but they physically couldn’t. The psychological trauma of the “blood-soaked spider” was too fresh. Especially for Brooks. When he had climbed into the back of the ambulance, he had leaned in close, desperately crying her name. In response, Beverly had turned a mangled, blood-drenched face toward him, her eyes rolled back so far only the bloodshot whites showed. He had nearly gone into cardiac arrest on the spot. So, it was just me. I was the only one who withstood the pressure. I stepped up to the hospital bed and gently patted the thick gauze wrapped around Beverly’s shoulder. “Beverly, it’s okay. You have to be strong. If you can’t handle this, how are you going to survive the rest of it?” I suddenly understood the psychology behind killers returning to the scene of the crime. Looking at Beverly right now, she felt like my own personal masterpiece. The uglier she looked, the more an undeniable fondness bloomed in my chest. She couldn’t even maintain her delicate, innocent facade anymore. She bared her teeth and shrieked at me: “Helen?! Why the hell are you in here?!! It was you, wasn’t it?!! You did this to me!!!” “Mom! Dad!!! It was Helen!! She pushed me!! Punish her!! Do it now!!!” I offered a serene, almost saintly smile, my voice perfectly level. “Beverly, I understand why you’re blaming me… It’s my fault as your sister. I should have caught you. Mom and Dad tried so hard to stop you from jumping, but…” I caught the fleeting look of retroactive terror on my parents’ faces. Their hands subconsciously drifted to their own bandaged, scraped skin. The physical pain only amplified their deep-seated, biological fear of the girl in the bed. Beverly, of course, missed all of this subtext. All she heard was that her parents hadn’t caught her. Panicked over the prospect of being permanently disfigured, she lost her mind entirely, spitting out words without thinking: “Why didn’t you stop me?! If you had just stopped me, I wouldn’t look like this!!” It was the exact sentence I was waiting for. System. Let her say it a hundred times. 5. “We tried to stop you! But we couldn’t!!” My father’s face was twisted in distress as he tried to defend himself. “You were too strong!” My mother nodded frantically. “Yes, yes! You dragged me right across the ground…” She pulled back her designer sleeve to show Beverly the massive, angry road rash on her forearm. “Look. My skin was torn right off.” Under normal circumstances, Beverly would have instantly dissolved into tears, apologizing profusely and delicately blowing on her mother’s wound to soothe her. But right now, her eyes remained bulged, and she barked out the exact same accusation, her tone frantic and venomous: “Why didn’t you stop me?! If you had just stopped me, I wouldn’t look like this!!” My parents froze. They stared at her, deeply unsettled. “Beverly…?” my mother whispered, her voice trembling. Beverly kept going. “Why didn’t you stop me?! If you had just stopped me, I wouldn’t look like this!!” My father’s guilt instantly calcified into anger. “How dare you speak to us like that?! I just told you, we couldn’t hold you down! If you’re going to put this on us, I’m going to lose my patience very quickly!” … “Why didn’t you stop me?! If you had just stopped me, I wouldn’t look like this!!” “Excuse me? What is wrong with you? Are you deaf?!” … “Why didn’t you stop me?! If you had just stopped me, I wouldn’t look like this!!” “Say that one more time!” … “Why didn’t you stop me?! If you had just stopped me, I wouldn’t look like this!!” “Shut up!!!!” My father absolutely lost it. He was panting heavily, jabbing a finger toward the bed. “Do you have zero respect left?!!! Keep acting like this, and you can sit in this room by yourself! We’re done visiting you!!” His eyes were bloodshot with rage. But Beverly was completely deaf to the world. She just kept repeating the sentence. Over and over. The volume rising, the pitch turning into a grating, shrill siren. My mother clutched her chest, unable to take the sensory overload, and burst into tears again. “Beverly, how can you blame me?! Don’t you think I wanted to save you?! We couldn’t do anything, why can’t you understand that!” Only Brooks was still running defense. “Mom, Dad, she’s just in agony. The trauma is too much for a young girl. She’s just delirious from the pain, please, the most important thing is her recovery. Don’t be angry with her!” I immediately chimed in to help. “Yes, exactly… And… why does she keep repeating the exact same phrase? Do you think… when she hit her head…” I delicately tapped my temple with one finger. “Helen! What the hell is that supposed to mean?! Are you calling her brain-damaged?!” Brooks spat, instantly reverting to his default setting. “Stop trying to tear this family apart! We don’t even know why she jumped in the first place. You bully her every single day, maybe you drove her to it!” Brooks truly was a flawless NPC. No matter what happened to Beverly, his programming automatically pinned the blame on me. I didn’t even dignify him with a look. I just turned my gaze to my parents. “Mom, Dad, let’s just call the doctor in. It couldn’t hurt for them to check on her head.” The suggestion landed perfectly. My parents exchanged a long, heavy look, their eyes darting back to the bed, evaluating Beverly with a new, deeply cynical calculation. After all, a wealthy heiress with a few broken bones could be hidden away to heal. But an heiress whose brain was broken? That was a massive liability.

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The help’s daughter stole my mother’s vintage jewelry to pass out to her classmates, calling it “restorative justice.” In my first life, I called the police. She fainted from the sheer drama of it. The school heartthrob and a mob of students formed a human shield around her, claiming I’d promised the pieces as a donation. They turned on me, calling me a liar, a materialistic snob, a girl who cared more about diamonds than human struggle. They shoved me, screaming, until I was pushed past the school gates and directly into the path of an out-of-control semi-truck. The last thing I felt was the pavement. The last thing I heard was the sound of my own bones snapping. Then, I blinked. I was back. I was standing in the back of the lecture hall on the very day she decided to play Robin Hood. Cassidy was on the podium, her eyes shimmering with performative tears. She upended a backpack, and a waterfall of gold and gemstones cascaded onto the wood. “Don’t you see?” Cassidy’s voice cracked with emotion. “Madeline spends more on a single dinner than most of you live on for a year! I couldn’t just watch it anymore. I wanted everyone to have a taste of the life she takes for granted…” The room erupted in thunderous applause. Taking my inheritance to buy a reputation? How touching. The ghost of the truck’s impact throbbed in my chest. I didn’t hesitate. I lunged onto the stage, the heels of my boots clicking like a countdown. Before she could finish her “saintly” smile, I delivered two sharp, stinging slaps to her face. She spun, her eyes widening in shock before she collapsed into a wail. I turned to the stunned crowd, my voice dripping with honeyed poison. “Please, everyone, take whatever you want! I had no idea you were all so desperate. If my life is this good, the least I can do is share. Don’t be shy.” I watched Cassidy’s face turn a sickly shade of grey. This was the moment she had planned—her grand debut as the beneficent princess of Briarwood Prep. The students didn’t need a second invitation. They surged forward like a pack of starving wolves, grabbing at the necklaces and rings, stuffing them into their pockets while shouting their thanks to Cassidy. One girl even dropped to her knees, clutching a diamond brooch. “Cassidy, you’re an angel! My mom’s surgery… we can finally afford it now!” Cassidy, surrounded by her new disciples, shot me a triumphant, vicious little smirk from behind her tears. She thought she had won. She didn’t realize that in this life, I wasn’t playing by the rules of “polite society.” 1 It had started last night. I was going through the last of my mother’s estate—pieces I’d kept locked away since she passed. Cassidy had barged in without knocking, as she always did, and her eyes had gone wide. She’d actually had the nerve to demand half of it, crying about how “unfair” it was that I had so much and she had so little. When I refused, she didn’t listen to my reasons. She just screamed that our friendship was over. I hadn’t chased after her to apologize, which was her usual script. So, she’d waited until I left the house, snuck into my room, and emptied the safe. If she couldn’t have the status, she would destroy the source of it. Watching these strangers’ sweaty palms smudge my mother’s legacy made my skin crawl. The memory of the truck’s tires crushing my ribs flared up again—a phantom pain that burned like fire. I reached the limit of my patience. I stepped back to the mic, my voice cold enough to frost the windows. “I’m happy to help anyone in genuine need. But those pieces are my mother’s heirlooms. Return them. Now.” Cassidy stumbled back, her face contorting. “Madeline, what is wrong with you?! I already told them they could have it. Are you really this greedy? You want to snatch back a gift you already gave just so you can hoard it?” I ignored her. I began plucking pieces back from the podium, my eyes fixed on the students who were hovering like vultures. Cassidy tried to grab my arm, but I caught her wrist, leaning in so only she could hear. “You’re the housekeeper’s daughter, Cassidy. Did you start believing the lies you tell? One phone call to the DA and the dollar amount in those bags is enough to put you away for twenty years. Get. Back.” When I was three, my mother died. My father told me I stopped eating, stopped speaking, just sat in the nursery and faded. He brought in our housekeeper’s daughter, who was my age, to be my companion. He always said that the moment Cassidy arrived, I started living again. 2 My father was so “grateful” that he basically adopted her. He treated her mother, Mrs. Bennett, more like a wife than a servant, and gave Cassidy a life of luxury. I grew up thinking of her as my sister. I gave her everything she asked for. But the moment I said “no” to my mother’s jewelry, the mask slipped. In my last life, the police came, and Cassidy lied through her teeth. She’d spent years building a “rich girl” persona at school while I stayed low-key. The students, many of whom had already pocketed the jewelry, became her star witnesses. They filmed me being “the villain.” The media picked it up. Wealthy Socialite Accuses Charity-Minded Sister of Theft. By the time they pushed me into the street, I was the most hated girl in the city. Cassidy stared at me now, her breath hitching. She couldn’t believe I was outing her status in public. She gritted her teeth, her voice a low hiss. “You think they’ll believe you? Look at me, Madeline. Look at how they love me. You’re just a bitter girl barking like a dog. Give the jewelry back to the people who actually need it!” She leaned closer, her eyes glittering with malice. “Don’t forget, I’m the reason you’re even alive. Consider today a lesson in humility.” She turned back to the crowd, throwing her arms out. “Go ahead, guys! Take what’s yours!” I stood alone against the mob. I couldn’t protect it all physically. “Fine,” I said, my voice eerily calm. “Let’s call the police.” Cassidy’s bravado flickered. “What did you say?” “If you’re so sure this jewelry is yours to give, let’s let the authorities sort it out. I’m sure the detectives would love to see the receipts.” “Oh, shut up!” a voice barked from the crowd. It was Jordan, the varsity captain and the school’s golden boy. He stepped forward, looking at me with pure, unadulterated disgust. “I have never seen anyone so pathetic, Madeline. Are you that desperate for attention? You’re literally trying to rob your own sister in broad daylight.” The room hummed with agreement. “Seriously, Maddy is such a psycho.” “Cassidy brings us gifts and this is how she acts?” Jordan reached Cassidy’s side, putting a protective arm around her. He pointed a finger at me. “Give it back, Madeline. Kneel down, apologize to Cassidy for the lies, and maybe—just maybe—I won’t let the school board hear about this.” I used to have a crush on Jordan. I used to wonder why he hated me so much when I had never been anything but kind to him. I didn’t understand until the day I died. He had been the first one to reach my broken body on the asphalt. He’d leaned down, pretending to check my pulse, but instead, he’d pressed his thumb into my open wound, making sure the blood flowed faster. 3 He’d whispered in my ear while I was dying: “You know, Maddy? Freshman year, I was starving. I was hiding in the locker room eating bread scraps. Cassidy found me. She put my name on the scholarship fund. She saved me. She’s my princess, and you… you’re just the bitch who keeps hurting her. You deserve this.” Now, looking at him, he looked so small. So easily manipulated. “Scared?” Jordan sneered, seeing my silence. “This is just the beginning. You’re going to pay for being such a selfish brat.” He had no idea I’d already paid the ultimate price. I reached out and snatched a diamond tennis necklace sticking out of his pocket. One of my mother’s favorites. “My things!” he yelled, his face flushing a deep, angry red. He lunged for me. “That’s my necklace! Everyone saw her! She’s stealing it back!” I stepped back, the love I once felt for him completely withered. “Jordan, make sure you stay a good little dog for Cassidy. Because you aren’t getting another cent from me.” “I never took anything from you, you lunatic!” he spat. “Wait until the cops get here. You’re done.” I shrugged, waiting for him to dial. But Cassidy suddenly slapped his phone out of his hand. “Jordan, no!” she cried, her voice trembling. “We’re classmates. I don’t want to ruin her life over a few trinkets.” She turned to me, her eyes pleading. “Maddy, please. Haven’t I been good to you? I saved your life. Just give the jewelry back and let’s go home.” “No.” I pulled out my phone and dialed our estate manager. “Arthur? Someone broke into my room last night. I need the security footage from the hallway sent to my phone immediately. Yes, the 4K feed.” Cassidy lunged for my phone. “Are you insane? You’re going to send me to jail for some jewelry? You’re going to ruin my life? Just tell them you were confused! Tell them you’re greedy! If you don’t do this, I will never forgive you!” She still thought I was the same girl she could bully into submission. She thought her “debt of life” was an infinite credit card. “It’s not just jewelry,” I said, shaking her hand off. “It’s my mother. And you’re about to find out exactly what happens when you touch what’s mine.” Cassidy collapsed onto the floor, sobbing. Jordan looked like he wanted to murder me. The class was a chorus of “How could you?” and “Cassidy is too good for this world.” 4 “Seriously, Maddy, have some shame!” “Call the cops on her, she’s the one who’s crazy!” My phone buzzed. A notification from Arthur: Video sent, Miss Madeline. The thief is indeed Cassidy Bennett. Before Cassidy could stop me, I hit “Select All” in the class group chat and hit send. One by one, phones began to ping. The room went silent. The video was crystal clear. It showed Cassidy sneaking into my wing of the house with a heavy-duty trash bag. She looked over her shoulder, her face twisted in a sneer, and muttered, “If she won’t give them to me, I’ll make sure she never sees them again. High and mighty bitch.” She was seen stuffing the very jewelry they were holding into the bag like common trash. The silence in the room was deafening. The only sound was the video looping on twenty different screens—Cassidy’s voice, sharp and ugly, echoing through the hall. “NO!” Cassidy screamed, a primal, ugly sound. “Don’t look at it! Turn it off! I’m not a thief! I’m her savior! Half of that house belongs to me anyway! It’s my money! It’s all mine!” “So… Cassidy… you’re the housekeeper’s daughter?” a girl in the front row asked, her voice trembling. The atmosphere shifted instantly. The “princess” was gone. In her place was a girl caught in a lie. People started looking at the gold in their hands with a sudden, sharp fear of being accomplices. “Cassidy, you poser,” the class president muttered, stepping forward and dropping a bracelet onto my desk. “You made us look like idiots.” Slowly, other students began to follow suit, avoidant and embarrassed. Cassidy felt the tide turning. She stood up, her hair disheveled, her eyes wild. “I am NOT the help! I saved her life! I’m the adopted daughter! I’m her older sister! I gave you those things because I cared about you! You ungrateful snakes!” Jordan, who had been standing there with his fists clenched, finally exhaled. He stepped toward her, his face a mask of grim determination. “Madeline, is this how you treat the person who saved you? Are you happy now? Do you feel powerful making her cry?” Cassidy, seeing her last ally, turned on the waterworks again. “Maddy, how could you be so cruel? You eat ten-thousand-dollar meals while these people struggle. I just wanted to help them. I was afraid your greed would curse you, that you’d end up in hell, so I tried to buy you some grace. Is that such a sin?” I actually started clapping. “Bravo. Truly. An Oscar-worthy performance.” “You!” Cassidy pointed a shaking finger at me. “Do you want me to die? Is that it?” Her voice rose to a shriek. “What have I ever done to you? I shared everything with you! Every gift our father brought back—you always got the first pick. You got the master suite while my mother and I were cramped in the servant’s quarters for years! I never complained! Did you forget you said I could have anything of yours? Is this your gratitude?” 5 I couldn’t help but laugh. “Cassidy, you’re delusional. Your ‘life-saving’ act was being a paid playmate for a lonely toddler. For that, my father took you in. You’ve worn ten-thousand-dollar Chanel suits, eaten Wagyu flown in from Japan, and spent a monthly allowance that exceeds most people’s annual salaries. I gave you that. Without me, you are a ghost. You have no right to ‘complain’ about a life you didn’t earn.” “And as for your ‘cramped’ quarters? It’s a two-thousand-square-foot guest wing. You had it gutted and renovated for five million because you didn’t like the wallpaper. Who’s the extravagant one again? You didn’t steal this for ‘charity.’ You stole it because I finally said no to you, and you couldn’t handle it. If there’s so much as a scratch on my mother’s pearls, I’m pressing charges.” The students, terrified of being dragged into a felony, practically threw the jewelry back at me. I was busy sorting through the pile when Cassidy suddenly dropped to her knees in front of me. She grabbed the hem of my jeans, tears streaming down her face. “Madeline! These people are starving! They don’t have billionaire fathers! Living is a struggle for them! I apologize for them, okay? Just let them keep the jewelry. It could change their lives. Please, have a heart!” She was facing away from the class, sobbing into my knees. But from my angle, I could see it—the sharp, triumphant glint in her eyes. She was playing the “Class War” card. It worked. A few of the more aggressive boys stepped forward, pointing at me. “She’s right! You’re not even human, Madeline! You’re gonna let us starve over some rocks? If I fail out because I can’t afford tuition, your hands are stained with my blood!” “We shouldn’t even let her stay in this school! Drive her out!” “Yeah! Get her out of here!” They started closing in, rolling up their sleeves. Jordan stepped forward to haul Cassidy up, mouthing two words at me: You’re dead. I looked at their angry faces and remembered the truck. The cold metal, the smell of gasoline. I grabbed a heavy wooden chair and slammed it against a desk with a deafening CRACK. The mob froze. I held up my phone, my voice steady. “The video is already in the cloud. If you touch me, or if you keep a single piece of that jewelry, I will make sure your futures are erased before the sun sets. Cassidy is a thief. Do you want to be her cellmates?” Cassidy curled into a ball, weeping. The “revolution” died as quickly as it started. “Keep your trash then,” one girl hissed, dropping a ring. “Always causing trouble.” I didn’t care what they said. I just needed my mother back. As they filed out, muttering insults, Cassidy stayed on the floor. She looked up at me, her face twisted with pure venom. “Madeline, you’re going to regret this. Robert is going to kill you for this. Just you wait.” She ran out, clutching her phone. I knew exactly who she was calling. My father. Her greatest protector. It was time to prune the family tree. I had just finished packing the jewelry when my father appeared at the classroom door. But he wasn’t alone. Mrs. Bennett was at his side, dressed in a designer silk suit, looking every bit the “lady of the manor.” She was clinging to his arm, and for a second, I saw something I’d missed for years. They weren’t just employer and employee.

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When Victoria’s golden boy stole her company’s trade secrets and drove her empire to the brink of bankruptcy, I didn’t walk away. Instead, I brought my family’s quiet, generational billions and stepped into the role of the devoted, background husband. I poured my wealth into the Croft family business, saving it from ruin. When Victoria was caught in a devastating car wreck, I stayed by her bedside, feeding her ice chips and managing the crumbling company single-handedly. When she finally recovered, she held my face in her hands and swore that I was the one person on this earth she would never, ever betray. But then Tristan came back. All it took was one whisper from him—a casual comment about a gruesome scene he’d watched on some historical HBO drama—for Victoria to shatter my legs and string me up from the vaulted ceiling of our Hamptons living room. For three days and three nights, I hung there. Parched, starved, and delirious with agony, I begged her to cut me down. She didn’t even look up. She simply pulled Tristan into her lap, their bodies tangled together on the Italian leather sofa, right in front of me. “If you hadn’t taken advantage of my vulnerability to force me into marriage, I wouldn’t be in a position where I can’t give Tristan my last name,” she sneered, her eyes entirely devoid of the woman I thought I knew. “You framed him. You sent him into exile. Now that he’s back, it’s time you paid your debts.” When it was over, my spirit was utterly broken. I dragged what was left of myself to my older sister, collapsing at her feet. “I lost, Caroline,” I choked out, pressing my forehead against the cold hardwood. “I was blind. Please, just get me out of here.” 1 By the time they finally cut me down, the pain had long since mutated into a cold, suffocating numbness. My body collapsed onto the Persian rug like a sack of broken porcelain, the slightest twitch of my fingers sending electric shocks of agony up my spine. The heavy, metallic stench of blood hung thick in the air. I forced my eyes open, catching sight of the dark, pooling stain beneath me, soaking into the hardwood. The rope burns on my wrists and ankles had cut straight down to the bone. The blood had already begun to coagulate into black crusts. “Victoria, he stinks.” Tristan pinched his nose, putting on an exaggerated show of gagging. Victoria looked down at my pale, wretched form. For a fraction of a second, a flicker of hesitation—maybe even pity—crossed her features. But it was instantly snuffed out by Tristan’s next words. “I bled this much too, you know,” he murmured, his voice trembling with practiced fragility. “When the men he hired violated me.” The temperature in Victoria’s eyes plummeted. Her voice hardened into absolute ice. “Drag him out to the patio,” she ordered the guards. “Hose him down with ice water. Let him wash off the filth.” My body began to violently tremble on instinct, but I bit down on the inside of my cheek, refusing to let a single plea slip past my lips. This was all because of a TV show. Tristan had been watching a bloody fantasy epic and mentioned how thrilling it was to see a traitorous general strung up by his broken legs on a castle wall. And just like that, Victoria ordered her security team to hoist me up in the center of our home. I had fought back, screaming in sheer disbelief. “Are you out of your mind, Victoria?! I am your husband!” But she had just held Tristan closer, looking at me like I was something scraped off the bottom of a shoe. “This is what you owe him,” she had said coldly. “If you hadn’t orchestrated that setup to ruin his name, he never would have suffered so much before finding his way back to me. You are ruthless, Nigel. You did whatever it took to force me to marry you.” I had stared at the stranger wearing my wife’s face. Three years of marriage. Three years of waking up beside her, holding her, building a life together—annihilated by a few whispered lies from a ghost of her past. “He’s lying to you,” I had rasped, my voice tearing. “Have you forgotten the security footage? You saw him stealing the financial data with your own eyes.” Victoria’s lips had pressed into a thin, white line. “You manipulated the situation to force his hand.” Tristan had buried his face in her neck, shooting me a wicked, victorious smirk over her shoulder. “Nigel only did it because he loves you so much, Victoria. I don’t blame him. It’s just… the things they did to me in exile… it still hurts so much.” That single, hollow lie had been the catalyst. Victoria pulled him tighter, her protective instincts weaponized against me. “Break his legs first,” she instructed the guards, her tone chillingly casual. “Then string him back up. The general on television had broken legs. I want it to be exact.” Panic had surged through my veins. I scrambled backward, trying to get to my feet, but two massive bodyguards flanked me, driving my shoulders into the floor. A third man walked toward me, a solid aluminum baseball bat gripped in his hands. “No! Victoria, snap out of it!” I screamed, thrashing wildly. But it was useless. Crack. Blinding, white-hot agony exploded from my right leg. A guttural scream ripped through my throat. The bat had connected squarely with my knee, shattering the joint. “He sounds pathetic,” Victoria complained, pinching the bridge of her nose. “Gag him. Keep going.” A filthy rag was shoved down my throat, muffling my screams into pathetic, suffocating whimpers. Crack. My left knee caved. The sheer volume of the pain ripped my consciousness away for a few merciful seconds. When I came to, I was suspended in the air. My shattered legs dangled uselessly beneath me, every microscopic sway of the ropes sending shockwaves of nauseating pain through my pelvis. And there they were. Sitting on the sofa directly in front of me, curled up together, watching television. Occasionally, they would lean in to share a slow, lingering kiss. Tristan had intentionally cranked the volume on the TV. The canned laughter from the sitcom echoed off the high ceilings, creating a grotesque, mocking soundtrack to my torture. “Are you happy now, Tristan?” she asked softly. He wrapped his arm around her waist, whispering something against her ear. She let out a beautiful, ringing laugh—the exact same laugh she had given me three years ago when she woke up in the hospital and saw I hadn’t left her side. They began to make out on the couch, completely absorbed in one another, as if the dying man bleeding out above their heads simply didn’t exist. Tears slid silently down my cheeks, soaking into the gag. My heart didn’t just break; it felt like it was being fed through a shredder. 2 The shock of the freezing water hitting my skin was violently abrupt. It felt like a thousand needles driving into my flesh all at once. The initial piercing cold gave way to a deep, burning agony. I couldn’t even scream; I could only grind my teeth together, letting the sensory overload tear my fading sanity into shreds. Victoria stood on the edge of the patio, her gaze detached as she watched my lips turn a bruised, sickly purple. Tristan pressed himself against her side, his face glowing with sheer, sadistic pleasure. Victoria gestured to the staff. “Bring another bucket.” “Victoria, I think he’s actually dying,” Tristan murmured, coating his voice in a thick layer of mock concern. “Should we call a doctor?” “No,” Victoria replied flatly. “He won’t die that easily. He’s a cockroach. He probably likes the attention.” I turned my head, my whole body convulsing with shivers, and forced out a gravelly whisper. “Victoria… what did I ever do to deserve this? From the day I married you… haven’t I given you enough?” She brushed off the question like a nuisance. “Do you honestly think playing the devoted husband cancels out the years of hell Tristan endured because of you, Nigel?” I managed to lift my head, desperately wanting to scream that I had nothing to do with Tristan’s exile. But the absolute void of empathy in her eyes killed the words in my throat. Suddenly, Tristan’s eyes lit up. “Oh, in the show, the general was forced to drink urine, too. I want to see that.” Anger burned through my shivering frame. “No!” But Victoria merely offered a cynical smirk and waved a hand at the bodyguards. My pupils dilated in pure horror as the men stepped forward, unzipping their pants. The warm, metallic, putrid stench rained down over me. One of the men pried my jaw open, forcing the foul liquid down my throat. I thrashed wildly, but the catastrophic pain in my legs kept me paralyzed on the concrete. I collapsed onto my stomach, dry-heaving violently. My stomach, already hollow and burning from starvation, cramped so hard it felt like a knife twisting in my gut. I retched again, and suddenly, a dark spray of blood spewed from my mouth onto the patio stones. Victoria’s eyes locked onto the blood. Her pupils contracted, and her foot twitched forward, an involuntary instinct to help. But Tristan casually leaned against her shoulder. “You know, when Nigel’s thugs beat me, I threw up blood for days. No one called a doctor for me, either.” He’s lying! I had never hired anyone to touch him. But Victoria swallowed the lie whole. The brief flash of humanity vanished, replaced by a freezing glare. “He made a mess again,” she said. “Keep the ice water coming.” I genuinely wanted to ask her: what had our three years together actually meant? I had sacrificed everything for her, stripped myself of my own identity to be her anchor, and this was my reward. The ice water hit me again, flooding my nose and throat. The cold shocked my nervous system, but it was nothing compared to the absolute devastation in my chest. I glared at her through bloodshot eyes, my gaze burning with a hatred so profound it felt holy. “Victoria… I want a divorce.” The sheer force of my rage sent my heart into overdrive, and my vision immediately tunneled into black. I passed out. When I finally regained consciousness, someone was splashing lukewarm water on my face. I was lying in the dark, suffocating dampness of the estate’s basement storage room. My clothes were still soaked, and a fresh pool of blood had formed beneath me. I couldn’t feel my legs at all anymore. I forced myself to look down; the flesh around my knees was turning a terrifying shade of necrotic black. The faint, sweet smell of decay lingered in the stagnant air. Tristan was standing over me, looking down like a king surveying a slaughtered peasant. I hadn’t eaten in four days. My body was so depleted I couldn’t even lift my hand. My throat felt like it was lined with shattered glass, and every breath was a localized earthquake in my ribs. “Look at you. So pathetic,” he sneered, using the toe of his Prada loafer to tilt my chin up. “If you get on your knees and beg me, maybe I’ll let you live.” I let out a weak, rattling cough. My skin was radiating an unnatural heat—the infection had set in. But I locked my jaw. My entire body was vibrating with fever, but I refused to give him the satisfaction of my submission. I looked him dead in the eye, my lips pulling back into a blood-stained grin. “You really are the man Victoria deserves. You’re both absolutely vile.” His face contorted in rage. He grabbed a fistful of my wet hair, yanking my head back. “You think you’re so tough. You think she’s going to suddenly feel sorry for you? She won’t!” he hissed. “You’re just a toy. Whatever I want to do to you, she’ll let me. You brought this on yourself for getting in my way.” “What way?” The sudden female voice from the doorway made Tristan freeze. Victoria was standing at the entrance to the storage room, her brow furrowed in confusion. Tristan panicked for a split second before seamlessly slipping back into his victim persona. His eyes welled with tears. “I just came down to check on Nigel, but he started calling me a cheap whore…” Victoria’s confusion melted into fierce protectiveness. She pulled Tristan into her arms, then stepped forward, driving her heel directly into my ribs. “Don’t listen to him,” she cooed to Tristan. “You are my entire world. If he’s going to be this stubborn, clearly the punishment wasn’t enough.” The kick forced another mouthful of blood up my throat. My stomach spasmed violently. But they weren’t done with me. 3 Victoria had the guards strip me and force me into a piece of humiliating, sheer lingerie. Then, she fastened a thick leather dog collar tightly around my neck. I was dragged out to the driveway and chained to the rear bumper of her Mercedes. Like an actual dog. “Let’s go. Take the mutt for a walk,” she said lightly, slipping into the passenger seat as Tristan took the wheel. The car rolled slowly out of the estate and toward the commercial district. I was forced to stumble behind it, my bare, shattered feet dragging against the asphalt. Pedestrians stopped in their tracks, whipping out their phones to record. Laughter. Pointing. Disgust. I tried to shrink away, but the chain yanked hard against my windpipe, choking me. The passenger window rolled down. Tristan feigned a sigh. “Is this taking it too far, Victoria? Maybe we shouldn’t…” “Don’t be naive,” Victoria chuckled softly. “He was so vicious to you, and you still have a soft heart. Look at him. He loves the attention. He’s practically begging them to look.” The car came to a stop at a red light. A drifter, reeking of alcohol and unwashed clothes, stumbled off the sidewalk and approached me. His eyes roamed over my exposed, bruised skin. I tried to back away, but the chain held me tethered. He lunged, pinning me to the pavement. His filthy hands tore at the fragile lace. I fought wildly, screaming, but the necrotic pain in my legs paralyzed my movements. “Help! Somebody, please!” The man just gave a sickening, yellow-toothed grin. “Soft skin for a rich boy. Shut up, nobody’s coming to help you.” “Get off me! Get off!” Inside the Mercedes, Tristan’s laughter echoed over the chaos. He clapped his hands in delight. “Victoria, this is fantastic!” Through the rearview mirror, my absolute terror and the man’s vile assault were entirely visible. But Victoria just sat there, utterly indifferent. She cast one bored glance in the mirror, then let Tristan rest his head on her shoulder. “As long as you’re happy, darling.” Just as the man moved to unbuckle his jeans, the light turned green. The chain pulled taut, and the car accelerated. The violent jerk nearly snapped my neck, ripping me right out from under the man’s grasp. I lay flat on my stomach, being dragged down the avenue. The friction of the asphalt tore through my skin, scraping down to the muscle. I left a thick, red trail of blood in the car’s wake. Tristan leaned his head out the window, watching my agonizing tumble, smiling radiantly. My ears were ringing. The world shattered into fractured light and shadow. I truly believed I was going to die on that street. The car finally stopped. The door opened, and Victoria stepped out, looking incredibly bored. She looked down at my bleeding, mangled form with nothing but cynical mockery. “Remember this, Nigel. Your days of playing god in my house are over. You are going to atone for what you did to Tristan until he says you’re done.” My throat was so swollen I couldn’t form words. I could only lie there, gasping for air like a dying fish. Arthur, our elderly butler who had driven the trailing security car, finally broke. He rushed forward, his voice trembling. “Ma’am, please! Mr. Stephen is going to die out here! We have to get him to a hospital, I’m begging you!” Victoria frowned, deeply irritated by the interruption. “Watch your tone, Arthur. Throw him back in the storage room and lock the door.” “Victoria, don’t be mad,” Tristan whined, reaching for her hand. “It’s my fault. I took it too far…” “But he made me suffer so much,” Tristan added, looking down at his shoes. “I just wanted a little payback.” Victoria’s eyes softened instantly. All her anger evaporated. She gently brushed a stray curl from Tristan’s forehead. “You did nothing wrong. I promised to make you happy, and I will never let anyone hurt you again.” She wrapped her arm around him, and they walked back inside, already murmuring about their upcoming vacation to the South of France. The staff stood frozen in the driveway, heads bowed in terrified silence, avoiding my gaze. I tried to lift my head, but my vision was swimming in red. Hot blood dripped from my hairline into my eyes, turning the world gray. I realized, with quiet certainty, that I wasn’t going to survive the night. The only thing I could see in my mind was my sister Caroline’s face. If she knew I had ended up like this, it would destroy her. The darkest irony of it all was that I finally understood the truth: aside from my late parents, Caroline was the only person in the world who had ever genuinely loved me. I prepared myself for the end. But as soon as Victoria left the estate for the airport, Arthur defied orders and smuggled me into the back of his own car, speeding toward the hospital. I had helped his grandson with college tuition years ago, and he simply couldn’t watch me die. Clinging to the very last thread of my consciousness, I borrowed Arthur’s phone and dialed Caroline’s number. “Care… please… help me…” Meanwhile, lounging in a first-class suite on her way to Paris, Victoria felt a strange, nagging unease. She wanted to punish me, yes, but she hadn’t actually planned on killing me. She picked up her phone to call Arthur, intending to tell him to let me out and call a private doctor. But Tristan noticed. He leaned over, tracing her jawline. “You know, when his guys broke my ribs and locked me in a flooded basement for five days, I survived just fine…” His lies were structurally absurd, falling apart under the slightest scrutiny, but Victoria drank them in like gospel. She set her phone back down. They were flying back in two days anyway. She would take me to the hospital then. Just then, her phone buzzed. It was her Chief Operating Officer. “Victoria, you need to get back immediately! Five of our primary distributors just breached their contracts. They said the Stephen Group in New York has officially declared war on us…”

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At 2:00 PM, my stepmother texted me asking for my laptop password. I was in a meeting and didn’t reply. At 3:00 PM, another message popped up: “I found someone to factory reset it since you didn’t answer. Everything’s gone now, just so you know.” I dropped my phone, grabbed my keys, and blew through three red lights to get home. When I burst into the living room, my laptop was sitting on the coffee table. The screen was glowing. I lunged for it, my fingers trembling as I clicked through the folders. Empty. Every single one of them. A white-hot rage flared in my chest. “This is my computer! Who gave you the right to wipe it?” Pamela was lounging on the sofa, scrolling through her phone. She didn’t even bother to look up. “I needed to use it for something. You didn’t answer, so I had it cleared. It’s not a big deal.” “Not a big deal? Do you have any idea what was on here? All the photos of my mother, and—” Slap! The force of the blow jerked my head to the side. My vision blurred for a second. My father stood over me, his eyes wide with fury. “Your mother has been dead for twenty years! Why do you keep bringing her up to spite Pamela? Show some respect and stop being so dramatic!” I held my burning cheek, staring at them. Pamela looked bored; my father looked disgusted. Then, I started to laugh. It was a cold, jagged sound. This laptop didn’t just hold the only digital copies of my mother’s life. It held the entire architecture for my father’s latest venture. A two-hundred-million-dollar acquisition. No backups. … 1 I turned to leave. “Stay right there,” my father’s voice barked from behind me. I didn’t stop. “I said get back here! What is wrong with your attitude?” I halted, taking a slow, shaky breath. He pointed a finger at Pamela. “Your mother just wanted to borrow your laptop. Who do you think you’re looking down on?” Pamela leaned back into the cushions, her eyes suddenly brimming with well-practiced tears. Her voice went soft and fragile. “Robert, forget it. It’s my fault. I just wanted to handle a few files, and I got impatient when she didn’t reply… I shouldn’t have had it wiped.” She let a single tear fall. My father’s face hardened. He marched over and stood inches from me. “Your mother is talking to you. Are you deaf?” “She isn’t my mother,” I said, my voice steady. Slap! The second one hit the same cheek. I let my head hang. “Listen to me,” he hissed, his finger nearly touching my nose. “Pamela didn’t do anything wrong. You did. Now, apologize to her. If you don’t, don’t bother coming back to this house ever again.” I looked up at him. I had called this man “Dad” for twenty-seven years. When my mother died when I was five, I knelt at her casket and cried until I was sick. Less than three months later, he brought this woman home. She was already pregnant with Tyler. As soon as my mother was gone, my grandfather—overcome with grief—followed her six months later. My father wasted no time. He rebranded the Miller Group into Wainwright & Co. The man who had married into the family, who had started with nothing but my mother’s grace, had suddenly become the king of the castle. For twenty-seven years, I asked for nothing. When I graduated, he told me to start at the bottom. I did. Tyler was made Executive Vice President immediately. I said nothing. Pamela squeezed me out of every family event, every holiday. I endured it. I lived in a cramped apartment across town just to breathe clean air. But the things on that laptop… “Dad,” I said, looking him in the eye. “My mother might be dead, but she was the woman who built you. She gave you everything. All I had left of her were those photos. Does that mean nothing to you?” He hesitated for a fraction of a second. Pamela chimed in from the sofa. “They’re just pictures, honey. They can’t be that important.” “Everything is gone,” I said to her. “Did you even think to ask before you killed the drive?” Pamela looked away, playing the victim again. My father’s face went through a range of emotions before settling back on anger. “It’s a few photos! Get over yourself and apologize!” I smiled at him, savoring the words I was about to say. “Dad, that laptop also held every contract for the acquisition. The two-hundred-million-dollar deal? It was all in there.” He froze. Then, he let out a mocking laugh. “The contracts were on your laptop? You think I’m an idiot?” He pointed to a framed photo of the three of them—him, Pamela, and Tyler. “I gave that project to Tyler. He’s the lead. He has the contracts. Why are you lying?” Pamela sniffled. “Robert, don’t listen to her…” “Why don’t you call him and ask if he has them?” I challenged. “Fine! I’ll show you just how pathetic your lies are.” My father pulled out his phone and dialed Tyler. Twice, it went to voicemail. “He’s probably busy with the closing,” Pamela whispered. Just then, the front door swung open. Tyler walked in, swinging his Porsche keys, looking annoyed. “Dad, why have you been blowing up my phone? I just parked.” 2 Tyler stopped short when he saw me standing in the middle of the room. “What’s going on?” My father pointed at him. “The contracts for the deal. You have them, right?” Tyler blinked, then grinned. “The contracts? Yeah, of course. They’re under control.” My father’s shoulders relaxed, and the look he gave me turned icy. Tyler walked over and clapped our father on the back. “Don’t worry about it, Dad. I hired the best in the business to draft the final terms. You’ve heard of Vesper, right? She’s a legend in corporate law. The contracts are perfect. We sign tomorrow.” “Tyler,” I said, my voice cutting through his bravado. “I am Vesper.” The room went silent. “The contracts you begged me to help you with? Every detail, every core data point, every legal safeguard—they were on my laptop. The laptop your mother just had wiped.” Silence stretched for two long seconds. Then Tyler burst into a loud, mocking laugh. “Sis, are you feeling okay?” He tapped his temple. “Vesper is based in London and New York. Everyone in the industry knows that. You think because you take a few business trips to the states you can just claim her identity? Vesper is a world-class consultant. You’re a mid-level manager at a firm your dad owns. That’s a hell of a hallucination.” Pamela stopped dabbing her eyes and let a smirk slip. “Oh, Cassie. I know you’re jealous of Tyler, but this is sad. You’re making things up just to tear your brother down.” My father stepped toward me, his face darkening. “Enough,” he growled. “First you blame Pamela for deleting ‘photos,’ then you claim you have the contracts, and now you’re claiming to be some international expert. What is your endgame here?” I looked at them. It was always like this. I was eight when Pamela smashed my mother’s heirloom vase right in front of me. When I told my father, she told him I’d done it myself to frame her. He didn’t ask a single question; he whipped me with his belt until I couldn’t stand. Pamela had stood by, “pleading” for him to stop because I was “just a child,” while her eyes danced with triumph. My father had spent the rest of the night comforting her, telling me, “Don’t you ever upset your mother again.” Tyler sighed, putting on a show of sibling concern. “Cassie, I know you hate us. But do you realize the state the company is in? If this deal falls through, we’re done. Can you stop the drama for one night?” Pamela started crying again. “Robert, I’ve been in this family for twenty years and she still treats us like enemies…” My father’s patience snapped. “Last chance,” he said, his finger back in my face. “Apologize.” I said nothing. “Fine!” He turned to Tyler. “Call this expert. Right now. Put her on speaker. Let’s hear what ‘Vesper’ has to say about being in this room.” Tyler pulled out his phone, found the number, and hit speaker. “Hello, this is Vesper’s office,” a woman’s voice answered. Tyler shot me a smug look. “Hi, I’m looking for Vesper. I wanted to check in on the status of the Wainwright contracts.” “Vesper is currently in meetings,” the assistant said. “But I can confirm the contracts are finalized and ready for tomorrow’s signing.” The living room went quiet. 3 “However,” the assistant continued, “Vesper actually traveled back to the States yesterday. She told me she would email the final execution copies to you by tonight.” “I’ll try to reach her and have her call you. Goodbye.” The line went dead. Tyler gripped his phone, his head turning slowly toward me. Pamela was the first to break the silence. “Ha!” She pointed a manicured nail at me. “Robert, did you hear that? She’s a liar! She’s not Vesper. She’s just trying to sabotage Tyler’s big moment!” My father’s expression shifted from confusion to pure, unadulterated rage. Tyler stepped forward, looming over me. “Cassie, you were so sure of yourself. You knew about the project details… wait. Did you sneak into my office? Did you read my files on my computer?” The more he talked, the more he convinced himself. “That has to be it! I didn’t tell anyone the specifics, but you knew them! You were trying to steal corporate secrets, weren’t you?” Pamela shrieked, “Robert! She was going to steal the company and sell it out from under us!” It was a well-rehearsed play. I felt nothing but a weary sense of the absurd. My father’s face turned a violent shade of purple. “You ungrateful brat!” He kicked me squarely in the stomach. I collapsed, my back hitting the sharp edge of the coffee table. The world went black for a second. “You want to steal from me?” Another kick caught me in the ribs. I curled into a ball, shielding my head. He didn’t stop. He kicked my back, my legs, my arms. Tyler watched from the sidelines, a faint smile on his lips. Pamela dabs her eyes, whispering, “Robert, stop… she’s learned her lesson… even if she is a thief…” Her eyes were bright with joy. My father finally stopped, panting, his chest heaving. “You’re pathetic!” he spat. “You’re a woman—what do you want? To inherit the company? You’re not fit for it! I’ve raised you for twenty-seven years, and this is how you repay me?” I tasted copper in my mouth. I looked up at him, wiping the blood from my lip. “Dad,” I said, my voice eerily calm. “Is this even your company to give?” “This company belonged to the Millers. It was my mother’s and my grandfather’s. You were just the man who married in.” His face contorted. He grabbed a heavy ceramic vase from the table and hurled it at me. I couldn’t move fast enough. It shattered against the wall behind me, a shard slicing across my cheek. “The company is Wainwright now!” he roared. “I changed the name! Your mother is dead, your grandfather is dead, and this company belongs to the Wainwright men!” I lay on the floor, the metallic scent of blood filling my nose. I saw Pamela looking down at me from her height on the sofa. “Cassie, I know you hate me. But stealing? If word gets out, you’ll never work in this town again.” She sighed and stood up. “Robert, lock her away. She needs to think about what she’s done.” “One last warning,” I croaked. “If you want to save this deal, if you want to save this company, take that laptop to a data recovery specialist right now. If you wait, it’s over.” My father glanced at Pamela. Her face turned red with fury. “You’re still lying!” She lunged for the broken laptop on the table. She picked it up and slammed it onto the hardwood floor with all her might. CRACK. The casing split. She didn’t stop. she stomped on it until the screen was a spiderweb of glass and the internal components were crushed. I watched the debris scatter. The last bit of loyalty I held for that house finally snapped. 4 Tyler walked over to the wreckage and ground his heel into the motherboard. “That’s for trying to frame my mother,” he hissed. I looked at the three of them. My stomach was throbbing, the blood on my face was starting to itch as it dried. “You can’t save a ghost that wants to die,” I whispered. Tyler kicked me one more time. “Who are you calling a ghost?” He grabbed me by the hair, hauling me up, and began slapping me—one, two, three times. My father sat back on the sofa and took a sip of tea, staring at the wall. “Tyler, honey, don’t hit her too hard,” Pamela said softly. “She has to be presentable for whatever happens tomorrow.” Tyler threw me back onto the floor. “Lock her in the basement. I’ll deal with her after I sign the contracts tomorrow.” I was dragged down the stairs. The heavy wooden door slammed shut, and the bolt clicked. Pitch black. I knew this room. It was the “timeout” room of my childhood. Whenever Pamela was bored, whenever Tyler cried, my father would toss me in here. No light, no sound, no one. I leaned against the cold stone wall. My body ached, my lips were parched. But I didn’t cry. The next morning, the door opened. Tyler stood there, silhouetted by the light from above. “How was your night, Sis?” I didn’t answer. I was starving, bruised, and my throat felt like it was filled with sand. Seeing he couldn’t get a rise out of me, he grabbed my arm and hauled me up. “Get up. You’re coming to the office. I want you to watch. I want you to see the moment my name goes on that contract and your grandfather’s legacy officially becomes mine.” I was shoved into the car. Pamela sat in the front, humming to herself. My father sat in the back with me, but he didn’t look at me once. When we reached the office, my father finally spoke. “After the signing, I’m calling an emergency board meeting. I’m transferring all my shares to Tyler.” He looked at me then, his eyes like flint. “And you? You’re fired. Effective immediately.” Tyler pushed me into a glass-walled observation room adjacent to the main conference hall. I could see them, but they couldn’t see me through the tint. Tyler took the head of the table. My father sat to his right, Pamela in the corner. The clients arrived. Handshakes, small talk, the usual corporate theater. The secretary opened her laptop to pull up the final documents from the email. Her face went pale. “Mr. Wainwright… the final contracts… they haven’t arrived.” Tyler froze. “What?” My father frowned. “What do you mean?” Tyler scrambled for his phone. “I’ll call the assistant.” the lead investor, a man named Mr. Lewis, checked his watch. He looked unimpressed. “Tyler, we’re here to sign. Where is the paperwork?” Tyler’s voice was shaky as he got the assistant on the line. “Where are the contracts? We’re in the meeting!” “I’m trying to reach Vesper, sir! But her phone is off. She’s completely unreachable.” “What do you mean unreachable? We need to sign now!” Mr. Lewis stood up. “Is this a joke, Robert? You brought us here to waste our time?” My father scrambled to apologize. “Mr. Lewis, please, a small technical glitch. One moment.” Tyler’s hands were shaking so hard he almost dropped his phone. The assistant spoke again over the speaker: “Sir, I have a secondary emergency number for Vesper. I’ll send it to you now.” “Hurry!” A text came through. Tyler dialed it immediately. The conference room went silent. Everyone watched Tyler’s phone. Ring… ring… ring… Then, a muffled buzzing sound began to vibrate inside the glass observation room. From my pocket. Tyler’s screen displayed the contact name: Cassie. Tyler turned slowly, his face a mask of pure, horrified disbelief. 5 Tyler stared at his screen, his face turning a sickly shade of grey. Mr. Lewis narrowed his eyes. “Tyler? Are you going to answer the phone or talk to your expert?” Tyler fumbled with the buttons, hanging up in a panic. He forced a jagged laugh. “Wrong number. Sorry, just a… technical error.” Pamela stood up suddenly, pointing at me through the glass. “Robert, look at her! She’s doing this on purpose! She’s sabotaging us!” My father slammed his hands on the table, pushed back his chair, and stormed into the observation room. “What kind of game are you playing?!” he bellowed. I leaned back in the chair, meeting his eyes. “I told you. I am Vesper.” Tyler followed him in, his face flushed. “Liar! Vesper wouldn’t spend years working as a low-level manager in a mid-sized firm! You just stole her number somehow. You’re a fraud!” Pamela crowded in behind them, her voice venomous. “Robert, she’s obsessed. She’s trying to trick you into thinking she’s someone important so she can steal Tyler’s inheritance!” My father seemed to latch onto that. “You’ve always been a performer, haven’t you? Ever since you were a kid, trying to get attention.” I couldn’t help but laugh. It was so pathetic. “The contracts were on my laptop. You smashed it. You don’t believe I’m Vesper. So, what now?” Pamela’s tone shifted, becoming sickly sweet. “Cassie, honey, I know you’re hurt. But this company is your father’s life. Do you really want to see it go bankrupt over a grudge?” Tyler’s eyes darted around, a new plan forming. “Wait. If you are Vesper, then fine. Prove it. The contracts are gone, but if you’re the expert, you can just draft them again, right? Right now.” He turned to our father. “Dad, if she really cares about this family, she’ll fix this. It was her grandfather’s company too, right? She wouldn’t let it fail.” My father nodded eagerly. “Yes! If you’re Vesper, prove it. Fix the contracts now!” I looked at them, marveling at the audacity. “I can rewrite them,” I said. “But I have one condition.” Pamela bristled. “What condition?” I looked straight at my father. “Admit it in front of the board and the investors. Admit that this company belongs to the Millers. Admit that you were just the man who married in and took over.” My father’s face turned a deep, bruised purple. “You—!” “Robert, look at her!” Pamela screamed. “She’s trying to humiliate you!” “Dad, don’t listen to her!” Tyler yelled. “She’s bluffing! She can’t do it! She’s just trying to tear you down!” My father pointed a shaking finger at me. “Listen to me very clearly. This is Wainwright & Co. You either fix those contracts right now, or you are dead to me. Get out of my sight and never come back!” I stood up, smoothing my skirt. Pamela had a smirk hidden behind her “concerned” expression. Tyler looked triumphant. My father was shaking with rage. “Fine,” I said. “I’m leaving.” “And don’t you dare come back!” Pamela shouted as I walked away. At the door, I paused. “Just remember. Without me, this deal is dead.”

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For fifteen years, I believed my wife was infertile. Then, she got pregnant. When I dug into the impossible math of it, the truth unspooled like a nightmare: she had quietly rekindled a romance with her high school boyfriend. Even worse? My mother-in-law had moved out of our house years ago specifically to live with him, facilitating the affair under the guise of “giving us space.” When the secret finally broke open, the screaming match that followed nearly tore the roof off our house. Yet, somehow, the people in our living room were looking at me like I was the monster. “Nate, you’ve been married a long time. There’s a chance the baby is yours,” one of her friends reasoned, her voice dripping with condescension. “And even if it’s not, Caroline is finally getting the chance to be a mother. You can’t just strip away a woman’s right to motherhood. Be reasonable.” I looked across the room at Caroline. At forty, she was still effortlessly striking, her posture defensive but defiant. I felt a hollow, scraping despair in my chest. “You can have the baby,” I said, my voice eerily calm, offering the final, bleeding piece of my dignity. “If it’s mine, it stays. If it’s not, the baby goes. And he goes with it.” It was the ultimate concession. Caroline didn’t scream. She simply picked up her purse and walked toward the front door. For a fractured second, I thought she had accepted my terms. Then, her hand paused on the doorknob. She didn’t look back. “Cameron has been living in the shadows for years,” she said softly. “I am absolutely not sending him away. If you can’t accept that, then from now on, he and I will just have to build a home somewhere else.” A dull, rhythmic ache pulsed behind my ribs. I lowered my eyes. The last flickering ember of our marriage quietly suffocated. “Then let’s get a divorce,” I said. 1 My words dropped the room’s temperature to absolute zero. Caroline let go of the doorknob as if it had burned her, spinning around to stare at me in sheer disbelief. “Nathaniel… stop throwing a tantrum. Even if you’re trying to scare me, it’s not going to work. I am not kicking Cameron out.” Her brows knitted together, twisting her beautiful face into a mask of pure indignation, as if I had just suggested something utterly profane. “Nate, sweetie, Caroline is right,” her aunt chimed in from the kitchen island, nursing a glass of Pinot. “You’ve been together forever. People make mistakes. Marriage is a partnership. Is there really nothing we can discuss here?” “And you really shouldn’t blame her,” a cousin added, crossing his arms. “All these years, Caroline took the bullet. She let everyone think she was the one who couldn’t have kids. But clearly, since she’s pregnant now, the issue was always you. She sacrificed fifteen years of her pride for you, Nate. Can’t you forgive her just this once?” “She just wants a baby. It doesn’t mean she doesn’t love you.” The chorus of friends and family swelled around me. Caroline stood behind them, her chin tilted up, looking for all the world like the perfect, flawless victim. “Is that really how you see it?” I asked, my lips trembling as I looked directly at her. These people didn’t know the truth, but she did. For fifteen years, we had gone to the clinic for our annual checkups. She was always the one who picked up the physical reports. I was perfectly healthy. I had always been perfectly healthy, until I made a choice last year—a choice I made for her. Even if I were the problem, Caroline had no right to let me stand here and be crucified by her family. Especially when I knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that I was completely capable of giving her a child. “Nate, what is the point of obsessing over the past?” Caroline sighed, the sound heavy with performed exhaustion. “We aren’t children anymore.” “Why can’t you be a little more like Cameron? All these years, he never demanded anything. He never fought me. He even told me to go back to you, time and time again. In his heart, he just wanted to be near me. Is that such a crime?” She placed a protective hand over her perfectly flat stomach. “He stayed by my side in the dark, and now you want me to throw him out onto the street. I’m sorry. He is the father of the child growing inside me. I can’t be that cruel.” With that, she opened the door and walked out into the evening. The peanut gallery of relatives exchanged awkward glances before shuffling out after her, leaving me alone in the sprawling, suddenly cavernous house. I dug my fingernails into my palms. It was summer, but the house felt like a tomb. Fifteen years ago, I met Caroline on a blind date and fell stupidly, profoundly in love. She was radiant, kind, and possessed a quiet grace. I thought I had won the lottery. I couldn’t understand why a woman like her needed a setup. A year later, right before I bought the ring, she sat me down with a medical file in her hands. Tears in her eyes, she told me she couldn’t have children. She said if that was a dealbreaker, she would understand if I walked away. My parents were furious. They were traditional, insisting I couldn’t marry into a childless future. But I loved Caroline. I loved her so fiercely that I told my parents to go to hell. I told them if they didn’t accept her, I would go get a vasectomy just to prove a point. My sheer stubbornness won. We got married. For fifteen years, I thought we were the lucky ones. We built a beautiful life, just the two of us against the world. I didn’t know our happiness was a house of cards. And now that the wind had blown it down, all that was left was a sprawling, suffocating grief. The deepest betrayal, though, wasn’t even Caroline. It was her mother, Helen. A few years ago, to finally put an end to her mother’s passive-aggressive comments about grandchildren, I lied. I told Helen I had gotten a vasectomy, taking the “blame” entirely onto myself so Caroline wouldn’t have to suffer her mother’s judgment anymore. Helen had wept. She told me I was a saint, that she would treat me like her own flesh and blood forever. Yet, it was Helen who abruptly moved out of our guest house five years ago. Her excuse at the time was wanting “independence.” The truth? She had moved into an apartment across town to cook, clean, and care for her daughter’s secret lover. A sharp, stabbing pain radiated through my chest. I dragged myself out to the balcony and sat in the dark, staring at the skyline until the sun came up. Caroline didn’t come home. The next morning, my phone buzzed with a text from her. The tone was devastatingly casual. Nate, have you thought about it? Cameron never wanted to break our marriage apart. He just wants to join our family. We’ve been together for so long. I don’t want to make this hard for you, and I don’t want to see you hurt. Can’t you just try to see this from my perspective? If you agree, I’ll bring Cameron home tomorrow. I promise you, he won’t try to challenge your place as my husband. I read the paragraphs twice, my vision blurring. A bitter, broken laugh escaped my throat. 2 In her twisted reality, she wasn’t the one tearing our life apart by having an affair—I was the one being unreasonable by not letting her lover move into the guest bedroom. If I didn’t welcome Cameron with open arms, I was the bad guy. My fingers shook as I typed my reply. Caroline, what the hell do you think I am? You’re pregnant with another man’s baby. You don’t just want me to accept the kid; you want me to live under the same roof as the man you’re fucking. You want us to pass each other in the hallway so you can play house with both of us. Do you even have a conscience? I hit send, hoping to shock her into snapping out of this delusion. The “typing” bubble danced on the screen for a long time. When she finally replied, her voice note sounded almost regretful, but laced with a terrifying entitlement. “I’m sorry, Nate. But it happened. We just have to learn to accept reality. I told you before we got married that there was a boy from my past I never fully got over. Please. Do this for me. Just try to accept Cameron. I’ll give you time to adjust.” She used the softest, sweetest tone to deliver the most repulsive demand I had ever heard. It was as if I were seeing the real Caroline for the very first time. The illusion shattered completely. I put my phone down, opened my laptop, and found the number for a divorce attorney. “I need you to draft a separation agreement,” I told the lawyer over the phone, my voice dead flat. “I don’t care about the assets. I just want out.” Every second I spent breathing the air in this house felt like inhaling poison. I was willing to leave with nothing if it meant I could be free of her. Three days later, the lawyer couriered over the finalized divorce papers. Caroline still hadn’t come home. This was her classic move. The silent treatment. If I didn’t yield to her demands, she would freeze me out. I didn’t care anymore. I spent my days packing boxes, numb to the world. Seeing that her daughter’s stalling tactic wasn’t breaking me, my mother-in-law, Helen, decided to go on the offensive. My phone started pinging relentlessly with photos and videos. It was a curated gallery of Caroline and Cameron’s domestic bliss. In Helen’s twisted narrative, I was supposed to see how beautiful this was. Caroline, a woman who notoriously hated cooking and practically lived on takeout and private chefs, was wearing an apron, chopping vegetables, making soup from scratch for the man she loved. Cameron sat at the kitchen island, looking boyish and appreciative, dutifully eating everything she put in front of him. The subtext of the photos was violently clear: Caroline was smiling a genuine, glowing smile. She was willing to serve him, because she truly loved him. Helen’s texts followed like artillery fire. See this? Caroline never loved you. She didn’t want to have kids with you because she swore she would only ever bear Cameron’s child. I don’t know where you get the nerve to throw a fit. The person who isn’t loved is the real third wheel in a relationship. Caroline is doing you a massive favor by not kicking you to the curb, and you have the audacity to say you won’t tolerate Cameron? Paragraph after paragraph filled my screen. I stared at the words, feeling a dark, icy calm settle over me. I typed back, blunt and merciless. It doesn’t matter how ‘unloved’ I am, Helen. On her legal documents, my name is the one listed as her husband. No matter how much she loves him, the kid she’s carrying is a bastard who won’t even be able to get on a proper insurance policy without a massive legal headache. The moment the message delivered, Helen fired back a 60-second voice memo. It was the maximum length the app allowed. I could perfectly picture the veins popping in her neck as she screamed into her phone. I didn’t even press play. I was about to block her number when a FaceTime call popped up. I hit accept. Helen’s face filled the screen, twisted in absolute rage. “Nathaniel! I don’t care how hurt your little ego is, you do not talk about an unborn child like that! What, you want my grandchild to be branded a bastard before it’s even born? How can you be so vicious? I’m telling you right now, over my dead body!” She was fiercely, desperately protecting the child of the man her daughter was sleeping with. I swallowed the lump of ash in my throat, staring at the venomous woman on my screen. How could people change so fundamentally? This was the same woman who used to hold my hands, teary-eyed, telling me, “Nate, we owe you everything. You are my real son. Caroline doesn’t deserve you.” How much time had actually passed? She had morphed into a stranger. Caroline had morphed into a stranger. And somehow, they had convinced themselves that I was the villain. 3 The seconds ticked by like a metronome. I hung up on Helen without a word, dropped the phone onto the coffee table, and finally broke. I buried my face in my hands on the balcony, my shoulders shaking as the grief ripped its way out of my chest. When Caroline finally came home, I was still sitting there, my eyes bloodshot, staring emptily at the city lights. She walked out onto the balcony as if she had anticipated finding me like this. She knelt beside my chair and wrapped her arms tightly around my waist. The warmth of her body contrasted sharply with the chill of the evening air. I shuddered, looking down at her. She didn’t say a word. She just buried her face against my chest. It was a silent manipulation. She was saying, I’m here. Don’t do anything drastic. Years ago, when my startup nearly went bankrupt, we had held each other on this exact balcony. We were broke, living in a city that didn’t care if we existed, dealing with parents who thought I was a failure. At my absolute lowest, I had considered ending it all. I thought walking away from life would free her from the burden of my failures. Caroline had sensed it then. She had cried, holding me just like this, whispering, “Nate, do you regret marrying me? Are you trying to leave me?” Her tears had soaked through my shirt. I had held her back, pulling myself off the ledge. “Caroline, I’m sorry. I’m just so overwhelmed. I’ll never leave you. I love you. I will never divorce you, no matter what happens.” The hum of the summer cicadas had borne witness to that vow. She had been my anchor. It was that same night I had asked her, gently, “Caroline, can we go to a specialist? I know how much you want a baby. Let’s just see if there are options. If not, we can adopt.” I had wanted to give us hope. But Caroline had recoiled. She had made excuses—she didn’t want her body to change, she didn’t want to go through the trauma of IVF, she wasn’t ready. … So why? I looked at her now, her face pressed to my chest. Why is she willing to ruin her body and suffer for him? Why did she lie to me for fifteen years? I played dumb, sitting rigidly in the chair. Caroline let out a heavy sigh, keeping her silence for a few minutes too long. In that quiet space, the last lingering thread of my love for her snapped. It was over. “Nate,” she finally murmured, pulling back to look at me. “I will explain all the details to you later. But right now… I want to introduce you to someone.” The sliding glass door behind us opened. A man stepped out onto the balcony. He looked nervous, his posture submissive, but he extended both hands toward me with a practiced, melancholic smile. “Hi, Nate. I’m Cameron. I know you’re hurting right now. Caroline and I… we’re so sorry for the pain we’ve caused you. But the baby is innocent. I’m begging you, please let her keep the baby. I’ll walk away forever if I have to. Just let my child live.” He delivered his lines perfectly, his eyes darting to Caroline, overflowing with a tragic, cinematic longing. Time and time again, even before the baby was born, they were both so unshakably confident that the child was his. And I was just sitting there, the pathetic clown in the middle of their tragic romance. “Please?” Cameron asked again, his eyes pointedly dropping to where Caroline’s hand was resting on my knee. His sorrow looked so genuine. When we got married, I knew Caroline had a ghost from her past. A boy she loved desperately when they were young, but timing and circumstance had ripped them apart. I had always thought of him as a closed chapter. It wasn’t until this exact moment, seeing the sickeningly thick tension between them, that I realized what an absolute fool I had been. “Nate, Cameron is talking to you,” Caroline said softly, instinctively pulling her hand away from my knee and stepping backward—right into Cameron’s orbit. The way they gravitated toward each other was entirely unconscious. Their physical intimacy was so natural it must have been rehearsed a thousand times over the last five years. Tears pricked the corners of my eyes again, but this time, they were cold. I tilted my head up, a deep, freezing apathy washing over me. “And if I say no?” I gritted out. Caroline’s face hardened instantly. The soft, apologetic wife vanished. She glared at me. “Nathaniel, I was doing you the courtesy of informing you. I am not asking for your permission. This is happening. Are you really going to declare war on a pregnant woman?” 4 She protectively touched her stomach, which wasn’t even showing yet. Cameron immediately wrapped his arms around her from behind, looking frantic. “Caroline, please don’t get upset,” he cooed. “Nate is just having a hard time processing this. You’re carrying little Camden. You can’t let your stress levels spike.” Camden. Combining his name with hers. A roaring sound filled my ears as the foundations of my memory collapsed. Years ago, I had read an article about a father who named his daughter an anagram of his wife’s name, as a tribute to how much he loved her. I had thought it was the most romantic thing in the world. I had turned to Caroline in bed one night and whispered, “If we ever have a baby, let’s name it something that honors you. Or give it your last name.” Caroline had looked annoyed. She had brushed it off, accusing me of subtly mocking her inability to get pregnant. Now, I realized she had probably been laughing at me in her head the entire time. Why would I ever have a child with you? “Caroline,” I said, my voice barely a whisper. “You’re naming him Camden?” I stared her down. She avoided my eyes, coughing awkwardly into her hand. “Nate, don’t start a fight over nothing. What’s wrong with the name? I’m the one who has to carry this child for nine months. Do I not even get the right to name him?” She was talking entirely too fast, trying to bury her guilt under a mountain of defensive chatter. Cameron wasn’t an idiot. But his true talent lay in knowing exactly when to play the martyr. “Nate, if you really hate it, we can name him after you,” Cameron offered softly. “I don’t mind. Caroline is risking her life to have this baby. As long as she’s okay, I’ll disappear. I only ask that you treat the child as your own.” He looked mournfully at Caroline’s stomach, then made a show of turning around, as if he were actually going to walk out the door. It worked perfectly. It instantly erased whatever microscopic trace of guilt Caroline had left toward me. She grabbed Cameron’s arm, her eyes flashing with anger as she pointed around my living room. “Cameron, I love you. I want to have a baby that belongs to us. Don’t listen to a word Nathaniel says. When we got married, he put my name on the deed to this house. He put my name on everything. If he has a problem with the way things are, he can be the one to pack his bags. He doesn’t have the right to kick you out.” She felt entirely entitled to the empire I had built. She was openly moving her lover into my home, armed with the knowledge that years ago, in a gesture of absolute, blind devotion, I had put all our major assets solely in her name to make her feel secure. I had thought of everything to protect her. And now, those protections were knives, sliding effortlessly into my back. “Caroline, please, don’t say things like that,” Cameron murmured, though he shot me a fleeting, triumphant look over her shoulder. I let out a dry, hacking laugh. Suddenly, this house—the hardwood floors I installed, the walls we painted together—felt like a crime scene. It made me physically nauseous. It wasn’t my home anymore. It was theirs. “Nate, apologize to Cameron right now, and I’ll let this go,” Caroline ordered, her tone authoritative. “I know how badly you’ve always wanted kids. When Camden is born, he can call you his godfather. Hell, if you’re good to him, he can even call you Dad.” “Stop throwing a tantrum. I’m pregnant, and my hormones are all over the place. I can’t deal with this.” She was so utterly convinced that I was unconditionally addicted to her. She thought I would never, ever walk away. I shook my head, staring at the floor, a dark smile playing on my lips. I reached over to the patio table and picked up the manila folder I had left there. We had been married for fifteen years. Caroline had been with me when I had nothing, and she had eaten ramen out of styrofoam cups right alongside me in the early days. Because of that, I was willing to be generous. The agreement gave her exactly half of my current business equity, plus the house. “Take a look,” I said, tossing the folder onto the table in front of her. “If the terms are acceptable, sign it.” A strange, hollow peace was settling over my mind. Once her signature was on that paper, I could grab my bags and walk out the door. The ink didn’t even need to be dry. “I won’t even make you move. You can keep the house. Just sign the papers.”

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A scrawny, dirt-smudged girl—maybe twelve, maybe thirteen—wandered into my scrap metal yard one afternoon. She held up a heavy chunk of iron sloppily coated in yellow spray paint. “Mister,” she said, her voice a thin reed. “Selling copper.” I just stared at it. The paint was literally still wet. She knew it wasn’t copper. I knew she knew. Her face was paper-white, terrified to the point of tears, but she kept her skinny arms locked, holding that heavy block of iron up toward me like an offering. I didn’t say a word. I just took it from her and dropped it on the industrial scale. “Five pounds,” I grunted. “Four bucks a pound for the good stuff. Let’s call it twenty.” I pulled a crumpled twenty-dollar bill from my pocket and held it out. She snatched it with trembling fingers and took off running, fast as a startled deer. After that, she came back every single week, regular as clockwork, to sell me another piece of “copper.” Right up until the cops showed up at my door. They were looking for a missing girl. 1 I have a record. Manslaughter. Add that to the fact that I’m built like a brick outhouse, with a rough beard and a permanent scowl, and it’s no surprise most folks in this rust-belt town give me a wide berth. Because of that, the scrap yard barely broke even. It wasn’t making me rich, but it kept me from starving. It was just existing, pure and simple. My only real moments of quiet joy came from the occasional treasures I’d sift out of the junk—a forgotten silver ring, a tarnished locket. I’d clean them up and line them neatly on the battered steel filing cabinet in my bedroom. That was my routine. Until two years ago, when I met the girl selling “copper.” The copper was a joke. A blind man could see it was just painted iron. But her hunger? That was real. It was that deep, hollow kind of malnutrition. When the wind blew against her oversized, threadbare middle-school hoodie, it caved in, revealing the sharp architecture of her ribs. Her hair was a brittle, dishwater blonde, like dead winter grass. So, it was copper. Fine. If I refused to buy it, or if I called her out on the hustle, she’d definitely cry. And I didn’t have the patience to deal with a crying kid. Besides, it was just twenty bucks. Twenty bucks wasn’t going to buy me a ticket out of this life, and losing it wasn’t going to drag me any further down. When I handed her the cash that first time, I noticed her hands shaking. There was bright, tacky yellow paint smeared across her knuckles. She grabbed the bill, spun around, and bolted. Not a single “thank you.” It didn’t matter. For some reason, I slept straight through the night that evening, didn’t touch a drop of whiskey, and woke up with a strange tightness in my face. I was smiling. Roxy, who drove for the local cab company, stopped by later that week with a six-pack. Her eyes went wide when she saw me. “What the hell is wrong with you? You look like you found a gold mine in the trash.” I didn’t even think before I answered. “Found some copper.” I took the jewelry off my steel cabinet and replaced it with that chunk of yellow-painted iron. Over the course of seven hundred days, I collected over a hundred of those painted blocks. They sat stacked on the cabinet, heavy enough to make the metal groan and bow. I actually started thinking I’d need to weld a new shelving unit if she kept coming. I finished welding the new shelf. But she never showed up. At first, I told myself it was the weather. We’d had brutal rainstorms; maybe she couldn’t make the trek. When the rain cleared, I told myself she was probably just home sick with the flu. She’d be back when her fever broke. Before I knew it, a month had bled by. Then the cruiser crunched up my gravel driveway. The detective told me they needed my cooperation regarding a missing person. The moment I stepped into the precinct, the sterile smell of floor wax and stale coffee hit me. The ghost of my years in prison rattled in my bones. My knees felt weak. But then I thought of the heavy, silent weight of those iron blocks on my cabinet. I straightened my spine. “Mack,” the detective said, leaning across the table. “Do you know a thirteen-year-old girl named Sadie?” “I know a kid who’s around that age,” I said. “Never got her name.” He slid a sketch across the table. “This her?” I recognized those hollow cheeks instantly. I nodded. It was the first time I’d ever heard her name. And in the same breath, I learned she was gone. In that moment, it felt like a cold hand had reached into my chest and squeezed my heart until it stopped. The detective told me her only family was an elderly grandmother whose health was already failing. The old woman had practically cried herself blind, swearing up and down that her Sadie was a good girl. No matter what happened, she would never just run away. I knew, with a dark, heavy certainty, that someone had taken her. Our town was isolated, economically depressed. Every few years, someone vanished. We caught predators when we could, but there was always another monster waiting in the dark. When the cops found out Sadie had been visiting my yard every week, passing off painted iron as copper for cash, the detective slammed his fist on the table. The sound cracked through the room like a gunshot. “You expect me to believe you don’t know the difference between iron and copper, Mack?” his voice was pure ice. “Why were you paying top dollar for garbage? What the hell was your endgame with this little girl?” I looked at him, letting the silence stretch. “I didn’t have an endgame,” I said quietly. “I just wanted to help the kid out.” He didn’t buy a word of it. But I had served my time. I paid my debt. I wasn’t a killer anymore. 2 They held me in lockup for forty-eight hours. They tore my scrap yard apart, searching for a body, a trace, anything. I wasn’t just a suspect because of my record. I was a suspect because on the day Sadie vanished, she had come to my yard, sold me a piece of “copper,” and hung around for over fifteen minutes. The detective hammered me on those fifteen minutes. What happened? What did you do to her? I told him the exact truth. After I gave her the money, she didn’t run off like usual. She curled up on a busted vinyl sofa I kept near the office and just soaked in the sun, like a stray cat catching a warm ray. I was eating my lunch—beef stew out of a thermos. I poured half of it into a clean mug and handed it to her. We didn’t talk. We didn’t exchange a single word. It was just a quiet, peaceful stretch of time, so still it felt like a painting rather than a memory. The cops definitely didn’t believe me. But they didn’t have a shred of physical evidence, and once the clock ran out, they had to cut me loose. That night, I bought Roxy dinner. Afterward, I asked her to drive me to Sadie’s place. It was a decaying farmhouse on the edge of the county line. The wood siding was rotting, and the front door didn’t even have a deadbolt. It swung open with a pathetic creak when I pushed it. Sadie’s grandmother was still in the hospital. The house was a hollow shell. The only things left were an empty clothesline swaying in the night breeze, and the faint, unmistakable chemical sting of yellow spray paint. “Roxy,” I asked, staring into the dark yard. “Who sells paint around here?” Roxy sighed, leaning against her cab. “What, you wanna play detective now, Mack?” She launched into a lecture. This was cop work. My job, according to her, was to figure out a way to settle down, find a woman while my parts still worked, and have a kid. Build a life. Because if I waited much longer, I’d die alone in that scrap yard. She could talk the ears off a brass monkey, and when she got going, it gave me a headache. Roxy was a good woman, but she didn’t know how to embrace the quiet. Still, even as she chewed me out, she put the cab in gear and drove me to every hardware store and supply shop in a twenty-mile radius. The next morning, I zeroed in on an independent hardware spot on the edge of town. They sold the exact brand of metallic yellow-gold paint. More importantly, in the alley behind the shop, there was a heap of scrap metal—irregularly cut iron blocks, identical to the ones on my cabinet. The owner, Walt, was an older guy. When the store was empty, he liked to kick back in a recliner behind the register and read the local paper. He didn’t hear me come in. I walked straight past him to the back door, picked up a heavy chunk of iron from the scrap pile, and weighed it in my hand. Still didn’t notice me. I dropped the iron back onto the pile with a loud, metallic CLANG. He jumped, nearly spilling his coffee as he scrambled out of the chair. “Can I help you?” I offered a slow, easy smile. “Just looking to buy some paint.” It’s a small town. As I walked toward the counter, his eyes adjusted to the light, and I saw the recognition hit. He knew exactly who I was. He hurriedly pulled out a few cans of paint, nervously pitching the benefits of each. I kept my tone conversational, light. I casually steered the topic to the time I went to prison. The murder. It was the darkest, most whispered-about piece of gossip in the county. Walt couldn’t help himself. He was completely captivated, morbidly fascinated by the details, leaning over the counter as I talked. He even rang me up with a twenty percent discount. As I grabbed the cans by the plastic handles, I paused, turning back toward him. “You know, Walt, you shouldn’t leave your inventory out back like that. What if someone steals it?” He was still riding the adrenaline of my true-crime story. He waved a dismissive hand. “Ah, it’s just garbage iron and cheap paint. Not worth a damn thing.” My grip on the plastic handles tightened. I gave him a smile that didn’t reach my eyes. “Still. Better safe than sorry. Things are getting bad around here again. You hear about that kid, Sadie?” “Missing,” he said quickly. “Vanished into thin air,” I pressed. Walt just offered a stiff “Oh,” and practically shoved the door open to help me carry the paint out to the cab. He didn’t ask how my prison story ended. He practically ran back inside and hid behind his newspaper. Only, he was holding the newspaper upside down. I got into Roxy’s cab. “Take me to the precinct. Right now.” “Walt’s hiding something.” 3 I was absolutely certain Sadie had been stealing the iron and paint from Walt’s place. When I warned him about leaving his paint out, he immediately lumped the iron in with it. That meant he already knew someone had been skimming both. And who else in this town was going to steal paint and chunks of heavy, useless iron together? Only Sadie. The moment I dropped her name, the blood had drained from his face. Panic. But when I took this to the detective, he shut me down. Walt was clean. The cops weren’t stupid; when they found the fake copper at my yard, they tracked the source of the materials. They had already looked into Walt. They pulled CCTV from the businesses next to his shop. On the day Sadie went missing, and the days immediately before and after, Walt never left his store. He had a rock-solid alibi. If anything, my little vigilante investigation only made the cops look closer at me. “Mack,” the detective sighed, rubbing the bridge of his nose. “The girl isn’t your blood. She isn’t your kid. Why the hell are you so obsessed with her?” Roxy, standing right behind me, didn’t let me answer. “What kind of question is that?” she snapped, stepping up to the desk. “Yeah, Mack killed a man. But he killed the monster who deserved it! He did his time. He paid for it. Are you telling me a man can’t try to do a good deed once his slate is clean?” She pointed a finger at the detective. “He saw a starving kid and he gave her hundreds of bucks out of his own pocket over the last two years. He doesn’t even spend that kind of money on himself!” We walked out of the precinct, but the reality weighed on me like an anvil. Sadie was still out there. No body. No ransom demand. Just gone. And the terrible truth of this world is that if a girl is taken by traffickers, the longer the clock ticks, the colder the trail gets. Every hour drops her survival rate. That night, I took Roxy to the local diner. I ordered two expensive steaks and bought a good bottle of bourbon. By midnight, we were back at my place. Roxy was hammered. She stumbled, falling against my chest, her hands gripping my flannel shirt. “What are you doing, Mack?” she cried, her voice cracking. “Just tell me what we’re doing here. Please.” Tears streaked through her makeup. “I’m in my forties. Driving that cab twelve hours a day is destroying my body. In a few years, even if you begged me to have a baby with you, I wouldn’t be able to give you one!” She buried her face in my chest. “If you don’t find a way to have a family again… you are never gonna survive what happened to you.” The smell of her drugstore perfume was sharp, cutting through the alcohol. I wrapped my arms around her and just held her. I kept drinking, pouring shot after shot, staring at the wall. When I first got out of lockup, Roxy was the one who co-signed the lease for the scrap yard. I had paid her back every dime, but a debt like that—someone believing in you when the world tells them not to—you can never truly repay it. Eventually, her crying faded into the soft, rhythmic breathing of sleep. I gently laid her down on the sofa and covered her with a blanket. I walked into my bedroom, opened the bottom drawer of my desk, and pulled out thick stacks of cash. Every dollar I had to my name. The money I’d made from selling the jewelry I found in the scrap was in there, too. I had originally planned to keep those rings and necklaces. I was going to polish the best one until it shined like new, and I was going to put it on Roxy’s finger. That was the only thing keeping me anchored to the earth. My only plan for a future. But something shifted. I didn’t even fully understand why Sadie mattered so much. She stole from Walt. That made her a thief. She passed off iron as copper. That made her a con artist. She had never once thanked me. She didn’t even have basic manners. But there was a voice roaring in my blood, a primal, deafening command that drowned out everything else: I have to save her. And my gut was screaming that Walt was the key. 4 My gut has always been right. It was right years ago, when I tracked down the trafficker who took my daughter. The cops told me they didn’t have enough evidence. I found him myself. I dragged the confession out of his throat, and then I put a knife through it. But I was too late that time. I couldn’t save my little girl. This time, I was going to save Sadie. I grabbed a pen and wrote a note on the back of an envelope. Roxy, the cash is all yours. Do whatever you need to do with it. If I make it back, we’ll do whatever you want. We’ll build a life. If I don’t, please… stop drinking so much. Take care of yourself. I weighed the note down with the stacks of bills. Then, I went to the shed, grabbed a solid, heavy steel crowbar, and walked out into the night. It was pitch black by the time I reached Walt’s property. He lived alone in a nice, two-story colonial on the good side of town. His wife had died of cancer a couple of years back. His only kid, a son, worked a corporate job in the city and had his own place. The cops had already searched this house from top to bottom. They didn’t find a single hair belonging to Sadie. So I didn’t bother searching the house. I went straight for the bedroom. I slipped through a window, moved silently through the dark, and stood over his bed. I pressed the cold, angled tip of the crowbar directly against his windpipe. “Ah!” He jerked awake, letting out a choked, terrified gasp. The sudden movement caused the jagged edge of the steel to break the skin on his neck. A bead of warm blood swelled against the metal. “Mack?” he wheezed, his eyes adjusting to the shadows, wide with absolute horror. “What the hell are you doing? Are you insane?” he stammered. “You already went to prison! You do this, you’re never seeing daylight again!” I let out a low, dry chuckle. “Doesn’t matter.” “My life is already over, Walt. You think I care if I rot in a cell?” The dead, hollow tone of my voice terrified him more than the weapon. He started trembling so violently the mattress shook. A sharp, ammonia smell filled the air as he lost control of his bladder. “I have money! I’ll give it all to you!” he begged, his voice cracking. “It’s in the safe downstairs. I’ll open it.” “Mack, please. Take the money, knock me out, run. Just don’t kill me!” I kept smiling. I pressed my weight down, digging the steel a fraction of an inch deeper into his throat. Just a little more pressure, and I’d crush his windpipe. “I don’t want your money, Walt.” “I want something else—” Instantly, his entire body went rigid. It was like a switch had been flipped. He realized what I was there for, and a new kind of terror—something much deeper than the fear of a crowbar—flooded his eyes. His voice dropped to a frantic, rattling whisper. “I had nothing to do with Sadie! The cops checked! I’m innocent, I swear to God!” My heart slammed against my ribs. Got him. I hadn’t said a single word about Sadie. I had no connection to her. Yet the moment I said I wanted “something else,” his mind went straight to the missing girl. If that wasn’t the guilt of a man hiding a monster, I didn’t know what was. I ground my teeth together, bearing down on the iron. “Walt, I don’t think I ever told you the exact details of how I killed that man,” I whispered, my face inches from his. “I drove a hunting knife right into his carotid. When I pulled it out, the blood hit the ceiling. But the blade was surgically sharp. He bled out in seconds. It was quick. Almost painless.” I dragged the crowbar slightly, letting the friction pull at his skin. “But this? This is blunt. It’s heavy. It’s slow. And it hurts like hell. If I use this, you are going to feel every single second of your own death.” The sheer primal terror of it made his eyes bulge. He made a wet, gasping sound, like an old bellows trying to pull air. I knew what it looked like when a man realized he was going to die. I knew the desperate, clawing instinct to survive. Usually, a man will sell his own soul to buy another minute of breathing. He’ll spill any secret. But… Walt just closed his eyes. Tears leaked into his gray hair. He just kept repeating the same two broken sentences, over and over. “Don’t kill me.” “I’m innocent.” Two hours passed. The sweat was stinging my eyes. My patience was completely shattered, but he hadn’t given me a single name. He hadn’t broken. I was losing my mind. “Are you not afraid to die?!” I roared, pulling him up by the collar of his pajama shirt. “Tell me! Where the hell is she?!” The only answer I got was the wail of police sirens approaching fast. Walt passed out, his head lolling to the side. Before I could slap him awake, the bedroom door burst open. Roxy was screaming, and three uniforms swarmed me. They tackled me to the hardwood floor, wrenching my arms behind my back and snapping the cuffs shut. Roxy fell to her knees, sobbing so hard she was choking on the air. “Why, Mack? Why did you have to throw it all away for someone else’s problem?”

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The new estate manager claimed he was a “Narrative Hijacker.” To max out Madeline’s love meter and steal the heroine’s affection, he saved her life eight times. And eight times, he died right in front of her. On his ninth resurrection, the manager collapsed at Madeline’s feet, his voice raw and desperate. “Please, ma’am. Just love me this once. If I fail again, the System will erase me completely.” Madeline kicked him out without a second of hesitation. She threw herself into my arms, her eyes wide and earnest. “Cole, I swear to you,” she whispered against my chest. “You are the only man I will ever love in this lifetime. It’s just you and me.” Then, the earthquake hit. It was a sudden, localized anomaly. I was buried under the rubble of our collapsing sunroom. Madeline fell to her knees, digging through the jagged concrete until her fingers were shredded and bloody. Her screams echoed through the dust. “If Cole dies, I don’t want to live!” Everyone who witnessed it wept. They thought her love for me was etched into her very bones. But when I was finally pulled from the wreckage, barely clinging to life, I accidentally overheard Madeline talking to the manager in the shadows of the hospital corridor. “Maddie, you and Cole are the protagonists of a strict, monogamous romance algorithm,” he said. “The narrative rules dictate you can only love him. Every time you sleep with another man, the universe registers a glitch. It retaliates with catastrophic accidents.” “I know,” Madeline replied, her voice eerily calm. “But I used the System to transfer the physical punishment entirely onto him. Tell me… seeing him crushed like that, did it make your heart ache for me?” His answer was the wet, desperate sound of lips crashing together. I listened to the sickening rhythm of their bodies pressing against the wall. “You died eight times to save me,” Madeline murmured, her voice laced with a dark, intoxicating sweetness. “He’s just absorbing the narrative punishment for a year. You said it yourself—he’s the male lead. The plot won’t let him die. When your mission ends in a year, I’ll go right back to being the Madeline who only loves Cole.” The truth was a cold knife to the gut. She had already given him her heart. I felt the ground tremble beneath me once more. Another anomaly. I looked up at the sterile ceiling, staring into the invisible void of the narrative matrix. Good, I thought. I can finally go home. 1 The Price of Betrayal When the room began to shake violently again, I knew instantly. Madeline was in another man’s bed. The muffled sounds of heavy breathing and moans drifted through the thin hospital walls, drilling directly into my skull. My head throbbed. The next second, the heavy steel frame of my hospital bed snapped. The mattress buckled. My half-healed wounds tore open in a spectacular rip of agony, hot blood instantly soaking the back of my gown. The IV needle violently jerked out of my vein, leaving a massive, angry purple welt on my hand. The deafening crash brought the nurses running. They found me crumpled on the linoleum, pale and gasping for air. Panic set in as they scrambled to lift me. “What the hell happened? How did the bed just collapse?” “I checked this room top to bottom before he was admitted! This bed is brand new. There is zero mechanical reason for this!” “Oh my god, if Madeline finds out, we are all getting fired. You know how protective she is of her husband.” The youngest nurse was on the verge of tears. I looked at her terrified face and opened my mouth to offer a hollow reassurance. But before I could speak, the heavy metal IV pole tipped over, the steel base slamming directly into my forehead. The world went black. When I blinked my eyes open again, Madeline was sitting at my bedside. Her back was to me. Both of her thumbs were flying across her phone screen, and even from this angle, I could see the soft, unmistakable curve of a smile on her lips. “Water…” I rasped, my throat feeling like sandpaper. Madeline jumped. She hastily shoved her phone into her purse and poured a glass of steaming hot water from the thermos. Then, she immediately called the doctors in to check my vitals. As I looked at the unfamiliar faces of the medical staff, she sighed, brushing a hand through her hair. “The last shift was incredibly negligent. I can’t believe they let you get hurt. I’ve already had the hospital administration terminate all of them.” I managed a weak, bitter smile. My eyes drifted to the pristine white collar of her blouse. Just above the fabric, blooming against the delicate skin of her neck, were fresh, unmistakable red marks. She was completely oblivious to them. “Your neck…” I started to say. Before the words fully left my mouth, a ringtone shattered the tension. Madeline glanced at the caller ID and quickly hit decline. A second later, a text chimed. She opened it, her bright eyes widening for a fraction of a second before a deep, undeniable flush crept up her cheeks. She pocketed the phone and leaned over to tuck the blankets around my chest. “There’s an emergency at the company,” she said smoothly. “I’ll come back to see you tomorrow.” “Can’t you handle it from the hospital?” I asked quietly. She paused. “It’s highly time-sensitive. Don’t worry, Cole. Tomorrow, I’ll clear my entire schedule and stay with you all day.” She turned to leave. As she did, her elbow caught the edge of the tray table. The glass of scalding hot water she had poured for me tipped over, splashing directly onto my bruised, swollen hand where the IV had been ripped out. The skin instantly turned a furious, blistering red. My entire body violently spasmed from the pain. “Maddie. It burns. God, it hurts.” She stopped in the doorway. “I’ll go get the doctor.” She didn’t come back with them. I knew she wouldn’t. I watched as the new doctor frantically applied burn ointment and wrapped my hand. Once he thoroughly inspected the room to ensure nothing else could possibly malfunction, he let out a long sigh of relief. The moment the breath left his lungs, the fluorescent light fixture above my bed exploded. Sparks showered down. The electrical surge blew the outlet next to the bedside table, causing the heavy glass water boiler to shatter. Boiling water and jagged shards of glass rained down onto my broken body. 2 The Truth in the Wounds I was a mess of blood and ruin. Crimson soaked deep into the white hospital sheets. The boiling water had fused the fabric to my scalded skin. When they tried to move me, a massive layer of tissue peeled away with the blanket. The attending physician frantically dialed Madeline’s number to report the critical complication. When she answered, she only asked one question: “Is it life-threatening?” The doctor looked at my mangled body, his face pale. “No, not life-threatening, but…” Madeline cut him off, her tone sharp and impatient. “I pay your hospital a premium to fix problems. If you can handle it, don’t interrupt me.” “But—” “If you let my husband suffer permanent damage, you can all pack your bags. Do your jobs.” The line went dead. I drifted in and out of consciousness, listening to the dial tone echo in the room. I closed my eyes, a mocking laugh dying in my throat. The nurses whispered above me, their voices filled with confusion. “I thought she was obsessed with him? A year ago, he got a tiny paper cut and she practically shut down the boardroom.” “I know. Remember when he burned his finger on the stove? She took a red-eye flight back from Europe just to be the one to change his Band-Aid. Why is she…” A younger nurse leaned in, her voice dropping to a hush. “When she answered the phone just now… I swear I heard another man’s voice in the background.” No one said another word, but the heavy silence confirmed what they were all thinking. Dozens of tiny glass shards were embedded deep into my boiled, blistered flesh. Because of my erratic vitals, they couldn’t risk putting me under general anesthesia. The doctor had to use surgical tweezers to extract the glass, piece by agonizing piece. I was entirely, brutally awake. I felt every jagged edge dragging against my raw nerves as the glass pulled free from my muscle. I clamped my jaw shut, trembling violently as cold sweat poured from my face. The white pillow beneath my head was thoroughly soaked. I couldn’t tell if it was sweat, or tears. When the grueling procedure finally ended, the doctor wiped his brow and gestured for the nurses to prep a new room. “Don’t bother,” I rasped, my voice barely a whisper. “I’m going home.” 3 The Breaking Point I called Madeline three times. It went straight to voicemail. I arranged for private medical transport to take me back to our house. Miraculously, the narrative algorithm spared me any accidents on the drive. When I finally wheeled myself through the front door, the scene was exactly what I expected. Clothes strewn across the hardwood floor. Unidentifiable wet spots on the rug. The heavy, unmistakable scent of musk, sweat, and sex hung thick in the air, suffocating the beautiful home we had built together. From the master bathroom, the slick sounds of skin slapping against skin sent a fresh spike of agony through my skull. “Maddie, your love meter for me is already at ninety percent,” a male voice purred. “That means Cole’s narrative punishment is going to double. Don’t you want to swing by the hospital and check on him?” “The male lead can’t die,” came Madeline’s breathless reply, punctuated by soft moans. “But physical pain can break a man’s mind.” “He’s just taking a few cuts and bruises. You died eight times for me, Gavin. You bled out right in front of my eyes. Compared to the trauma you went through, his little injuries are nothing.” “Then you better make it up to me,” Gavin groaned. “Push that meter to a hundred.” “I will. For this entire year, you are the only man I touch.” The second the promise left her lips, the massive, twenty-pound crystal chandelier suspended above the living room ceiling gave a violent groan. The reinforced chain snapped. Trapped in my wheelchair, I had nowhere to run. I could only watch the mountain of glass and brass plummet directly toward me. The impact was deafening. I heard my own bones splintering. The wheelchair collapsed under the weight, sending me crashing to the floor in a grotesque, unnatural angle. Countless shards of crystal pierced my skin, embedding themselves into every inch of my body. The pain was so absolute, so blinding, I couldn’t even push the scream out of my lungs. The thunderous crash startled the two in the bathroom. Madeline burst into the living room, clutching a towel to her chest. She froze. She saw the devastation. She saw me pinned beneath the ruined chandelier, a pool of dark red expanding rapidly across our imported rug. Her pupils dilated in sheer horror. I reached a trembling, blood-soaked hand toward her. “Maddie… help me.” But before she could move, a loud thud came from the bathroom. Madeline didn’t hesitate. She ripped her eyes away from my mangled body, turned her back, and sprinted toward the bathroom. I watched her retreating silhouette. A moment later, Gavin emerged, leaning heavily on her shoulder. He was completely naked, wearing a flawlessly executed expression of distress, while Madeline looked at him with frantic, obsessive concern. In that moment, the final piece clicked into place. Madeline didn’t love me anymore. Gavin looked over her shoulder, meeting my eyes. He shot me a wicked, triumphant smirk, and pressed his bare chest closer to my wife. The pain finally dragged me under, and the world went beautifully, mercifully dark. 4 Prelude to an Exit While I was unconscious, a mechanical voice looped endlessly in my head. [Plot trajectory deviating. Plot trajectory deviating. Commencing repairs. Commencing repairs…] I forced my eyes open. I was floating in a stark, blindingly white void. A metallic, humanoid entity—an Administrator—was frantically smashing its hands against a floating holographic keyboard, trying to patch the broken code of this universe. “I have a solution,” I told it. The Administrator paused, turning its blank face toward me. I laid out my plan. It processed the data, then gave a slow, mechanical nod. “But once the bugs are fixed,” I said firmly, “I want to be extracted. I want to go back to my original world.” Madeline didn’t know this, but I wasn’t from this universe. I had accidentally transmigrated into this romance novel years ago. Over time, living in Cole’s skin, breathing his air, and experiencing Madeline’s overwhelming affection, I had truly fallen in love with her. I embraced my role. But I never expected her to betray the very foundation of this world. Even though the narrative was hard-coded to make her strictly monogamous, she couldn’t resist the allure of a new player dropping into her life. She compromised her soul. She weaponized the universe to torture me. I saw reality for what it was. I wasn’t going to cling to the rotting scraps of her affection, begging for her to turn back. With the deal struck, I woke up. This time, Madeline wasn’t by my bed. Instead, the living room was alive with conversation. “The doctor said the impact from the chandelier practically shattered his spine,” Gavin was saying. “He’s likely going to be paralyzed, Maddie. Are you really going to spend the rest of your life tied to a cripple?” “Then you stay,” Madeline replied softly. “If he’s paralyzed, he can’t interfere with us anymore.” “Maddie…” “Don’t leave me, Gavin. A year isn’t enough. I want you by my side forever.” Her confession hit me like a phantom limb. A dull, aching echo of something that used to be whole. I remembered the early days of our marriage. We were curled up on the sofa, her head resting on my chest as she aimlessly scrolled on her phone. I had kissed the top of her head and asked, “Hey, what if I just vanished one day? Would you come looking for me?” She had dropped her phone instantly, her arms locking around my neck in a panicked grip. “Don’t ever say things like that. I can’t even process the thought of you gone. I would lose my mind, Cole.” She had looked up at me, her eyes shining. “We are going to be together forever. One lifetime isn’t enough. I’m going to find you in the next one, too.” Oh, Maddie. The version of you in this lifetime doesn’t love me anymore. It was time for me to go. 5 The Wedding Trap In the days that followed, they stopped hiding. Perhaps because I was entirely bedridden, functioning as little more than a breathing corpse, Madeline and Gavin threw caution to the wind. They practically lived on top of each other, constantly tangled together like teenagers in the throes of first love. And for me, the universe’s wrath became a daily occurrence. If a wardrobe wasn’t collapsing on me, a freak electrical fire was breaking out in my room. A gas leak nearly suffocated me. Even when I was simply wheeled onto the patio to feel the sun, a stray hunting knife from the neighbor’s yard inexplicably launched over the fence and embedded itself in my chest. A month blurred by. I was wrapped in thick, blood-stained gauze from head to toe. Not a single hospital in the city would admit me. The whispers said I was cursed, a magnet for death, and they were terrified I would die on their watch and ruin their statistics. I didn’t care about the rumors. I was just waiting. Counting the seconds until my extraction. Until Gavin came into my room alone. He leaned over the bed, tracing a heavy gold band on his middle finger. His eyes gleamed with malice. “You know, Cole, Madeline’s love meter for me has hit ninety-nine percent. For that final one percent, she told me she wants to give me a wedding. She wants to be my wife.” He chuckled, a dark, venomous sound. “You really failed, didn’t you? Even with the Author’s algorithm hard-coding her to be obsessed with you, she’s willing to break reality just to walk down the aisle for me. To make sure I leave with no regrets.” I stared up at him from my fortress of bandages. My voice was raspy, hollow. “Gavin… is your mission really just about making her love you?” His smug expression faltered for a fraction of a second. Then, he leaned in so close I could smell the mint on his breath. “Does it matter? Once her love meter hits one hundred, I get everything I came for.” “Then I wish you a beautiful marriage,” I whispered. “May you two be deeply, madly in love for the rest of your lives. Forever tied together. Never to be parted.” My blessing wiped the smile off his face. He grabbed my throat, his grip tight enough to cut off my oxygen. “What the fuck are you talking about? Who wants to be stuck in this simulated hellscape tied down to one woman for a whole lifetime? Only a pathetic idiot like you actually believes a woman’s promises mean forever.”

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