Category: English

I was reborn along with Arthur, but he had no idea. He thought I was still the same love-struck, delusional girl from our past life. The girl who provided him with the best of everything, sent him to the finest university, and supported his startup even if it meant driving my own family into bankruptcy. And in return? Once he had drained every drop of my usefulness, he kicked me to the curb. To add insult to injury, he brought my lifelong nemesis to my face just to tell me he “finally didn’t have to endure the humiliation of my money anymore.” Reborn, I swore I wouldn’t give him a single rusty penny. When it came time to select a student for our corporate scholarship program, he stood in front of me, arrogant and brimming with confidence. But I looked right past him and chose the quiet, battered kid standing next to him. 01 It was the annual charity gala, and I was attending as the representative for the Sterling Corporation. To show our dedication to philanthropy, every year we selected one exceptional student from the applicant pool for a full-ride, one-on-one mentorship and financial sponsorship, handled directly by our executive team. In my past life, this was the exact moment I laid eyes on Arthur and chose him immediately. Unfortunately, he turned out to be an ungrateful parasite. This time, before I arrived, I made sure to invite Chloe. She was my rival—and Arthur’s long-time crush. In our previous life, Arthur had told me more than once that long before I ever sponsored him, Chloe had been secretly in love with him. He claimed that my money had been the only thing standing in the way of their true love. Well, this time, I wanted to see if Chloe would even spare him a passing glance before he became the “Sterling Corporation’s Golden Boy.” When Chloe and I arrived at the grand hall, the administrators and applicants were already gathered. There were over a hundred students crowding the room. I spotted Arthur instantly. I had to admit, purely from an aesthetic standpoint, my past self had good taste. He was over six feet tall, lean, with striking features and pale skin. Standing among a crowd of plainly dressed, underprivileged students, Arthur stood out like a swan among a flock of ducks. Sensing my gaze, Arthur straightened his posture and tilted his chin up even higher. I knew he was reborn, just like me. I wondered how the former billionaire CEO Arthur was adjusting to suddenly waking up as a broke, struggling teenager again. And I was incredibly curious to see how he would react when his most hated enemy humiliated him today. I walked in with a bright, enthusiastic smile. The university officials were incredibly warm, constantly thanking the Sterling Corporation for giving these students a chance to focus on their studies without financial terror. See? Even strangers knew how to be grateful. But simply because I loved him, Arthur had twisted all my sacrifices into a personal insult. Well, this time, I was revoking that love. I hope he’s satisfied. I offered a few polite, humble remarks about corporate social responsibility. Then, it was time for the main event. The university had pre-screened the applicants based on GPA, awards, and extracurriculars, presenting me with a shortlist of ten candidates. I had to choose one for the full-ride sponsorship. I sat at the head of the conference table. The coordinator lined the candidates up to introduce themselves to me one by one. They were all exceptional kids. Their only limitation was a lack of financial resources holding them back from their true potential. Our sponsorship was designed to be the boat that carried them across that first impossible river. The students looked at me with gratitude and burning hope. Everyone knew the one-on-one sponsorship came with massive networking resources and a golden ticket to a brighter future. Soon, it was Arthur’s turn. He really was brilliant. He consistently ranked in the top ten of his class and had a resume packed with state and national academic awards. The coordinator clearly favored him and prompted him to say a few words to make a strong impression on me. But Arthur didn’t play along. He just stared at me coldly and said a flat, “Hello.” The coordinator’s face darkened. Arthur couldn’t care less. He looked at me with an expression of pure, arrogant disdain. In my past life, after hearing his resume, I had bypassed the rest of the candidates and immediately selected him on the spot. He was definitely expecting me to do the exact same thing today. Too bad for him. I turned to the coordinator. “No need to force him. Let’s move on and meet the next student.” Arthur froze, clearly not expecting to be dismissed so quickly. He didn’t move. The coordinator immediately ushered him along. “Arthur, please step aside. We don’t want to waste Ms. Sterling’s time.” Arthur shot me an icy glare before turning on his heel and walking away. See? If I don’t choose you, you aren’t even qualified to stand in front of me. I didn’t even spare him a second glance, focusing my attention on the next candidate. After listening to all ten presentations, I chose a boy named Liam. He didn’t have a laundry list of flashy extracurricular awards, but his GPA was flawlessly ranked number one year-round. He was also the only student with a visible, fading bruise on his face. Rumor had it his alcoholic father beat him regularly. He didn’t seem to harbor any hope of being chosen. It wasn’t until I announced his name that he looked up at me with his dull, lifeless eyes and quietly muttered, “Thank you.” Arthur, unable to accept the loss, sneered loudly from the back of the room. “Just a mindless bookworm.” Liam’s lips pressed into a tight line, but he didn’t say a word. I, however, had absolutely no intention of letting that slide. “Excuse me, applicant. Are you verbally bullying your peer?” I asked, my voice dropping to a freezing temperature. Arthur looked at me in genuine shock, before his face morphed into a subtle, smug expression that clearly said: Ah, I see. You’re just doing this to get my attention. I wanted to vomit. Arthur just put on his best aloof, unbothered persona. “I was just stating a fact.” “So, you don’t believe your behavior is inappropriate?” I didn’t even bother engaging with him further. I turned directly to the university officials. “This is the caliber of candidates you shortlisted? “I seriously question the moral character of this selection pool. “The Sterling Corporation sponsors future leaders who will pass this kindness forward. “If this student treats his peers with such arrogance and cruelty now, I highly doubt he will ever extend a helping hand to those in need when he gains power.” I threw the book at him, aggressively escalating it into a moral issue. Having lived this life once before, I refused to waste my charity on a parasite. As expected, my words threw the administration into a panic. The coordinator immediately jumped in, demanding Arthur apologize to Liam, threatening to revoke his eligibility for any future financial aid if he refused. Arthur glared at me with furious indignation. I didn’t even look at him. Didn’t you say my money was an insult to your dignity? Let’s see if the great CEO Arthur is willing to swallow his pride and beg me for a few thousand bucks of ‘humiliation’ today. “I will not apologize.” Arthur stood his ground. “Don’t think you can use your money to force me to bow my head. “One day, I will show you exactly what I’m capable of! Don’t underestimate a man just because he’s poor today!” Arthur delivered his self-righteous, cinematic monologue. Everyone in the room just stared at him in profound silence. So, me choosing not to give you free money means I’m bullying you? What an absolute, staggering ego. The awkward silence was broken by the sudden, slow clapping of hands. It was Chloe. She clapped as she walked over to stand beside me. “What an incredibly principled young man. You shouldn’t be so harsh on him, Chloe.” Chloe played the manipulative “pick-me” card perfectly, trying to paint me as an elitist bully picking on a poor student. Arthur’s eyes lit up the second he saw her. In his head, he was probably scripting a romantic movie scene where his fragile, secret crush bravely stood up against the evil billionaire to defend his honor. Unfortunately for him, I saw the smug, mocking smirk hiding in the corner of Chloe’s mouth. She was just using Arthur as a pawn to annoy me. I wasn’t the naive idiot I used to be. I wasn’t going to let her play the saint at my expense. “But he was the one who refused to apologize first,” I pointed out, shooting Arthur a look of pure disdain. Predictably, he tilted his chin up defensively and glared at me. “I did nothing wrong.” I let out an exaggerated, theatrical sigh. “The Sterling Corporation absolutely refuses to sponsor candidates who create toxic, hostile environments for their peers. “However—” I pivoted sharply. “Since you are so impressed by this young man’s principles, Chloe, why doesn’t your family sponsor him?” The moment those words left my mouth, Arthur’s eyes sparkled with desperate hope as he looked at Chloe. Chloe, however, choked on her words. Her face contorted awkwardly. She finally mumbled a vague excuse, “I… I’ll have to discuss it with my family.” Heh. She was a neglected, illegitimate daughter from a minor branch of her family. She couldn’t secure a five-dollar loan if she tried. But seeing the arrogant smirk on Arthur’s face—clearly believing that even without me, he had Chloe to back him up—I simply grabbed some mental popcorn and took a seat. I was incredibly excited to see how far Arthur would get this time without the Sterling family’s bottomless bank accounts. 02 Liam and I both enrolled at Columbia University. Arthur ended up at a local state college. His grades were originally high enough for Columbia. But the state college offered him a massive financial aid package, incredibly cheap room and board, and a monthly living stipend. Liam and I bumped into Arthur on the street one day. His eyes swept over Liam dismissively from head to toe, and he scoffed. “Gold-digging toyboy.” This exact scenario had played out in my past life too. Back then, I was obsessed with him. I found every excuse in the book to hang around him. Rumors started spreading that he had latched onto the Sterling heiress and was set for life. One day, while I was waiting in line with him at the cafeteria, a guy passing by muttered “sugar baby.” Arthur’s face instantly turned black. While the guy swaggered away laughing, Arthur spun around and violently slapped my lunch tray out of my hands, screaming at me to stay the hell away from him. Greasy food splattered all over my clothes. The entire cafeteria stopped and stared at me. Even now, I can remember the suffocating, agonizing humiliation of that moment. I wanted the floor to swallow me whole. I deeply regretted not slapping him across the face right then and there. What an absolute piece of trash. Someone insulted him, and he took his bruised ego out on me. And now, he was mercilessly insulting the guy who had taken his place. I was just about to rip into him when Liam stepped forward, staring dead into Arthur’s eyes. “You’re jealous of me.” It wasn’t a question. It was a flat, objective statement delivered with chilling clarity. Arthur took a step back, desperately trying to maintain his composure. “Why the hell would I be jealous of you?” Liam took another step forward. “You’re jealous that I got into Columbia, and you didn’t. “You’re jealous that Chloe chose me, and she didn’t choose you. “You’re jealous that I’m the one standing next to her right now, and you aren’t.” A lethal, three-strike combo. I honestly wanted to give Liam a standing ovation. Arthur was completely outmatched. After all, he couldn’t exactly claim he chose state college because he thought Columbia was beneath him. In the end, all he could do was mutter a pathetic “I don’t have time for your bullshit,” and scurry away. Only then did Liam drop his aggressive, intimidating aura and step quietly back to my side like an obedient puppy. “You aren’t mad?” I asked. “I know it isn’t true,” Liam replied simply. Perfect. At least the guy I picked this time was mentally stable, unlike the last one who turned into a rabid dog over a single stray comment. 03 I thought after an absolute humiliation like that, a guy with an ego as massive as Arthur’s wouldn’t show his face around me for a very long time. I severely underestimated his shamelessness. While I was studying in the library, he tracked me down. “Chloe, I’m giving you the opportunity to invest in my new clean-energy tech startup. “If you give me $5 million, I’ll give you 0.1% of the founder’s equity.” Arthur stood in front of my desk, planting both hands on the table, staring down at me with absolute authority. His eyes were a perfectly calibrated mix of 30% mockery, 30% indifference, 30% coldness, and 10% charity. It was an aura of pure, unadulterated “Billionaire CEO.” But who the hell pitches a venture capital investment like an absolute psycho? I kicked the leg of the table hard and shoved my chair back, standing up. “You’re standing too close to me.” Arthur’s hand slipped, and he stumbled awkwardly before catching his balance. Good. His “Alpha Male” aura was still leaking, but at least it wasn’t suffocating me anymore. The students studying nearby shot us annoyed glares. I bowed my head apologizing profusely. “I am so sorry. This guy from another school was harassing me, and I couldn’t hold it in.” “Who the hell said I was harassing you?!” Arthur yelled. Instantly, several large, athletic guys sitting nearby stood up, glaring at Arthur. Arthur instantly deflated. “It’s a misunderstanding. Just a misunderstanding.” I signaled that I was fine, and the guys sat back down. Arthur leaned in close, gritting his teeth in a furious whisper. “Chloe, do not push your luck.” I shrugged, showing him his threats meant absolutely nothing to me. Furious but lacking options, Arthur forced himself to negotiate. “Chloe, think this through. “If you don’t invest in my company now, when your family’s empire collapses, don’t blame me for not giving you a lifeline.” Arthur looked down at me from his imaginary pedestal, looking exactly like a benevolent god staring down at an ant. In that moment, everything clicked. Right. In my past life, to fund his startup, I threw a suicidal tantrum and forced my family to liquidate every cent of our cash reserves to invest in him. Because of the massive cash drain, our company almost went bankrupt. It was only when his core technology finally achieved a major breakthrough that he secured series B funding and pulled my family out of the crisis. No wonder he always acted so arrogant and superior around me. He genuinely believed he was the savior of my family. But if I hadn’t drained our entire cash flow to fund him in the first place, we never would have faced bankruptcy at all! A guy like him… even reborn, he only remembered the parts of history that glorified him. The actual facts and context? Completely irrelevant. Now that I understood his psychotic mental gymnastics, I was going to be even more ruthless. “You want an investment? Show me your corporate incorporation documents. “Where is your engineering team? “Where is your business plan? “Where are your projected ROI reports?” A rapid-fire barrage of basic questions. Arthur couldn’t answer a single one. I looked at him with pure, unadulterated contempt. “You show up here with absolutely nothing and demand my money? “Based on what? “That pretty face of yours?” I genuinely just wanted to insult him. But his brain must have gone to a very weird place, because he looked at me with an expression of deeply offended, violated modesty. “Chloe Sterling, don’t think that just because you have a little money you can do whatever you want! “I will never, ever submit to you! “If you won’t invest, fine! “I’ll wait for the day you come crawling back, begging me.” Then he literally jogged out of the library in a huff. It looked bizarrely like a Victorian maiden fleeing a scandalous proposition. But God as my witness, I literally just didn’t want to give him my money. Somehow, Arthur still managed to secure funding. Rumor had it Chloe used her connections to secure a $500,000 seed investment for him, taking 51% of the equity in his newly formed startup. Arthur became an instant legend at his state college. He was enrolled in their prestigious education program, but those classes were completely useless for his tech startup. So, he simply stopped going to class. When a professor criticized him for slacking off, he arrogantly snapped back, asking the professor how many decades of teaching it would take to earn the half-million dollars he just secured in funding. After that, no one at the school bothered to discipline him again. I knew exactly what Arthur’s startup project was. He was a smart guy. In his past life, he entered the electric vehicle sector, specifically focusing on extending battery life and efficiency. Back then, I loved him, so naturally I thought he was a misunderstood genius. I used my family’s massive influence to pull strings and get him accepted into Columbia’s elite Energy Science and Engineering program. He spent four years laser-focused on his studies in a world-class environment, and during his Master’s, he co-founded his company with his thesis advisor. But now? He was just a freshman at a mid-tier state college. Even with his memories of the future, he had spent years sitting behind a CEO’s desk, completely detached from the actual front lines of R&D. Could a washed-up CEO really single-handedly develop revolutionary battery technology from scratch? I couldn’t wait to watch the train wreck. 04 Arthur assembled his startup team. He hunted down the people who had co-founded his company in our past life. Unfortunately for him, only the guys who were currently broke and desperate enough to listen to his sales pitch actually joined him. As for his genius thesis advisor from our past life? I heard he refused to even take a meeting with Arthur. Obviously. He was a globally recognized titan in his field. Why the hell would he entertain a pitch from a random freshman at an unrelated state college? I, however, took a different approach. Leveraging my status as an alum, and armed with $3 million in venture capital, I happily finalized a partnership with that exact professor. And I slipped Liam into his lab as a research assistant while I was at it. He was majoring in the exact same field anyway. Getting him early access to an elite R&D team and setting him up for a seamless Ph.D. track? Win-win. Shortly after joining the lab, Liam started sharing the gossip his upperclassmen had about Arthur. For example, Arthur had marched into a meeting and commanded: “I want a complete dossier on every single one of our competitors on my desk in three minutes.” One of the grad students painstakingly opened an industry database, typed in a flurry of commands, and hit a paywall requiring an expensive corporate subscription to proceed. He turned the monitor around to face Arthur. Arthur’s intimidating, billionaire-CEO aura instantly vanished the second he saw the price tag. It cost $30,000 a year. To the Arthur of his past life, backed by the Sterling family’s endless wealth, those reports were just a few clicks away. But in this life, he was getting a brutal reality check on exactly how expensive raw, actionable market data truly was. He obviously didn’t pay for the subscription. An hour later, Arthur tossed a list of target companies to the team and told them to manually scrape the internet for product specs. But after hours of searching, they found barely anything. One of the companies on his list hadn’t even been incorporated yet. When the student tried to hand in the pathetic results, Arthur screamed in his face for half an hour, yelling that these were industry titans and it was impossible that there was no data on them. Terrible pay, psychotic demands. The student snapped, got into a screaming match with Arthur, and quit on the spot. When he returned to Columbia, he vented to Liam and the rest of the lab, saying Arthur didn’t have the destiny of a CEO, but he definitely had the mental illness of one. I thought that summary was absolutely flawless. Arthur had always been arrogant. In our past life, his smooth, meteoric rise to success was entirely because I was paving his path with the Sterling Corporation’s limitless resources. He needed data? My corporate strategy department held platinum subscriptions to every major database in the world. He needed a business plan? I had a dozen elite project managers draft individual sections, compiled it, and let Arthur present it as his own. He needed a technological breakthrough? A lab full of brilliant, exhausted engineers pulled 80-hour weeks for months to secure the patents… and put Arthur’s name as the lead inventor. Those were the people who forged the halo that made Arthur look like a brilliant tech visionary and a billionaire prodigy. But he was so narcissistic he genuinely believed he was the sun, radiating light all on his own. And the old me had been so utterly blind and love-struck that I actually believed he was a diamond buried in the rough.

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On the day of my shotgun wedding to Liam Vance, his childhood friend cried and asked him: “If she and I ever get into a fight in the future, whose side will you take?” Liam impatiently told her she was being ridiculous. Yet, he sided with her every single time. When his childhood friend orchestrated a cyberbullying campaign against herself, Liam was convinced I was the mastermind and forced me to issue a public apology across all platforms. “Mia, when you do something wrong, you have to apologize.” But he didn’t know. Every apology was a countdown to our separation. Once I completed the final three forced-apology plot points, I could detach from the system and go home. 01 Popular actress Chloe Sterling was accused of being a homewrecker, interfering in my relationship with Liam Vance. That same day, she stormed into my studio and slashed my wrist. Just as my manager, Sarah, grabbed Chloe to call the police, Liam arrived. The moment he walked in, Chloe started crying pitifully: “Liam, everyone online is attacking me. Can you ask Mia to clear things up for me?” Everyone knew she was the childhood friend Liam had spoiled since they were kids. Every time she framed me and cried, Liam always assumed it was my fault. Sarah realized this too, her face turning pale with anger: “Based on one photo, why are you assuming it’s Mia’s doing?” The photo exposing Chloe was plastered all over the internet. In the photo, Chloe was on her tiptoes, trying to lean in and kiss Liam. Coincidentally, I had a very similar photo on my phone. So, Chloe insisted I was framing her. I looked up at Liam, about to explain, but he grabbed my wrist. He usually maintained a calm, indifferent demeanor. But when his eyes fell on my bandaged wrist, he frowned. “Does it hurt?” The warmth of his fingertips transferred through the gauze. Maybe the pain was making me delusional. In that moment, I almost thought Liam was going to believe me this time. But the next second, Liam let out a soft chuckle. “If you knew it would hurt, why did you do it?” My heart dropped, sinking lower with his words. I slowly looked up, meeting Liam’s gaze. I saw the blatant mockery in his dark eyes. “Mia.” He pinched my chin, forcing me to look at him. “Why can’t you just learn to behave?” 02 Liam still didn’t believe me. He was convinced I had posted the photo out of jealousy. He demanded I apologize and clear her name across all platforms. As soon as he finished speaking, a dead silence fell over the studio. I didn’t look up, but I felt numerous eyes on me. Relying on Liam’s backing, Chloe had stolen many roles and endorsements from me over the years. My current position in the industry was already precarious. Stepping forward to apologize now would completely ruin my career. Liam knew this better than anyone, but he showed no mercy. I looked up at him, my nose stinging uncomfortably. “So from the very beginning, you came here to interrogate me on her behalf.” From the moment he walked through the door, I had clung to a sliver of hope. Thinking that after being by his side for five years, he would stand by me just once. But he never did. Liam was now a prominent figure everyone in the city looked up to. His features hadn’t changed much from five years ago. His downcast eyes always seemed to carry a hint of tenderness. “I don’t play favorites,” he looked at me, enunciating every word. “Mia, when you do something wrong, you must make amends.” There’s that phrase again. But Liam. What gives you the right to condemn me so easily? The system sighed, unable to watch: [I told you not to invest real feelings when doing missions!] [Just endure it a little longer. Only three apology missions left, Host.] Seven years ago, I was pulled into this world. The only way home was to play the role of the long-suffering original wife and complete the idiotic forced-apology plot missions. And now, I was only three away. The sudden ringing of a phone shattered the silence. Sarah answered it. But the next second, all the color drained from her face. “Mia,” Sarah looked up at me, her voice strained. “The Best Actress award… they changed the winner.” My throat tightened. “…What?” 03 This was the award I had spent seven years fighting tooth and nail for, risking my life. For one close-up shot, I stayed in freezing water during winter for over forty takes, leaving me with severe lingering health issues. After being nominated and losing for three consecutive years, I thought my hard work was finally going to pay off this time. Chloe slowly peeked out from behind Liam, her eyes curving into a smile at me. “Sorry, Mia.” “I forgot to tell you.” “Liam said this year’s Best Actress award is my birthday present.” A loud ringing filled my head. I looked at Liam, suddenly unable to say a word. Chloe’s sweet, syrupy voice kept drilling into my ears. “I actually told him I didn’t really need it, but Liam insisted on giving it to me…” I couldn’t listen anymore. I grabbed whatever was nearby and hurled it at them. Chloe hid behind Liam in fear. Liam stood in front of her, frowning, “Stop making a scene.” “Stop making a scene, did you hear me?!” I didn’t want to lose face like this, but the tears wouldn’t stop falling. I knew I must look ugly and ridiculous right then. I looked at Liam and asked him: “What gives you the right? I risked my life for that. What gives you the right to just give it to Chloe?” Not expecting such a huge reaction from me, Liam was stunned. “It’s just one award. I’ll get you a more prestigious one next time, okay?” “Stop crying.” … But Liam, I don’t have a next time. Then, as you wish, I’ll apologize. That way, I can quickly finish the plot and return to my own world. 04 I typed out the clarification post word by word while crying. A few hundred words with only one core message: I was jealous of Chloe and maliciously took a misleading photo to deceive the public. After posting it, overwhelming abuse flooded my feed. [So disgusting. She staged a fake photo to create drama for herself.] [Our Chloe has always said she doesn’t plan on getting married. Besides, they’ve been platonic childhood friends for over twenty years. Stop acting crazy and throwing dirt, old lady.] [Mia is not that kind of person! I’ve been her fan for years, I know her better than you do. Mia, if you’re being threatened, change your profile picture!] [Stop trying to clean up her image. No one cares. I hope old lady Mia and her brain-dead fans go to hell.] … My vision suddenly went dark. Liam had returned at some point. He blocked the screen, preventing me from reading further. “If it’s just meaningless talk, don’t take it to heart.” “Just get through tonight, and I’ll suppress the trending topics.” I didn’t say a word. The living room was completely quiet. Liam reached out to tuck a stray strand of hair behind my ear. “I explained the photo to you at the time. Chloe was drunk.” “I’ve always seen Chloe as a little sister. You don’t need to keep making things difficult for her.” Liam seemed to have never considered that Chloe was the one who provoked me first. He had never believed me. I looked up at Liam. Suddenly, I wondered. If he knew I was innocent. If he knew that every apology accelerated my departure. What kind of expression would he have? 05 The second-to-last apology came very quickly. Sarah couldn’t stand seeing me bullied and publicized my marriage certificate with Liam. She even added thousands of words detailing how Chloe had been causing trouble. To the public, Liam and I had always just been dating. Dropping this massive bombshell instantly shifted public opinion. People love drama. They don’t really care about what’s true or false. Many rushed to Chloe’s social media accounts, cursing her out. I found out about this late at night. I had been severely ill for the past few days. In my feverish haze, I felt someone push the door open. In the darkness, my eyes met Liam’s. In that moment, I felt a sudden disorientation. In the past, when I was sick, Liam would be so worried he couldn’t sleep all night. Drifting between sleep and wakefulness, I would see Liam sitting by my bed, watching me. Even an arrogant rich kid like him would get red-rimmed eyes from distress in the middle of the night. But now, he looked at me quietly, a smile on his face that didn’t reach his eyes. “Did you orchestrate Sarah’s post?” His cold fingers combed through my hair, the chill making me shiver. He asked me with a smiling tone: “Do you know what I’ve been busy with these past few days? I’ve been busy winning the auction for that limited-edition necklace you wanted.” “But what did you do?” “Mia, will you only be satisfied when Chloe is dead?” I propped myself up, my eyes full of confusion. Liam had no intention of giving me a chance to explain. He dragged me, still running a fever, to the hospital. It was only when he pushed open the hospital room door that I found out. Chloe had slit her wrists. 06 Lying in the hospital bed, she burst into tears the moment she saw me: “I never wanted to fight with you for anything.” “Mia, why won’t you just let me go?” She sobbed incoherently: “When I’m discharged… tonight, I’ll leave this city. I won’t appear around Liam ever again.” My head was spinning, and it took me a long time to react. …It’s these same cheap tricks again. Yet Liam believed them implicitly. In the beginning, I used to be so upset I couldn’t sleep, explaining things to Liam over and over again. He seemed to side with me, but whenever he spoke, he always favored Chloe. He always said making me apologize was for my own good. But it felt like he never actually believed me. Later, I started fighting with Liam. By the end of every argument, all that was left was resentment. Gradually, I began to realize that compared to me, Liam instinctively trusted the childhood friend he had spoiled since they were kids. No one could intrude on the bond between them. A wave of exhaustion deeply enveloped me. I asked him numbly, “How do you want me to apologize this time?” “Is it ‘you must make amends for doing something wrong’ again?” “Or an eye for an eye? Want to cut me again?” Liam’s eyes were complex. He reached out and rolled down my pushed-up sleeve, his voice somewhat helpless: “Stop talking nonsense.” I quietly waited for his next words. Like waiting for the final blade of execution. “I’ve thought about it carefully. We still need to minimize the chances of you two interacting.” Liam looked at me. “Mia, retire from the entertainment industry.” “You can do whatever you want in the future.” “I’ll…” A sharp slap interrupted Liam’s words. I pulled my hand back, my fingertips tingling. Liam’s head was turned to the side from the force of my slap. He turned his head back to look at me, finishing his sentence as if nothing had happened: “I’ll be right here with you.” 07 “Absolutely not!” An urgent, panicked voice rang out. Sarah, who had rushed over, stood in the doorway. She must have come in a hurry; her chest was heaving. “I did this on my own. Don’t make things difficult for Mia.” Sarah had always been strong, but that day, she stood in front of me and cried. She stared at Liam, incredibly sad. “I can’t stand seeing Mia suffer like this.” “Piece by piece, you’ve shown enough favoritism toward Chloe over the years.” “It wasn’t easy for Mia to get to where she is now.” “Could you at least… just once… choose to stand by her side?” 08 Liam ultimately didn’t change his mind. Before long, I would be completely blacklisted and hidden away. On the way back with Sarah, a sudden autumn rain began to fall. The cold wind felt like it was drilling into my bones. Sarah frantically tried to hold an umbrella over me. But the rain came too fast, and we still got mostly soaked. The wet clothes clung to my body, cold and sticky. I stared silently at my soaked cuffs. It felt like just a sudden downpour, but it seemed like these past seven years had all been this damp and cold. 09 The mission progress reached 99%. Just one last apology, and I could go home. I started packing my final belongings, giving whatever I could to Sarah. Sarah stared at me blankly. “What are you doing? Don’t do anything stupid.” “Didn’t Liam say he’d support me? I’ll spend his money, and I’ll use his money to support you.” I placed a bank card in Sarah’s hand. “Keep this safe for me.” “Mia, no matter what happens, I’m here.” “If you’re unhappy, come find me. Worst case, just divorce him.” I turned to walk back, waving at Sarah. If I had known that would be the last time I saw her, I would have said a few more words and given her a proper goodbye. 10 The sky was overcast when I left Sarah’s place. It looked like a heavy rain was about to pour. After picking up the custom watch from the store, I texted Liam as I walked back. [Birthday present. Come home early.] Liam replied very quickly, a low chuckle in his voice note: “Okay. Don’t trick me again today.” After I was blacklisted, Liam practically stuck to my side, inseparable. I called him disgusting. I found excuses to mess with him time and time again. Liam got quite angry. But I didn’t plan on messing with him this time. Today was his birthday. I wanted to use this birthday present to negotiate a better position for Sarah. After I leave, she’ll truly be alone. But I seem to have terrible luck. The more I want to do something, the less likely it is to happen. I was kidnapped.

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I saw a video of firefighters training online and couldn’t resist dropping a thirsty comment. “Nice waist, bro. I’d ride that.” The guy replied instantly: “? Don’t let me catch you.” Karma works fast. The next night, I rolled over in my sleep and somehow got completely wedged in the gap between my mattress and the wall, unable to escape. When the fire department broke down my door, my phone was still stuck on the comment section of his video. Our eyes met. The guy from the video was standing over me, holding a reciprocating saw, giving me a half-smile. “Wow, it’s you. Don’t remember me? You’re the one who ripped my underwear off while saving a cat.” Me: I am so dead! New grudges piled on top of old ones! 01 Stuck in the narrow gap between the bed and the wall, I tried to suck in my stomach and regulate my final, desperate breaths. The violent sound of my door being battered down echoed from outside, accompanied by the TikTok audio of a trending beat-drop song looping for the 800th time from my phone lying next to me. After what felt like an eternity, right as I was about to suffocate, I finally heard the sound of the deadbolt being popped. The door swung open, and a blast of freezing wind swept in. Along with the wind came several young, incredibly attractive firefighters. “I’m here… I’m down here…” A pathetic, weak voice squeaked from the gap like a dying kitten. The firefighters reacted quickly and tried to pull the bed away from the wall. I immediately let out a blood-curdling scream. “Whoa, relax! Don’t panic, we’ll get you out right now,” a firefighter reassured me patiently, while giving the bed a forceful heave. My vision went black, and I squealed like a slaughtered pig. By the time I recovered from the shock, I had been dragged out of the gap. The firefighters peeled back the six layers of blankets I was wrapped in, finally getting a clear look at my calf, which was still wedged tightly into the bed frame. It was covered in dried blood and swollen to twice its normal size. “Captain, the victim’s leg is trapped in the frame. We need tools to cut it.” Just as the firefighter spoke, the looping TikTok audio suddenly stopped. The man standing at the very back of the group had picked up my phone. With an icy, expressionless face, he crouched down by my feet to inspect the injury. I stared at his sharp, chiseled jawline and the name embroidered on his chest patch, instinctively gulping. Ethan Cole. God, he’s hot! “It’s wedged too tight. Go down to the truck and grab the reciprocating saw.” I closed my eyes in absolute agony. Great. Now I have to pay for a broken front door and a new bed. My poor bank account… Ethan, crouching beside me, seemed to sense my inner turmoil. He turned his head and patted my shoulder. “It’s okay. Just try to relax.” Looking at his devastatingly handsome face, a sudden realization clicked in my brain. He looks really familiar. I feel like I’ve seen him somewhere before… The saw arrived quickly. Someone plugged it in, and the loud, buzzing roar of the motor filled the room. Ethan stood up, took off his heavy turnout coat, and grabbed the saw. I looked up at his olive-green t-shirt clinging tightly to his sculpted abs, and the veins popping on his forearms. My brain instantly short-circuited. Wait. Isn’t this the exact same guy doing pushups in the viral video I was just drooling over?! Which means… when he was holding my phone a minute ago… he definitely saw my comment. I got caught red-handed. My brain spun frantically, trying to figure out how to explain that I was just a keyboard warrior who was all talk and no action. But Ethan was already approaching me, holding the saw, a dark half-smile playing on his lips. “Hold still. I’m very fast.” My face drained of all color, my eyes darting around in panic. The next second, his deep, deliberately lowered voice reached my ears. “Well, well. Don’t remember me? You’re the one who ripped my underwear off while saving a cat.” My confused expression instantly shattered. My temples throbbed so hard I thought my head was going to explode. I am so dead! New grudges piled on top of old ones! Watching Ethan lower the spinning saw toward me, I burst into terrified tears and screamed in sheer panic: “I’M SORRY! I WAS WRONG! I’M SO SORRY, HUBBY…” 02 That single “Hubby” completely obliterated whatever dignity I had left. Under the shocked and highly amused stares of the entire fire squad… I was tossed over Ethan’s shoulder, my face burning brighter than a tomato, and carried out to the ambulance. Yes, carried like a sack of potatoes. To maintain professional boundaries, my 100-pound self didn’t get a romantic bridal carry. I got the “hauling a dead boar out of the woods” carry. At the hospital, my best friend finally arrived. She stared at my calf, which was currently swollen to the size of a tree trunk, and slapped her thigh, honking with laughter. “Chloe, you are incredible. You literally made the local news.” My brain was still buzzing, and my leg was throbbing in agony. I quickly pulled out my phone. “SHOCKING!!! Woman wrapped in six blankets gets stuck in bed frame, nearly assassinated by her own bedding!” “Girl stuck in bed carried into hospital by firefighter, weight currently incalculable!” Me: [Angry embarrassment.jpg] When my best friend wheeled me out of the hospital, she relentlessly interrogated me about how I managed to rip a firefighter’s underwear off. To avoid being dumped on the freezing street, I gritted my teeth and recounted the most humiliating moment of my life. It happened three months ago, late at night. I was walking home from working overtime when I heard meowing coming from the bushes by the sidewalk. After searching, I found a tiny calico kitten stuck high up in a tree, too terrified to climb down. The kitten looked like it had barely been weaned, shivering violently in the branches. My heart broke, and I decided to save it. But I couldn’t find anything to climb on. Right at that moment, Ethan happened to run past on his nightly jog. So, I aggressively recruited him for a rescue mission I would never forget for the rest of my life. The kitten, terrified by our commotion below, kept crying and climbing higher. Ethan didn’t hesitate. He tied his shoelaces tight and started climbing the tree. The tree was incredibly thin. Ethan swayed precariously as he climbed, looking like he was going to fall at any second. I stood at the base, grabbing his calves to help stabilize him. Just as he was inches away from grabbing the kitten… the branch he was standing on snapped under his weight. Ethan panicked, trying to jump down safely. Blind panic took over me, and I reached my hands up, desperately trying to catch him. In a split-second flash of absolute chaos… my hands accidentally grabbed onto his upper thigh… and I violently ripped the side of his tight athletic shorts wide open. With the loud RIIIIIIP of tearing fabric, Ethan scrambled to adjust his footing and somehow managed to wrap his arms around the trunk, hanging on for dear life. The kitten, however, was launched from the shaking tree, landed safely in the bushes a few yards away, and bolted into the night. Just as this happened, a city bus slowly pulled up to the stop right next to us. Illuminated perfectly by the bus headlights… was Ethan, clinging to a tree, wearing shredded athletic shorts that fully exposed a pair of bright crimson, Year of the Dragon novelty boxers. The golden dragon embroidered on his crotch literally sparkled under the headlights, gleaming in all its majestic glory. The sheer, apocalyptic embarrassment was too much. I instantly hit the deck and combat-crawled straight into the bushes to hide. Leaving Ethan and his golden dragon crotch to make awkward, agonizing eye contact with the men, women, and children staring out the windows of the passing bus… “Are… are you okay?” After the bus drove away, I poked my head out of the bushes, cautiously asking Ethan, who had just dropped down from the tree. His face was pitch black. One hand was covering his ass, and the other was clenched into a tight, trembling fist. “What do you think?” I was absolutely terrified. I took three huge steps back, took off my jacket, and handed it to him. “It’s fine! Everything’s fine! At least we saved the cat, right? The cat…” The cat was long gone. I was crying internally. Please don’t punch me! Thankfully, Ethan just looked pissed. He snatched my jacket and tied it tightly around his waist. But the violent yank of the fabric caused the torn piece of his athletic shorts—which I had unknowingly stuffed into my jacket pocket—to fall out and land directly at his feet. Oh my god! What sin did I commit in my past life to deserve this?! My hands were shaking violently as I pulled out my phone and opened my Venmo QR code. “Sir, I’ll pay you for the shorts. Please, just add me.” Ding… The second he accepted the request, I turned and sprinted away faster than Usain Bolt. 03 Sitting on the curb, my best friend ignored the strange looks from passersby, slapping my head and laughing until she couldn’t breathe. For a very long time after that, it became her favorite piece of ammunition to mock me. Recovering from my leg injury at home was agonizingly boring. I saw the viral video of Ethan carrying me into the hospital being turned into meme edits all over Twitter. I decided it was time to exact my revenge. I was going to harass Ethan late at night. “You asleep yet, babe?” He replied instantly: “? Are you paying me back?” The smug smile vanished from my face. My brain was instantly flooded with the image of his golden dragon boxers and his incredibly firm, sculpted thighs. I hesitated for a few seconds, then Venmoed him $52.00. He accepted the payment instantly. Me: ??? FUCK!!! People really shouldn’t stay up late. I tried to troll him, and ended up losing money instead. So unlucky. But looking at the algorithm pushing more videos of his abs onto my feed… I decided I wasn’t going to let that money go to waste. My official goal for this year: Touch Ethan’s abs! To achieve this goal, as soon as my leg healed, I bought several massive orders of boba tea and delivered them to the fire station. My excuse? Showing my deep gratitude to Ethan for saving my life. The atmosphere at the station was great. A bunch of young, grinning firefighters grabbed the drinks and immediately scattered, giving us space. In the middle of the massive training yard, it was just me and Ethan, staring at each other. I handed him the last cup of boba. “Here. This one’s yours. I secretly told them to add extra boba.” Ethan hesitated for a few seconds before finally taking the cup. “Thanks.” His lips parted slightly. The olive-green t-shirt he was wearing was soaked with sweat from training, clinging tightly to the sharp outline of his abs. My mouth moved faster than my brain, and I blurted out: “If you really want to thank me, let me feel your abs.” The moment the words left my mouth, Ethan’s cold, aloof expression shattered, replaced by sheer, unadulterated shock. I pressed my lips together, my face burning hot. Okay, maybe that was a little too direct. But since the elephant in the room was already tap-dancing, I decided to just go all in. “Ethan, I already asked around. You don’t have a girlfriend. Can I pursue you?” The guy standing across from me was clearly still buffering from the shock of my first sentence and definitely didn’t process the second one. I didn’t give him time to react. I kept going. “Not gonna answer? Then I’ll take that as a yes, boyfriend.” And just like that, based entirely on my own unilateral assumption, Ethan was officially my boyfriend. By the time I left the station, several of the younger firefighters were already calling me “Sister-in-law.” I didn’t hold back either. I answered them brightly and enthusiastically. “Bye, Sister-in-law! Come back soon!” I nodded, turned to Ethan, and smiled. “I’m heading out! Bye, hubby.” Ethan had been standing there with a dark expression for five minutes, opening his mouth several times to say something. But that final “hubby” completely short-circuited his brain, leaving him speechless. 04 For the next few weeks, I lived a life of aggressively, unilaterally dating Ethan. To win him over and speedrun my way to touching those abs, I started posting on Reddit asking for advice. Finally, a highly-rated comment gave me a revelation: “These guys who act like tough, stoic walls of iron usually have a super flamboyant inner self. Otherwise, why would he be wearing bright red novelty boxers?” “Trust me, girl. Be direct. If he’s secretly wild, you have to be overtly wild. If that doesn’t work, just sexually harass him! Go get ’em!!!” Armed with this divine knowledge, I began my practical application. “Good morning, babe. I didn’t sleep at all last night, because I spent the whole night thinking about you in my dreams…” “Baby, the wind is so strong today. It’s almost as strong as my desperate need for you!” “I can’t sleep. My bed feels so cold. It feels like something’s missing… Oh, right. It’s missing you.” After a full week of aggressively sending him thirsty texts, Ethan only replied to me exactly two times. “Morning.” “If you’re cold, turn on the heater…” I mentally cursed that Reddit user 800 times. After agonizing over my failure, I came to a painful conclusion. Texting creates too much distance. I needed to show up in person and force my existence onto his radar. So, when I found out the city was hosting a firefighter skills competition and livestreaming it, I woke up earlier than I ever had in my life. When I arrived at the training facility, it was already packed with a massive crowd. Official drones buzzed overhead, filming the event. I tied my hair up tight and aggressively elbowed my way to the very front of the crowd. When the whistle blew, my eyes locked onto Ethan’s figure. Watching him hurdle over obstacles, low-crawl through the dirt, and drag massive tires over towering walls… I let out a feral, groundhog-like scream. Hot! He is so fucking hot! When the competition ended, the livestream host announced they would pick one random audience member to interact with the first-place winner. Standing in the front row, I frantically blew kisses and shot heart hands at Ethan, completely shameless. My unhinged behavior successfully caught the host’s attention, and I was gloriously selected as the lucky winner. On the live broadcast, the host asked me what I wanted to say to the champion. I grabbed the mic and walked right up to Ethan. His clothes were soaked in sweat, his chest heaving as he chugged a bottle of water. Staring at his bobbing Adam’s apple and his incredibly sexy collarbones, I made my bold request. “I want to see you do pushups. 100 of them.” “Also… can I sit on your back?” The crowd erupted in cheers. I tilted my head up, raised an eyebrow at Ethan, and flashed a triumphant, wicked smile. His face darkened. He silently put down his water bottle, dropped to the ground, and assumed a flawless pushup position. His flexed muscles showcased perfect, fluid lines, and the veins popped on his arms, radiating pure masculine energy. A group of girls in the crowd gasped. He looked up at me, his voice slightly strained through gritted teeth. “Sit!” The late afternoon sun hit his back, bathing him in a golden glow. A single drop of sweat dripped from his bangs, catching the light perfectly. The sight struck my heart, sending ripples through me. I happily kicked off my shoes, grinning like an idiot as I climbed onto his back. As he moved up and down, I almost slipped, so I leaned forward and wrapped my arms around his neck. The very next second, his entire body went rigid. I secretly smiled, leaning close to his ear, and whispered. “Keep going, hubby. You got this.” Underneath me, doing incredibly stiff pushups, Ethan’s ears turned a violent shade of crimson. Hehehe. I definitely got a feast today. One step closer to my ultimate goal! 05 After the livestream ended, I relentlessly harassed Ethan until he agreed to walk me home. As we walked past a row of street food stalls, the smell of barbecue was overwhelmingly intoxicating. I was literally drooling. Ten minutes later, there was a case of beer and three plates of grilled meat on our table. “When exactly are you planning to go home?” Ethan sat across from me, gripping a grilled sausage, his brows furrowed deeply. I aggressively gnawed on a grilled chicken wing, my voice muffled. “When I finish eating. Once you finish eating with me, I’ll go home.” Swallowing the chicken, I popped open another beer for Ethan. A few beers later, I was violently throwing up. Next to a trash can by the sidewalk, I stared at Ethan—who currently had three blurry clones overlapping him—and stumbled directly into his chest. “You smell so good!” Ethan completely froze in place, his hands hovering awkwardly in the air, having no idea what to do. “You’re drunk. Let me take you home.” I shook my head, aggressively rubbing my face against his chest. It was rock hard, and my nose actually hurt. “No. No way. You’re so mean to me. So cold and ruthless.” A heavy sigh came from above me. It sounded faint, but I could feel Ethan trying to push me away. I quickly wrapped my arms around his waist like a vice, hanging my entire body weight onto him. “Don’t move. You are not allowed to push me away.” “I like you so much. Can’t you just like me back, even a little bit?” I heard the sound of Ethan swallowing hard. A heavy, ragged breath blew down my collar, brushing against the back of my neck. It sent a tingling, electric shock down my spine. I tilted my head up, staring hazily at his devastatingly handsome face, and asked, word by word: “Ethan, do you like me even a tiny little bit?” The only answer I got was the sound of the wind. Then, Ethan hoisted me up with one arm and pulled me tightly into his chest… I never got an answer to my question. But the text messages from Ethan started becoming a lot more frequent. I just kept casually harassing him. I’d randomly show up at the station to drop off boba, then force him to walk me home. Half a month later, while walking me home, Ethan received an emergency dispatch page. Watching him sprint back toward the station in a panic, my right eyelid started twitching violently. Soon after, fire trucks roared past me, their sirens echoing through the streets. A news alert popped up on my phone: “Gas explosion at Sunset Apartments in the historic district triggers massive fire… Casualties unknown!” The second I saw the notification, I dropped my half-empty boba cup on the pavement. I unlocked a rental bike and pedaled like a maniac. My parents lived in Sunset Apartments!

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My Bestie’s 16th Idol Got Canceled, So She Mad-Debuted Me Instead Bad news: A massive industry plant just dropped into Hollywood. Good news: The industry plant actually has top-tier talent. 01 I was just chilling and streaming a show when an ear-piercing screech erupted from my bestie next to me. “Ahhhh! I’m going to slap him so hard he’ll be peeled off the wall! Not even twenty and he can’t keep it in his pants, damn it!” On X, the hashtag #ZackeryHayesScandal was sitting boldly at number one on the trending page. Zackery was my bestie Harper’s ultimate idol. He used to be a nobody, which felt safe, but then Harper bombarded him with all sorts of industry resources until he actually got famous. And less than half a month after hitting the big time, he got canceled. I patted Harper’s head. “Don’t be sad. It’s not your first time dealing with a cancellation.” 02 Other people stan celebrities; Harper plays minesweeper. Every single star she has ever loved, regardless of age or gender, has had their career implode. The reasons range from dodging taxes to sleeping with people they definitely shouldn’t be sleeping with. I held back a laugh, feeling a little sympathetic, but not much. “Look, maybe you should just give up on the whole fangirl thing.” Harper’s eyes were bloodshot. “Impossible. My luck can’t be this bad forever!” As the daughter of a billionaire tech mogul, Harper had money, looks, and brains. Her life was smooth sailing in every aspect—except for this bizarrely cursed luck when it came to stanning celebrities. I couldn’t help it; I burst out laughing, flashing a wide, obnoxious grin right into my bestie’s murderous glare. Then I heard her grit her teeth and say, “Better to stan a bestie than a stranger. Chloe, pack your bags. You’re debuting.” I blanked out. “Huh???” 03 One week later, I officially debuted. Parachuted straight into the lead role of a massive AAA fantasy adaptation! I stayed silent, but the internet exploded. [Who is Chloe? Does Hollywood even know this person?] [Hahahaha, people always talk about nepo babies and industry plants, but THIS is the ultimate industry plant.] [Wasn’t the lead supposed to be Olivia Thorne? Did she get robbed?] [LMAO, I looked her up. Total nobody. Made her Instagram yesterday, less than 100 followers.] The drama-hungry netizens quickly migrated to my page. In just one hour, my follower count skyrocketed by fifty thousand. Compared to the casual mockery on the official studio’s post, the comments under my page were overwhelmingly toxic. [Girl, doesn’t that stolen role burn your hands?] [Your first role ever is the lead in a $100 million franchise. The audacity.] [Hey, drop your sugar daddy’s contact info.] [Industry plant. Disgusting.] [You’re the bitch who stole our Liv’s role. Just wait, karma’s a bitch. You won’t be arrogant for long.] Even knowing I’d get flamed, I was still pretty shocked. After mentally cursing Harper out eight hundred times, I started a keyboard war with the haters: [You know a lot about selling out. Speaking from experience?] [I’m just brave. What’s there to be afraid of?] [Hehe, not sharing.] [If you’re getting nauseous that easily, maybe go get a pregnancy test.] [Who is Liv?] My thumbs moved like lightning. In less than ten minutes, I scored three more trending hashtags. #MostArrogantIndustryPlantEver# #ChloeFightsWithHaters# #ChloeSaysSheDoesntKnowOliviaThorne# That third hashtag climbed to the number one spot at lightning speed. 04 Under the trending tag, Olivia Thorne’s fans were furious. [I’ve never seen anyone so disgusting in my life. Stole Liv’s role and now throwing shade? Shameless.] [Tagging Chloe, come out and apologize.] [They’re in the same industry, how could she not know her? Stop playing the innocent act.] [First time I’ve ever seen a studio announce a cast without dropping a single photo of the lead. Do they know their lead is too ugly to show? Tagging Aethelgard Official.] [Protecting our Liv. Can the industry plant please learn to walk on her own?] [Seriously, they’re just letting any random stray dog into the industry now.] 05 What pushed the whole thing to a boiling point was Olivia Thorne herself. She liked an article directly throwing shade at me. No, not shade—it was a full-on targeted attack! Even though she unliked it a second later, eagle-eyed fans had already screenshotted it. The news spread like wildfire, instantly topping the trending charts. The internet grabbed their popcorn. [Dying of laughter, the actual celebrity came down to confirm she got robbed?] [Hollywood is so messy. No talent, just pure scheming.] [I don’t even follow pop culture, but stealing a role someone worked so hard preparing for is actually sickening.] I clicked on the article. The whole thing boiled down to one strategy: “Playing the Victim.” Though I didn’t care much for showbiz, having a hardcore fangirl bestie meant I had absorbed all the PR playbooks via osmosis. Clearly, she didn’t get the part, so she was stepping on me to gain sympathy. Oh honey, you kicked the wrong steel plate today. 06 Giving her a taste of her own medicine, I immediately liked a post on X. [The lead for Aethelgard was never finalized. Olivia bought so many PR articles that she convinced herself it was hers? Fool others all you want, but don’t fool yourself.] Netizens caught my move instantly. [Oh my god, she’s fighting back directly!] [Woooow, fight! Fight! We love to see it!] [It’s been three minutes and she hasn’t unliked it. This girl is absolutely doing it on purpose.] [The actual stars fighting each other publicly, how low-class.] [She’s calling out Olivia for being desperate, right? Right?!] At first, it was just casual onlookers commenting. But soon, the comment section was hijacked and copy-pasted by Olivia’s fans. [Flop, stop clout chasing.] [Industry plant, stop tying your name to hers. Can you walk independently?] [Wow, an industry plant who loves liking hate posts. Producers, are you really going to use an actress this emotionally unstable?] [Stop directing your own little drama. Get lost.] [Our Liv has no background and no sugar daddy. She prepared for four months and lost to you just whispering in some producer’s ear. Leave her alone.] Looking at these comments, I wasn’t angry. I just found it hilarious. With a smirk, I unliked the post and tweeted: [Sorry, my hand slipped, just like Miss Thorne’s.] [Also, I’ve blockchain-timestamped all the rumors defaming me. Please wait patiently for your court summons.] I added a little pleading-puppy emoji at the end. Maximum passive-aggression. 07 My absolute savage behavior was like dropping a bomb into the stagnant waters of Hollywood. Smelling the drama, millions of users flooded in. Seeing the situation blow up, Olivia Thorne finally made an appearance. [Sorry for taking up public server space. My hand accidentally slipped earlier, I apologize if it caused anyone trouble.] [As for Aethelgard, I want to clarify something here. As a die-hard fan of the original books, I actively sought this out since the project was announced. I prepared extensively, went to auditions, did the stunt training, and was so happy to receive validation from the director and crew.] [The female lead is the absolute soul of Aethelgard, so it’s true that even over the last three months, the casting wasn’t finalized. I’m very regretful that I ultimately cannot participate.] [I believe the producers chose Miss Chloe because she surely has extraordinary talents. I trust she will bring a spectacular performance to the audience!] [Finally, I couldn’t become Aelynn for a short while, but I will forever be Aelynn’s biggest fan.] Attached was a photo of her dressed in Aelynn’s iconic teal robes, striking a pose with a prop sword. The photo was highly polished—polished to the point where every single strand of hair was edited. With the perfect lighting, her already pretty face looked even more stunning. The Aethelgard book fans immediately recognized it: it was the most iconic look of the protagonist, Aelynn! 08 [Holy crap! So accurate!] [Ahhhh! Why isn’t Olivia playing her?!] [It’s missing a little edge, but the accuracy is so high.] [I want to see what kind of person the director picked if they weren’t satisfied with THIS!] [So naive. Directors have no say nowadays. It’s all about what the investors want. Whoever the money wants, gets the part.] [Industry plant get out of Hollywood!] Reading through these, I almost gave her a standing ovation. Brilliant. Truly brilliant. It sounded like she was speaking up for me, but every sentence was a trap. Saying she prepared a lot implied I didn’t prepare at all. Saying I would give a “spectacular performance” and then dropping her own gorgeous character photo was subtly raising the audience’s expectations. As long as I was even slightly worse than her—or even just equally good—the internet would cry foul for her. Most people in the world are just ordinary people. We don’t want to see capital and privilege easily defeat hard work. But unfortunately, she miscalculated one thing. How did she know I didn’t work harder than her? 09 Half an hour later, the official Aethelgard account dropped an absolute bombshell. [Per @Chloe ‘s request, to provide a fair, just, and open competitive environment for talented, hardworking actors, Aethelgard will launch the ‘Aelynn Initiative’, opening up the lead role to a public audition.] [The audition will be fully live-streamed, evaluating actors on vocals, line delivery, physicality, and acting. The audience will vote to decide the best actor.] [June 2nd, streaming simultaneously on YouTube and Twitch. Stay tuned.] The internet was dumbfounded. [Wait, what? Is this actually the official account? Not a prank?] [I literally have goosebumps. Chloe plays hardball.] [Witnessing history. Always wanted to see a studio cast a role publicly. Didn’t think it would happen today.] Some people had a different takeaway. [Official account, you’re spoiling her! She told you to post this and you actually did?!] [Why does it feel like the whole production team are just Chloe’s simps?] [Put yourself in Chloe’s shoes: People say I don’t deserve it, so let’s just compete publicly. Producer, you know what to do. Producer: Understood, setting it up right now! Damn, that’s such a flex.] These comments made my toes curl in secondhand embarrassment. I am not. I did not. I just casually mentioned to my dearest bestie that I wanted a fair competition! Sure enough, whenever Harper’s eyes light up, it’s never anything normal.

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My sister and I used to be drowning in our own toxicity, hell-bent on chasing men who didn’t want us. I was obsessed with the older one—a cold, ruthlessly disciplined, older corporate executive. My sister, meanwhile, was desperately in love with his younger brother—a frail, soft-spoken, wheelchair-bound boy with a shy smile. After an entire year of throwing ourselves at them and getting absolutely nowhere, we reached a point of pathetic desperation. We actually planned to drug them. It was a reckless, absurd idea. But right before we crossed that unforgivable line, a glitching stream of glowing text appeared out of thin air, hovering right in front of our eyes. The floating words screamed at us. The text berated my sister and me for our twisted, obsessive minds, begging us to spare these two men. The comments insisted that they belonged to the “rightful heroine” of the story. More terrifyingly, the floating text warned us of exactly what would happen if we went through with the drugging: our family would go bankrupt, our faces would be ruined, and we would be violently thrown out into the streets, left to rot. Seeing those warnings felt like taking a bucket of ice water to the chest. My sister and I snapped out of our fever dream. From that moment on, we stopped suffocating them. We stopped forcing our feelings down their throats. We decided to focus on ourselves, to pull our lives together, and to actually open our eyes to the other decent guys in the world. Yet, the universe has a sick sense of humor. The older brother—the man who had spent a year looking through me as if I were made of glass—suddenly cornered me in the hallway. Before I could process what was happening, he closed the distance and kissed me, hard. His breathing was ragged. He practically shook as he demanded to know why I had just given up on him so easily. He asked, his voice dripping with a dark, bitter insecurity, if I suddenly thought he was too old, too boring for me. The more he spoke, the more he lost control. The kiss turned desperate. Punishing. Panicking, I managed to shove him back just enough to hit speed-dial for my sister. When the call connected, I didn’t hear her voice. I heard her muffled, terrified crying. And then, crackling through the receiver, came the voice of the younger brother. The shy, gentle boy was gone. His voice was thick, dark, and sickly sweet. “Be a good girl,” he whispered through the phone. “Let’s do that again.” A chill violently clawed its way down my spine. 1 It was right after my ninth failed confession to my older stepbrother, Devin. I decided I was going to force his hand. My twin sister, Serena, didn’t approve at first. “You can’t force a flower to bloom,” she told me, lounging on my bed. “Matters of the heart require patience. We have to play the long game. Slowly reel them in.” Exactly one week later, Serena experienced her tenth brutal rejection from the younger brother, Kieran. She was devastated. She cried until her eyes were swollen shut. “You can’t force a flower to bloom,” she sniffled, wiping mascara from her cheeks, “but at least you can rip off the petals.” “Exactly.” “If I can’t have his heart, I’ll take his body.” “Damn right!” Serena initiated the raid; I immediately fell into formation. One look between us, and the plan was set. Sunday was our mother’s birthday gala. For the sake of convenience and showing off, it was hosted right here at our sprawling estate. Because it was the first birthday since our families had merged into one messy, wealthy blended household, our stepdad, Richard, had his two sons in attendance. I had acquired the goods. Serena stared at the five tiny green vials in the palm of my hand, her expression entirely skeptical. “Are you absolutely sure this sketchy powder you bought off a dark-web pop-up ad for ten bucks actually works?” I was brimming with misguided confidence. “The forums swore by it. It’s foolproof.” The party downstairs was a blur of designer dresses, clinking champagne flutes, and polite corporate laughter. Devin, whom I hadn’t seen in weeks, was dressed in a razor-sharp bespoke suit, looking like he owned the room. He stood near the grand piano, nursing a scotch and making small talk with the investors. He caught sight of me. His gaze lingered on me for less than three seconds before he abruptly looked away, his jaw tightening. He looked so painfully stiff and awkward that a stranger would have thought he was the one who had been rejected nine times. Kieran, confined to his wheelchair, sat quietly in the shadowed corner of the sunken living room. When Serena took a seat on the velvet sofa near him, he didn’t even dare to lift his head. They really were brothers. Their avoidance tactics were identical. Serena had been wavering slightly, but seeing Kieran shrink away from her solidified her resolve. “I’m going to find out if his body is as stubborn as his mouth,” she muttered. We divided the labor. Serena poured the drinks; I twisted the caps off the vials. Right as I was tipping the powder over the rim of the crystal tumbler, a blinding white light flashed across my vision. Neon text began scrolling through the empty air in front of me. [God, I am so sick of these two desperately horny sisters. Begging the author to let our two male leads go.] [The premise of this book is a love triangle where both brothers fall for the sunshine female lead! Even if these toxic twins drug them, it won’t work.] [This is so gross! Why can’t they just be normal stepsiblings?!] [In the original novel, these two evil stepsisters end up with the most gruesome fates just because they tried this stunt.] [Help, stop digging your own graves! Just be background characters!] [I eternally reject the ‘harassment as romance’ trope. Someone delete these side characters.] [When is the real heroine showing up? I’m dying waiting.] [Go ahead and drop the powder, girls. Enjoy your VIP package of bankruptcy, facial disfigurement, and getting thrown into the gutter.] “Bankrupt?” I whispered. “Disfigured?” Serena gasped. Another flash of white light. Suddenly, a vivid, horrifying montage played in my mind: Serena and I weeping, begging on our knees, being spat on, humiliated, stripped of everything, our faces scarred, our bank accounts drained to zero. I love money more than life itself. Serena worships her own beauty. We slowly turned to look at each other, the color draining from our faces. We spoke in unison. “You saw that too?” “…” 2 Serena and I are identical twins. We share the exact same face. We share absolutely none of the same personality traits. Serena reads obscure French poetry; I devour double cheeseburgers. Serena is the picture of poise; I’m a walking hurricane. We only have one thing in common. We are both incredibly pretentious. To prove how “different” and deep we were, Serena and I would camp out at the local artisanal coffee shop with our MacBooks, looking brooding and intellectual for ten hours straight. Because we thought adopting a dog or a cat was too basic, I bought a ball python, and she bought an iguana. Beyond that, our daily routine consisted of viciously competing with one another. We competed over who could eat more, who could fail an exam more spectacularly, who had a better metabolism, and who could curse someone out more creatively. Our mother, trapped between us, had a miserable time trying to keep the peace. Finally, after one too many nights of being forced to choose whether the snake or the iguana was “cuter” before we went to bed, our mother snapped. She decided she wasn’t going to suffer alone anymore. She was going to find a husband to draw some of our fire. Enter Richard. Richard was a widower of many years, dragging along two grown sons. In the high-society dating market, he was considered damaged goods. Our mother took one look at his bank accounts and zeroed in on him. Serena and I took one look at him and zeroed in on… his sons. Devin was twenty-seven. Kieran was twenty-five. Devin was ice-cold, impossibly arrogant, and ruled by logic. He was the quintessential, untouchable CEO from a romance novel. Kieran was the gentle aristocrat. Soft-spoken, warm, yet shadowed by the tragedy of his paralyzed legs, which gave him an air of fragile melancholy. I stared at Devin, practically salivating. “I want to see that ice-king lose his mind. It would be intoxicating.” Serena stared at Kieran, her eyes dark. “I want to pin him down and make him cry.” Like I said, Serena and I are family. We have the exact same twisted DNA running through our veins. We were creatures of impulse. If we wanted something, we took it. I was the action-taker. I immediately drafted a battle plan to conquer the older brother. I bought him absurdly expensive watches, sent him texts, ambushed him for lunches and movies. I studied his coffee orders, his habits, trying to dismantle his defenses brick by brick. After a year of this, my progress was exactly zero. Serena believed in the slow burn. She thought love should seep in like water into soil. Whenever she had a free moment, she was pushing Kieran’s wheelchair through the gardens. She talked to him about art, the moon, life, and philosophy. She listened to him talk about the trauma of losing his mother and the agonizing pain of losing his legs. But Kieran’s heart was apparently made of Kevlar. “Kieran said I’m too young, and that I’m just confusing pity for love,” Serena complained to me once. “Devin said my constant presence is a sign of deep-seated attachment issues,” I grumbled back. “Kieran said legally, it’s frowned upon.” “Devin said he has a corporate image to maintain and won’t involve himself in a scandal.” We both sighed heavily. This was the first time either of us had seriously pursued anyone. We just assumed we hadn’t tried hard enough, hadn’t dug deep enough into their souls. The more we failed, the harder we pushed. The more they pushed us away, the more obsessed we became. It grew into a sickness. A total fixation. But it turned out, we were just living inside the pages of a novel. Serena and I were the cannon fodder. The evil stepsisters. Devin and Kieran were the male leads. Their entire universe was meant to revolve around the heroine. Serena and I were just the pathetic catalysts meant to push the main characters closer together. We were flat, one-dimensional tools. We were never, ever going to get a text back. Under the invisible hand of the plot, we had slowly been driven insane, pushed toward making unforgivable choices, destined to die penniless and ruined. I looked down at the powder dusted across my knuckles. A cold sweat broke out over my entire body. 3 [Why is the evil stepsister just standing there spacing out? Is she plotting something worse?] The text was still hovering in the air. I quickly pulled out my phone and checked my banking app. I counted the zeroes. They were still there. Serena whipped out her compact mirror. Her flawless face was untouched. We both let out massive, shaky breaths. We looked at each other, communicating entirely through our eyes. Actually, when you really think about it, Devin always has a stick up his ass. He’s not even fun. Men age like milk anyway. He’s twenty-seven, which in club years is basically sixty-two. He’s too old for me. Kieran is so fragile. If I actually got him into bed, he’d probably break. Love is great, but my face is worth millions. If I have to choose between a man and my trust fund, the man has to go. Serena always knew exactly what to say. I decisively dumped the remaining powder straight into the nearest potted plant. But I couldn’t just leave the drinks sitting there. It felt too suspicious. I grabbed a pitcher of tap water and topped off both glasses of scotch until they were thoroughly diluted. [Wait, why did the villain back out?] [The plot is totally shifting. Am I reading a pirated version of the book?] [Oh no! The first encounter between the heroine and the male leads is totally ruined! How are they going to have their romantic, drug-fueled one-night stand now?!] First encounter? One-night stand? Romantic? Now that I was pulled out of my obsessive haze, reading those words made me want to gag. What a load of toxic bullshit. Serena saw the text too. She frowned, looking visibly nauseated. “Thank God we stopped,” she whispered. “We didn’t ruin our own lives, and we didn’t accidentally traffic them to some random girl.” Devin stepped up to the bar. Seeing the glass in my hand, he assumed it was for him. He reached out to take it. After seeing those floating comments, looking at him made my chest feel tight and complicated. Maybe it started out as physical attraction. A shallow crush. But over the last year of trying to break through his walls, I had actually given him pieces of my real heart. But if this was a story, and I was the villain, there was no point in bleeding out for him anymore. “This isn’t for you,” I said coldly, pulling the glass away. “…” Devin’s dark eyes narrowed. A flicker of something unreadable crossed his face. I lifted the glass, intending to take a sip just to prove my point. His hand shot out, wrapping around my wrist. He pulled the glass down. “Did you forget you’re allergic to alcohol?” I actually had forgotten. I let him take the glass. He brought it to his lips and took a slow sip. Serena watched him, opening her mouth to say something, then shutting it. I knew firsthand how terrifyingly observant Devin was. Once, I had accidentally left a single strand of hair on his office chair. The next day, he presented it to me, noting the length and the curl pattern, and told me to learn the definition of boundaries. There was no way he didn’t taste the tap water I had just dumped into his Macallan. But before I could dwell on it, our mother clinked her glass to announce the cake cutting. Serena and I linked arms and walked up to the front to stand with her. I accidentally glanced up. I met Devin’s eyes across the room. I didn’t give him my usual desperate, glowing smile. I just looked at him blankly, and then shifted my gaze to the wall. Around ten o’clock, the party wound down. I headed upstairs to my bedroom. Devin was leaning against the mahogany railing at the top of the stairs. He called my name, stopping me in my tracks. The light from the crystal chandelier hit the sharp angles of his jaw. Usually, his features were entirely composed, practically monastic. But tonight, there was a faint flush to his cheeks. He was holding a small, dark red velvet box. He looked at me. I watched his Adam’s apple bob as he swallowed. “Last week was your birthday. I was out of town on business and missed it. This is your gift.” I took the box and offered a polite, distant smile. “Thank you, Devin.” Devin’s eyes widened, a sudden, jarring clarity cutting through his buzzed state. His voice hitched with a strange tension. “What did you just… call me?”

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The endgame of the Apex Trials arrived not with a roar, but with a terrifying, clinical silence. Three faces frozen around a cold metal table. Before us sat three identical capsules. The rules were as simple as they were barbaric: two contained the antidote that would allow us to walk out of here; the third contained a fast-acting neurotoxin that would liquefy your organs in minutes. The survivor wouldn’t just win their life back; they’d walk away with a ten-million-dollar purse. The loser would die in agony. And here we were, the final three: me, my fiancé, and my younger sister. Maya, who had struggled with a congenital heart defect since she was a toddler, was trembling so violently she could barely sit upright. She reached out, her fingers like cold wire as she gripped my forearm. “Jo,” she choked out, her eyes swimming with tears. “I was never going to live a long life anyway. Give me the poison. You and Gabe… you have to live. You have to take care of Mom and Dad for me.” My heart felt like it had been pierced by a needle. I fought back my own tears, nodding as I reached for the capsules to distribute them. I looked at them one last time—the man I planned to marry and the sister I had spent my life protecting. I raised my capsule to my lips. Suddenly, a hand clamped around my wrist. The grip was so savage I felt the delicate bones of my arm creak. I looked up. Under the harsh LED lights, Gabe’s face looked like a stranger’s—cold, sharp, and utterly devoid of the warmth I’d known for eight years. “Joanna,” his voice was like a winter wind. “Maya is your sister. You should give that pill to her.” Before I could process the betrayal in his tone, the comms monitor on the wall crackled to life. My parents’ faces appeared on the screen, broadcast from the viewing gallery. My mother’s voice was thick with tears, but her words were hard as flint. “Joanna, Maya is pregnant! You can’t let two lives end today. Give her the antidote. Now!” In that heartbeat, the world fractured. The jagged pieces finally clicked into place—my sister and my fiancé hadn’t just been close; they had been together. And my parents? They had known all along. A chill crawled up my spine, freezing the marrow in my bones. But instead of screaming, I started to laugh. A low, jagged sound that scraped my throat. They seemed to have forgotten one thing. They were so sure I was holding the antidote. But in this game, nothing is ever what it seems. 1 The final round of the Apex Trials. Three pills on a table. Two are life. One is a death sentence. The winner gets ten million dollars and a second chance. The loser rots. And the only ones left in the arena are me, my fiancé, Gabe, and my sister, Maya. Maya, the girl with the “fragile heart,” was currently sobbing into my shoulder. “Jo, please. My heart was going to give out before thirty anyway. Let me take the hit. You and Gabe… you’re my world. Just promise you’ll look after the parents.” My chest throbbed with a dull ache. I nodded, my eyes blurring as I handed out the pills. I took one last, lingering look at the two people I loved most, preparing to swallow my fate. Then Gabe’s hand was on me, pinning me down. I looked at him, stunned. “Joanna, she’s your sister. She needs that pill more than you do.” On the screen, my mother’s grief turned into a sharpened weapon. “Joanna, for God’s sake! Maya is pregnant. How can you be so selfish? Give her the medicine!” The word pregnant hit me like a physical blow. My brain hummed with static. I wrenched my hand away from Gabe, clutching the pill in my palm, my eyes fixed on Maya. I didn’t blink. I couldn’t. Maya and I are twins. We shared a womb, shared secrets, shared a life. She never mentioned a boyfriend. She never mentioned him. Maya’s eyes darted away, her pale face ghost-white. She clutched her chest, shaking her head. “Mom, Dad, please… stop. I already owe Jo so much. My heart is a ticking clock anyway. Just let me take the poison and go. I just want you all to be happy.” She made a show of raising her hand to her mouth, but Gabe caught her. The look on his face—a mixture of desperate panic and raw devotion—was something he had never once given to me. “Maya, stop. It’s not your fault. I’m the one who fell for you.” He turned his gaze toward the camera, then back to her. “You’re carrying my child. I’m not letting anything happen to you. Not today. Not ever.” I felt the air leave my lungs. I felt my knees give way, my body suddenly heavy with the weight of the injuries I’d sustained during the earlier rounds. To keep Maya safe, I had taken the hits. I’d walked through fire, literally and figuratively. My body was a map of bruises and half-healed lacerations. I was at my limit. But the physical pain was nothing compared to the sensation of my heart being ground into glass. I whispered the words, tasting the metallic tang of blood in my mouth. “Your… child?” “Gabe, stop it. This isn’t a funny joke.” Gabe and I had been together for eight years. Eight years of him knowing exactly how I liked my coffee, of him cooking soup for me when I was sick, of him warming my feet under the covers in the dead of winter. I thought he was my rock. I decided to marry him after my accident last year. He had been late to pick me up, and I’d tried to catch a bus, only to be clipped by a distracted driver. I was thrown ten feet. Broken ribs, shattered leg, internal bleeding. In the ICU, through the haze of morphine, I heard him begging the doctors. “Save her. Sell the house, take my car, take everything I own—just don’t let her go.” When they needed blood, he didn’t hesitate. He sat in that chair and let them draw until he turned gray, refusing to let them stop even when he passed the safety limit. “If she dies because I was a few milliliters short, I’ll never forgive myself,” he’d told the nurse. When Maya told me that story later, I cried until I couldn’t breathe. The moment I was stable, I grabbed his hand and told him to put the ring on my finger. I thought it was our “happily ever after.” But looking back now, I remembered how his hands had trembled when he slid that diamond onto my finger. Was that joy? Or was it the tremors of a man who had just realized he was trapped by his own guilt? I tried to smile, but tears were carving hot tracks through the dirt and blood on my face. I prayed—I actually prayed—that this was some hallucination brought on by blood loss. Then Gabe spoke again, and the trapdoor beneath my feet finally swung open. “Jo… she’s four months along.” 2 I stared at him, the math failing to compute. Gabe sighed, his voice heavy with a weary kind of pity. “The night of your accident… the reason I was late? I was with her.” “We lost track of time. It was intense. I was so preoccupied with her—cleaning her up, buying her new clothes because I’d ruined hers, making sure she got to work okay—that I forgot about the time. I forgot about you.” I remembered that night. I had called Maya while waiting for Gabe. I had gushed to her about how lucky I was to have him. I told her I hoped she found someone just like him so we could be happy together. Maya’s voice had been strange then. Breathless. Strained. I’d heard a muffled groan in the background. “Maya? You okay?” I’d asked. “Just a cold, Jo,” she’d rasped after a long pause. “My body… you know how it is. I shouldn’t… ugh… I shouldn’t burden anyone else.” “As long as I can see you happy… then I’m happy too. Ha.” Growing up, my parents always leaned toward Maya. The “Sui’an” to my “Mengbai”—the peace to my purity. They spent their lives hovering over her, terrified of her heart, terrified of her pain. Even on our shared birthdays, there was only ever one cake. Maya’s favorite flavor. Every single year. I used to be bitter. Until the year Maya took that cake and threw it in the trash. She’d taken my hand, her face pale and defiant, and told our parents: “Today is Jo’s birthday too. If you keep ignoring her, I’m going to stop taking my meds. I’d rather be dead than see her hurt.” My resentment vanished in that instant. My mother had wept, pulling me into her arms, promising to love us both equally. From that day on, we were inseparable. Or so I thought. “Maya, don’t worry,” I had whispered into the phone that night. “I’m going to win this money. I’m going to pay for your transplant. We’re sisters for life. Not a second less.” I’d hung up and signed the contract for the Apex Trials to save her life. Now, those memories felt like a sequence of slaps across the face. Every sacrifice I’d made for her felt like a jagged piece of hot coal in my gut. I couldn’t take it anymore. I lunged forward and slapped Gabe across the face. “Do you even have a soul?” I screamed, my voice breaking. “She’s my sister! My flesh and blood!” “You told me you cared for her like family. Was ‘family’ just code for ‘mistress’? What am I to you, Gabe? A placeholder? A backup plan?” Maya let out a sharp cry and tried to step between us. Gabe’s expression shifted instantly—from cold indifference to feral protection. He lashed out, kicking me square in the stomach. I flew backward, my spine slamming into a jagged rock. The world went black for a second, then rushed back in a wave of cold sweat and agonizing pain. But Gabe didn’t even look at me. He was busy checking Maya’s pulse, running his hands over her shoulders. “Maya, are you okay? The baby? Don’t worry, I’ve got you. I won’t let her hurt you.” Maya shook her head, tears streaming down her face. “Gabe, stop. Leave me. I’ve had a bad life, I’ve accepted it. I’ve had parents who loved me, and in the end, I had you. That’s enough.” “The only thing I regret is this baby. But it’s okay. When I get to the other side, I’ll tell the little one I’m sorry.” She looked at me, her eyes shimmering with a performative grief that made my skin crawl. “Joanna, I know I did a terrible thing. But I never lied about wanting you to be happy. When I found out you signed up for this game for me… the guilt nearly killed me.” “So let this be my penance. Let me take the poison.” 3 The words had barely left her mouth when she broke free from Gabe’s arms and lunged for the pill Gabe had knocked out of my hand earlier—the one they were so sure was the toxin. Suddenly, a piercing scream erupted from the monitors. “Maya! If you swallow that, we’re coming with you!” I looked up, dazed. My parents had somehow made it to the edge of the arena fence. My mother was holding a small utility knife to her own throat, her face a mask of maternal madness. “Maya, life isn’t worth living without you. You have a baby now. They found a donor heart for you, honey! You have a future. I won’t let you throw it away here!” Her tears weren’t falling on the ground; they were falling on my soul. I gasped for air, clutching my broken back, and used the last of my strength to scream at the screen. “Mom! I’m your daughter too! Does my life mean nothing to you?” “I’ve called you ‘Mom’ for twenty-five years. Did you ever actually love me?” My mother’s eyes flickered toward me, cold and hollow. “Joanna, Maya said she owed you, but the truth is, you owe her. You were the stronger twin in the womb. You sucked all the nutrients out of her. You’re the reason her heart never developed. You got the normal life, you got to run and play, and then you took the man she loved. You’re the thief, Joanna. If anyone has to die today, it’s you.” I closed my eyes. I bit my lip until it bled, but I couldn’t stop the sob that tore through my chest. I felt like a fish gasping on dry land, drowning in the open air. My mother didn’t love me. But I had loved her. I had come here for Maya. I had already decided, before the betrayals came to light, that I was going to take the poison. When I was distributing the pills, I had already palmed the toxin. I was going to die so they could be happy. But now, I realized my sacrifice was a punchline. The people I would have died for were currently cheering for my execution. [Trial Countdown: Five Minutes. If no one consumes the toxin, all remaining players will be terminated.] The mechanical voice boomed. Gabe’s face twisted. He lunged at me, pinning me into the dirt, prying my fingers open with brutal force. I looked at his snarling, unrecognizable face. “Gabe,” I whispered. “If I told you that the pill in my hand right now is the poison… that I was always going to choose death for you… would you even feel a shred of guilt?” Gabe froze for a second. But then my mother’s voice shrieked from the fence. “Gabe! Maya collapsed! Her heart! You have to hurry! Give the poison to Joanna and take the money! Save Maya!” Panic erased whatever doubt was in Gabe’s eyes. He sneered at me. “Nice try, Joanna. I know how selfish you are. You’d say anything to save your own skin.” “You want the truth? I only asked you out because I thought you were Maya that night. By the time I realized the mistake, I tried to break it off, but Maya… she’s too good. she begged me to stay with you because she didn’t want to break your heart.” “That ring? It was always meant for her. You used our guilt to trap me. I’ve hated you for years.” I felt my heart shatter into a million pieces. My strength vanished. I watched, numb, as he ripped the pill from my palm and shoved a gritty, dust-covered capsule into my mouth. The bitterness exploded on my tongue. I looked at him, my voice a ghost. “Why… why didn’t you just tell me?” Gabe smiled, a cruel, triumphant thing. “Because I knew you’d never believe it. You’re too narcissistic to think anyone could prefer her over you. You probably knew all along and just liked watching us suffer.” I swallowed the bitterness. I lay there on the dirt, watching the giant countdown clock hit zero. A second later, a scream that sounded like a dying animal ripped through the air. “NO!! MAYA!”

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On the stage of the National Pastry Championship, I had planned to honor my grandfather’s legacy by recreating his signature dessert. I didn’t expect my girlfriend’s childhood sweetheart to step forward and accuse me of lacing my entries with synthetic opioids. As I scrambled to clear my name, she locked me in our house. She held me for a long time, weeping, telling me she loved me, promising she would finally say “yes” when I proposed. But her next words were a serrated blade to my heart: “I’m so sorry, Sam. Jackson needs this trophy too much. Just this once. I promise I’ll help you rebuild everything next time.” The result was predictable. Jackson walked away with the gold, while my family’s multi-generational reputation—the pride of the Mitch name—was dragged through the mud, branded as a den of addicts and cheats. This was the ninety-ninth time. For Jackson’s sake, she had systematically stripped away everything that belonged to me, making me the laughingstock of the culinary world. Later, when Jackson had finally achieved his “rightful” fame, Nancy stopped preventing me from competing. She even said that once I won a comeback title, she wanted me to bake our family’s traditional wedding cake for their ceremony. She probably will never know that Jackson had my hands severed months ago. 1 “Wait, isn’t that Sam Mitch? Henry Mitch’s grandson? What the hell happened to him?” “Look at him. He looks like he’s been through a death camp. This is the International Grand Prix—is he really here just to embarrass himself?” Amidst the jeers of the crowd, I was forced toward Nancy by two burly security guards. Nancy looked at me, her face tight with a mixture of embarrassment and fury. Before I could speak, she slapped me across the face. “I gave you the chance to showcase your family’s masterpiece, and you show up looking like a pathetic charity case? You’re ungrateful, Sam.” She leaned in, her voice a low hiss. “You’re already disgraced because of the drug scandal. Today is the only chance I’m giving you to redeem your name. Now get over there and prepare.” I remained silent, head bowed. Beside her, Jackson began to stir the pot, his voice dripping with faux-sympathy. “Nancy, maybe Sam is still angry with me. After all, I’ve taken the spotlight the last ninety-nine times… maybe I should just withdraw. I can’t bear to see him like this.” His eyes reddened. He leaned into Nancy, a stray tear escaping. Nancy’s heart clearly broke for him. She reached out, cupping his face with a tenderness she had never once shown me. “Don’t cry, baby. That glory belongs to you. As long as you’re on that stage, he will always be standing in your shadow.” The reporters and Jackson’s frantic fan-girls started jeering louder. “Mitch’s got some nerve. Losing ninety-nine times to Jackson? If I were him, I’d have walked into traffic by now.” “I heard his grandfather stole the ‘original’ recipes from Jackson’s family anyway. And Sam was the one who tried to come between Nancy and Jackson. The whole Mitch family is just a bunch of shameless grifters.” My heart gave a violent shudder. They could say whatever they wanted about me, but they had no right to slander my grandfather. Grandpa Henry had spent his entire life in a kitchen, pouring his blood and sweat into his craft to earn his place. He was a man who spent his weekends at soup kitchens, who gave everything to the poor. Why did he have to carry this filth in his grave? I gritted my teeth and forced myself upright, turning toward the nearest camera. “Stop lying! My grandfather never stole a thing. Every Mitch recipe is an original masterpiece!” The crowd didn’t buy it. They only responded with a chorus of derisive scoffs. I turned to Nancy, my eyes burning. I begged her—with a look, with a silent plea—to tell them the truth. Nancy only recoiled in disgust. “Your family’s reputation is in the gutter because of your own actions. Why should I explain anything? If you’re so talented, prove it on the table.” The staff shoved me toward the pastry station. I stared at the gleaming stainless steel and the polished marble. A wave of nausea hit me. This place was supposed to be my sanctuary, my altar of honor. Instead, every inch of it was stained with the memory of pain. There was a time when Nancy loved me—or so she said. She used to tell me that my desserts were the only things that made her feel alive. She said she’d never get tired of them. Then she imprisoned me in a basement, forcing me to act as Jackson’s ghost-writer, his shadow, his stepping stone. After the ninety-ninth time she demanded I throw a competition for him, I finally broke. I told her I was done. Nancy had looked at me then with eyes full of a haunting, manipulative sorrow. “Sam, being a pastry chef is Jackson’s only dream. Please, don’t take this from him. Just this once, okay?” “You still have me. I’ll love you forever. But Jackson… Jackson lost everything trying to save me once. I can’t let him lose his career, too.” 2 I knew Jackson didn’t care about the art. He only cared about the title of “Pastry Prince.” Yet, back then, I hadn’t fought her. I had just nodded, a hollow shell of a man. I felt I owed Nancy for a debt from our youth. I thought I was paying her back. I was so naive. I thought if I stepped down, she would let me go. I didn’t expect her to plant those drugs in my kitchen, to orchestrate the raid that destroyed a hundred-year-old legacy in a single afternoon. When I screamed at her, asking why, she had been so calm. “You have talent and the recipes, Sam. You can bounce back whenever you want. But Jackson has nothing. I have to clear the path for him.” “I’m sorry. This is the debt I owe him. I’ll spend the rest of my life making it up to you.” She kept me locked in that cellar, bringing me out only for competitions, forcing me to endure the public’s spit and venom as I lost over and over. Nancy, you owed him. And I owed you. So today, I’m paying you back in full. And then, I am done. I closed my eyes, waiting for the execution. Jackson stood at the station opposite me. The host shouted for the round to begin. Under the hungry gaze of the audience, Jackson began cracking eggs, his movements practiced and flashy. I didn’t move. I just stood there, staring into space. The crowd grew restless. “What’s wrong with him? Does he even know how to bake?” “He’s a hack! He probably forgot his ‘secret ingredients’—the ones from the pharmacy!” “If you can’t do it, get the hell off the stage!” Nancy, standing in the front row, marched over. She leaned over the barrier, her voice a sharp whisper. “What is wrong with you? Start the prep. Now.” I gritted my teeth, my voice trembling. “I don’t have hands anymore, Nancy. Haven’t you had enough?” Nancy laughed, a cold, sharp sound. “Sam, give it a rest. You’ve been living in luxury in my villa for three years. I told the housekeeper to make sure you were pampered. I specifically told her to look after your hands. Stop lying for attention.” Jackson looked up then, his voice oily. “Nancy, don’t push him. He’s clearly still bitter about my success. Maybe I should just quit…” He started to untie his apron, his eyes brimming with fake tears. The audience went into a frenzy, screaming insults at me, throwing crumpled programs and water bottles. The livestream chat on the giant screen was a waterfall of hate. But I really didn’t have hands. How was I supposed to bake? I reached for my sleeves, desperate to show them, to prove the nightmare. But Jackson moved faster. He lunged across the gap, grabbing my forearms, his fingers digging into the stumps hidden beneath the fabric. He squeezed with agonizing force. “Sam, your hands are fine. Why are you making excuses?” I looked into Jackson’s eyes. They were cold, triumphant, and utterly evil. He was the one who had done it. He had walked into that basement with a meat cleaver and a smile. How could he stand there and say this? Before I could scream, Nancy’s hand connected with my cheek again. “If you keep up this act, I will release your grandfather’s private journals to the press tonight. Start the competition. Now.” I froze. My grandfather’s journals—the record of his life’s work, his soul. They were in the safe at the house. I hadn’t realized she’d stolen them for Jackson. “Nancy…” my voice cracked. “You know how much he cared for you. He treated you like his own daughter. How can you use him to threaten me?” Nancy looked away, a flicker of guilt crossing her face before hardening back into stone. “Don’t play the emotion card. There is no sentiment on this stage. I am being fair.” Fair. It was laughable. She just wanted me to lose one last time on the world stage. This was the Grand Prix. The winner would be immortalized. But without my hands, and with my grandfather’s legacy held hostage, what was left? The rage boiled in my blood. I wanted to leap over the counter and kill them both, but the fear for my grandfather’s memory held me back. If those recipes were lost or defiled, the Mitch name truly died. “Please,” I whispered, tears blurring my vision. “Stop. I’ll do it. I’ll try.” 3 I spoke through sobs, stepping toward the station with leaden feet. But… Without palms, without fingers, I couldn’t even pick up an egg. I tried to pin an egg between my shrouded wrists, but it slipped, shattering on the floor. The crowd erupted in laughter. “Is he pretending to be a thalidomide kid now? How pathetic.” “This is the Mitch heir? Jackson is a god compared to this clown!” Jackson smiled, basking in the cheers as he began whipping cream. The bitterness rose in my throat like bile. I let the tears fall. The first scent of baking filled the air. Jackson was making a lemon tart—my grandfather’s recipe. He had stolen the soul of my family and was parading it as his own. Meanwhile, my station was a disaster. I couldn’t adjust the oven temp accurately. I couldn’t whisk. My entry looked like a pile of raw, grey sludge. The judges didn’t even want to look at it. One of them sneered, “Is this a joke or just incompetence?” Jackson chimed in, his voice dripping with faux-concern. “Judges, I know Sam. He’s better than this. He’s doing this on purpose for the cameras. He wants to look like a victim.” I was paralyzed with shame. A moment later, Jackson “accidentally” bumped into my station, knocking my bowl to the floor and shoving me down. “Oh! My god, Sam, I’m so sorry! Let me help you up.” As he leaned down, his face inches from mine, his voice dropped to a terrifying whisper. “You want to know the truth? I killed that old man. He held onto those recipes until his last breath. I had to use a pillow to shut him up… he died protecting a pile of paper that I’ve already burned to ash. You have nothing left, Sam.” The world turned cold. My blood felt like shards of ice in my veins. I tried to grab him, to scream, but I had no fingers to grip his throat. “You monster! You murderer!” I lunged upward. Immediately, Nancy was there, her hand cracking across my face for the third time. “What are you doing? Jackson tried to help you! You serve up this filth and then attack the champion? Your family was always a fraud, Sam. You just bought your way to the top.” She stood there, righteous and indignant, completely forgetting that when she was a starving orphan, it was my grandfather who paid her tuition and put clothes on her back. I broke. Right there in front of the world, I screamed at Jackson. “Why? Why did you kill him?” Nancy’s face twisted. “Shut up! What are you talking about? Henry died of natural causes! Stop lying!” Jackson began to sob. “I know you hate seeing me happy, Sam, but to accuse me of murder?” “You admitted it! You cut off my hands in that basement! I’m calling the police!” “ENOUGH!” Nancy screamed. “Stop slandering him! You’ve been living in my house, being pampered, and now you’re throwing a tantrum because you want my attention? You’re sick!” She turned to the cameras, to the millions watching. “Don’t believe a word he says. He’s obsessed with his image. He would never let anything happen to his ‘artist’s hands.’” She looked at me with pure disappointment. “I was actually going to give you a custom watch today as a peace offering. I can’t believe I wasted my time on you.” The crowd was whipped into a state of feral rage. People started jumping the barriers, swarming the stage to get at me. I curled into a ball, trying to shield myself with my stumps. “Stop! Please! I’m not lying! My hands are gone! Look at me!” But no one listened. Nancy stepped forward and kicked me in the arm. “Stop acting. You’re a terrible liar, Sam.” In the chaos, Jackson “tripped,” spilling a pot of boiling clarified butter directly onto my back and arms. The scream that tore from my throat was unearthly. I felt my skin melting, the searing heat bubbling my flesh. The crowd recoiled, horrified by the sound, backing away to avoid the splatter. It was my only chance. I didn’t care about the pain. I began to crawl, desperate to get away from the lights, the cameras, and the monsters. But Nancy grabbed my shirt. The fabric was soaked in oil and sweat. As she pulled, the cheap material gave way, ripping entirely off my body. I collapsed, my last shred of dignity stripped away. I knelt on the floor, weeping, hiding my face. “Please… don’t look… please just let me go…” But the room went deathly silent. Nancy stood frozen. She stared at my arms. Her pupils dilated. Her voice was a broken, trembling reed. “Sam… where… where are your hands?”

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The first thing I did when I was given a second chance at life was purge the past. I spent the morning incinerating the physical remnants of a decade’s worth of lies. Nancy’s letters—three years’ worth of carefully scripted “devotion”—were fed into the shredder until they were nothing but confetti. The framed photos of Diana and me? I set them ablaze in the fireplace, watching the edges of our smiling faces curl and blacken into ash. In my previous life, I had been the quintessential fool, a supporting character in a drama where I wasn’t even credited in the playbill. I believed Diana when she whispered that she loved me. I believed her so much that I turned down a prestigious fellowship at Oxford just to stay by her side. And for what? She left anyway. She followed Felix halfway across the world the moment he beckoned, leaving me with nothing but a cold, parting remark: “He needs me more than you do, Ben.” I spent those months living like a ghost. Nancy was the one who pulled me back, or so I thought. She brought me dinner every night, looking at me with those soft, empathetic eyes, telling me she had waited eight years for me to notice her. I thought I had finally found my harbor. She never stayed out late; she never looked at another man. Until the winter of my accident. I spent seven days in the ICU, hovering in the gray space between life and death. Nancy never showed up. Not once. Instead, I drifted in and out of consciousness to the hushed gossip of the night nurses: “Poor guy in Bed 12. His wife is here every day, but she never steps foot in his room. She’s always next door, fussing over that guy, Felix.” Later, I learned the truth. Diana hadn’t gone abroad to be with Felix out of love—she went to pay off his gambling debts. And the money? It had all come from Nancy. In the twisted play these three were staging, I was nothing more than the human ATM and the emotional safety net. Not this time. This time, I moved fast. I put the house on the market and booked two one-way tickets to London for myself and my grandfather before the first act could even begin. … “The guy in Bed 12 is breaking my heart. His wife is here around the clock, but she hasn’t even looked in on him.” “I know. She goes straight to the room next door. That patient, Felix? She won’t leave his side.” The nurses’ voices filtered through the heavy door of the ICU. My body was shattered from the car wreck, a map of broken bones and internal bleeding. My eyes were fused shut, but my mind was sharp, recording every word. I heard the nurses call Nancy’s phone over and over. She never picked up. She was busy with someone more important. The “redemption” I thought I’d found with her was just another layer of the scam. I tried to scream, to wake up, to demand an explanation, but my strength failed. The last thing I “saw” was the jagged rhythm of my heart monitor smoothing out into a single, eternal horizontal line. When I opened my eyes again, the sunlight was blinding. I was sitting at my old mahogany desk. The calendar read three months before the deadline for the Oxford fellowship—the one I had thrown away for Diana in my past life. I didn’t hesitate. I picked up the phone and dialed the International Programs office. “Professor? It’s Ben. I’m calling to confirm my acceptance of the exchange program. I’d like to finalize the paperwork today.” The professor sounded relieved. “Glad to hear it, Ben. It would have been a tragedy to waste talent like yours over… well, anything.” A tragedy. Yes. Throwing away a future for a woman who viewed me as a footnote wasn’t just a tragedy; it was a farce. After hanging up, I called a real estate agent. I told him I wanted my parents’ house sold—cash only, fast closing. No exceptions. As I finished the call, Diana’s name flashed on my screen. I felt a phantom ache in my chest, the ghost of a love that had once consumed me. “Ben,” she said, her voice cool and commanding. “Felix is struggling with his senior thesis. His design is a mess. You’re the best in the department; I need you to go over to his place and fix it for him.” Always Felix. He was the invisible third person in our bed, the constant shadow over our dinners. In my past life, I had pulled three all-nighters to rebuild his project from scratch. When he won the departmental award, my name wasn’t even mentioned in the fine print. Diana’s excuse back then? “Felix has such a fragile constitution, Ben. He needs this win for his resume more than you do.” I gripped the phone, a cold smile touching my lips. “Sure, Diana. Have him email me the files.” “Good boy,” she said. One word. Like she was patting a golden retriever. I looked out the window, marveling at how easily I used to be manipulated. An hour later, there was a knock at the door. It was Nancy, holding a takeout bag from my favorite dim sum place. She set the containers out with practiced grace, her expression a mask of gentle concern. “Eat while it’s hot, Ben. I know you’ve been stressed helping Diana and Felix. Don’t burn yourself out.” She always appeared right when Diana’s coldness reached a breaking point, playing the role of the nurturing alternative. “You know,” she added, her tone conversational, “Felix’s project is so vital. Diana is just worried. He’s been sickly since they were kids; he can’t handle the pressure like you can.” The script was so predictable. Felix was weak, so he deserved everything. I was strong, so I deserved to be bled dry. I picked up a dumpling and smiled at her. “I get it, Nancy. I won’t make things difficult for Diana.” Nancy smiled back, satisfied. They both thought I was still the same Ben—the man who would compromise his soul for a scrap of affection. The next day, I took my laptop to the campus library to finish my visa application. As I scanned the aisles for references, I saw them. Diana and Felix were tucked into a corner booth. Felix was leaning into her, his head on her shoulder. He looked perfectly healthy—flushed and laughing. “Diana, I don’t know what I’d do without you,” he whispered. She looked at him with a tenderness she had never afforded me. “Silly boy,” she murmured. When Diana stood up to get a coffee, she spotted me. Her expression hardened instantly. My presence was an intrusion on their curated intimacy. I didn’t storm over. I didn’t demand an explanation. I simply caught her eye and gave her a polite, distant nod before returning to my books. I could feel her gaze burning into the back of my neck, confused by my lack of reaction. I didn’t care. My countdown had already started. I didn’t touch a single file of Felix’s thesis. Two days later, Diana cornered me in the library. She snatched the book out of my hands and slammed it onto the table. The loud thud drew glares from the surrounding students. “Ben, what the hell? I told you to help Felix. Why are you sitting here reading trash?” I looked up at her, then at Felix, who was hovering behind her with a practiced look of innocence. “I’m doing my own research,” I said simply. “What research could possibly be more important than Felix’s graduation?” Diana hissed. She pulled Felix forward. “He hasn’t slept in days worrying about this, and you’re just… ignoring him?” Felix touched her sleeve, his voice a soft whine. “Diana, don’t. Ben probably has his own stuff to do. I’ll just… I’ll figure it out. Even if I fail.” Diana’s eyes flashed with anger. “See? Even now, he’s more considerate than you! Ben, I’m saying this one last time: I want that completed proposal on my desk in a week.” I looked at them, the golden boy and his protector, and felt nothing but a dull sense of relief. “Understood,” I said. She assumed I had folded. She softened slightly, gave my shoulder a dismissive pat, and led Felix away. I went back to my work. It was the last time I’d ever let her see me as her subordinate. The calls started becoming frantic as the deadline approached. “Ben! Where is the file? It’s due in forty-eight hours!” Diana’s voice was shrill over the phone. I turned on the faucet in the kitchen, letting the rush of water fill the silence. “I’m sorry, Diana. My grandfather hasn’t been feeling well. I’ve been at the hospital with him. Everything else has had to take a backseat.” “Felix’s future depends on this! Can’t your grandfather’s nurse handle it? Just finish the damn project, Ben.” My grandfather, the man who raised me, was less important to her than a plagiarized thesis for a boy who had never worked a day in his life. “I’ll see what I can do,” I lied. “You’d better. If Felix doesn’t graduate, we are done.” She slammed the phone down. I stared at my reflection in the mirror. I couldn’t believe I had ever loved a woman who held me in such low Brooke-style contempt. The real estate agent called ten minutes later. He had a buyer. All cash, quick close, way over asking price. I told him to send the contract immediately. To make the “move” look real, I needed to get rid of some of the heavy antique furniture my parents had left behind. It was a two-person job, and I decided to test Nancy one last time. “Nancy? Are you free? I need to move some of the heavy stuff out of the house today. Could use a hand.” There was a long pause. Then, the sound of a faint, pathetic cough in the background. Felix. “Oh, Ben, I’m so sorry. I’m stuck at Felix’s. He’s running a fever and I’m the only one here to look after him. Can’t you just hire movers? I’ll Venmo you the money later.” Always Felix. “Don’t worry about it,” I said, my voice steady. “Take care of him.” I hung up and booked a professional moving crew within five minutes. If money could buy my freedom from their “favors,” it was worth every cent. An hour later, I called Nancy back. My voice was a strained whisper. “Nancy… my stomach. It’s bad. I think I need to go to the ER. I’m at City General.” “Stay put! I’m coming!” she cried. I sat on a cold plastic bench in the hospital lobby, watching the automatic doors. Thirty minutes later, Nancy burst through. She was breathless, eyes darting around frantically. But she didn’t see me. She didn’t even look toward the waiting area. She ran straight past me, sprinting toward the Orthopedics wing. I stood up and followed her at a distance. Outside an exam room, Felix was sitting in a wheelchair, his ankle wrapped in a light bandage. He was crying—fat, theatrical tears. Nancy dropped to her knees in front of him, her face a mask of genuine agony. “It’s okay, baby, it’s okay. The doctor said it’s just a minor sprain. You’ll be fine in a few days.” “But it hurts so much,” Felix whimpered, leaning his head against hers. She reached out to touch his ankle, her hands trembling with a tenderness she had never shown me even when I had a 103-degree flu. This was the “care” I had been promised in the ICU. It had been happening long before the accident. I stepped out from behind the pillar. “Nancy?” She jumped, nearly knocking Felix over. Her face went pale. “Ben? What… why are you here?” Felix’s tears vanished instantly. His eyes narrowed, flashing a look of pure, territorial triumph. “Stomach pains,” I said, patting my midsection. “I was just heading to get my prescription.” “Are you… are you okay?” Nancy stammered, standing up. “I’ll live. It’s an old issue.” I looked at Felix. “Looks like you’ve got your hands full, though. I’ll let you get back to it. I can find my own way home.” I didn’t wait for her to explain. I walked away, knowing that my “jealous but resigned” act would keep them from suspecting anything until it was too late. The day I signed the closing papers and saw the wire transfer hit my account, the sun was shining. I went straight to the registrar’s office, filed for an indefinite leave of absence, and finalized my student visa. That weekend, a mutual friend organized a karaoke night. I knew Diana and Nancy would be there. To keep up appearances, I went. The neon-lit room was thick with the smell of cheap beer and perfume. After an hour, Felix, clutching a bag of dice, stood up with a grin. “Let’s play King’s Game! Whoever draws the King gets to make any two people do whatever they want!” The room cheered. Diana and Nancy laughed, looking at Felix with indulgent eyes. Naturally, Felix drew the King in the first round. He probably cheated. “I command… Number 2 and Number 5 to reenact the ‘I’m flying’ scene from Titanic!” Everyone revealed their cards. I was Number 2. Diana, with a look of visible annoyance, flipped over Number 5. The room exploded into whistles and jeers. “Come on, Ben! Your big moment!” “Diana, don’t be a killjoy, just hug him!” I was pushed onto the low coffee table in the center of the room. Diana stood in front of me, her arms crossed, looking like she’d rather be anywhere else. Nancy laughed from the couch. “Hurry up, Diana. Don’t keep us waiting. Ben, open your arms!” I stood there, stiff and humiliated, closing my eyes to avoid seeing the disgust on Diana’s face. I waited for the hug. It never came. Instead, I felt a violent shove against my chest. It was Felix. He had leaped up behind me, laughing as he wrapped his arms around me in a mocking embrace. “Look, Diana! Is this better?” But his momentum was too much. I lost my balance on the slick surface of the table. My feet slipped, and I went crashing backward. CRACK. My head hit the sharp corner of a side table. Stars exploded in my vision. Everything went black for a second, then a searing, white-hot pain bloomed at the base of my skull. I fell to the floor, and the impact knocked several drinks over. Ice-cold gin and sticky soda drenched my hair and clothes. The room went silent. Then, I heard it. Diana didn’t gasp. She didn’t run to help. She let out a sharp, mocking snort. “God, Ben. You’re such a buzzkill,” she said, turning back to the group. Nancy just sighed, checking her manicure. “Honestly, Ben, how clumsy can you be? It was just a game.” No one reached out a hand. All eyes were on Felix, who was now pouting, his eyes welling with fake tears. “I’m sorry, Diana… I didn’t mean to… I just wanted to be funny.” Diana pulled him into her side, her voice softening. “It’s okay, sweetie. It’s not your fault. He just can’t keep his feet.” The pain in my head was nauseating. I lay there on the cold, sticky floor, shivering and soaked. I didn’t say a word. I gathered what was left of my dignity, stood up, and walked out of that room. I didn’t look back. I just felt a profound sense of gratitude. The house was sold. The visa was in my bag. I was leaving in three days.

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The day of my third-trimester check-up, I stumbled across a confirmation email for a service package my husband had booked. It wasn’t for a nursery or a postpartum doula. It was for “Post-Abortion Recovery and Wellness.” I thought it was a clerical error, a dark glitch in the system. I was laughing, ready to make a joke about it as he walked into the kitchen, but the look on his face stopped the air in my lungs. He didn’t look confused. He looked resolute. Gideon told me, with a calmness that made my skin crawl, that he’d been seeing a college student. He described her as “kind” and “pure,” someone who didn’t want his money or his title, someone who didn’t want to break up our marriage. But now, this girl was pregnant. And Gideon had decided he couldn’t let her suffer the “stigma.” He wanted her child to be born with the legitimacy of his name. Ten minutes later, I was forced onto an ultrasound table. My body went rigid, a cold sweat breaking out as the technician applied the gel. My voice shook so hard I could barely form the words. I asked him if he was divorcing me to marry her. Gideon didn’t look away. He gripped my hand, his thumb stroking my knuckles while he used a paper towel to wipe the excess gel from my swollen belly. He gave me a thin, patronizing smile. He reminded me that when he married me, he promised I would be his only wife. He pointed out that both my parents were gone—that if he left me, I’d have nowhere to go. His plan was simple, and sick: I would adopt the girl’s baby. My own pregnancy had to be “terminated” because he was afraid that if I had my own flesh and blood, I would never truly love the child he shared with her. He slid a surgical consent form onto my lap. He told me to be a “good girl,” promising that I would always be the mistress of this house, that no one could ever take my seat at the table. I looked at him—really looked at him—for a long time. Then I stood up, my legs feeling like lead, and walked toward the operating room. At the threshold, I stopped. I told him he didn’t need to worry. I told him I hoped he’d never regret the choice he made today. He will never know the truth. He will never know that in this entire world, I am the only person capable of carrying a child for a man with a zero sperm count. 1 I didn’t wake up until three days later. The first thing I heard through the haze of anesthesia was a hushed, panicked conversation. “Mr. Scott, that was an incredible risk. Forcing a late-term termination at eight months is dangerous enough, but demanding a total hysterectomy at the same time? Your wife nearly bled out on the table. We almost lost her.” Gideon’s voice was dismissive, lacking even a hint of tremor. “I made a promise to Daisy. I told her I would only ever have one child, and it would be hers. The only way to guarantee that was to make sure Isabel couldn’t try again.” As his eyes shifted toward the bed, they met mine. He didn’t flinch. He didn’t look guilty. He simply reached out and tucked the thermal blanket around my shoulders with a sigh of feigned exhaustion. “You heard that, didn’t you?” he said, his tone bordering on a pout. “I didn’t have much choice, Isabel. Daisy said she’d only feel comfortable with the adoption if the ‘other mother’ was physically unable to conceive. Since you were already going under for the procedure, I figured we’d save you a second surgery later and just take care of it all at once.” He saw the tears leaking from the corners of my eyes and wiped them away with a thumb. He actually chuckled. “I didn’t expect the complications, but look at the bright side—I’d hired the best OB-GYN in the state for Daisy, and he happened to be in the building. You should thank her. Her ‘blessings’ are the only reason you’re still breathing.” My body began to shake. I summoned every ounce of strength I had left to raise my hand and swing at his face. My chest felt like it was being ripped open from the inside out. “Gideon… you’re a monster.” But my hand was weak. It barely grazed his cheek, leaving nothing but a faint streak of salt. Suddenly, a small, lithe figure shrieked and lunged toward the bed. A sharp crack echoed through the room as her palm collided with my face. I fell back against the pillows, my oxygen mask slipping, gasping for air like a fish out of water. A young girl, eyes brimming with performative tears, stood in front of Gideon like a shield. She screamed at me. “How dare you touch him! Do you have any idea how hard he’s worked? He’s been sitting outside the ICU for three days straight! If I hadn’t been bringing him nutritious meals every day, he would have collapsed! Why do you treat a man this wonderful like your personal punching bag?” I didn’t miss the look in Gideon’s eyes—the flash of raw tenderness and protective heat as he looked at her. I had seen that look before. He’d looked at me that way when I spent a week in the hospital with alcohol poisoning after covering for him at a high-stakes corporate dinner. He’d looked at me that way when I knelt on the floor, sobbing, begging debt collectors not to take his hands, offering them the only heirloom my mother left me just to buy him another month. I had destroyed myself for him, and in the end, it was worth less than a single tear from this girl. The pain was a dull knife carving into my ribs. I propped myself up, looking at the two of them—the devoted lover and his “pure” girl. I let out a jagged, hollow laugh. “Am I supposed to be grateful? Grateful that he killed my baby? Grateful that he gutted me like a fish so I can never be a mother? Grateful that he watched me almost die just so he could keep his little mistress happy?” Daisy’s tears began to fall in earnest. She glared at me with a terrifying, righteous fury. “Fine! It’s all my fault! I’m the villain! Is that what you want? Do you want me to pay for it?” She went manic. She shoved Gideon aside and grabbed a paring knife from the fruit basket on the nightstand, pointing it at her own stomach. “I’ll do it! I’ll cut my baby and my womb out right now if it’ll make you stop being such a bitch!” Gideon lunged for her, grabbing the blade. Blood began to drip from his palm as he wrestled the knife away. He turned to me, his eyes cold and full of genuine hatred. “Isabel, are you happy now?” He scooped the “fainting” Daisy into his arms, carrying her out of the room without looking back. He threw one last sentence over his shoulder. “I think I’ve been too kind to you. I’ve let you believe you actually have a say in how this works. Since you want to be difficult, you can find out what life is like without my protection.” I watched them leave, laughing through the tears. The man who once swore he’d spend his life shielding me from the world was the one who had finally set it on fire. Gideon’s security detail didn’t wait. They dragged me out of the bed, barely giving me time to find my shoes. “As of this moment, Mr. Scott is rescinding all privileges,” the guard said, his voice a mechanical drone. “If you want to stay in this private wing, you’ll need to pay the balance yourself.” I smiled, a bitter, broken thing, and turned toward the exit. “Don’t worry,” I whispered. “I don’t want anything that belongs to Gideon Scott ever again.” 2 My phone, my credit cards, my keys—all gone. They were “company property.” I stood on the street corner, clutching my hospital gown closed under a thin coat, trying to hail a cab. Every time a car slowed down, one of Gideon’s shadows would step forward. “Unless you want to be blacklisted by Summit Group, keep driving,” they’d say. The drivers would look at me with pity, shake their heads, and floor it. The guard looked at my trembling legs and spoke with cold detachment. “Mr. Scott wanted me to give you a message. This is what happens when you’re ungrateful. If you’re willing to apologize to Miss Daisy and agree to act as her live-in caretaker during the rest of her pregnancy, he’ll let me take you home.” I didn’t even look at him. I just started walking. A thin trail of blood began to seep down my leg, staining the pavement, drawing stares from the evening commuters. I was numb to it. I walked until the sun dipped below the skyline, until the city lights felt like needles in my eyes, and finally, I reached the house. Our house. The windows were glowing, a warm invitation against the night chill. I reached out with frozen fingers to punch in the security code. Beep-beep. Access Denied. I tried again. And again. The system hissed at me with every failure. Finally, the housekeeper opened the door. She didn’t look at me with concern. She looked at me with smug disdain. “Ma’am, stop. You know the rules. Until you apologize to Mr. Scott, you aren’t allowed to use anything he paid for. And he paid for this house.” She looked me up and down, a sneer curling her lip. “If I were you, I’d just say sorry. Look at who he is. There are a thousand women waiting in line for your spot. You’re in your thirties, you have no family left, and now you can’t even have kids… he’s being generous by not divorcing you. Why make a scene?” “I’m not coming in,” I said, my voice raspy. “I just want one thing.” She scoffed. “Everything in there belongs to him. What could you possibly own? You’re probably trying to steal some jewelry to sell, aren’t you?” “I want my medical file,” I said calmly. She rolled her eyes, disappeared inside, and returned a moment later to hurl a brown envelope at my feet. I picked it up. Inside was a lab report from a decade ago. It bore Gideon’s name and a diagnosis: Azoospermia. Permanent infertility. I remembered the day we got those results right before the wedding. I remembered the crushing weight of the secret. Gideon was a man of immense pride, a man who built an empire on the idea of his own perfection. How could he have lived with the knowledge that he was “broken”? How would his competitors have used it against him? But the doctor had told me a secret back then. My biology was an anomaly. Something in my hormonal makeup was capable of “triggering” his dormant, non-motile sperm. It was a one-in-a-million medical fluke. “Mrs. Scott, your husband is a lucky man,” the specialist had told me. “I’ve never seen a compatibility like this. You are quite literally the only person on earth who could give him a biological child.” I had intended to take that secret to my grave. I wanted to protect his ego. I wanted him to feel whole. I never imagined I would be the one to tear the veil down. I took the last bit of cash I had hidden in my coat pocket and went to a 24-hour copy center. I made twenty copies of that report. I called a courier service. “Deliver these immediately,” I told the man, giving him the addresses of every rival CEO in the city. “Tell them it’s a wedding gift from the former Mrs. Scott. They’ll tip you well.” Gideon, this is the last thing I’m giving you. I hope you enjoy the fallout. 3 I didn’t go back to the mansion. I went to the tiny, one-bedroom walk-up we’d lived in when we first started the company. Back then, we were broke. We lived on instant noodles and dreams. Gideon used to lie to me, saying he’d already eaten at a business meeting so I could have his portion of the food. I’d wake up at 2 AM and see him at the kitchen sink, drinking glass after glass of tap water just to stop the hunger pangs. We got married in that living room. No guests. Just a pair of cheap silver bands that cost less than fifty bucks. That place meant everything to me. Even after we moved into the ten-million-dollar penthouse, I’d secretly bought the unit from the landlord. I used to imagine us retiring there, going back to the beginning when things were simple. I never thought I’d be returning there because the end had come. I turned the key and pushed open the door. My heart stopped. There, on the worn-out thrift store sofa, were two bodies tangled together. And the silk pajamas I’d kept in the closet—the ones Gideon and I bought as our first “luxury” purchase—were draped over Gideon and Daisy. My brain went white. “Gideon! How could you bring her here? You know what this place is—” Daisy didn’t let me finish. She moved with practiced speed, slapping herself across the face so hard her cheek reddened instantly. She threw herself in front of Gideon, weeping. “Isabel, I’m sorry! I just wanted to see where Gideon grew up! I begged him to bring me here! Please, if you’re angry, hit me, just don’t hurt him!” Gideon’s face transformed with fury. He cupped her “injured” face, blowing on her cheek as if she were a child. Then he looked at the guard behind me. A massive hand gripped my arm. A heavy palm slammed into my cheek. Once. Twice. My ears began to ring. They didn’t stop until I was slumped on the floor, gasping. Gideon looked down at me, his expression flat. “Why do you have to make this so difficult, Isabel? If you’re feeling unwell, go back to the hospital. Why are you stalking us?” “Home?” I whispered, tasting blood. “Do I still have a home?” I looked at him, my eyes burning. “Why this place, Gideon? You can screw whoever you want, but why did you have to ruin this? The Gideon I loved at twenty was the only thing I had left. Why did you have to kill him too?” Gideon’s eyes flickered for a second—a ghost of a memory—but then they hardened into obsidian. “Ruin it? I built it! If it wasn’t for me, you’d still be rotting in a hole like this. Don’t forget, the money you used to buy this place came from my accounts. It’s mine. I’ll do whatever I want with it.” He let out a sharp, jagged laugh. “You think I’m making it dirty? Isabel, I don’t care about this dump. I’ll burn it to the ground before I let you hold it over my head.” He signaled the guards to drag me outside. I watched, paralyzed, as they hauled in several canisters of gasoline and a few industrial fire-starters. With a single flick of his lighter, the only place where we were ever truly happy went up in a roar of orange flame. Through the wall of heat and smoke, my tears wouldn’t stop. Gideon stared at my face, his anger seemingly sated by the destruction. His voice dropped to a cold, clinical low. “Isabel, what will it take for you to understand? I gave you the Scott name. I gave you the penthouse, the Birkin bags, the couture gowns you’re wearing right now—things most people couldn’t earn in three lifetimes. Wasn’t that enough?” “You’re not young anymore. Did you really think I’d stay in love with a fading woman forever? I’m giving you dignity. I’m giving you a life of luxury. All I asked was for you to keep your eyes closed and make room for Daisy and the baby. Is that so hard?” I looked into his eyes, and for the first time, I felt nothing but a deep, hollow pity. “I won’t do it.” “Gideon, you just burned the last bridge. I want a divorce.” His jaw tightened. “Divorce? Never. Even if I don’t love you, you’re a part of the Scott brand. I’m not letting you go.” He stepped closer, his voice a hiss. “I never owed you anything, Isabel. If anything, I owe Daisy. I’ve made her live in the shadows during the best years of her life. I tried to give you a graceful way out, but you insisted on making it ugly.” He turned away from me and dropped to one knee in front of Daisy. He pulled a massive, 10-carat diamond from his pocket. “Daisy, I’m sorry I found you so late. I can’t give you a legal marriage certificate yet, but I’m going to give you the biggest wedding this city has ever seen. I want everyone to know you’re the one I love.” Daisy gasped, her eyes shining with triumph, but then she looked at me and pouted. “I can’t, Gideon. I love you, so I’ve been willing to be the ‘other woman,’ but I can’t stand the thought of the whole world calling me a home-wrecker. Unless…” She turned her venomous gaze toward me. “Unless the ‘first wife’ stands as our witness. Unless she tells the world that the woman who isn’t loved is the real intruder. Unless she admits she is the third wheel.” 4 I met the girl’s malicious gaze with a blank stare. Gideon, seeing my silence, twisted the knife. “Isabel, don’t forget where your parents are buried. That private cemetery? I own the deed to that plot. You wouldn’t want them to end up like this house… would you?” It felt like he’d reached into my chest and squeezed my heart until it burst. I could taste the copper in my throat. I nodded slowly. “Fine. I’ll be there.” Daisy squealed with delight and threw herself into Gideon’s arms. He took her to look at gowns and hotels, but he paused at the door. For a moment, his voice softened. “It’s just a ceremony, Isabel. It doesn’t change your legal status. Just play along.” “Okay,” I said. He looked at me deeply, finally satisfied. “You don’t need to look after Daisy for now. Go rest. When the baby is born, the three of us will go on a trip. Think of it as your compensation.” “Okay,” I repeated. The day of the “wedding,” Gideon was so paranoid I’d cause a scene that he had guards lock me in the bridal suite early. Daisy was preening in a gown that cost more than a suburban house. “Isabel, the dress is so heavy, I can’t reach my shoes. Be a dear and help me?” Gideon frowned, his eyes shifting to me. I didn’t say a word. I knelt, lifted the layers of lace, and slid the heels onto her feet. Gideon looked at me with a complicated expression—guilt, perhaps, or a lingering sense of wrongness. He opened his mouth to say something, but Daisy pushed him toward the door. “Honey, I’m parched. Go grab me some orange juice?” He smiled, kissed her forehead, and stepped out. The second the door clicked shut, Daisy’s foot lashed out, kicking me square in the chest. I sprawled back as she looked down at me with a sneer. “You think I’m just some gold-digger, don’t you? You have no idea. Gideon and I? We’ve been together for almost ten years.” The shock must have shown on my face, because she laughed. “He said I was too young to suffer through the lean years with him. So he kept me in a condo across town while he used you to build the company. He felt so bad for ‘using’ you that every time he made his first big commissions, he told you the debt collectors took the money. In reality? He was buying me Chanel bags. Whenever I got bored, he’d have those ‘collectors’ come to your house and put on a show so he could siphon more cash to me.” “It was about two million dollars in total. Oh, and that cheap silver bracelet you liked? I threw it in the trash.” I was shaking so hard I couldn’t breathe. Two million dollars. That was the money I’d worked three jobs for. I’d fainted on a factory line once, nearly losing my arm to a machine, just to make sure Gideon’s “debts” were paid. When he found out, he’d held me and cried, saying he was a failure. And all that time… it was a lie. Daisy kept going, her voice a sharp stiletto. “And then you got pregnant. I was so mad I wouldn’t let him touch me. So he staged that ‘celebratory dinner’ with the investors. He made sure they kept pouring you drinks until you miscarried. You were dying on the operating table, and he was on the phone with me, begging me not to be mad at him.” The world went black for a second. “But he still won’t divorce you!” she hissed, her face contorting with rage. “You’re just a habit he can’t quit. You think your ‘history’ makes you special?” She smiled then—a slow, terrifying grin. “Tell me, Isabel… if Gideon thinks you tried to kill his baby, do you think he’ll still care about your ‘history’?” My hair stood on end. I turned to bolt for the door, but she was faster. Daisy grabbed a bottle of champagne and smashed it against her own stomach, letting out a blood-curdling scream. “Gideon! Help me! She’s killing the baby!” The door flew open. Gideon was there in a heartbeat, his face a mask of horror. He grabbed my wrist and threw me across the room. He didn’t see me hit the wall; he only saw the blood beginning to bloom on Daisy’s white skirt. “It wasn’t me…” I tried to say, but his hand was already around my throat, cutting off my air. His eyes were bloodshot, his voice a primal roar. “Isabel! You’d even kill a child? You disgust me!” “You took her baby,” he snarled, his face inches from mine. “So don’t blame me for what happens to your parents.” Through my tears of agony, I heard him bark an order into his radio. “Destroy the graves. I want the headstones crushed and the remains thrown into the sewer. Now.” “NO!” I screamed, a sound that didn’t feel human. “Gideon, you madman! Look at the security cameras! I didn’t touch her!” Daisy scrambled up, sobbing, and ran toward the open window. “The baby is gone! What’s the point of living? I’ll just jump! Go ahead, Isabel, tell him more lies!” Gideon panicked, dropping me to catch her. He held her tight, looking at me with a coldness that froze my blood. “Isabel, you’ve exhausted every ounce of mercy I had. You hurt my family? You’re going to pay.” “Call the police,” he said to his guards. “Tell them she assaulted a pregnant woman. And call the warden at the county jail. Tell him to make sure she doesn’t have a single ‘good’ day inside.” ——– Gideon ignored every red light on the way to the hospital. He ran into the ER with Daisy in his arms. “Save my child! I’ll donate ten million to this hospital if you save my baby!” The doctor on duty jumped, looking at Gideon with a confused frown. “Mr. Scott?” He looked at Gideon, then at the “fainting” Daisy. “Your child? Mr. Scott, you have a documented case of Azoospermia. You’re sterile. How could you have a child?”

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My best friend once told me something she meant as a joke. She said that if we were ever out for dinner and she didn’t touch the hot sauce, the person sitting across from me definitely wasn’t her. I’ve always been a spice fanatic—the kind of person who carries a bottle of habanero flakes in her purse. Bella, on the other hand, used to have the palate of a toddler. She spent a year secretly training herself to handle heat just so she could keep up with me on our Friday night food crawls. By the time she “graduated,” she was ordering the “Nuclear” option right alongside me. Tonight, we were at our favorite dive bar, a place famous for wings that could strip paint off a car. As usual, I ordered a basket of the “Suicide Wings.” But after one tiny bite, she slammed her fork down. She looked at me with a flash of genuine anger and snapped, “Joanna, what the hell is this? You know I can’t do spicy food!” I froze. She was right. She didn’t used to eat spicy food. 1 Memories started flooding back, unbidden and sharp. I live for the burn. For years, every time Bella and I went out, I had to compromise, picking the blandest things on the menu so she could share. She felt so guilty about it that one day she announced she was going into “training.” I laughed, thinking she was bluffing. But she actually did it. She started buying hot sauces from the grocery store, working her way up from mild salsa to jalapeños, then habaneros. I lost count of how many times she called me, crying because her mouth was on fire, but she wouldn’t quit. It took her best part of a year, but she turned herself into a woman who could handle a level-four Thai curry without breaking a sweat. The day she finally did it, she looked as proud as if she’d won an Oscar. “Joanna,” she’d said, beaming, “you never have to order the wimp sauce for me ever again.” Then she’d added that prophetic little joke: “If the day ever comes where I’m sitting across from you and I’m not eating spicy, you better call the cops, because that’s not me.” I’d punched her lightly on the shoulder. “Shut up! Don’t say creepy stuff like that.” But right now, she was spitting a piece of spicy chicken into a napkin, her face twisted in disgust. I stared at the discarded wing, a cold knot forming in my stomach. I waved the server over and hurriedly ordered a side of plain fries and some mild sliders, but my palms were already starting to sweat. The woman sitting across from me… was she really the Bella who had vowed to share a lifetime of spice with me? I stole a glance at her. She was currently mid-rant about a “toxic” girl in her department. Her cadence, her tone, the way she rolled her eyes—it was classic Bella. Perfectly, undeniably her. I tried to tell myself I was being paranoid. Maybe she had an ulcer? Maybe she was just over the whole “spicy” phase? But the unease kept crawling up my chest like ivy. Then, Bella started telling a story about their office happy hour last week. Apparently, a guy from accounting got wasted and confessed his love to the receptionist, only to get a drink poured over his head. She mimicked the guy’s heartbroken, drunken face, squinting her eyes and twisting her mouth, and then she burst out laughing. Her mouth opened wide, showing a row of perfect white teeth. My hand tightened around my glass until my knuckles went white. Bella never laughed like that. She always covered her mouth with her hand. In middle school, she’d chipped half a front tooth in a biking accident. Even though it had been capped and fixed years ago, the habit remained. It was a muscle memory carved into her over a decade. I’d teased her about it a million times. “Your teeth are fine, Bella! Stop hiding them.” And she’d always giggle and say, “I can’t help it. My hand moves faster than my brain.” But the person in front of me didn’t even flinch. She just laughed, open and uninhibited. Avoiding spice could be a stomach issue. But the hand? That was an instinct. That was a decade of subconscious conditioning. You can fake an accent, you can mimic a rhythm of speech, you can even study someone’s opinions. But how do you fake a person’s most deep-seated, unconscious tics? I took a long, hard swallow of my beer, but it couldn’t wash away the terror. The person sitting here wasn’t Bella. Who was she? Why was she pretending? And most importantly… where the hell was the real Bella? 2 I didn’t sleep that night. I lay in the dark, the neon light from the street filtering through my blinds, replaying every second of that dinner. The way she’d recoiled from the chili. The way she’d laughed. I sat up, grabbed my phone, and started scrolling through our chat history. Last week: a selfie of her at her desk with the caption “Drowning in spreadsheets. Send help.” Before that: a link to a TikTok of a cat falling off a fridge. I’d replied with a string of laughing emojis. Then, two weeks ago: “Jo! The Reno is finally done! You have to come over this weekend. First dinner in the new place is mandatory!” I remember that dinner. Her family had been there. Her mom kept praising her cooking; her dad and her brother, Tyler, were so proud of her for buying a place on her own without help. Bella had been glowing that night. But shortly after that, she sent me a voice note that felt… off. “Hey Jo, just wanted to let you know I might be heading out of town for a bit. Some work stuff, maybe overseas. Not sure where yet.” At the time, I figured it was a sudden promotion. I’d asked where she was going, but she’d been vague. “I’ll let you know when it’s settled. I’m gonna miss you, though. We might not see each other for a while.” I’d thought it was sudden, but I didn’t push. Looking at it now, the hair on my arms stood up. Two weeks ago, she was throwing a housewarming party, ecstatic about her new life. Why would she suddenly disappear for “work stuff”? Then I remembered something Bella said the night she signed the closing papers. We were sitting on the floor of her old apartment, drinking cheap Prosecco. She’d hugged her knees, tipsy and sentimental, and whispered, “Jo, I’m never leaving this city. I finally have a place that’s mine. As long as you’re here, I’m here.” A horrifying thought took root. What if the Bella who told me she was leaving was the same “Bella” who couldn’t eat spicy food? What about her family? Did they know she’d been replaced? As soon as the sun came up, I didn’t hesitate. I drove straight to her new condo. I knocked. No answer. I called. Straight to voicemail. But Bella had given me her door code. She’d made me enter it myself the day she moved in—a six-digit string of numbers that was her birthday. “This place is yours as much as mine,” she’d told me. I punched in the numbers. The lock clicked open. The moment I stepped inside, my heart sank. It was too clean. Bella was a lived-in person. She left coats on the sofa; there was always a half-finished bag of pretzels on the coffee table. But this place looked like a staged model home. The air didn’t smell like her vanilla candles. It smelled like bleach. I walked toward the balcony. The row of succulents she loved—the ones she treated like her children—were all dead. The leaves were shriveled and yellow, the soil cracked. Bella would never let them die. Not unless she was gone. I took a shaky breath and walked into the master bedroom. I pulled open the closet. Empty. Every single piece of clothing was gone. I sank to my knees, reaching toward the back corner of the closet floorboard. Bella and I had a tradition. On move-in day, we’d taken a key and carved our initials into the wood, just like we used to do on our school desks in the fifth grade. “Our secret base,” she’d called it, her eyes crinkling. My fingertips found the grooves. The initials were there: B + J. But next to them, someone had scratched a series of numbers—not a date, not a phone number. 302-2-401. 3 I sat on the floor of that empty closet, staring at those numbers for what felt like hours. 302-2-401. It wasn’t a phone number—too short. It wasn’t a birthday. What was she trying to tell me? I broke it down in my head. 302… 2… 401. 302-2-401. I stood up so fast I got dizzy. Bella grew up in an old neighborhood on the South Side. Before the developers started tearing it down, I’d been to her house hundreds of times. Building 302. Entrance 2. Apartment 401. Every time I’d go over to play, her mom would lean out the window and shout, “Bella! Your friend is here!” But that complex had been scheduled for demolition three years ago. Her family had moved out ages ago. Why would she carve that address here? What was waiting for me at the ruins of her childhood home? I sprinted out of the condo. The drive to the South Side took forty minutes. I gripped the steering wheel so hard my hands cramped. As I approached the highway ramp, I checked my rearview mirror. A white van was behind me. It was keeping a steady distance—not tailgating, just… there. I tried to ignore it and merged onto the expressway. The van merged too. I switched lanes. The van switched lanes. My heart started thudding against my ribs. I took the next exit, made three quick turns, and ducked into a side street. The van was still there. Sweat poured down my back. I swerved into a mall parking garage, wound through the levels, and tucked my car into a dark corner. I cut the engine and waited. Ten minutes passed. The van didn’t appear. I leaned back against the headrest, gasping for air. Someone was watching me. If there were cameras at Bella’s new place, or if the smart lock recorded entries… whoever was pretending to be her knew I’d been there. I forced myself to breathe. I pulled out my phone and mounted it on the dashboard, hitting “record” on the video app. Then I sent a text to my coworker, Morgan. “I’m going to check something out. I’m sending you my live location. If you don’t hear from me in two hours, call the police.” Morgan replied instantly: ??? Jo, what’s going on?! I didn’t explain. I shared my location and restarted the car. When I finally reached the old neighborhood, I saw that the demolition was only half-finished. The south side of the block was a graveyard of bricks and twisted rebar. But on the north side, two old brick buildings were still standing, their windows caked in dust, looking like skeletons that had forgotten to fall over. Building 302 was one of them. I walked to the entrance. The dust on the stairs was disturbed—fresh footprints, some large, some small, back and forth. This wasn’t just a squatter. It was too frequent. I followed the tracks up the stairs. Second floor. Third floor. Fourth floor. I reached the door to 401. The sharp, chemical scent of bleach drifted through the door frame. It was the exact same smell from Bella’s new condo. I stood there, my hand hovering over the wood. I didn’t dare knock. This was her family’s old place. The only people who would have a key were her parents or her brother. Bella always told me how much her parents loved her. How Tyler, though quiet, was always protective. She’d even secretly added her parents’ names to the deed of her new house as a surprise for their retirement. She gave everything to that family. She loved them with every fiber of her being. But the final clue she’d carved into her closet led here. To her roots. To the people she trusted most. I stood at the door of 401, trying to steady my shaking hands, and finally tried the knob. It was locked. I pushed, but it wouldn’t budge. The smell of bleach was stronger now, seeping out of the cracks, but I was stuck on the outside. As I walked back down the stairs, my feet felt like lead. Near the entrance, an elderly woman in a faded cardigan was sitting on a stone bench, peeling vegetables. I recognized her. Mrs. Gable. She used to live right below Bella’s family. When we were kids, she used to give us peppermint candies whenever we passed her door. “Mrs. Gable?” She squinted at me through thick glasses. “Is that… Joanna?” “Yes, it’s me.” “Oh, sweetheart, it’s been years! You looking for Bella? They moved out a long time ago.” I knelt down beside her. “Mrs. Gable, has anyone been back lately? To the old apartment upstairs?” The old woman thought for a moment, then nodded. “Yes. A couple of weeks ago. Her parents were here.” My heart skipped a beat. “When?” “Last week, maybe? I can’t be sure. They came at night in a white van. I heard the noise and looked out my window.” A van. A white van. Just like the one that had been following me. 4 “Was it just them?” “And the son. The three of them together.” I clenched my fists. “How long were they here?” “Not long. Maybe an hour. They carried a large trunk up. When they came back down, they were empty-handed.” A trunk. Carried up, but never brought back down. “What kind of trunk? Did you see it?” The old lady shook the water off her greens. “Black. Plastic, I think. Big. The son carried it up by himself. Looked heavy.” “And no one’s been back since?” “No. Just that once.” She went back to her vegetables, adding casually, “Moving things in the middle of the night… I thought it was strange. Why not do it in the light of day?” I couldn’t answer. A draft blew out of the stairwell, carrying the faint tail-end of that bleach smell. I slowly stood up and looked up at the grey, dusty window of the fourth floor. Every nerve in my body was screaming. I called 911. My voice was shaking so badly the operator had to ask me to repeat the address twice. “I think my friend has been hurt. Building 302, Apt 401. There’s a powerful smell of chemicals coming from inside.” The operator asked for my name. I gave it. They asked for my friend’s name. I opened my mouth, but the name “Bella” got stuck in my throat. When it finally came out, it was a sob. The police said they’d be there in five minutes. I waited by the entrance. Five minutes. Every second felt like a needle pricking my skin. I leaned against the brick wall, staring up at the fourth floor. My mind was full of Bella. The way she’d move into my house when we were kids just because she was bored. The way she’d stood up to the bullies in middle school, winking at me while her mom got lectured by the principal. The night we graduated college, she’d been so drunk, clutching my hand and saying: “Jo, I’m the luckiest person in the world because I have you. And because my parents are so good to me. I’m just… I’m so happy.” She’d had a red nose and teary eyes, smiling like a fool. The tears finally spilled over my cheeks. Bella, the people you loved—the ones you said were so “good” to you—what did they do? Screaming sirens cut through the air. Two cruisers pulled up, and five or six officers jumped out. The lead was a middle-aged detective—Detective Cooper. He asked me a few quick questions and then led his team up the stairs. I followed, but was stopped at the fourth-floor landing. “Stay back, Miss. Don’t come any closer.” I heard the sound of a door being breached. The heavy thud of wood. Then, a young officer stumbled out of the apartment, leaning against the hallway wall, retching. Detective Cooper’s voice came from inside, low and grim. “Call the ME.” My legs gave out. I tried to rush in, but an officer caught me. “You can’t go in there!” “Let me see her! Just let me see her!” I fought with everything I had. I was screaming, hysterical. The officer couldn’t hold me back, and finally, Detective Cooper stepped out. He looked at me for a long beat. “Are you sure?” “She’s my best friend!” He stepped aside. I walked in. In the small storage room, a black plastic trunk had been moved aside by the police. In the corner behind it, a floorboard had been pried up. Underneath, in the shallow crawlspace, was a body. I recognized the necklace around her throat. The one I’d bought her for her birthday last year. I recognized the fitness tracker on her wrist. We’d bought them together on Black Friday so we could compete on daily steps. I recognized the ring on her left ring finger. A cheap, ten-dollar silver band we’d bought at a flea market in high school. We’d each bought one and promised to wear them forever. I fell to my knees on the cold concrete of the storage room. I didn’t feel the pain in my joints. I didn’t feel anything at all. The rest is a blur. The scene was cordoned off. The forensic team arrived. Bella was carried out in a black bag. I don’t know how long I sat on the curb outside. It was dark when Detective Cooper walked over to me. “Joanna, the forensics team found a recording on the deceased’s fitness tracker.” I looked up, my eyes burning. “It has a voice memo feature. She managed to record something. I want you to listen to it—see if it helps us understand the context.” I followed him into the back of the police van. He hit play. At first, there was silence. Then, the sound of shallow, terrified breathing. Then, Bella’s voice. It was a whisper, calm but thin, a terrifying stillness that made me shiver. “Jo… if you’re hearing this, it means I’m gone.” “Because I found out. I found out their secret.”

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