Category: English

I was just shooting the breeze with my buddy that day, completely unaware until I happened to glance back and saw Viola standing there. Her face was dark as a thunderhead, practically vibrating with rage. We had been venting about the exhausting, messy realities of dating. I was mid-sentence, casually saying that she was just a placeholder—someone to pass the time with, because compared to Mona, everyone else was just static on the radio. I even brought up her best friend. I said that with the lights off, there wasn’t a damn bit of difference between them anyway, and that faking my way through that little performance had been a total waste of my energy. The truth was, sleeping with her best friend had originally been a desperate, clawing attempt to get back at Viola. But the morning after, I overheard the two of them laughing about it. Viola actually told her friend that it was a calculated move. She said it was just a way to teach me a lesson—that once I felt dirty, once I was terrified she’d throw me away for being tainted, I’d finally stop throwing tantrums and fall in line. Her friend even chimed in to compliment my body, laughing that I was just a little too inhibited, and if I’d let loose a bit more, she would have had the time of her life. But what Viola didn’t see coming was this: I truly, fundamentally, did not give a single damn. 1 The day after I slept with Shirley, Viola showed up at her door. She sank into an armchair, her posture painfully languid, her tone entirely too casual. “Don’t look so tense. I’m not here to read you the riot act. I know Holden came to your place last night.” “I let it happen.” Shirley let out a low whistle. Viola lit a cigarette, the flame illuminating the sharp angles of her face. “How was he?” “Pretty damn good,” Shirley said, sinking back into the opposite sofa, a reminiscent gleam in her eyes. “I see why you keep him around. The boy’s got fire. Built perfectly, firm everywhere it counts.” “He’s just wound a little tight. If he leaned into it, he’d be lethal.” “And that look on his face—like he was right on the edge of crying? Jesus, it was so pure it almost hurt. Thinking about it now makes me…” Viola kept smiling, but the expression was entirely localized to her mouth. It never reached her eyes. “Still,” Shirley mused, “you knew he was only crawling into my bed to get back at you. Why give him the green light?” “Because now he’ll learn his place,” Viola said, her voice completely flat. “He’s been acting out lately. Throwing fits, testing my patience. It was getting exhausting. Once he realizes that throwing a tantrum gets him absolutely nowhere, he’ll stop.” Shirley looked thoroughly entertained. “Aren’t you worried that giving him a taste of the buffet will turn your house cat into a stray? What if he decides he likes sneaking out?” Viola let out a dismissive scoff. “He won’t.” “Holden grew up in the foster system. He’s been starved of affection his entire life. You give a guy like that a single drop of warmth, and he treats you like a life raft. He loves me down to the marrow of his bones. Last night was just a blind, impulsive lashing out because he was hurt. He doesn’t have the spine to make a habit of it.” She tapped her cigarette against the ashtray, the words spilling out with a cloud of grey smoke. “I know how he ticks. Once the anger burns off, the guilt is going to eat him alive. He’s going to feel filthy. He’s going to be terrified that I’ll look at him and see something used. After this, he’ll be perfectly docile. No more shouting, no more crying. Low maintenance.” “Let him cross the line once, and I buy myself a lifetime of absolute obedience.” “It’s a good return on investment.” Shirley clicked her tongue, giving a slow, mocking round of applause. “Spoken like a true CEO. You train your men the way people train dogs.” “But from what I remember, Holden is practically a saint. The guy doesn’t have a mean bone in his body. What the hell did you do to push him over the edge? Was it… because of Hayden?” “Don’t tell me he walked in on you two—” Shirley made an explicit gesture with her hands, a wicked grin spreading across her face. Viola shot her a dead-eyed glare. “Keep your mind out of the gutter. He just saw us kissing.” Shirley whistled again. “Seriously though, what’s the endgame here? Hayden is back in the States. Who are you picking? He’s the ghost you’ve been chasing for a decade.” “You only keep Holden around because their names sound the same, and they have the same jawline.” “Hayden isn’t going to share you.” The cigarette smoke veiled Viola’s face, blurring the hard lines of her expression. She let the silence stretch out. “I’ll deal with it when I have to,” she finally said. “Holden can’t survive without me. Worst case scenario, I keep him set up somewhere quiet.” “He’s naïve. If I don’t protect him, this city will chew him up.” Then, remembering something, she shot Shirley an ice-cold look. “You made him use protection, right?” Shirley froze, taking a fraction of a second too long to recover. “Obviously.” Viola crushed her cigarette into the glass tray. She pulled her trench coat tight around her shoulders and stood up, her voice dropping to a glacial chill. “I let you take a bite out of my property last night. But hear me clearly.” “There won’t be a next time.” 2 It was high noon, and the California sun was relentless and bright. I had thrown on a fresh outfit and was in remarkably good spirits as I walked into the diner to meet Cam. The second I slid into the booth, Cam grabbed my shoulders, checking me over like I’d just survived a car wreck. “Are you okay? Seriously, man, what’s going on?” I laughed, batting his hands away. “I’m fine. Never better.” Cam wasn’t buying it. “Are you sure? When you called me last night, you were barely making sense. I kept asking what was wrong, and you just went dead silent and hung up. Then it went straight to voicemail. I was losing my mind, thinking you were in a ditch somewhere.” “Level with me. Did Viola do something to you again?” I pulled him down into his seat, leaning back with effortless ease. “I’m genuinely fine. I just dropped my phone and shattered the screen last night. Nobody did anything to me. Viola is being Viola. She pays the bills, keeps the lights on.” I paused for a second, swirling the straw in my iced water before adding casually, “Though, her old flame did just move back from Europe. She hired him as her personal assistant. And yesterday, I just happened to walk in on them swapping spit in her office.” Cam just stared at me. “Dude, you call that fine?!” He looked like he wanted to tear his hair out. “Are you not losing your goddamn mind? She’s cheating on you!” “I told you from day one that woman was toxic, but you treat her like she hangs the moon.” “It’s whatever,” I said, my tone feather-light. “I slept with her best friend anyway.” Dead silence. Cam stared at me. He didn’t even blink. Then, he let out a whispered, earth-shattering, “Holy shit,” so intense that the little girl at the next table jumped. Realizing he was causing a scene, he slapped a hand over his mouth, looking around like we were plotting a heist, before sliding across the vinyl booth to get closer to me. “…Who?” “You don’t know her.” “What the hell were you thinking? Was it a revenge lay?” “Not really.” I pushed my sparkling water toward him with a smile. “I just noticed Shirley has this crescent-moon scar on her shoulder. It looks exactly like Mona’s birthmark. I had a few drinks in me, and for a second… my mind just played a trick on me.” Cam looked at me like I had grown a second head. “You are insane…” “To be honest, it wasn’t even a good time,” I continued smoothly. “Lights off, she’s exactly the same as anyone else. Nothing special to touch. Faking my way through it felt like an acting exercise.” “Viola is slightly better, I guess. She knows what she’s doing, and she’s got a decent face. When she smiles, there’s maybe a twenty percent resemblance. But even that gets old.” “Whatever. If it’s not Mona, they’re all just placeholders.” “Just passing the time. Nobody needs to take it so seriously.” Cam sat there like a statue. He was so stunned he’d forgotten how to breathe. Eventually, entirely out of shock, he slowly raised his hand and gave me a thumbs-up. I clinked my glass against his. “Just one question,” Cam started, his voice a little hoarse. “Who exactly is Mona—” His voice hitched. I followed his frozen, terrified gaze over my shoulder, and found myself staring directly into Viola’s face. It was so dark and stormy you could almost hear the thunder. A ragged, guttural sound tore its way out of her throat. “Holden. Who the hell is Mona?” 3 “You better start talking. What the fuck did you just tell Cam?” After the disaster at the diner, Viola had practically dragged me back to her penthouse by the collar. The air in the room was suffocating. She was practically vibrating with a desperate, furious need to interrogate me. I didn’t feel an ounce of the shame you’re supposed to feel when you’re caught red-handed. Instead, I let my body go completely boneless, sinking deep into the velvet sofa, looking up at her with a highly amused smile. “You heard every word, didn’t you?” I lifted a single finger and pointed it lazily at her chest. “You. Are. A stand-in.” I admitted it with devastating ease. Viola’s eyes were bloodshot. Her arms were visibly shaking. She stared at me with a look so violently intense I thought she might try to peel my skin off. “So all this time you’ve been with me… you were pretending I was someone else?” “Yep.” The answer dropped without a fraction of hesitation. The air in the room smelled like gunpowder. I met her burning, furious gaze without flinching. Right then, her phone buzzed against the marble coffee table. She snatched it up frantically, her eyes darting away from me for just a second to read the screen. A long moment passed. Slowly, the tight, agonizing knot between Viola’s eyebrows began to smooth out. She let out a scoffing laugh, her shoulders dropping as relief washed over her. “Holden, you don’t have to invent these pathetic lies just to get a rise out of me. I’ve had my people run background checks on everyone you know. There is no one named Mona.” “Who put you up to this?” “Was it Cam?” …God, the sheer, staggering arrogance of this woman. I clicked my tongue. “Whatever helps you sleep at night. Believe what you want.” I stood up, planning to walk right past her to the bedroom, but her hand clamped down on my wrist like a vice. “Where were you last night? Why didn’t you come home?” I looked at her, genuinely perplexed. “I was at Shirley’s. You knew that.” Hadn’t she heard that part at the diner? Or did her ego completely block out my critique of her best friend in bed the second she heard the word ‘placeholder’? Maybe this was so far off the script she had written in her head that Viola actually froze, a deep crease forming between her brows. “You slept with her?” Still playing dumb. I didn’t hold back. “You sleep with Hayden, I sleep with your best friend. Seems like a perfectly balanced ledger to me.” She choked on her next breath. She searched my face, her frown deepening into something resembling horror. “Do you not feel completely sick with yourself?” “No? Actually, I feel fantastic. Shirley was literally on her knees, begging for my attention like a stray dog.” The only thing dirty here was the absolute trash-fire of her own ego. Watching the sheer bewilderment crack across her flawless face, it suddenly clicked. I let out a sharp laugh. “Wait. You didn’t actually think I was going to sit around crying because I touched another woman, did you? Did you think I was going to hate myself, beg for your forgiveness, and cling to your legs promising to be a good little boy who does whatever you say?” Her silence was a rigid, paralyzed confirmation. I had hit the bullseye. I let my eyes drag slowly up and down her frame, my expression dripping with open mockery. “Viola, please don’t flatter yourself. I’m not that pathetic, and you’re not that special. Frankly, you’re pretty thoroughly average.” “You aren’t the center of the universe. I’ll survive perfectly fine without you.” My reaction had completely short-circuited the narrative she was trying to control. This time, Viola was genuinely, truly furious. Her jaw locked tight, her expression twisting into something ugly and dark. I sat back and watched her unravel. It was a beautiful view. The veins at her temples and along the back of her hands bulged. She let out a cold, venomous laugh. “Fine. Let’s play it your way, Holden.” “You don’t care, right? You don’t need me? Let’s test that theory.” “Let’s see how many days it takes for you to crawl back.” With that, she spun on her heel, radiating absolute fury, and slammed the front door so hard the walls shook. 4 Here’s the thing: I’m not Holden. I only arrived in this world last night. According to the System, the original owner of this body lost his parents when he was little. He grew up in crushing poverty, was rejected by extended family, and eventually got dumped into the foster system. In a world that decays and rots, being devastatingly beautiful is a curse. Growing up, Holden was constantly harassed by girls who didn’t understand the word ‘no,’ and brutalized by boys who couldn’t stand the sight of him. He never had a single good day in foster care. It forged him into someone deeply insecure, hyper-vigilant, and painfully fragile. In a way, Viola was the first person to ever look at him with something resembling kindness. She was the first person to say, Don’t be afraid. I’m here. When a kid who has been starved of love his entire life finally feels a flicker of warmth, he will throw himself into the fire just to stay close to it. He fell entirely, hopelessly in love with her. And Viola fed the addiction perfectly. She bought him expensive clothes, checked in on him, smothered him with financial security. She gave him everything—except loyalty. Not too long ago, Holden realized his entire life was a pathetic joke. Viola claimed she loved him, but she was still deeply, obsessively in love with her college ex, the golden boy who just flew back from Paris. Not only did Hayden and Holden share a striking physical resemblance, especially in the sharp curve of their profiles. What completely broke him was discovering the mole. Holden had a small, reddish mole on his chest—the exact spot Viola was obsessed with biting and kissing when they were in bed. He realized Hayden had the exact same mark. In the exact same place. He noticed it when he accidentally walked in on them kissing in her office. Though ‘kissing’ was a generous term; half their clothes were already off. It was obvious where things were heading. The tightrope his sanity had been walking for weeks finally snapped. Holden lost his mind. He wanted to hurt Viola with everything he had. So, he went and slept with her best friend, Shirley. And Viola had been entirely right about him. Halfway through the act, the blistering need for revenge was drowned out by a tidal wave of crushing regret. He started shaking. He started hating his own skin, sobbing and begging Shirley to let him go. But nobody listens to the desperate prayers of the powerless. Holden felt like his life was over. Afterward, he dragged his half-dressed body out into the torrential rain, wandering aimlessly across a bridge, weeping, seriously debating just throwing himself over the edge to make it all stop. Right before the end, he just wanted to hear his best friend’s voice. He called Cam. But before he could even get the words out, a speeding Maybach that couldn’t hit the brakes in time threw him twenty feet into the air. As his broken body hit the asphalt, his consciousness went completely dark. And that’s when I woke up inside him. Honestly, when the System downloaded his memories into my brain, I didn’t feel pity. I felt pure, unadulterated rage. Yes, rage. What Holden did wasn’t revenge; it was self-mutilation. He took his own boundaries, his dignity, his very soul, and tried to use them as a weapon against someone who didn’t care. He didn’t hurt anyone but himself. He dragged his own spirit through the mud and turned into the exact thing he despised. But here is the universal truth: if you don’t cherish yourself, how can you expect anyone else to treat you like you’re worth something? Real revenge doesn’t look like that. You can use people as tools. You can use them as stepping stones. But you never sacrifice yourself in the process. You stay impeccably clean. You stand high above them. And you wait until the people who wronged you are crawling through the filth. Until they are kneeling at your feet. 5 I know exactly how people like Viola operate. Arrogant. Playing the savior while acting like the god of their own little universe. On the surface, she convinced herself she was just keeping a pet, a stand-in for her real love. But in her blind stupidity, she didn’t realize she had actually fallen for him. She took his unconditional devotion for granted, treating him like garbage because she assumed he would never, ever leave. I have a lot of experience dealing with people exactly like her. For three straight days, Viola didn’t set foot in the apartment. And I didn’t send a single text. In the past, whenever they fought, Viola would deploy the silent treatment. Within an hour, Holden would be practically crawling to her, apologizing profusely, over-analyzing everything he did wrong, and taking the blame even when he was entirely innocent. She was completely conditioned to wait for him to cave first. So this time, the absolute, ringing silence was guaranteed to make her lose her mind. Sure enough, at ten o’clock tonight, the front door clicked open. Viola walked in, physically supporting a heavily intoxicated man. I stepped into the hallway, blocking her path. “What do you think you’re doing?” She gave me a cool, dismissive look, deliberately pulling the man closer against her hip. “Hayden had too much to drink. I’m putting him in the guest room for the night.” “If he’s drunk, get him a hotel. He’s not sleeping in the guest room.” My rejection was cold and absolute. Viola feigned annoyance, but I could see the poorly concealed thrill of victory in her eyes. She thought she had predicted my exact reaction. Viola owned several properties across the city. She brought him here entirely on purpose, dragging him right past my face. She wanted to see me crack. She wanted to watch me fight for her. Viola hardened her jaw. “Do you have any idea how dangerous it is for someone this drunk to sleep alone? He could choke on his own vomit. I need to keep an eye on him.” “Stop being childish. Move.” I didn’t budge. “I said, he’s not sleeping in the guest room.” She tilted her chin up, looking every inch the victor, a smug smile finally breaking through her cold facade. “Holden, and you said you didn’t care about me anymore. Look at you, absolutely sick with jealou—” Viola’s entire body went rigid. The words died in her throat. Her eyes locked onto something directly behind me, the color draining from her face in an instant. “Holden. Who the hell is she?!” I glanced back. The woman had just finished showering. Her dark hair hung damp over her shoulders, and she was wearing a silver silk slip dress that clung to a devastatingly perfect hourglass figure. She was wearing the brand-new designer slippers Viola had just bought. She possessed the kind of face and body that instinctively felt like a threat to any woman in the room. I smiled and walked back toward her. “Let me introduce you. This is Mona. The ‘Mona’ I was telling you about. She just flew in from Switzerland today.” “The reason I said no to him staying in the guest room is because…” I dragged the words out, looking at Viola out of the corner of my eye. “…the guest room is currently occupied.”

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I came from the foster system. Ever since the Lancaster family took me in, I had been tethered to Tristan’s side. When we were children, I was his designated study partner. As we grew older, I became his kept woman, a bird in a gilded cage who lived with the constant, humming fear of being discarded. There was a time, though, when Tristan truly adored me. He gave up the underground clubs and the reckless street racing, all for me. He used to shadow my every step, calling me “baby” in a voice so thick with sweetness it felt like drowning. That was until he found the love letter I had written to his older brother, the golden heir of the Lancaster family. In a single heartbeat, every ounce of his tenderness vanished. Now, the nights are different. He pins my wrists to the mattress, bruising my skin, using my body to exorcise his demons. He forces me to look into his eyes, his voice tearing at the edges as he snarls, “Look at me, Margot! Look at me and tell me who the hell I am!” 1 1:00 AM. I was lying in the dark, staring at the ceiling, sleep entirely out of reach. My phone buzzed on the nightstand. It was one of Tristan’s friends. “Hey, Margot. Tristan’s trashed and refusing to leave. Any chance you could come collect him?” Not this again. Third time this month. I let out a heavy, ragged sigh into the quiet room and murmured an agreement. But when I arrived at the VIP lounge, the heavy bass thumping against my ribs, I immediately realized the truth. Tristan wasn’t drunk at all. His friends smirked, nudging each other as I walked in. “Look at that. Good girl Margot, right on cue.” “At his beck and call.” “Well, they don’t call her the most obedient girlfriend in our circle for nothing.” That title—the good, obedient girlfriend—was a recent invention. It only started six months ago, right after Tristan found that letter. Since then, his moods had become a pendulum swinging between cold indifference and volatile cruelty. I had tried to run. Seven times I ran; seven times I was dragged back. The last time was the worst. He locked me down so thoroughly that the household staff had to bring my meals to the edge of the bed. That was when I learned how to play the good girl. No matter who he paraded around, no matter what he did, I remained quiet, docile, invisible. Just like tonight. His childhood friend, Gemma, was clinging to his arm, batting her eyelashes and pouting. I didn’t interrupt. I just found a quiet corner in the leather booth and let their voices wash over me. “Tristan, I really want to go to New Zealand for my birthday,” Gemma whined, pressing herself against him. “Come with me. Please?” Tristan took a slow sip of his bourbon. “Busy.” Gemma’s pout deepened. “But your assistant told me you had a clear schedule next month!” Damn it. I had told her that out of common courtesy, and here she was, throwing me right under the bus. Tristan’s grip on his glass tightened. His gaze flicked toward my corner, dark and unreadable. “My assistant,” he drawled, his voice dripping with sarcasm, “is incredibly dedicated to her job.” “Since she’s so dedicated, maybe she can book our flights?” I lowered my eyes, swallowing the humiliation. Gemma, emboldened, slid across the booth until she was sitting right beside me. She leaned in, her perfume cloying and sweet. “Margot, look, I’ve saved all these travel itineraries. Tell me what you think.” When she doesn’t need me, I’m the assistant. When she does, I’m her best friend. Gemma’s ability to pivot was almost impressive. She shoved her phone screen into my face. “This one is eight days, seven nights. But this one is nine days. Oh, wait, what about the twelve-day package?” I couldn’t fight the sheer force of her feigned enthusiasm. I turned my head and methodically, quietly, began analyzing the pros and cons of each luxury package for her. From across the table, one of Tristan’s friends elbowed him. “Gotta hand it to you, man. You’ve got her trained well. You’re planning a romantic getaway with Gemma, and Margot isn’t even flinching. She’s literally planning the trip for you.” He laughed. “She must be crazy about you.” That was the wrong thing to say. The air in the room suddenly turned to ice. Tristan’s aura darkened, radiating a heavy, suffocating hostility. Crack. He hurled his crystal glass at the floor. Shards of glass exploded outward, raining against the toes of my boots. I looked up. His face was a mask of absolute fury. “Get out,” he snarled. One word. The music seemed to mute. The room froze. Playing my part, I stood up quietly, ready to make myself scarce. Because I knew the signs. The storm was about to break. 2 Ever since the love letter incident, certain words were absolute landmines. Love. Affection. And worst of all: His brother. His friend had just danced on all of them. I was secretly relieved to have an excuse to leave, but before I could reach the door, his voice cracked like a whip. “Margot!” Apparently, I wasn’t the one being told to leave. The rest of the room caught on immediately. They scrambled for the exit, dragging a protesting Gemma with them, and shoved me back inside as they pulled the heavy mahogany doors shut. The silence left behind was deafening. I stood rooted to the spot. Unsure if I should sit. Unsure if I should speak. Finally, he reached out, gripping my waist, and yanked me hard against his chest. He stared down at me for a long, agonizing moment. The fury on his face slowly morphed into a mocking, twisted smirk. “They say you’re crazy about me, Margot,” he whispered, his breath warm against my skin. “What do you think?” A chill raced down my spine. My hands curled into tight fists. I went for deflection. “Tristan, you’ve had too much to drink.” He let out a low hum. “Yeah. I have.” Then his mouth crashed down on mine. It was a bruising, breathless kiss, punishing in its intensity. I didn’t fight back. I just endured it, perfectly pliant. But then his hands moved, slipping under the hem of my blouse, pushing the fabric up aggressively. My eyes flew open in shock. No matter how erratic he had been lately, he had never crossed this line in a public place. 3 I started to struggle, pressing my hands against his chest. His fingers dug into my waist. His tone was dangerously light. “What’s wrong? Tired of playing the good girl?” “Let’s talk about this,” I pleaded softly, my voice trembling. “Let me go.” “Let you go?” He let out a harsh, bitter laugh. “But in that pathetic little letter you wrote to my brother, didn’t you promise him you’d stay by my side and take care of me? It’s bad enough you fake being the perfect girlfriend to my face. But you’re lying to a dead man, too?” Holden had been dead for two years. How could he use his own brother’s ghost as a weapon like this? Before I could process the sting of his words, he caught my hand. He brought my fingers to his lips, kissing my knuckles with a mocking, wicked smile. “Your hands are so talented at writing love letters, Margot,” he murmured against my skin. “I wonder if they’re just as talented at other things.” He dragged my hand down his jaw, tracing his neck, over the rigid muscles of his stomach, moving lower… Tears of panic pricked my eyes. “Tristan, stop! We’re in a club!” Anyone could walk through that door at any second. He arched an eyebrow, entirely unfazed. “Scared?” He leaned in, his voice dropping to a vicious whisper. “When you wrote him that letter, when you decided to use me as a convenient stand-in for a ghost, you should have known this day would come.” He noticed the wetness on my lashes. “Crying?” His thumb brushed away a tear, mockingly gentle. “Shh, don’t cry. I just want you to look at me. Look closely. Inside and out.” He pressed me harder against the wall. “Tell me, where do I resemble him? Is it here? Or here?” “…” 4 I didn’t wake up until noon the next day. Panic flared in my chest as I scrambled out of bed, but the familiar surroundings grounded me. I was in my own apartment. Tristan was here, too. He was slouched on my cheap sofa, completely relaxed. His back was bare, the muscles shifting smoothly, revealing the red scratches I had left on him the night before. He glanced up at me, his expression unreadable. “Go put some clothes on. Helen will be here soon.” Helen had been the Lancaster family’s head housekeeper for twenty years. Why on earth was she coming to my tiny apartment? Seeing my confusion, he clarified, “She’s taking over your meals and daily routine from now on.” I actually laughed. A dry, humorless sound. He obviously thought he had pushed me too far last night and that I was gearing up for run number eight. So, he was bringing in the warden. The obedient facade cracked. I was too exhausted to pretend. “I already told you, I’m done running. Even if I wanted to, I can’t outrun you, and I certainly can’t outrun the Lancasters. You don’t need to put a spy in my house.” He completely ignored my anger. He casually reached for a cigarette from the coffee table and lit it. Within seconds, the acrid scent of tobacco filled my small living room. I hated the smell of smoke. He knew I hated it. But he sat there, taking a long drag, watching me through the haze. My brows knit together. I walked over and snatched the cigarette from his fingers, crushing it into an ashtray. His eyes narrowed dangerously. “My brother didn’t smoke. So now you’re going to ban me from doing it too?” I stared at him, utterly speechless. How did he twist everything back to Holden? His mental gymnastics were exhausting. When I didn’t reply, he stood up. He grabbed the back of my neck, tilting my head up, and crushed his mouth to mine. The bitter taste of ash and nicotine invaded my mouth, burning my throat until my eyes watered. When he finally pulled back, he stared down at me. “You’ve been with me long enough to know, Margot. I am not my brother. Stop pushing me.” Holden again. The ghost of his brother was becoming my personal nightmare. I wiped my mouth, my temper flaring. “You’re right, you’re nothing like him. Holden was a thousand times kinder than you’ll ever be.” Tristan let out a dark, hollow laugh. “If he was so kind, why didn’t you just climb into his bed?” “I would have,” I snapped back, reckless. “I just didn’t get the chance before he died.” “You—!” Tristan looked like he might actually tear the room apart. 5 He didn’t contact me after that day. Even matters regarding Lancaster Enterprises were relayed strictly through his executive assistant, Bennett. I enjoyed the peace and quiet. The only reason I saw him again was because Vicky—the Lancaster matriarch, my adoptive mother in name only—called me. “Margot, Tristan isn’t answering his phone again,” her crisp, aristocratic voice echoed through the speaker. “Tomorrow is the anniversary of Holden’s passing. Be a dear and make sure he comes back to the estate.” I had no power to refuse Vicky. I never did. I dialed Tristan’s number. Gemma answered. “Tristan is at my place,” she said, her voice dripping with smug satisfaction. “He’s decided to take me to New Zealand after all. So, I moved my birthday party up to today. Oh, I totally forgot to invite the assistant. My deepest apologies.” Her petty high school games barely registered. I just felt tired. “When Mr. Lancaster has a moment, please ask him to return my call,” I replied flatly. Gemma gave a dismissive hum and hung up. I waited. From 1:00 PM until 8:00 PM, my phone sat completely silent. When I finally called again, it went straight to voicemail. His phone was off. Left with no choice, I grabbed my coat and headed to Gemma’s estate. 6 Gemma’s pool party was chaotic, loud, and blindingly bright. The place was crawling with trust-fund kids and old money heirs. Most of them knew exactly who I was. Walking through a sea of designer bikinis and tailored swim trunks while wearing a modest button-down shirt and long slacks made me stick out like a sore thumb. I could hear the whispers trailing in my wake. “What is she doing here?” “Chasing after Tristan, obviously. What else does she do?” “I honestly don’t get it. She’s not even that pretty. How did she manage to wrap both Lancaster brothers around her finger?” “She’s a manipulator. I heard that when she was trying to trap the older brother, she actually got his name tattooed on her ankle.” “No way. Really?” “Seriously. Think about it—when was the last time you ever saw her wear a skirt or shorts? She always covers her ankles.” “Damn. Now I kind of want to see it.” I kept my gaze fixed straight ahead, letting the gossip slide off me like water. I was just here to find Tristan. I finally spotted him on the patio, playing poker with Gemma and her inner circle. He didn’t look up, but he felt my presence. He dealt a card, his voice frigid. “What do you want?” “Your mother wants you home,” I said evenly. “Another blind date?” “No. It’s the anniversary.” At the mention of Holden, Tristan went completely rigid. He threw his cards face down on the table, a dark, stormy look washing over his features. “I’m busy. I’m not going.” 7 I had anticipated his refusal. That was why I made sure my phone was fully charged before I left. I calmly pulled out a patio chair, sat down a few feet away, and prepared to wait him out. I hadn’t been sitting for ten minutes when someone suddenly shrieked. “Oh my god! My bracelet is gone!” It was one of Gemma’s best friends. I barely looked up. If you lost your bracelet, go look for it. Why scream about it? But then the whispers started again, growing louder, more pointed. They were circling me. And when they suggested—with fake, breathless concern—that everyone needed to be searched, I understood the play. They wanted to see my ankles. Gemma looked at Tristan, playing the distressed hostess perfectly. “Margot, I know this is awkward. But I’m hosting this, and… well, for my peace of mind, would you just let them check?” I looked down at the hem of my slacks. My voice was deadpan. “I didn’t steal it.” The girls immediately bristled. “Oh, so we just take your word for it?” “If you’re innocent, take off the clothes and prove it.” “Exactly. It’s a pool party. What are you hiding?” I kept my posture rigid. “I didn’t steal it.” Sighing dramatically, Gemma turned to Tristan, silently pleading for him to intervene. Tristan didn’t look at her. He looked at me. He sat back in his chair, swirling his drink, his expression arrogant and detached. He was waiting. Beg me, Margot. Just ask for my help, and I’ll make them stop. I refused to give him the satisfaction. I met Gemma’s eyes, my voice ice-cold. “Call the police.” Gemma’s face flushed with real anger. “Excuse me? I am giving you face because of your history with Tristan. You want to bring the cops to my birthday party? Over a misunderstanding?” She stepped closer, dropping her voice so only I could hear the venom. “Besides, you’re a stray from the foster system. You were raised with nothing. It wouldn’t be the first time trash took something that didn’t belong to them.” The crowd had gathered now, forming a tight, suffocating ring around me. Seeing that Tristan was remaining completely silent, sipping his drink like a bored spectator, Gemma’s friends grew bolder. They lunged. Fingers grabbed at my shirt, pulling and tearing. I fought back, shoving their hands away, but there were too many of them. The buttons of my blouse popped. They yanked it off my shoulders. But that wasn’t what they were looking for. “What about the pants?” one of them sneered. “That’s where she’d hide it. Are you going to take them off, or do we have to do it for you?” I stood there in my bra, my fists clenched so hard my fingernails bit into my palms. My entire body was trembling with absolute, blinding rage. I looked at Tristan. He was still watching. Cold. Unmoved. That indifference hurt more than the tearing of my clothes. It broke something fundamental inside me. “Fine,” I whispered, my voice shaking. “I’ll take them off.” With trembling fingers, I reached for the zipper of my slacks. Tristan swore violently. He finally threw his glass onto the table and stalked over, shoving his way through the circle of girls to stand between me and the crowd. “Enough!” he roared, the sheer volume of his voice making everyone flinch. “It’s a cheap piece of metal. Give me a number, and I’ll wire you the money right now.” I froze, staring at his broad back. He’ll wire the money. Did he think I took it too? Did he honestly believe I was a thief? A terrifying, hollow calm washed over me. I stepped out from behind him, my face entirely blank. “I didn’t steal it,” I said, my voice cutting through the tension like glass. “And I’ll take them off.” Tristan whipped around, his eyes wide. “Margot, are you deaf? I said it’s enough!” He reached out to grab my hands, but I took a sharp step back, putting distance between us. I unzipped my pants and let them drop to the pool deck. I kicked off my shoes, leaving my legs and my ankles completely bare. I looked straight into Gemma’s horrified face. “Are you satisfied?” Then I turned to Tristan. “Are you satisfied?” Gemma was speechless. Tristan looked like he had been struck by lightning. Nobody was looking at a tattoo. The entire crowd was staring at my left ankle, an unsettling silence falling over the patio as they realized what they were looking at. “What… what is that?” someone whispered. “Is that some kind of new jewelry?” “Some weird kink thing?” “Are you blind? Look at the blinking light.” “Is that… a GPS tracker?”

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I realized I could hear people’s darkest thoughts the moment I woke up from a dead faint. I’d been working three jobs back-to-back, surviving on caffeine and the desperate need to save my family. I thought my parents and my sister were dying. I thought the crushing weight of their medical bills was my cross to bear. Then I heard my mother, who had been coughing up blood just an hour ago, complaining in her head about how “low-quality” the theatrical blood tasted. She was already mentally spending my next paycheck on a vintage Chanel bag. I heard my father, the man with the “shattered leg,” grumbling that his muscles were cramping from pretending to be a cripple. He was dreaming of the high-end massage parlor he’d visit once I “cleared the family debt.” Even my “frail” younger sister was mentally drafting a breakup text to her “loser” boyfriend, eager to toss him aside so she could hunt for a richer mark. I watched them perform. I listened to their rehearsed whimpers. I didn’t say a word. I simply reached out and took back the envelope of “surgery money” I’d laid on the table. Later, I went to see my sister’s boyfriend to deliver her message. That’s when I heard his voice. He knew she was dumping him. But his inner monologue wasn’t full of heartbreak—it was full of cold, calculating amusement. He was the sole heir to a tech empire, playing a game of “poverty tourism” to test her love. He was waiting for the moment we’d all regret underestimating him. A sharp, jagged idea took root in my mind. I didn’t deliver the breakup speech. Instead, I feigned a dizzy spell, let my knees buckle, and collapsed straight into his arms. 1 The world spun with practiced precision. I calculated the angle perfectly, letting my body go limp as I fell toward Gideon. “Oh…” I let out a soft, breathless gasp, my forehead landing right in the crook of his neck. Instantly, I was wrapped in a scent that didn’t belong in a dive apartment—it wasn’t the smell of cheap soap or hospital antiseptic. It was expensive cedarwood and cold rain. I smirked inwardly, but kept my face a mask of fragile exhaustion. My hands gripped his shoulders for support, shifting just enough to ensure I couldn’t “quite” find my footing. As I moved, I heard a low, rough groan vibrate in his chest. Wait. Something was wrong. He was supposed to be… paralyzed from the waist down, wasn’t he? A man in a wheelchair shouldn’t have a reaction that visceral, that present. Heat crawled up my neck, but before I could pull away, a large, searing palm clamped onto my waist. The grip was terrifyingly strong—nothing like the weak hold of a chronic patient. I looked up, startled, and collided with a pair of dark, bottomless eyes. The gentle concern he usually wore was gone, replaced by a turbulent, predatory current. On the surface, he looked devastated by the news of the “breakup.” But his mind was a different story: [Tsk. This ‘damsel in distress’ routine is almost painful to watch.] [Though… her waist is surprisingly small.] I didn’t have time to process his hypocrisy. In the next heartbeat, Gideon’s mouth was on mine. The night that followed was a blur of reckless, feverish mistakes. When I finally drifted back to consciousness, my body felt like it had been pulverized. Sunlight stabbed through the gaps in the curtains. I bolted upright, realizing the space beside me was cold. The tangled sheets and the mess on the sofa were the only evidence of last night’s madness. The culprit was sitting across the room, perfectly composed in his wheelchair. He was watching me with an unreadable expression. He had slipped back into his “fragile” persona, making the dominant, fierce man from the night before feel like a fever dream. “I’m sorry,” he said first. His voice was gravelly, thick with rehearsed guilt. “I heard that Judy wanted to leave me, and I… I lost control. I couldn’t handle the rejection.” He paused, looking pained. “I did something unforgivable to you. You can hate me, hit me—I’ll accept whatever you decide.” He looked like a man seeking penance. His mind, however, was a cold machinery: [Ugh, what a hassle. It was one night; why does she look like she’s about to burst into tears? Still… she tasted better than I expected.] A surge of white-hot fury crested in my chest. They were all the same. My sister faked illness for bags; this man faked poverty to play God with people’s emotions. They deserved each other. But I forced my features into a mask of devastation. I pulled the duvet up to my chin, my eyes brimming with tears as my voice trembled. “You… how could we do this? How can I ever look my sister in the eye again?” Gideon blinked, seemingly taken aback by my tears. He looked ashamed. In his head, he sneered: [She really is the dumbest of the lot, isn’t she?] [Can’t see her family is playing her for a fool, and now she’s playing the martyr. Pathetic. We spent hours together last night—how has she not realized my legs work perfectly fine?] I clenched my jaw under the covers. Dumb? Maybe I was, once. I’d nearly worked myself into an early grave to buy medicine that was never needed. If I hadn’t developed this “glitch” in my hearing, I’d still be their slave. But now? Now I was going to play the game. If my sister didn’t want this “poor, broken man,” I’d take him. I’d take him and everything he was hiding. I was going to make sure they all learned exactly what happens when you push a “saint” too far. 2 Over the next few days, life settled into a suffocating rhythm. I still got up before dawn. I still brewed herbal teas and made breakfast. But I quietly quit the three soul-crushing side hustles that had been killing me. My parents and Judy seemed to sense my “idleness.” Their performances grew more dramatic to compensate. One evening, while I was peeling an apple for my father, he let out a heavy, theatrical sigh. “I heard from a friend today,” he started, staring wistfully out the window. “There’s a clinic in Switzerland. They’ve had incredible success with cases like ours.” My mother’s eyes lit up on cue before she slumped back, feigning weakness. “Switzerland? George, we can barely afford the electricity bill. Let’s not burden the girl.” “She’s right, Dad,” Judy added, her voice a fragile whisper. “The care is better there, but the cost… it’s impossible.” I watched this perfectly choreographed play, feeling a cold stone where my heart used to be. The old Caitlin would have been scouring the internet for loans within the hour. They knew exactly which buttons to press. I set the knife down and pinched my own arm hard, forcing the blood to rush to my face. I let my voice shake with “determined” devotion. “Dad, Mom… what are you saying?” I stood up, looking at each of them with wide, shimmering eyes. “As long as there’s a chance, I’m not giving up! Money can be replaced. You can’t.” “But honey… the cost…” my mother whimpered. I gritted my teeth, looking like a woman ready to jump off a cliff for her family. “Don’t worry! If I have to sell my soul, or take out a thousand loans, I’ll get you to that clinic! If it means you’ll get better, I’ll do anything!” The room went silent. And then, I heard it. The synchronized, deafening thrum of three hearts leaping with greedy joy. [Got her! The little idiot actually fell for it!] [Loans? Selling her soul? Haha, she’s so easy to manipulate!] [Finally! Europe! Shopping in Zurich, here I come!] Their faces, however, were masks of heartbreaking gratitude. My mother reached out to squeeze my hand. “Oh, sweetheart, we don’t deserve you.” “I’m a failure as a father,” my dad sobbed, wiping dry eyes. “It’s okay,” I whispered, pulling my hand back gently. “I’ll go look into the costs. Just rest.” The moment the door clicked shut behind me, my smile vanished. Sell my soul? No. If you want money so badly, I’ll “help” you get it. Over the next week, under the guise of “processing international medical visas,” I gathered their ID cards, their passports, and even the forged medical records they’d used to trick me. I didn’t go to a bank. I went to the darkest corners of the city—to the predatory, high-interest “private lenders” who don’t ask questions as long as there’s collateral. An hour later, a massive sum of money—with an interest rate designed to swallow a person whole—was deposited into three brand-new accounts I’d opened in their names. I stepped out into the blinding sunlight and dialed my sister. “Judy?” My voice was sweet enough to cause cavities. “Tell Mom and Dad the good news. I got the money. All of it. You’re going to Switzerland.” I listened to their muffled cheers on the other end, my lips curling into a jagged smile. I hope you’re just as happy when you come back and find the mountain of debt waiting for you. 3 As I left the lender’s office, I spotted a familiar figure at an outdoor cafe across the street. Gideon. He was sipping an espresso, looking entirely too relaxed. I wiped the cold calculation from my face and replaced it with frantic worry. I hurried over to him. “Gideon? Where’s your wheelchair? It’s dangerous for you to be out here alone!” He froze, a flicker of genuine surprise crossing his eyes before he smoothed it over. [This woman… is she actually serious? Does she still think I’m a cripple?] I pretended not to notice his confusion. He set his cup down, his voice dropping into that husky, vulnerable register. “The chair is being serviced. I just needed some air. I felt… trapped.” His eyes flickered to the thick envelope in my hand. “What are you doing in this neighborhood?” I looked away, biting my lip. He reached for the envelope, and I let him “accidentally” see the loan documents. “I… I was trying to secure some funds,” I whispered, my eyes turning red. “But please, don’t tell Judy. I don’t want her to worry about how I’m paying for her treatment.” Gideon stared at me like I was a specimen in a jar. [Is she a saint or just a moron? She’s taking out shark loans for those three parasites?] We sat in a heavy silence for a moment. Then, I stood up and offered my hand. “It’s going to rain. Let me get you home.” Gideon hesitated. I looked at him with pure, unadulterated “kindness.” “I forgot—your legs. I’ll call an Uber, but let me carry you to the curb so you don’t have to struggle.” [Carry me? Has she lost her mind?] Despite his internal mocking, something in my persistence made him yield. He let me hoist his arm over my shoulder. He was heavy—solid muscle—and I buckled slightly, gritting my teeth as I maneuvered him toward a taxi. By the time we reached his cramped “studio apartment,” the sky had broken. A torrential downpour washed over us. I fumbled with the door, and as we crossed the threshold, I purposely tripped, sending both of us sprawling onto the floor. “I’m so sorry! Are you okay?” I ignored my own scraped knees and scrambled to my feet, kneeling beside him. I cupped his face with trembling hands, my tears mixing with the rain dripping from my hair. Gideon lay there, soaked through, looking weary and defeated. “It’s fine. I’m just… a burden.” I held his face tighter, my eyes burning with a feigned intensity. “Don’t you ever say that. You are not a burden. You’re going to get better. I’ll make sure of it.” He opened his eyes wide. The mockery was gone, replaced by a dark, complex confusion. [She…] Looking at his lips, so close to mine, I leaned down in the middle of the storm and kissed him. I woke up the next morning to an empty bed. Voices drifted from the balcony. Gideon was on the phone, his tone low and authoritative. “I know. I’ll be back within the week. Prepare the board.” I stayed still, heart hammering, as he ended the call and walked back into the room. He stopped by the bed, his gaze burning into me. His thoughts were crystal clear: [My father is breathing down my neck to take over the company. This ‘undercover’ game is over. Judy was a bore, but this sister… she’s fascinating in her stupidity. Maybe I’ll fake a relapse, see how far her ‘martyr’ complex actually goes.] I kept my eyes shut, my mind racing. The next morning, I showed up at his door with a thermal flask and a bright smile. “Judy and my parents left for Switzerland this morning. They think they found a cure. I’m going to take care of you while she’s gone.” Gideon looked stunned, then masked it with “gratitude.” For the next few days, I was the perfect housewife. I cleaned his dingy apartment, cooked for him, and organized his life. Then, during dinner, Gideon suddenly clutched his nose. Blood dripped onto his plate. “It’s nothing,” he muttered. “Just a bit of stress.” I insisted on taking him to the hospital. The results came back an hour later. Cancer. Stage four. Gideon played the part of the broken man perfectly. He turned his face away, his voice cold. “Go away. Don’t come back. You shouldn’t waste your life on a dead man.” I didn’t argue. I didn’t cry. I simply turned and walked out without a second glance. Behind the closed door, I heard his mental chuckle: [I thought she’d make a scene. At least she knows when to quit.] I paused in the hallway, a slow, cold smile spreading across my face. You think you’re the only one playing a game, Gideon? My move hasn’t even started yet. Two days later, I went to a shady clinic and sold 400ml of my rare blood type. Then, I walked to Gideon’s door, waited for the exact moment I felt the lightheadedness peak, and collapsed. 4 The smell of hospital grade disinfectant greeted me as I drifted back. A doctor’s voice was muffled in the distance: “She’s pregnant. Between the malnutrition and the blood loss, she’s lucky she didn’t lose the baby. She needs absolute rest.” I felt a heavy, burning gaze on me. I waited until the doctor left before opening my eyes. Gideon was sitting by the bed, his expression a chaotic mess of guilt and shock. “How are you feeling?” I didn’t answer. I reached into my pocket with a trembling hand and pulled out a debit card. “This is everything I’ve saved,” I whispered, my voice cracked. “Take it for your treatment. Don’t worry about me. I… I’m going to terminate the pregnancy. I can’t bring a child into this.” Gideon’s eyes nearly bulged out of his head. “Where did you get this much money? And why would you get rid of the baby?” I let out a hollow, jagged laugh. “Our ‘mistake’ was never supposed to happen. I want this baby more than anything, Gideon, but I’m broke and you’re dying. I won’t bring a child into the world just to watch them suffer like I have.” Gideon stared at his phone. He’d clearly been doing some digging. “You fainted because you sold your blood? You sold your blood to give me this card?” I didn’t say a word. I just forced the card into his hand. He gripped it, his face twisting in a way I’d never seen. He sat in silence for a long time before handing the card back. “I’m going to marry you,” he said. “Keep the baby. I’ll provide for both of you.” “But your illness—” “The hospital made a mistake,” he said quickly, his voice firm. “It’s not cancer. I’m going to be fine.” I pretended to be overwhelmed by the “miracle,” while my heart hammered with triumph. Gideon pulled out his phone and, right then and there, transferred five million dollars into my account. The zeros on the screen were dazzling. “I have money, Caitlin. You never have to worry again.” I forced a look of pure, wide-eyed shock, while internally I was screaming. Five million. Goodbye, poverty. Hello, luxury. I was moved to a VIP suite. I ate food I couldn’t pronounce. Two months later, we had a small, private wedding. But as I smoothed down my silk gown, ready to walk into the reception hall, a familiar screech echoed from the entrance. “Caitlin! You backstabbing bitch! You took out loans in our names!” It was my mother. I turned to see my parents and Judy standing there, looking bedraggled and furious. Judy’s eyes landed on my designer dress and the diamond-encrusted venue. She grabbed my mother’s arm, her voice dripping with sudden, venomous greed. “So, you’re getting married to a rich guy, huh, Sis?” Judy smirked. “How much is the dowry? Because whatever it is, it’s going toward our debt. Consider it his way of proving he’s worthy of our family.” I saw Gideon walking toward us, his tall, imposing figure casting a long shadow. I smiled. “Sure. Your brother-in-law is right there. Why don’t you ask him for the money yourselves?”

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When I slid the divorce papers across the kitchen island toward Simon, my voice sounded like it belonged to someone else—someone carved entirely out of ice. “You walk away with nothing,” I said. “That is your only option.” Three days ago, I was pulling an all-nighter in the lab, furiously formatting my dissertation, when my phone screen lit up. It was an Instagram post from the newest PhD student in our research group, Paige. She had uploaded a screenshot of an acceptance email from Nature Chemistry, listing her as the first author. In the second photo, she was smiling brightly in the lab, Simon’s hand resting intimately on her shoulder. Everyone in the department knew that the novel catalyst project was mine. I had bled for it since my first year of grad school. It was my lifeline. To get those stability metrics, I had spent over three hundred sleepless nights in the cleanroom. I had even hidden my wedding ring on a gold chain under my scrubs, wearing latex gloves to conceal the phantom indent on my finger. But when I confronted Simon, he just brushed it off. “Paige helped you polish the abstract,” he said, not even looking up from his laptop. “That counts as a co-contribution.” Later that afternoon, standing by the fire doors in the stairwell, I heard Paige’s voice echoing from the floor below. She was whining, laying on the baby voice thick. “You’re so biased, Dr. Adler. I just told you I was stressed about my prelims, and you practically handed me Carlin’s paper.” Simon’s low chuckle floated up the stairs. It sounded like a velvet-wrapped ice pick. “She’s fully funded on that NSF grant,” he murmured. “Losing one first-author credit isn’t going to kill her.” Three years of a secret marriage, outweighed by a few manufactured tears. The research I had poured my soul into was nothing more than a poker chip to him, traded away to buy a younger woman’s affection. Before I even had the chance to move the tassel on my graduation cap, my marriage and my academic future had shattered into a million jagged pieces. Now, looking at him across the granite countertop, I only wanted one thing. I wanted this man, along with his twisted sense of “fairness,” completely eradicated from my life. … The day Paige joined our lab, Simon personally gave her the grand tour. He finally stopped at my bench. “This is Carlin, a senior PhD candidate and the unofficial manager of the lab,” Simon said. His tone was perfectly sterile. Professional. “If you need anything, ask her.” I pulled down my safety goggles and offered her a warm smile. Paige didn’t look like a typical stressed-out grad student. She was wearing a tweed designer jacket, her nails were perfectly manicured, and there were faint, sophisticated laugh lines at the corners of her eyes. “Hi, Carlin. It’s so nice to meet you. I’ll be counting on your guidance.” When she spoke, Simon’s gaze lingered on her. There was a softness in his eyes, a microscopic shift in his posture that made my stomach drop. I told myself I was being paranoid. But that night, for the first time in our marriage, Simon claimed he had to “finish a grant proposal” and slept in the guest room. The unease settled in my chest, a quiet, persistent hum. The next day, I was under the tissue culture hood, splitting cells. My lab mate, Ben, rolled his stool over, lowering his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “Hey. Do you know the actual story with the new girl?” I was still distracted by the phantom chill of the empty bed beside me. “What story?” “She did her undergrad in this lab a few years ago. Went out into the corporate world, and now she’s suddenly back for her PhD.” Ben leaned in closer. “I heard… I heard she’s the reason Dr. Adler got divorced the first time. Apparently, his ex-wife found their texts. Total scandal.” My hand twitched. The tip of my micropipette plunged straight into the biohazard waste beaker. “Don’t spread rumors like that,” I said. My throat felt like sandpaper. “I’m just telling you what the postdocs say,” Ben muttered, shrinking back a little. “Just watch your back, Carlin. He treats her differently.” I murmured an acknowledgment and returned to my cells, but it felt like someone had poured liquid nitrogen down my spine. Texts? An affair? When Simon and I married three years ago, he told me his first marriage fell apart because his wife wanted to move to Europe and they simply grew apart. Had he been lying to me this whole time? But Simon had always been so good to me. When I was a senior undergrad, he was the brilliant young assistant professor who patiently taught me how to design experiments and write fellowship applications. I grew up with no money, so he created a paid lab manager position just for me, adding an extra twelve hundred dollars a month to my meager stipend. The year we got married, he had just been granted tenure. I was starting my PhD. To avoid Title IX complications and department gossip, he insisted we keep our marriage a secret. The lab manager stipend quietly transitioned into him transferring two thousand dollars a month into my checking account. “A husband allowance,” he had joked, kissing the top of my head. I refused to believe he could betray me. It was just academic gossip. I forced myself to forget it and bury myself in my work. But things started happening. During Paige’s first month, my personal micropipette went missing. It was the one I’d used for three years, marked with a tiny dot of crimson nail polish. I tore the lab apart looking for it. I finally found it sitting squarely on Paige’s bench. “Oh, this?” She looked up, her eyes wide and innocent. “I found it lying around and assumed it was a spare. You don’t mind, do you?” I took the pipette back without a word. In her second month, my cell cultures got contaminated. I came in at 6:00 AM to get a head start. The lab was silent, except for the low hum of the incubators. Paige was standing right in front of my incubator shelf, holding one of my culture flasks. “What are you doing?” I asked, my voice sharp in the quiet room. She turned around. Her expression didn’t even flicker. “Just checking out the morphology of your cells. Learning the ropes. Is that a problem?” I stepped past her and pulled out my trays. Two months of grueling, early-morning work. Every single flask was cloudy, floating with white fungal fuzz. Dead. Paige stood beside me and let out a soft, theatrical sigh. “Oh, no. What a shame. Try not to let it get to you, Carlin. This kind of stuff happens all the time in bio labs. You can just redo it.” She said you can just redo it with the breezy cadence of someone commenting on the weather. I stared at her for a long time, searching her face for a crack, a sliver of guilt. There was nothing. She smiled back at me, utterly bulletproof. That night in our apartment, I couldn’t hold back the tears as I told Simon what happened. He was eating takeout at the dining table. He paused, setting his fork down, and looked at me with mild disapproval. “Carlin, you’re the senior student here. You need to be a little more forgiving. She’s just trying to learn. I highly doubt she did it on purpose.” I stared at him, stunned. “Forgiving? She contaminated two entire months of work! You know how hard I worked on those lines!” Simon frowned. “Do you have proof she contaminated them?” “The lab camera is broken.” “Then you don’t have proof. And without proof, it’s just a baseless accusation.” I swallowed the hard lump in my throat. “Simon. You don’t believe me?” He sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose. “It’s not about not believing you. It’s about maintaining a professional environment. Paige was my student years ago. I know her character. She wouldn’t do something malicious.” I put my hands flat on the table. “Simon. I am your wife.” He fell silent for a few seconds. When he looked at me, his eyes held the weary patience of a man dealing with a petulant child. “Exactly. Because we’re married, I need you to be the bigger person here. Don’t turn the lab into a toxic environment over a minor setback.” A minor setback. My cells dying was a minor setback. I wondered, then, what constituted a major one. In Paige’s third month, Simon took a sub-project that was entirely mine and handed half of it to her. He called me into his corner office. His tone was gentle, almost pleading. “Carlin, you’ve got so much on your plate right now. Paige is struggling to find her footing. If you let her take the lead on the secondary assays, it’ll take some pressure off you. I’ll make it up to you tonight, I promise.” It felt wrong, like a stone settling in my gut, but I didn’t fight him. I nodded. I convinced myself it was just a PI managing his lab, just a husband looking out for his stressed wife. Six months later, during our weekly lab meeting, Paige stood up to present her progress. Every single data point on her slides was mine. I sat there, frozen in my plastic chair. Those were my preliminary trials. I had spent an entire semester optimizing those concentration gradients, coming in at midnight to take time-points. I hadn’t even drafted the manuscript yet, and here they were, perfectly formatted in her PowerPoint. “These metrics…” I started, leaning forward urgently. “These metrics build beautifully on the preliminary data Carlin gathered,” Simon interrupted smoothly, his voice projecting across the conference room. He didn’t even look at me. “Paige took that foundation and really ran with it. Excellent work, Paige. I think we’re looking at a solid publication here.” The room went dead silent. I could feel Ben and the other postdocs staring at me with deep, uncomfortable pity. The light in my eyes just… died. At the front of the room, Paige looked down at the podium. But I saw the corner of her mouth curve up. It’s mine now, that smile said. When we got home that night, I cornered him in the living room. “Simon, that data was mine. It’s unpublished. How could she just present it as her own?” I kept my voice low, terrified the neighbors would hear the tremor in it. He leaned back against the sofa cushions, looking exhausted and annoyed. “Carlin, part of being a senior PhD is mentoring the juniors. Besides, data generated in the lab belongs to the lab. What does it matter who writes it up? You have three other projects. You don’t need this one.” “But—” “Enough. Stop being so territorial.” He stood up and reached out to pull me into a hug. I flinched, stepping out of his reach. His arms dropped. “Look,” he said, his voice hardening slightly. “When you graduate, you’re going to leave all your protocols behind for the younger students anyway. We’re a family, Carlin. My success is your success. If Paige publishes a high-impact paper, it makes my tenure package look incredible. Aren’t you happy for me?” A family. I stood in the dim light of our living room, looking at the man I had slept next to for over a thousand nights. He looked like a stranger. That was the moment I finally understood. Only Paige’s problems were major problems. As I was wrapping up my dissertation, Simon called me into his office. “How is the novel catalyst paper looking?” he asked. My heart did a nervous little stutter. “Good. I’m formatting it for submission next week.” He nodded. Tapped his pen against his desk. The silence stretched until the air felt thin. “Listen,” he finally said. “Paige mentioned she did quite a bit of troubleshooting on that protocol. Go ahead and add her as second author.” I felt a bizarre, out-of-body sense of inevitability. Of course. I swallowed the bile rising in my throat. “What exactly did she do? Name one thing she contributed to this project.” “She maintained your cell lines when you were writing, didn’t she? She helped you clean up the datasets?” “Maintained my cells? You mean the ones she deliberately contaminated—” “Stop it,” he snapped, his patience evaporating. “Adding her as second author costs you absolutely nothing. She’s new, she needs to build her CV, and it’s your job to help her.” I stared right into his eyes. He broke eye contact first, looking away toward the window. That evening, I stood at the stove, frying vegetables. The oil sizzled loudly in the pan, mirroring the chaotic static in my brain. Simon was in his home office, supposedly reviewing manuscripts. Something was fundamentally wrong. I couldn’t articulate the exact shape of it, but the shadow it cast over my life was suffocating. Over dinner, I set my fork down. “Simon. Do you have feelings for Paige?” His chopsticks paused in mid-air. A microscopic tightening of his jaw. “What is that supposed to mean?” “It means… you treat her differently. You protect her.” He set his bowl down and let out a long, theatrical sigh. “Are you seriously jealous right now, Carlin?” I let out a harsh, incredulous laugh. “Shouldn’t I be? I’m your wife. She is your student. Do I really need to list out exactly how blatantly you favor her?” “She was my student years ago! I’m just looking out for her!” His voice rose, bouncing off the kitchen tiles. “I did the exact same thing for you when you joined the lab! What exactly are you accusing me of?” But he was omitting the most crucial detail. When he was “looking out for me,” we were already sleeping together. I looked down at my plate, hiding the bitter sneer forming on my lips. “I’m not accusing you of anything.” “Then drop it.” He picked up his bowl, his face a mask of cold fury, and went back to his meal. Watching his profile, I suddenly felt incredibly foolish. When we got married, he told me academia was deeply biased against young female scientists. “If people know we’re married, they’ll say you slept your way to your PhD. They’ll diminish your brilliance. Keeping this quiet protects you.” I swallowed it whole. Because of that, no one in the department knew that after the lab lights went out, we drove to the same apartment and slept in the same bed. He told me academic politics were treacherous. We had to be flawless. So, I never walked into the building with him. We never ate lunch together in the courtyard. I never claimed him in public. Even my wedding ring was relegated to a secret chain around my neck, hidden beneath the collar of my shirts. Back then, I thought none of it mattered, as long as we loved each other. It was all a lie. It was just a convenient way for him to hide me. Because clearly, he had no problem openly favoring a student when he actually wanted to. I was nothing but a living, breathing joke. In the spring of my final year, I finished the manuscript for the novel catalyst project. Before I submitted it, Simon called me into his office and said he had made some final edits. He wanted me to review them. I opened the Word document on his monitor. My eyes locked onto the very first line. Authors: Paige Sutton, Carlin Adler, Simon Adler. Paige was first author. I was second. The blood drained from my face. I looked up at him. “Simon,” I whispered, the tremor in my voice impossible to hide. “This is my project. I did all of it.” “I know.” His voice was utterly calm, adopting the detached cadence of an administrator making a budgetary cut. “But Paige did a lot of the backend data visualization. And frankly, Carlin, her writing is just stronger than yours. The narrative flows much better after her edits. Giving her first authorship doesn’t hurt you—you’re still a co-first author on paper. It’s enough.” “Enough?” My hands were shaking so hard I had to grip the edge of his desk. “This is three years of my life. This was the cornerstone of my dissertation. How am I supposed to secure a postdoc without a sole first-author publication on my main project?” Simon’s face darkened. “Are you questioning my authority as your PI?” I didn’t answer. He sighed, adopting that patronizing, sickeningly gentle tone again. It was the voice of a god handing out scraps. “Look. I’ll assign you a new, fast-track project. I guarantee you’ll be first author on the next one. Just let Paige have this. She needs this publication to qualify for the departmental fellowship. You already have your funding. You’re a fifth-year, one paper won’t break you. Let’s talk about it at home.” I stared at him, desperately searching his face for the man I used to know. The man who held me when my mother died. The man who promised to protect me. There was nothing there. Just cold, calculated self-interest. “What about my fellowship applications?” I asked softly. “You already won the NSF grant your second year. Give the younger students a chance. She’s older than you, she’s feeling the pressure.” I dug my fingernails into my palms until they ached. Older. Feeling the pressure. What about me? I am your wife. What does my pressure, my anxiety, my future mean to you? “We will talk about this at home,” I said, and walked out. He didn’t come home until late that night. I sat on the living room sofa in the dark, waiting. At 11:00 PM, the lock clicked. When he walked in and saw me sitting there in the shadows, he flinched. “You’re still awake?” “I was waiting for you.” He took off his shoes, walked into the living room, and sat down on the armchair across from me. He looked deeply uncomfortable. “Go ahead,” he said. I looked at him, my voice completely flat. “Why did you really give my paper to Paige?” He let out a heavy breath, running a hand through his hair. “Carlin, I already explained this to you. She needs—” “I don’t want the HR answer. I want the truth.” He went silent. The silence stretched so long I could hear the faint hum of the refrigerator in the kitchen. I thought he was going to refuse. Then he spoke. His voice was hoarse, fractured. “Because she’s pregnant with my child.” A gust of wind rattled the apartment windows. The apartment was suddenly freezing. I stared at his face. The face I had loved for five years. He looked entirely alien to me. “What did you just say?” He dropped his gaze to the floor. “Paige… she’s pregnant. It’s mine.” I stood up. I sat back down. My brain was a wall of white noise. I didn’t know what to do with my hands. When I finally found my voice, it was barely a whisper. “When?” “Three months ago.” “Three months?” My voice cracked, rising in pitch. “We have only been married for three years!” He looked up at me, his eyes swimming with something that looked like guilt. “Carlin. I am so sorry.” I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I didn’t want his apologies. I stood in the center of the room, my whole body vibrating. “Simon, you made me hide our marriage. You said it was for my career. You told me to let her abuse me in the lab, because she was just a junior student. You forced me to give her my paper, because she needed it. And now you’re telling me she’s pregnant with your baby?!” He didn’t speak. “Look at me!” I screamed. He looked at me. And in his eyes, beneath the guilt, I saw something else. Something that broke me completely. Relief. He was relieved it was finally out. “Carlin, I’ll handle it,” he said softly. “Just give me some time.” I unclenched my fists. I took a slow step back. Hot tears spilled over my eyelashes, hitting the hardwood floor. “Time?” A bitter, jagged laugh ripped out of my throat. “I gave you three years, Simon. What did you give me?” I looked at him with absolute clarity. “I don’t want your time. I want a divorce.”

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I had been married to the boy I grew up with for exactly three years. Then came the day I accidentally overheard him complaining to a friend, casually dropping the bomb that he only married me for my looks. The second she loses her looks, I’m filing for divorce, he’d said. Hearing those words felt like swallowing ice. A cold, hollow ache bloomed in my chest, carving out the spaces where my certainty used to live. So, I made a decision. I decided to make myself ugly. I told him I was having a severe allergic reaction to a new makeup line. For the next three months, I walked around with a face completely covered in furious, angry “cystic acne,” fully expecting him to make good on his promise and hand me divorce papers. Instead, the opposite happened. He didn’t ask for a divorce. He hovered. He became meticulously, suffocatingly attentive, asking how I felt every waking hour. I began to second-guess myself. Maybe his feelings for me went deeper than skin level. But that careless, jagged sentence he’d thrown around with his friends still lived in my head, a splinter I couldn’t dig out. After agonizing over it in the quiet hours of the night, I decided to take the initiative. I asked for a trial separation, telling him we needed space to see if we were actually meant to go the distance. He didn’t yell. He didn’t cry. He just stared at me in heavy, suffocating silence for a long moment, then turned and walked out the door. But later that very night, my phone rang. It was his best friend. Through the receiver, his friend sounded thoroughly bewildered, asking Chase why he hadn’t just signed the papers. Isn’t this what you wanted? his friend pressed. She’s lost her looks. Why aren’t you leaving? Before I could even process the question, Chase’s voice blasted through the background, thick with tears and defensively loud. “You don’t know shit! She’s beautiful even with a breakout! Look at me! I’m the one who’s washed up! I’m losing my hair, I’m losing my youth! Why are you always telling me to divorce her, huh? Are you trying to make a move on my wife?!” His friend was stunned into silence. I stood in my kitchen, clutching the phone to my ear, completely and utterly speechless. 1. The moment I got the text from Chase’s friend about where they were drinking, I left the house without a second thought. When I reached the private booth at the back of the lounge, the door was slightly ajar. His voice drifted through the narrow crack, loud and entirely uninhibited. “Who says I’m in love with her? If she hadn’t been the prettiest girl in our zip code her whole life, there’s no way I would’ve married her.” Ice flooded my veins. I froze, my hand hovering inches from the brass handle. “I don’t let her do chores because she’s delicate. If she breaks a nail, she’ll cry, and crying ruins her face.” A beat of laughter from the room. Then, the killing blow. “The second she loses those looks, I’m divorcing her.” I didn’t stay to hear the rest. I turned on my heel, walked out into the crisp night air, drove home, and sat rigidly on the edge of our California king bed. Two hours passed. If I hadn’t heard the words bleed directly from Chase’s own mouth, I never would have believed he didn’t love me. We had been orbiting each other since we were in diapers. We’d rarely spent more than three days apart. Getting married wasn’t just a choice; it felt like the inevitable pull of gravity. And for these past three years, he had treated me like glass. He never let me lift a finger around the house. He handed over all the finances for me to manage without blinking. Anyone looking from the outside would have crowned him the ultimate Instagram-husband, the gold standard of modern devotion. Especially me. I felt it every day. But sitting there in the dark, sifting through the memories, a quiet, terrifying realization settled over me: Chase had never actually said the words “I love you.” Click. The front door opened. Chase stumbled in, the heavy scent of bourbon and expensive cologne trailing behind him. For the first time in three years, I didn’t get up to help him out of his jacket. He grumbled as he kicked off his shoes. “Everyone else’s girlfriends came to pick them up. Why didn’t my wife come get me? Does she not love me anymore?” “I didn’t see your text,” I lied, my voice sounding entirely detached from my body. He nodded slowly, swaying on his feet. “Okay. I’m gonna shower. I’ll warm up some milk for my wife in a minute.” Watching his clumsy, retreating back, a sharp wave of acidity rose in my throat. When he emerged from the shower, slightly more sober, he handed me a warm mug of milk. I drank it in one go, only then realizing his eyes were fixed entirely on my face. “Why are you staring at me?” I asked, my voice tight. He wrapped around me like an octopus, burying his damp hair into my shoulder. “Who’s the prettiest girl in the world? Oh, right. My wife.” It was the same sweet nothing he whispered a hundred times before. Before tonight, it would have made my heart flutter. Now, it just felt like a mocking echo. If I was being honest, I never thought of myself as breathtaking. Compared to Chase, who had girls throwing themselves at him since middle school, I was, at best, conventionally attractive. Maybe because we’d spent so much time together, his aesthetic preferences had just morphed to look exactly like me. I decided to test the waters. “What if I’m not pretty someday? What will you do then?” He loosened his grip, pulling back to look at me critically. He studied my face for a long moment before diving back into the crook of my neck. “Impossible. You’ll always be the prettiest. Wait, are you breaking out? I told you not to stress so much about the gallery. I’ll wire you some money tomorrow. Go book a weekend at that wellness retreat in Sedona.” So it was true. He really did just marry me for my face. He nuzzled against my chest like a golden retriever puppy. “My wife. My beautiful wife.” My chest felt like a graveyard. Operating purely on instinct, I gently pushed him off, turned my back to him, and pulled the covers up. Behind me, the sleepy haze in Chase’s eyes seemed to clear. I felt him frown before his arm wrapped heavily around my waist, pulling my rigid body tightly against his chest as we slept. 2. The next morning, Chase practically tackled me for his good-morning kiss before rushing off to his architectural firm. Staring at my phone screen—at the fresh $5,000 transfer he’d sent with the note For my girl’s spa day—I made up my mind. If Chase didn’t actually love me, I refused to settle for the illusion of a marriage. And if my face was the only thing keeping him here, I was going to destroy it, force his hand, and make him ask for the divorce. Fortunately, I worked as a professional makeup artist for a living. Special effects were child’s play. After expertly applying seven or eight inflamed, cystic “pimples” across my cheeks and jawline, I set down my beauty blender. The effect was horrifyingly realistic. Even I felt a little repulsed looking in the mirror. I left my phone alone for an hour. By the time I checked it, Chase had flooded my notifications. What’s my wife up to? Work is so boring today. Gotta grind so I can buy my girl more bags. When I didn’t reply, there was a fifteen-minute pause. Then, the barrage started. Why aren’t you answering? Are you annoyed with me? Wow, okay. Guess you don’t care about my texts. People talk about the seven-year itch, but it’s only been three. Are you tired of me already? Is it because I was drinking last night? Do I look haggard? Am I losing my looks? It was a string of manic, spiraling texts, but I didn’t have the emotional bandwidth to entertain him. Half an hour later, the bedroom door flew open. I gasped. I hadn’t expected him to actually come home in the middle of the workday! My makeup wasn’t fully set yet. Chase stood in the doorway, chest heaving, a bead of sweat tracing his temple. The irritation on his face vanished the second his eyes locked onto mine. He froze. He stared at my face. I watched the emotions war across his features in rapid succession. Panic spiked in my chest—did he realize it was makeup? “I had an allergic reaction to a new foundation,” I blurted out. “I look awful, don’t I?” His eyes softened into an expression of sheer devastation. They actually welled up with tears. He crossed the room in two strides and pulled me fiercely into his arms. “Oh, my god. Is this why you were asking those questions last night? Did you use concealer before bed so I wouldn’t see?” A tear—an actual, literal tear—fell from his eye and hit my collarbone. “I didn’t even notice you were hurting. I’m a terrible husband.” Wait. What? This was not how the script in my head was supposed to play out. Was he acting? “Don’t worry, baby,” he whispered into my hair. “Starting today, I’m working from home. I’m going to take care of you, manage your stress, and get you back to perfect.” He pulled back and gently reached out, brushing his thumb against one of my fake blemishes. Then, his brow furrowed. “Wait… these don’t feel raised. Are they…” My heart slammed against my ribs. “Are they what?” His expression turned utterly tragic. “Oh god, the infection is entirely under the skin. It’s deep tissue!” … 3. True to his word, Chase set up a makeshift office in our dining room and devoted himself entirely to my “recovery.” Meanwhile, I was mentally crossing off days on the calendar, waiting for him to serve me papers. Two months passed. Then three. My “acne” hadn’t cleared up in the slightest, yet Chase hadn’t shown a single flicker of disgust. Every night, he still pulled me tight against his chest. Even worse, he made a point of gently kissing my textured, inflamed “skin” before falling asleep. I lived in constant terror that my setting spray would fail. But according to the conversation I’d overheard, he should have bailed months ago. Staring at my reflection, I was genuinely baffled. Was I just not ugly enough yet? Taking advantage of a rare afternoon when he had to go to a physical job site, I pulled out my heavy-duty SFX kit. I went to town. When Chase walked through the door that evening, he took one look at me and actually broke down. “Baby, it’s spreading,” he cried, dropping his briefcase. “We have to go to a dermatologist. I don’t care what it costs.” I shook my head, avoiding his gaze. “No. I hate doctors.” I took a steadying breath. “If you think I look hideous now, you should just…” “Are you insane?!” he interrupted, looking thoroughly scandalized. “In your current medical condition, you want to kick me out? Who’s going to make your meals? Who’s going to make sure you’re hydrated?” I fell silent. It hit me then. Chase was exactly what people described when they talked about “good men”—the kind of guy who would do the right thing and take care of you, even if the romantic love wasn’t there. He was doing this out of pure duty. And if that was the case, I absolutely could not anchor him to a loveless marriage for the rest of his life.

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The third spring since Edison left has arrived, uninvited. I’m standing on the balcony of the twenty-fourth floor. The wind whistles through my clothes, clawing at my skin like it wants to peel me apart. Outside, the world is aggressively coming back to life—buds bursting, grass pushing through the thaw—but I’m just a piece of rotting timber, stagnant and moldy. My therapist used to say that spring is the danger zone for people like me. There’s a violent disconnect between the vibrancy of the world and the stillness of a dead soul. That gap is usually wide enough to swallow the last bit of courage it takes to stay alive. And now, there’s no one left to grab my hand and tell me the world is worth the effort. I close my eyes, imagining myself as one of those willow catkins drifting below. I just want to be light. I just want to fall. As I lean into the void, a cold, synthesized voice explodes in my head. [“April Recovery Protocol” activated. Binding to host in critical condition.] [Starter Task: Take three steps back and drink a glass of lukewarm water.] [Warning: Failure to comply will result in the permanent revocation of suicide privileges.] I freeze. The wind tosses my hair into a tangled mess. Since when did dying require a prerequisite exam? What kind of glitchy hallucination is this? … 1 The living room is a cacophony of forced cheer. Today is the “Big Reveal” party for my younger brother, Tyler. He’s headed to an Ivy League school on a full ride, and my parents have invited every relative we share a bloodline with. The table is groaning under the weight of a catered feast. I’m huddled in a worn armchair in the corner, feeling like a patch of black mold in a pristine house. “Our Tyler has always been the star of the family,” my Aunt Margaret says, spitting sunflower seed shells into a napkin while cutting her eyes at me. “Not like some people. Always moping around with that funeral face, like the world owes her a living.” My mother emerges from the kitchen with a platter of glazed ribs. She looks at me, her expression darkening instantly. “Willa, for God’s sake, it’s your brother’s big day. Can you stop looking like a corpse for five minutes?” I look down at my pale, trembling fingers. “Mom, just ignore her. She’s just being dramatic,” Tyler says, shoving a rib into his mouth. He doesn’t even look up from his phone. “The doctor said it’s just a lack of structure. If she actually got a job instead of staring at walls, she’d be fine.” My father takes a long pull of his beer and sighs. “The money we wasted on those specialists… We could have put that toward Tyler’s housing in New Haven.” I listen to them, but I feel nothing. No anger, no sorrow. Just a vast, echoing hollow. I’ve been sick for three years. Ever since Edison. Edison had ALS. He watched his body turn into stone, and then, rather than letting the bills bankrupt us or the disease turn him into a ghost while he was still breathing, he took a handful of pills right here in this house. I’m the one who found him. And I’m the one who believes I killed him. If I’d worked more hours, if I’d sat with him longer, maybe he wouldn’t have felt so alone. But my parents? They saw Edison’s death as a tragic release. And they see my depression as a fresh burden. I stand up without a word and head for the balcony. I slide the glass door open. The air smells like magnolias. It’s sickeningly sweet. I climb onto the railing. Below, the city lights are a river of gold and red. Just jump, I think. No more voices. No more pills that make me slow and heavy. Edison, I’m coming. I close my eyes and lean forward. [WARNING! Host attempting high-risk maneuver! Initiating emergency intervention!] The voice is piercing now, a jagged blade of sound. Suddenly, a force—invisible but absolute—jerks me backward. I hit the balcony tiles with a bone-jarring thud. The noise in the living room stops for a heartbeat. “Willa? What the hell are you doing out there?” my mother screams through the glass. “Are you trying to ruin this for everyone?” I lay there on the cold ceramic, gasping. The mechanical voice returns, but this time, there’s a flicker of something… a glitch? A tremor? [Host… please. Do not do this in the spring.] 2 I assume I’m finally losing my mind. Auditory hallucinations are common when the darkness gets this heavy. I push myself up, ignoring the voice, and look back at the railing. [Task Reminder: Step back three paces and drink one glass of lukewarm water.] [Countdown: Five minutes.] Who are you? I ask in the silence of my mind. [I am the April Recovery Protocol. Designation 001.] [My objective is the total elimination of the host’s depressive index.] “I don’t want to be cured,” I whisper. “I want to be gone.” [Passive resistance detected.] [If the host refuses the task, the System will take manual control of the host’s motor functions. I will force you to enter the living room and perform a high-energy TikTok dance in front of your extended family.] I freeze. For someone with crippling social anxiety and a soul made of lead, the idea of being a puppet for a viral dance trend in front of my judgmental relatives is a fate worse than death. “You wouldn’t.” [Countdown: Three minutes.] [Downloading ‘Savage’ by Megan Thee Stallion…] I grit my teeth and scramble up. I take three steps back, away from the ledge. I slide the door open and walk back into the suffocating heat of the party. Every eye is on me—judging, annoyed, disgusted. I ignore them. I walk to the water cooler, take a paper cup, and mix hot and cold until it’s exactly lukewarm. I tilt my head back and swallow. The water hits my parched throat, and a tiny, flickering spark of warmth settles in my stomach. [Task complete.] [Reward: Three hours of deep, restorative sleep.] The moment the words fade, a wave of exhaustion hits me like a physical blow. For three years, I’ve survived on two-hour snatches of drug-induced unconsciousness. Without a word to anyone, I turn and walk into the tiny, windowless walk-in closet that my parents converted into my “bedroom” after Edison died. I collapse onto the mattress and sink into a black, velvet dream. In my sleep, I think I smell him. That faint, clean scent of Ivory soap that Edison always used. Outside the door, I hear my mother slam her silverware onto the table. “Can you believe her? Walks in, drinks water, and goes back to bed. Like we’re her servants! God, why did I get stuck with such a broken child?” The voices fade. The “reward” is a fortress. 3 I sleep for exactly three hours. No nightmares. No jolting awake with a racing heart. When I open my eyes, the house is silent. The party is over. I walk into the dining room. It’s a graveyard of half-eaten food and crumpled napkins. My stomach growls. I’m actually hungry. [Daily Task triggered: Eat a hot meal.] [Requirement: Must include protein and greens.] [Reward: 10% boost in dopamine production.] I scan the table for leftover ribs. “What are you doing?” Tyler is standing there, wearing a new designer hoodie, car keys in hand. “I’m hungry,” I say. “Get a Lean Cuisine or something. I’m packing the good stuff for a late-night hang with my friends.” He heartlessly scrapes the remaining ribs into a Tupperware container. My mother walks out of her bedroom, her face tightening the moment she sees me. “Finally awake? Clean this mess up. You’ve done nothing but sleep while the rest of us celebrated.” She pauses, her tone turning cold and clinical. “Since you’re up, let’s get this over with. Tyler is heading to New Haven soon, and his tuition is astronomical. We’re cutting back.” My heart sinks. “Your therapy sessions? We’re stopping them. Two hundred an hour to talk about your feelings is a luxury we can’t afford. And that imported medication? We’re switching you to the generic brand.” I stand frozen. My therapy is the only place I can breathe. And the medication… the withdrawal from the brand name is notorious for causing tremors and suicidal ideation. “Mom, the doctor said I can’t just switch…” “Oh, stop it!” she snaps. “You’ve been ‘sick’ for three years, Willa. Look at you. You’re a ghost. Edison had a real disease, a physical one, and he had the decency not to drain us dry. He knew when to stop being a burden. Why can’t you?” The words are a rusted blade, twisting in my chest. Edison. My vision blurs. My breathing hitches. I want to scream, to break every plate on this table, to rip my own hair out. [System alert: Host approaching emotional collapse.] [Initiating Mental Shield.] A rush of cool, mountain-spring water seems to pour through my brain. The white-hot panic is muffled, pushed down by a strange, steady force. [Host, breathe.] [Do not let their words define your worth.] [Your life is yours. You are not a blood bag for their expectations.] The voice is still mechanical, but I swear I hear a note of… fury? I look at my mother, then at my brother. They look like strangers. “Fine,” I say, my voice eerily calm. “No more therapy. No more pills.” My mother blinks, surprised by my lack of a fight. “Good. At least you’re being sensible for once,” she mutters, turning back to her room. I walk into the kitchen. I pull out a pan, some pasta, two eggs, and a handful of spinach. [Host, what are you doing?] “Making dinner,” I whisper as I light the stove. “Protein and greens. I’m completing your task.” The flame flickers, reflecting in my hollow eyes. If I can’t die, I have to change. Starting tonight, I’m done waiting for them to love me. 4 The pasta is bland, but I eat it mechanically. [Dopamine levels rising. Good work, host.] I don’t answer. I wash my dish and go back to my closet. Half the space is taken up by Edison’s old boxes. Books, clothes, things my parents couldn’t be bothered to sort through. The next morning, I’m jolted awake by a heavy pounding on the door. “Willa! Get up and clear this junk out!” my mother barks. “Tyler’s treadmill is arriving this afternoon. I need this space for his home gym.” I sit up, my heart hammering. “No! These are Edison’s things!” “He’s been dead for three years, Willa! Keeping his trash is just morbid. Either you clear it out by noon, or I’m calling the junk haulers to take it to the landfill.” Silence follows her heavy footsteps. I stare at the boxes. This is all that’s left of him. And they want to erase that, too. Suddenly, the voice returns. It’s slower today. [Special Task Triggered: Within two hours, pack Edison’s belongings and move them—and yourself—out of this house.] I’m stunned. Move? To where? [Reward: Unlock ‘Independent Living’ storyline.] [Penalty: Electric shock…] The system glitches. A loud, static hum fills my ears. Bzzzt— And then, in the silence of my mind, I hear a sound. Not a computer. Not a machine. It’s a soft, wet, ragged sound. “Cough… cough…” It’s the sound of someone with atrophied throat muscles trying to clear their airway. A sound I heard a thousand times during Edison’s final months. My blood turns to ice. What… what was that? I ask, my fingers digging into the mattress. The system is silent. For a full minute, nothing. Then: [System interference detected. Rebooting audio module.] [Proceed with the task, host.] I don’t move. My heart is beating so hard it hurts. A ridiculous, impossible thought begins to bloom in the wreckage of my mind. “You’re lying,” I whisper, tears streaming down my face. “You aren’t a system. That sound… was that you?”

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I was just starting to feel out the rhythm of this brand-new city. Everything here carried a crisp, unfamiliar novelty, allowing me a temporary reprieve from the suffocating memories of my recent past. When Victor Caldwell got into that car accident and lost his memory, he also completely wiped the slate clean of all the obsessive, forceful things he had done to me. His family moved with ruthless efficiency. They had the divorce papers drawn up and finalized the very same day. Armed with a freshly minted divorce decree and a check bearing an astronomical sum of money, I was promptly “escorted” to this city by his people. Freedom came so abruptly that it took me quite a while to adjust to a life where my every move wasn’t being monitored. Then, on a day just like any other, as I was walking back from the local farmer’s market, a hand clamped down hard over my nose and mouth. The world faded to black. When I opened my eyes again, the damp chill and the hauntingly familiar shadows of that basement sent a violent shudder down my spine. A man’s voice, low and icy, brushed against my ear. “As long as you behave, I can give you anything you want in this world.” …Perfect. Exactly like it was all those years ago. 1 By the time I found out Victor had lost his memory, a full week had passed since his car crash. The surgeons had practically pulled him back from the brink of death. When his mother told me about it, she was a terrifying mixture of grief and pure rage. One eye weeping, the other glaring daggers at me. “If he hadn’t gone out looking for you, my Victor wouldn’t be lying in a hospital bed right now!” According to her, Victor had been in the middle of a session with his therapist when he realized I had run away again. He immediately got into his car to chase me down. In a moment of frantic distraction, he swerved into the path of an oncoming semi-truck. Thank god his car was a custom-built, armored monstrosity of a vehicle, giving the truck driver just enough time to jerk the wheel. Otherwise, Victor wouldn’t just have lost his memory; he would have been completely wiped from the server and sent straight to his next life. It hit me then. Oh… so that’s what happened. No wonder he hadn’t shown up to drag me back all week. I had honestly just assumed the GPS tracker he implanted in my things was broken. It was his fault I spent an entire week getting wind-whipped on a private island for nothing. 2 I was the wife Victor Caldwell had acquired through sheer, unadulterated force. Personally, I didn’t think I possessed a single trait that warranted that level of obsession. I was a standard corporate drone, and he was my boss’s boss—the man who owned the very skyline we worked in. Thinking back on it, our only real intersection before the madness began was the night of the company gala, when I smashed a bottle of expensive Merlot over his cousin’s head for sexually harassing a junior female employee. For about twenty-four hours, I was certain I was going to be blacklisted from the industry. Instead, the next morning, I received a transfer notice. I was pulled from my crumbling, dead-end branch office and dropped straight into the Manhattan headquarters—a position people would gladly sell their souls for. My salary tripled overnight. Like a good little corporate workhorse, I put my head down and started plowing the fields. Victor seemed to genuinely appreciate my work ethic. He always greeted me with a warm smile, gave me raises and promotions with alarming frequency, fired the middle managers who tried to make my life difficult, and even went out of his way to get rid of my relentless, clingy ex-boyfriend. He validated my professional worth, while simultaneously acting as a safety net for any mistake I ever made. The cheap, twenty-dollar cufflinks I bought him for his birthday stayed pinned to his bespoke suits, day in and day out. I thought I was just incredibly lucky. Every day when I left the office, I practically bowed to the heavens, thanking the universe for blessing me with such an incredible boss. I would have gladly worked for him for the rest of my life. Then came the night I had a little too much to drink at a celebration dinner. In a hazy fog, Victor guided me into the back of his Bentley. He pulled me against his shoulder, his voice a soft, low hum. “Go to sleep. I’ll take you home.” I was a lightweight, and I had drank enough that night to easily pass out until morning. But, by some twist of fate, I woke up halfway through the drive. I opened my eyes just in time to catch Victor Caldwell secretly, desperately kissing my lips. 3 The illusion shattered, and Victor didn’t even bother trying to glue the pieces back together. He stopped pretending. He told me he wanted me. A billionaire’s pursuit is always blunt and overwhelming. Private jets, yachts, diamonds, haute couture, priceless antiques—if I could imagine it, Victor could buy it. And beyond the money, the man himself was entirely unreasonable in his perfection. Chiseled jaw, broad shoulders, narrow waist. Dangerously charming when he smiled, devastatingly intense when he didn’t. Whenever we walked down the street, people looked at me like I had pulled off the heist of the century. But I’ve always been a pragmatist. If I don’t feel it, I don’t feel it. I thought, If this is some elaborate rich-man’s game, I’m going to make sure he pays for it. But it wasn’t a game. It was a terrifying reality I didn’t want to admit: beneath the mountains of cold, hard cash, he was offering me his actual, beating heart. And playing with someone’s true heart is just asking for bad karma. So, after I rejected his advances for the final time, Victor snapped. He owned a sprawling waterfront estate, and deep within that estate was a soundproof, windowless panic room. He told me that if I ever tried to run, he would drag me into that room and take me apart. Afterward, with his face still flushed and breathless, he would force me to marry him. “Be mine, and I’ll give you the world,” he would threaten, adding that if I refused, he’d break my legs and keep me locked away forever. Of course, he made these threats constantly, but he never actually followed through with the violence. Every time he caught me running away, he’d drag me back, look at my utterly indifferent expression, and get so furiously worked up that his eyes would go red, teetering on the edge of tears. Then, I would behave for a while. Mostly because I thought he looked incredibly hot when he cried. At first, this little cat-and-mouse game was novel. But after a while, even I got bored. I couldn’t actually escape, and he couldn’t bring himself to actually hurt me. Besides, the estate was massive. There were so many beautiful rooms left unexplored, and constantly having sex in a cramped panic room just wasn’t practical. So, on a bright, sunny Tuesday morning, I married him. Most of the time, Victor was the dominant force in the room. Like any powerful man used to taking what he wanted, he wished he could tie me to his belt loop and monitor my existence down to the second. But he was also crippled by a profound insecurity. He knew he had secured our marriage through underhanded coercion, so he never dared to actually lock me in a gilded cage. He lived in constant, agonizing fear of losing me. If I was out of his sight, he lost his mind. Eventually, torn apart by his dual nature of insecurity and possessiveness, Victor couldn’t help himself. While I was sleeping, he planted micro-trackers in my phone, my bags, and my jewelry. If I stayed away from the house for more than twenty-four hours, it wouldn’t take him sixty minutes to suddenly appear and drag me back home. Once I figured out his system, I just started treating him like a premium Uber service. If I was out shopping and got tired, I’d just check into a nice hotel and go to sleep. Because I knew, without fail, I would wake up in my own silk pajamas, tucked into the massive bed at the estate. It was as convenient as teleportation. The only downside was that upon waking up, I’d inevitably find fresh, blooming bruises along my collarbone where Victor had decided to help himself while I was out cold. 4 This time, however, I miscalculated. I had only planned a little day trip to the private island off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard that he bought for me. But three days passed, and my phone didn’t so much as buzz. I sat on the beach, the ocean breeze whipping my hair, thoroughly inspecting my phone to see if the tracker had short-circuited. I was literally contemplating if the GPS satellites had fallen out of the sky. It never even occurred to me that Victor was the one who had crashed. It worked out beautifully, really. Now he had amnesia and had forgotten I even existed. When people at the hospital informed him he had a wife, he just waved a hand, his face perfectly blank. “Divorce her. I don’t remember the woman anyway.” With just a few casual strokes of fate’s pen, everyone ended up exactly where they belonged. Victor went back to being the untouchable, ice-cold billionaire CEO who had zero interest in romance. His mother finally got the chance to set him up with some suitable heiress. And me? I was free. Oh, and I also walked away with eighty million—in US dollars. 5 Right before I left, Victor’s mother gave me an explicit warning to never show my face in front of her son again. “Victor’s obsession with you was nothing more than a psychological symptom. Now that he’s practically cured, don’t you dare delude yourself into thinking he’ll ever look at you the way he used to.” I had heard whispers about Victor’s mental state—a sort of obsessive paranoia rooted in severe childhood trauma. It explained his fixation on me, I suppose. Makes sense. What kind of sane, well-adjusted man aggressively forces a woman into marriage against her will? Those three years of marriage felt like a bizarre fever dream. Now that I was awake, the waterfront estate, the yachts, the diamonds, the dark little panic room… they were all gone. All I had left was the feather-light weight of eighty million dollars in my bank account. His mother told me to get as far away as humanly possible, and I was a woman of my word. I pulled up a map, found the city that was furthest away from Victor Caldwell’s New York headquarters, booked the next flight out, and left without looking back. 6 I settled down in Portland, Oregon. I bought a moderately sized house, picked up some simple furniture, and got a part-time job at a quiet, cozy artisanal bakery just to pass the time. It felt exactly like my life before Victor Caldwell had ever stepped into it. The owner, Betty, had a grandson named Hudson. He was a senior in college and helped out at the shop on his weekends. He was obsessed with financial news and business gossip, keeping the small TV in the corner of the café permanently tuned to Bloomberg or CNBC. The first time I saw Victor again was on that screen. He was being discharged from the hospital. The paparazzi were clamoring to get a shot of his still slightly pale face, but he didn’t spare them a single glance. He was distant, aloof, completely unapproachable. A reporter shouted a question about rumors of a secret marriage, shoving a blurry, poorly-lit photo of me into his face. “Mr. Caldwell, is it true this woman is your wife?” Victor glanced at it, his expression devoid of any emotion. “I’m sorry, but I have absolutely no memory of her.” Watching this, Hudson leaned against the counter and sighed. “Professor Caldwell has to be in his thirties by now, right? I can’t believe he’s not married.” “Professor?” I asked. “Yeah, he used to be a guest lecturer at my business school. You have no idea how many people were obsessed with him.” “Why?” I asked, lazily propping my chin on my hand. “Because he didn’t take attendance?” “Because he’s gorgeous, obviously!” Hudson went on to explain how men like Victor Caldwell were revered on college campuses. Sophisticated, mature, impeccably polite but entirely unreachable. He talked my ear off, recounting legends of how coldly Victor had rejected both female and male students who tried to shoot their shot. Hudson’s glowing, reverent descriptions slowly merged with the icy, composed man on the television screen. I suddenly remembered what Victor’s mother had screamed at me the day we got married. “This is all your fault! My Victor was never like this before he met you!” At the time, I thought she was just being completely unreasonable. How was I supposed to know what Victor was like before me? From the moment he set his sights on me, he had been a ruthless, unhinged bastard willing to do whatever it took to keep me. The kind of man who, if I slapped him across the face, would probably just kiss my palm. Now, a profound realization washed over me. Oh. So this is who Victor Caldwell really is. Psychological trauma really is a terrifying thing. It took an untouchable man on a pedestal and completely warped his personality, turning him into someone who would cry for me, lose his mind over me, and stoop to the most despicable lows just to trap me. Thank god he lost his memory. 7 The news cycle surrounding Victor was relentless over the next few days. Losing three years of his memory didn’t seem to impact his genius one bit. One day he was acquiring a massive tech firm, the next he was closing a merger. His empire was expanding faster than ever. In interviews, he was perfectly normal. When a host asked if he had any plans to marry soon, he stated plainly that he didn’t hold much expectation for romantic love, and would likely enter into a strategic marriage of convenience when the time came. “But what if you meet the girl of your dreams?” the host pressed. He offered a faint, polite smile. “Even if I did, I doubt I would do anything about it. I highly respect boundaries and the autonomy of others.” I sat in front of the TV in total silence. Right person, wrong time, I guess. Hudson walked out of the back kitchen holding a massive bowl of the bakery’s most expensive signature dessert, loaded with extra toppings. “Wow, big spender today,” I teased. He beamed. “Of course. Celebrating my new job offer.” “Congratulations. Which firm?” “Caldwell Enterprises.” I choked on my pastry, coughing violently into a napkin. “Wait… isn’t Caldwell HQ in New York?” “They’re opening a new branch. Haven’t you been watching?” He rewound the interview by thirty minutes. Sure enough, there was Victor Caldwell, speaking eloquently about corporate expansion. And the very first stop on his new national map? Portland, Oregon. Remembering my own soul-crushing days as a corporate drone in a branch office, I offered a word of warning. “Working at HQ is great, but branch offices will work you to the bone.” “But the pay is incredible.” “You’re young. Why are you in such a rush to make money?” Hudson cast a fleeting, nervous glance my way, then quickly looked away, the tips of his ears turning pink. “I guess… I just want to feel more confident when I ask out the person I like.” 8 I don’t think it was just my imagination. Hudson had a crush on me. Twenty-something boys are too easy to read. The flushed cheeks when we made eye contact, the nervous fiddling with his sleeves, the random bursts of hyperactive energy—he wore his heart on his sleeve. Unsurprisingly, he confessed his feelings to me. Equally unsurprisingly, I rejected him with swift, clean finality. Unlike Victor—who, upon being rejected, would show up the next day pretending nothing happened and shamelessly declare, “Persistence is a virtue”—Hudson had thin skin. The moment the words left my mouth, his eyes welled up. He mumbled a choked “I’m sorry to bother you,” and bolted out the door. By 11:00 PM, he still wasn’t back. Betty was pacing the floor of the apartment upstairs, sick with worry. I was just about to call him when my phone buzzed with a text from his number. [June, I’m at the police station. Can you come bail me out?] 9 To my surprise, Hudson hadn’t gone on some destructive, heartbroken rampage. Instead, he had actually gone to a networking dinner for his new job. After a few drinks, a wealthy client suggested they “go have some real fun.” Hudson, slightly buzzed and naive, just followed along. It wasn’t until they were in a private VIP room at a club and someone tried to unbuckle his belt that he snapped out of it. “I didn’t know the client was into guys, and the club he took me to was… well, I panicked. So I called the cops.” The result was that he ended up getting himself thrown in a holding cell alongside the client. “The client told me he’s going to ruin my career,” Hudson said, looking like he was about to cry again. “My boss is on his way here right now…” “Your boss?” A sudden, cold dread pooled in my stomach. “Which boss, exactly?” “It’s…” Before he could finish, Hudson stood up abruptly, his teary eyes fixed on something over my shoulder. “Mr. Caldwell. You’re here.”

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Yellow police tape snapped in the bitter wind, a physical barrier between me and the hospital doors. A line of heavily armed SWAT officers blocked my path, their faces obscured by tactical visors. They said there was a highly corrosive, toxic leak inside. They ordered all unauthorized personnel to clear the area immediately. I was just opening my mouth to declare my credentials when my apprentice suddenly collapsed onto the concrete, pointing a shaking finger directly at me. Her scream tore through the frigid air. She told them the source of the poison was in my bag. She shrieked that I was about to go inside and initiate a secondary release, begging the police to arrest me before it was too late. The chaos of the scene instantly evaporated into a suffocating, dead silence. The air felt thick, entirely frozen. Suddenly, I was staring down the barrels of multiple assault rifles. My chest burned with a frantic, desperate heat as I scrambled to explain. I told them I was a senior fellow at the National Institute of Biological Sciences. I told them the titanium cooler in my hands contained a highly classified, synthesized serum—the culmination of seven years of my life’s work. It was a universal counter-agent. Inside that ICU, thirty-six critical patients were drowning in their own fluids, waiting for this exact cure. The lead detective hesitated, his eyes darting between me and the cooler. But my apprentice wasn’t going to let it go. She told me to drop the innocent act. She told the officers that just last night, I had bragged about upping the dosage to kill the children in the ward. She claimed that now that my sick experiment was exposed, I was just trying to talk my way out of a federal prison sentence. The detective’s voice cracked like a whip, ordering the cooler opened. In the next breath, he commanded his men to cuff me and haul me in for a full interrogation. They didn’t open the cooler; they breached it. The lock was smashed, and the vials of crystalline serum shattered, bleeding out onto the asphalt. My heart plummeted, hitting the bottom of my stomach with a sickening thud. Thirty-six lives were tethered to the glass now mingling with the dirt. Their vitals were already crashing. And I—the only living person who knew the precise protocol to administer the compound—was being dragged away like an animal, all because of a fabricated, malicious lie spun by the very student I had trained. I looked at my watch. We had exactly thirty minutes before the first patient’s heart would stop forever. 1. “Dr. Thomas Aris. You claim you’re a senior fellow at the National Bio-Institute, yet your identification number doesn’t exist in the federal database. Care to explain that?” The sky above was an unforgiving, bruised gray. I was forced to my knees, my hands locked behind my head. Two burly officers gripped my arms, hauling them back to snap the cold steel of the handcuffs around my wrists without an ounce of hesitation. Captain Brody stood over me, his service weapon drawn and leveled squarely at my temple. “Papers can be forged. They don’t prove a damn thing,” Brody said, his voice flat. “You’re exhibiting suspicious behavior, carrying hazardous biochemicals into a hot zone, and we have an eyewitness making a direct, named accusation. To prevent a secondary mass-casualty event, you’re coming to the precinct.” Before I could even draw a breath to respond, a rough hand shoved my head down, and I was thrown violently against the metal grate of the cruiser’s backseat. “This is a setup!” I screamed, twisting wildly against the restraints. I refused to go quietly. “Captain, I work in classified, level-four federal research! My clearance and civilian records are scrubbed by the Department of Defense for security reasons! Look at the bigger picture!” “People are dying in there! They are out of time! Call the regional director, call the governor, call anyone—they will verify who I am!” A soft, mocking giggle cut through my desperation. Kate, my apprentice, stood safely behind the police line, watching the spectacle with a smirk. “Captain Brody, you’re not reading between the lines,” Kate said, her voice dripping with artificial sweetness. “He’s insulting you. He’s saying your pay grade is too low to understand his important work.” She crossed her arms, shivering theatrically. “He’s a pathological liar. A bottom-feeder. You guys aren’t seriously buying this ‘secret agent scientist’ routine, are you?” The blood in my veins turned to ice water. I hooked my boots under the edge of the cruiser’s doorframe, fighting the officers trying to push me inside. “The G-7 compound can only survive in a sterilized, temperature-controlled environment! The vials that didn’t break are already degrading! In less than thirty minutes, the efficacy will hit zero!” I roared, my throat tearing. “Let me in there right now, and they still have a chance!” Brody looked torn, his jaw ticking. But Kate seized the moment. She knelt by my confiscated medical bag, snapping on a pair of latex gloves, and began pulling out my sterilized, sealed reagents, twisting the narrative with breathtaking ease. “Look at this, officers,” she said, holding up a vial as if it were a grenade. “He bought these off the dark web. It’s the raw neurotoxin. He was planning to introduce it into the city’s water grid, the public schools, the maternity wards. He’s part of that domestic terror cell we’ve been reading about. The factory chemical spill two days ago? That was his test run.” A blinding, white-hot rage shot straight to my brain. My lips trembled so violently I could barely form the words. “Don’t listen to a word she says! Those are targeted, post-op extraction solvents issued by the Institute! They are entirely inert! They don’t have a single toxic property!” Kate blinked her wide, doe-like eyes, looking up at the officers with a playful, innocent shrug. “The labels are all in medical Latin and chemical shorthand. I mean, none of us can read that. Who’s to say it’s medicine? For all we know, it’s liquid fentanyl or weaponized anthrax.” Brody’s expression instantly hardened. Seeing the shift, Kate pressed her advantage. “The hospital is on lockdown. The media blackout is in effect. So, ask yourselves—does a random guy showing up with a briefcase full of chemicals look like a miracle doctor to you? Or does he look like the killer returning to the scene of the crime?” My soul felt like it had been hollowed out. I couldn’t process the reality that this girl—the young woman I had mentored, protected, and guided for years—was engineering my execution while innocent people were suffocating on their own blood. “Kate, what is wrong with you?!” I yelled, my voice cracking. “This isn’t a game! There are thirty-six human beings in there! You are playing with their lives!” She just clicked her tongue, shaking her head as she pulled out her phone and started recording my pathetic, restrained struggles on video. “Aww, did I hit a nerve? Getting defensive because you got caught?” she cooed into the camera. “You think you can threaten me, old man? You think I’m scared of you?” Spurred by her performance, Brody entirely shed his hesitation. He barked the order. “Bag the evidence and transport it to the precinct lab. Nobody goes in or out of that hospital until I have a toxicology report on my desk.” The remaining intact vials and the breached cooler were slapped with red evidence tape and tossed carelessly into the trunk of a squad car like discarded trash. Cold sweat drenched my shirt, sticking to my spine. I screamed until I tasted copper in my mouth. “It’s a matter of life and death! If we wait, every single one of them will die!” “Break his grip,” Brody ordered, utterly unmoved. “The prime suspect is sitting right in front of me. I’m not taking the risk of letting you walk into a mass-casualty zone.” I was plunging into a freezing abyss. Kate just offered me a bright, cheerful smile. “Enjoy the prison food, Tom!” she called out cheerfully. “And don’t worry, this is just the beginning. I’m going to make sure I get a front-row seat to watch your entire life burn to ash.” The cruiser door slammed shut. As the car tore away, the imposing silhouette of the hospital faded into the rearview mirror. In my mind, I could hear the phantom, agonizing gasps of the patients I was leaving behind. I glanced at the digital clock on the dashboard. Twenty-seven minutes until total organ failure. 2. The interrogation room smelled of stale coffee and bleach. I was cuffed to the iron ring on the table, my shoulders aching from the unnatural angle. “Dr. Thomas Aris. Senior fellow at the Bio-Institute. Head of experimental therapeutics.” Brody frowned, flipping through the leather-bound credentials they had pulled from my jacket. “The watermark looks authentic. But with today’s tech, a private seal is easy to fake. We’re contacting the forensics lab to run a mass spectrometry on the compounds.” I squeezed my eyes shut, fighting back tears of sheer frustration. I slid out of the metal chair, dropping hard onto my knees right there on the linoleum floor. “Captain Brody, please. A tox screen takes at least forty-eight hours. These people don’t have forty-eight minutes!” I begged, abandoning every ounce of my pride, my dignity, my titles. My eyes were burning, wet and red. “Take the serum to the ER. Cuff me to a radiator in the lobby, I don’t care. Put me on a radio with the chief surgeon, and I will walk them through the infusion process. You can hold a gun to my head the entire time! If I try anything, you pull the trigger!” “Thirty-six lives, Brody. Thirty-six families. If we lose them because of a bureaucratic delay, that blood is on your hands as much as mine!” Brody shifted his weight, his eyes darting toward the two-way mirror. He was wavering. He was a cop, but he was human. He opened his mouth to speak. The heavy steel door swung open. Kate practically skipped into the room. “Captain, I need to tell you a little secret,” she said, her voice pitched in a coquettish, little-girl whisper. “You don’t need to run those labs. Tom actually is a researcher at the Institute. The serum and the reagents are real. I was just trying to lighten the mood out there. Just a harmless little prank.” Brody’s face drained of color. His jaw clenched in sudden, furious realization. But before he could explode at her for wasting police time during a crisis, Kate’s face crumpled. Real, fat tears spilled over her cheeks. “But I wasn’t lying about him being a danger!” she sobbed, clutching her chest. “Just two weeks ago, he botched a thoracic surgery so badly he caused massive sepsis. He almost killed a pregnant woman and her baby!” “The Institute board secretly voted to terminate him! They only kept it quiet out of respect for his past contributions. They didn’t want the media circus!” The sheer audacity of the lie sent the blood rushing to my head. I slammed my cuffed hands against the table, the chain rattling violently. “That was your mistake! You were the one who scrubbed in drunk!” I roared. Kate shrank back against the wall, crying harder. With trembling hands, she pulled a folded incident report from her designer purse. She slid it across the table to Brody. Right there, under the ‘Attending Surgeon – Liability’ section, was my forged signature. “The proof is right there! Nothing you say matters!” Kate sneered, a vicious gleam in her eye contradicting her tears. Right in front of Brody, she pulled out her phone and initiated a FaceTime call to the Deputy Director of the Institute. “Dr. Wallace, hi. I’m so sorry to bother you, but I’m at the precinct. The police need to verify something about Tom.” The man on the screen adjusted his glasses, his expression grave and rehearsed. “Our internal investigation concluded that Dr. Aris is a severe alcoholic with a crippling opioid addiction. Furthermore, he’s begun exhibiting signs of paranoid schizophrenia. He harbors deep, violent resentments against the medical community and the public. We understand he’s now involved in a criminal inquiry.” Wallace sighed heavily. “The board convened an emergency session. Dr. Aris is officially terminated, stripped of all clinical privileges, and barred from any future medical practice.” My vision blurred. My palms were icy, slick with sweat. “Everyone at the hospital knows Dr. Wallace is your uncle!” I yelled, my voice echoing off the concrete walls. “He orchestrated this whole theatrical production just to save your career! You’re sacrificing my life, my reputation, to cover up your own malpractice!” Kate shook her head, adopting a look of profound pity. “Officer, look at him. He’s having a psychotic break. He doesn’t even remember what he did!” She clutched her arms, looking genuinely terrified. “I’m so scared. He dragged me to the hospital today to deliver that serum. Was he planning to use me as his fall guy when his little poisoning experiment failed?” Her manipulation was a masterclass in psychological warfare. Brody’s hands balled into tight fists. The sympathy that had been building in his eyes vanished, replaced by hard, righteous anger. “Get a warrant for a psych hold. Solitary confinement,” Brody ordered the officer at the door. My eyes widened in absolute disbelief. “Brody, run my background! Check the federal logs! I don’t have so much as a speeding ticket! None of this is real!” “Put him in shackles,” Brody snapped, turning his back on me. “Save your breath, Doc. You sit here and rot until the lab gives me the truth.” The adrenaline crashed, leaving me entirely hollowed out. My chest heaved. I stared at Kate, who was now leaning against the doorframe. “I gave you everything,” I whispered, the heartbreak choking my words. “You came to me five years ago. I taught you how to hold a scalpel. I secured your grant funding. I gave you my own fellowships. When you sliced into that pregnant woman and left a hemostat in her chest, I spent nine hours in the OR fixing your mess. I saved that woman’s life to save you.” As soon as Brody stepped out into the hall, Kate dropped the terrified victim act. She leaned over the table, idly scrolling through TikTok on her phone, her expression utterly bored. “You stupid bitch,” she said casually, not even looking up from her screen. “I wanted to destroy you. You know why? Because after I made that tiny, insignificant mistake in the OR, you had the nerve to dress me down in front of the entire surgical wing. You humiliated me.” She finally looked up, her eyes dark with pure entitlement. “Because of your little lecture, I lost the Chief Resident promotion. And my fiancé? He called off the wedding when he found out. My life is a complete mess right now. Did you really think I’d just let you go on being the hero?” I was staring at a monster. I had yelled at her because she had consumed three mimosas before scrubbing in for open-heart surgery. “You treat human lives like they are disposable,” I said, my voice barely a rasp. “Do you ever think about the consequences?” Kate rolled her eyes. “If they die, it just means they had bad genetics. How is that my problem?” She popped open a compact mirror and began casually reapplying her lip gloss. Suddenly, the door burst open. A young patrolman stood there, his face completely bloodless. “Captain Brody! Sir, you need to hear this!” the kid stammered, panic pitching his voice an octave higher. “The hospital just radioed. The patients are crashing. Two of them just flatlined.” “The attending surgeon says… they have exactly thirteen minutes before the toxins reach the heart muscle.” 3. I violently surged upward, the metal chair screaming against the floor as the chain snapped taut. “It’s moving too fast! The toxins are already binding to the myocardium!” I shouted, the panic clawing at my throat. “Grab the serum! Put me in the back of the cruiser with the sirens on! We might still have a window to reverse it!” Brody stood paralyzed, the weight of the badge suddenly too heavy for him. “The trauma center in Boston couldn’t reverse this. You’re telling me you can?” I ground my teeth together, a primal roar tearing from my chest. “That serum is the culmination of a century of Institute research! I am the only person on this continent with the biometric clearance to unlock the stabilizing protocol! Every sixty seconds you stand here debating, another person stops breathing!” “Make the call, Captain! Do you let me do my job, or do you stand there and let thirty-six civilians die because of a mean-girl prank?!” Brody was actively drowning in indecision. He looked at Kate, searching for an out. “Is it true? Is he the only one who can administer it?” Kate let out a sharp, derisive laugh. “Oh, please. It’s not magic,” she scoffed. “A cure-all serum? It’s pseudo-science garbage. He’s carrying around a thermos of sugar water and saline. A dog wouldn’t even drink it. Just wait for the lab results. You’ll see I’m right.” I was losing my mind. “The lab takes three days! They’ll be in body bags by midnight!” “Give me your phone,” I demanded, straining against the cuffs. “Call Dr. Warren, the Chief of Medicine at the hospital. Let him tell you!” Brody stared at the sweat pouring down my face. Against his better judgment, he pulled out his phone, unlocked it, and dialed the number I rattled off. He put it on speaker and set it on the table. Instantly, the line connected. A barrage of screaming, alarms, and absolute chaos flooded the interrogation room. “Tom?! Where the hell are you?!” Dr. Warren’s voice was ragged, practically a shriek. “This synthetic variant is tearing them apart! G-7 is the only antagonist that will bind to it! You’re the only one who knows the titration schedule! Who’s supposed to run the cascade if you’re not here?!” “Jesus Christ, the Mayor’s office begged the feds to fly you in! Where are you?!” “Seven of them are in V-fib! They’re crashing!” Warren was sobbing now. A grown man, a veteran surgeon, weeping into the receiver. “Did you hear him?” I whispered, my eyes locked onto Brody with dead, cold intensity. “Because of your hesitation, even if I save the ones who are left, they will suffer permanent neurological damage.” The room was so quiet you could hear the hum of the fluorescent lights. Brody reached for his keys, stepping toward me to unlock the cuffs. “You guys aren’t seriously buying this performance, are you?” Kate stepped directly into Brody’s path, blocking him from me. She crossed her arms, offering a condescending smirk. “We live in the era of deepfakes, Captain. AI voice cloning is a twenty-dollar app. He knows his secondary poisoning plan is blown, so he’s improvising an escape route.” She snatched Brody’s phone from the table, tapping the screen aggressively. “Look at this! The caller ID says ‘Unknown.’ The area code doesn’t even match the hospital’s registry. He had his little domestic terror buddies set up a spoofed number to trick you!” The last thread of my sanity snapped. “Give me the phone!” I lunged, the heavy table dragging an inch across the floor. Kate stepped back, her smile widening into a rictus of pure malice. She raised the phone high and hurled it onto the concrete floor. She brought her designer heel down on the screen. Crunch. She ground her heel into the glass, destroying the processor, obliterating my last lifeline. “Trying to call your sleeper cell for an extraction? I don’t think so,” she hummed, looking at Brody like she had just saved his life. “Captain, use your detective skills. If he was really a top-tier government scientist dispatched by the state, where is his federal escort? Where is his Secret Service detail? Why did he show up in an Uber with a plastic ID badge?” She grabbed Brody’s forearm, giving it a reassuring squeeze. “If he was a god-tier doctor, essential to the survival of the city, why would his own trusted apprentice turn him in?” Kate flashed a dazzling, pageant-ready smile. “Furthermore, if it was really an emergency, why didn’t he call this ‘Dr. Warren’ before he got arrested?” “I’m telling you, he got caught trying to poison the water supply, and now he’s trying to manufacture a crisis so you’ll un-cuff him and let him walk out the front door.” Brody blinked, the paranoia washing over him like a tidal wave. He stepped back from me, tucking his keys back into his belt. “Hold him here,” Brody said, his voice thick with anxiety. “I’m not making a move until I have a federal liaison verify his identity.” All the color drained from my face. “Brody, no! The timeline is over! They’re dying right now!” “Sit down and shut up,” Brody barked. “If you’re who you say you are, a few minutes won’t matter.” The words had barely left his mouth when the wail of the city’s emergency broadcast system bled through the precinct windows. A horrific, sustained siren. A patrol officer burst into the room, his radio crackling with panicked chatter. “Captain! It’s a mass casualty event! Multiple simultaneous fatalities at the hospital!” “The press broke the embargo. The Governor just activated the National Guard, and the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force is already en route!”

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The plan had been incredibly simple: buy a two-day park hopper pass, gorge on churros, and let my seven-year-old nephew run off his endless energy at Disney. Then my phone rang. It was the emergency override tone from Memorial Hospital. An OB-GYN case. Acute, catastrophic hemorrhaging. The patient was crashing, and as the on-call Chief of Maternal-Fetal Medicine, I was the only surgeon on staff with the specific vascular expertise to pull her back from the brink. I didn’t hesitate. I slammed on the brakes, cranked the steering wheel across two lanes of traffic, and floored the accelerator toward the city. My nephew, Mason, lost his absolute mind. When he realized the Magic Kingdom was shrinking in the rearview mirror, he didn’t just throw a tantrum. He rolled down his window at a red light, pointed a trembling finger at a nearby police cruiser, and screamed at the top of his lungs. “Help! Help me! She’s kidnapping me!” The sirens flashed instantly. Within seconds, two officers had my sedan boxed in against the shoulder. My palms were slick with cold sweat against the steering wheel. I rolled down my window, words tumbling out of my mouth in a desperate rush. “Officers, please, this is a massive misunderstanding. He’s my nephew. I had to cancel our Disney trip for a medical emergency, and he’s just acting out—” The older cop, hand resting cautiously on his utility belt, leaned down to look into the backseat. “Is that true, buddy? Is this your aunt?” Mason’s face was a mask of furious, vindictive defiance. He stared right at the cop and yelled, “I don’t know her! She’s taking me away! She’s a kidnapper!” The air in the car seemed to freeze. The officer’s expression slammed shut, morphing from mild concern to hard, procedural protocol. “Ma’am. Step out of the vehicle. Now.” I glanced frantically at the digital clock on my dashboard. Thirteen minutes. I had exactly thirteen minutes to scrub in before the woman on my operating table bled out. Mason sat in the back, a smug little smile playing on his lips, victorious. He didn’t know. He had absolutely no idea that the woman bleeding to death on the cold steel of that operating table was his own mother. … 1 “Officer, listen to me,” I pleaded, my voice cracking as I gripped the steering wheel, refusing to unbuckle my seatbelt. “I am the head of Obstetrics at Memorial Hospital. There is a woman hemorrhaging right now. Two lives are on the line—a mother and her unborn child. Every single second I sit here is a second they are bleeding out.” The cop didn’t flinch. His jaw was set in stone. “Unless you can prove your relation to this child right this second, you are coming down to the precinct. Step out of the car.” Panic, hot and suffocating, rose in my chest. I twisted around to face the backseat. “Mason, please,” I begged, the desperation bleeding into my tone. “Aunt Juliet is begging you. People are dying. I promise, I swear to you, we will go to Disney next weekend. Just tell them the truth. Tell them you made it up.” Mason crossed his arms over his chest, his chin tilted up in a terrifyingly pure display of childhood entitlement. “No. You’re a liar. You promised we’d go today. Now the police are gonna put you in jail.” “Ma’am,” the second officer warned, pulling open my door. “Do not make us use force. Step out.” They pulled me onto the asphalt. One officer took my driver’s license, calling it in, while the other crouched by the open back door, gently asking Mason about his parents. A lifeline suddenly appeared in my panicked brain. “Call his parents!” I gasped out. “I can call my brother and his wife. Right now. They’ll tell you who I am.” The officer nodded curtly. “Do it. On speaker.” My fingers shook so badly I almost dropped the phone. I dialed my sister-in-law, Rachel, first. It rang and rang, finally clicking over to voicemail. Biting my lip, I called my brother, Brad. He picked up on the third ring. “Brad—” I started. “Juliet, Jesus Christ, what is your problem?” Brad’s voice barked through the speaker, thick with irritation. “I asked you for one favor. Watch the kid for a single day so I can get some work done, and you’re already calling to complain? Are you that incapable of being a decent aunt?” “Brad, listen to me, the police—” “I don’t want to hear your excuses! Keep him entertained. I’m busy!” Click. The line went dead. I stared at the screen, horrified, and immediately hit redial. Call failed. He had sent me straight to voicemail. I tried again. Nothing. He had activated ‘Do Not Disturb’ or blocked my number entirely. Mason had always been a holy terror. From the moment he could walk, my brother and sister-in-law had treated him like a fragile prince, shielding him from consequences, boundaries, or the word ‘no’. When he saw the Disney commercials last week, he demanded to go. Brad claimed he was swamped at work, and Rachel, heavily pregnant and on bed rest, couldn’t handle him. Since I was on a rare weekend rotation break, Brad dumped him on me. Now, standing on the side of the highway, I realized the monster in the backseat wasn’t just a bad kid; he was the product of two parents who had nurtured his worst impulses. The officer looked at me, his eyes narrowing with deep suspicion. “So? Where are his parents?” I licked my dry lips, tasting salt and terror. “They… they aren’t answering. But Officer, I swear to God, I am not a kidnapper.” A small crowd of pedestrians had begun to gather on the sidewalk, their murmurs carrying over the rush of traffic. “Did you hear her? Said she was gonna call the parents, now suddenly she can’t.” “Thank God that little boy was smart enough to scream.” “Lock her up! Scum of the earth, trafficking kids.” I looked at my watch. The glass face was blurry through my tears. Nine minutes. 2 “Memorial Hospital is two miles from here,” I said, my voice dropping to an intense, low register. “If you turn your sirens on, we can be there in four minutes. Escort me. If I’m lying, you can arrest me in the lobby. But there is a surgical team standing around an empty table right now, watching a woman’s blood pressure bottom out. Please.” The sheer gravity of my tone made the older officer pause. He exchanged a look with his partner. They were wavering. But Mason saw he was losing his audience. He threw himself against the backseat upholstery, kicking his sneakers against the door panel, and started wailing. “No! I don’t want to go to the hospital! She’s gonna hurt me! She’s gonna let the doctors cut me open!” The younger cop’s head snapped up. He leaned back into the car. “What did you just say, buddy? Did she say she was going to cut you open?” Mason’s eyes darted around, calculating. “Yes! She was on the phone! She said she was taking me to the hospital to sell my organs! I want my mom! I want to go to Disney!” A collective gasp rippled through the onlookers. Cell phones were pulled out. Lenses pointed at my face. “Out of the mouths of babes,” an older woman hissed from the sidewalk. “She’s not just a kidnapper. She’s harvesting.” “There’s a whole black market for it! Disgusting!” “Don’t let her anywhere near a hospital, she probably has butchers waiting for him!” I shook my head violently, stepping toward the crowd. “No! He’s lying! I’m a surgeon, I’m his aunt, he’s just mad about a theme park—” A half-empty iced coffee sailed through the air, clipping my shoulder and splattering brown liquid across my blouse. The crowd was surging, their faces twisting with righteous, misinformed fury. Realizing the situation was turning into a powder keg, the officers grabbed my arms, practically shoving me into the back of their cruiser. They tossed Mason in next to me and slammed the door, stepping out to push the crowd back. In the suffocating quiet of the squad car, I grabbed Mason by the collar of his windbreaker. My hands were shaking so violently I could barely hold on. “Mason,” I breathed, my voice a jagged whisper. “When did I ever say I was going to hurt you? How could you make something like that up?” He didn’t look scared. He looked annoyed. “Because you broke your promise. I told my friends I was going to the Magic Kingdom. Now I look stupid. You’re a bad person.” I tried to force air into my lungs. “Mason, listen to me. Someone is dying. Do you understand what death is? You are seven years old. Stop this right now.” He kicked at my shins. “I don’t care! Take me to Disney or I won’t stop! I’m not going anywhere else!” I snapped. Every second of medical training, the Hippocratic oath, the sacred duty to preserve life—it all collided with the infuriating, sociopathic selfishness of the boy in front of me. Two lives were slipping away into the dark, tethered only by my physical absence, all because of a spoiled child’s temper tantrum. I raised my hand and slapped him across the face. The crack echoed loudly in the confined space of the police cruiser. “Your parents might let you get away with this,” I snarled, my voice vibrating with a dark, terrifying authority. “But today, you are dealing with me. You will tell the police the truth right now.” Mason had never been struck in his life. Brad and Rachel treated a minor scrape like a national tragedy. The shock of the slap, the stinging heat on his cheek, completely shattered his tough-guy facade. Fear finally flooded his eyes. I kicked the cruiser door open from the inside and shoved him out onto the pavement right at the officers’ feet. Tears streaming down his face, a red handprint blooming on his cheek, he sobbed, “She… she’s my Aunt Juliet! She’s not kidnapping me!” 3 “There!” I yelled, practically crawling out of the backseat. “You heard him! He lied. Now please, put me in the front seat and drive me to Memorial. We are out of time!” But the older officer’s hand dropped to his cuffs. His eyes were ice cold. “Dr. Brooks, if that’s who you really are, turn around. You are under arrest for the assault of a minor.” Before I could even process his words, he wrenched my arms behind my back. The cold steel of the handcuffs clicked tight around my wrists. “No! No, you can’t do this!” I screamed, struggling against his grip. “People are dying!” “Save it for the precinct,” the cop growled, marching me toward the door. I dropped all my weight, forcing my knees onto the rough asphalt. I didn’t care about my pride. I didn’t care about the cameras. I only cared about the slipping heartbeats of the woman and child waiting for me. “Look at me,” I pleaded, staring up at them from the ground. “If you take me to the station, two people will be dead before I’m booked. Give me sixty seconds. One minute. If I can’t prove it in one minute, I will walk into a jail cell without a fight.” The sheer, raw agony in my voice made the younger officer hesitate. He looked at my ruined clothes, my tear-streaked face, my scraped knees. “She doesn’t look like a trafficker,” he muttered to his partner. “Let’s give her a minute.” “Fine. Where’s your proof?” “My phone. Right pocket.” The officer fished my phone out and held it up. “Unlock it. Dial.” I dictated the passcode, then had him pull up FaceTime and call Jasmine, my surgical resident. It rang twice. Then, the screen flooded with the harsh, blinding white light of an operating room. Jasmine’s face appeared, framed by a blue surgical cap and a mask pulled down around her neck. Her eyes were wide with terror. “Dr. Brooks?! Where the hell are you? The patient is coding. O2 sats are dropping below 70. We are maxed out on pressors. We need you here now.” “Jasmine, I’m detained by the police,” I shouted at the phone. “Tell them who I am!” Jasmine didn’t miss a beat. She stared dead into the camera lens, straight at the police officers. “This is Dr. Juliet Brooks, Chief of Obstetrics at Memorial. We have a catastrophic maternal hemorrhage on the table right now. If you don’t get her here in the next five minutes, I am going to have to call time of death on a mother and her baby. Bring her to the ER bay immediately.” Behind Jasmine, the chaotic blur of nurses running with blood bags and the frantic, rhythmic beep-beep-beep of the heart monitor painted an undeniable picture of reality. The officers went pale. “Understood. We’re on our way.” Mason, realizing he had finally lost, threw himself onto the sidewalk, kicking and screaming like a feral animal. “I’m not going! She’s faking it! It’s a movie! I want my mom! I want my mom!” The crowd, however, wasn’t convinced. “Oh, please. Deepfakes exist,” a guy in a baseball cap sneered. “She probably has an accomplice.” “If she’s really a big-shot surgeon, let the hospital send an ambulance for her!” The older cop looked at the angry mob. It was a PR nightmare waiting to happen. “Can your hospital send an ambulance? It might be the safest way to extract you without causing a riot.” “An ambulance takes twenty minutes round trip!” I screamed. “She doesn’t have twenty minutes!” The crowd surged forward, linking arms, blocking the police cruiser. “We aren’t letting the trafficker leave until we see a real ambulance!” Jasmine’s voice cut through the phone. “Dr. Brooks, drop a pin. EMT Unit 4 is just two blocks from your location returning from a call. I’m routing them to you now.” The next three minutes were an agonizing blur of adrenaline and despair. I watched the seconds tick by on the officer’s watch. Every rotation of the second hand felt like a nail being driven into a coffin. Finally, the deafening wail of an air horn shattered the tension. A Memorial Hospital ambulance, lights blazing, smashed through the intersection and screeched to a halt right in front of us. 4 Even then, the crowd muttered conspiracy theories. But the paramedic jumped out, flashed his hospital badge to the police, and locked eyes with me. “Dr. Brooks? Jasmine sent us. Let’s go.” A woman in the crowd stepped back, deflating. “I know him. He took my dad to Memorial last month. He’s real.” The officer quickly unlocked my handcuffs. “Dr. Brooks. I am so deeply sorry for the delay.” The crowd suddenly fell dead silent, the collective guilt washing over them. People lowered their phones and backed away. A few of them turned their misdirected anger toward Mason, who was still sobbing on the ground. “You little brat,” a woman hissed at him. “You lied and put a woman’s life in danger? Where are your parents?” “Someone should lock him up! Spoiled little monster.” “If someone dies because of you, I hope you never sleep again!” Mason, who had only ever known a world that bent to his every whim, was paralyzed by the collective wrath of a dozen adults. He wailed, absolutely terrified. “I want my mom! Let me go home!” I grabbed him by the arm, not gently, and hauled him into the back of the ambulance. I looked back at the crowd. “When this is over, his parents will deal with him. Go home.” The ambulance doors slammed shut. We tore through the city streets, weaving through traffic with ruthless efficiency. But as we pulled into the ambulance bay, I looked at the clock. I was ten minutes late. In trauma surgery, ten minutes isn’t just a delay. It’s an eternity. It is the vast, insurmountable canyon between a heartbeat and silence. I shoved Mason into the surgeons’ lounge, locking the door behind him. “Stay here.” I scrubbed in with brutal, frantic speed. I shoved my arms into the sterile gown, kicked the OR doors open with my foot, and stepped into the freezing room. The moment I crossed the threshold, the long, flat, agonizing tone of the heart monitor filled the room. Beeeeeeeeeeep. “Push epi! Start chest compressions!” I barked, rushing to the table, stepping up to the stool. I locked my hands together, placing them over the patient’s sternum. I pushed down, hard. One, two, three— Then I looked at her face. The breath was punched out of my lungs. The room began to spin, the edges of my vision fraying into black. “Dr. Brooks?” Jasmine asked, her voice trembling. “Are you okay?” I forced myself to snap back. I pushed. I compressed. I shocked. I poured every ounce of my skill, my soul, my desperation into the woman on that table. Thirty minutes later, the room was silent. There was no heartbeat. No pulse. Just the terrible, heavy stillness of death. “Time of death,” I whispered, the words tasting like ash in my mouth. “11:42 AM. Two fatalities.” I didn’t bother changing. Still wearing my blood-splattered scrubs, the paper shoe covers rustling against the linoleum, I walked down the long, hollow corridor toward the lounge. From twenty feet away, I could hear the rhythmic thud of Mason kicking the door. “Let me out! I want to go to Disney! I hate it here!” I unlocked the door and pushed it open. I didn’t yell. I didn’t slap him. I just looked at him with an emptiness so profound it silenced him instantly. “Because of your tantrum,” I said, my voice dead, “I was late. Do you know who you just killed?” Mason stumbled back, his eyes darting to the blood on my gown. Then, anger flared up in him again. He put his head down and charged at me, swinging his little fists. “You’re a bad aunt! I’m telling my mom and dad! My mom is going to kill you!” I caught his wrists in one hand. Without a word, I dragged him down the hallway, back toward the OR. He slipped and stumbled, terrified of the sterile environment, the smell of iodine and copper. “Where are we going? I want my mom! Let me go!” I pushed the heavy doors open. The surgical team had stepped back. The body lay on the table, pale and motionless. “You want your mom?” I asked, my voice echoing in the cold room. “There she is.”

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The doctor’s words hung in the sterile, fluorescent-lit air, paralyzing me. My tubes had been tied for three years. I was physically incapable of getting pregnant. The doctor had just gently suggested that if we were so terrified of an accidental pregnancy, either the woman should undergo a procedure, or the man should get a vasectomy. He mentioned that the new experimental male contraceptive pill Wes had been taking was notorious for its brutal side effects. Breaking out in full-body hives was the least of it. The doctor lowered his glasses, his voice laced with professional concern. He told me my husband had swallowed a triple dose of the medication in a single week. Even if Wes wanted to spare me the discomfort of hormonal birth control, the doctor said, he couldn’t be so reckless with his own life. The whole ordeal had started because of a new intern at my marketing firm—a twenty-two-year-old kid named Connor. Connor had brought me coffee three days in a row. When I casually mentioned it to Wes, he played it cool. He smiled, kissed my forehead, and said it was nothing. But that night, I woke up at 3:00 AM to find him sitting in the dark, scrolling through my phone, his skin broken out in angry, red stress hives, his breathing shallow and erratic. On the frantic drive to the emergency room, his face was flushed with fever. Despite his condition, he shoved his phone into my face, pulling up a deeply researched background check on the intern. He swore Connor’s LinkedIn photo was heavily photoshopped. He practically yelled that the kid was wearing lifts in his shoes and was absolutely, definitively not six feet tall. In the ER triage, the nurses had to turn away to hide their smiles. Humiliated and exhausted, I gently clamped my hand over his mouth and guided him into a hospital bed. This was my husband, Wesley Crawford. I was the woman he had stolen from his own best friend. Because our relationship began with him as the “other man,” he harbored a deep, simmering paranoia toward every single male who entered my orbit. It was a running joke between us, though beneath the humor lay a suffocating truth: if I stopped to pet a Golden Retriever in the park, Wes wouldn’t relax until he confirmed that both the dog and its owner were female. … 1. I sat on the edge of the bed, watching Wes sleep. His chest rose and fell in a steady, reassuring rhythm. Quietly, I picked up his phone from the nightstand. His passcode was my birthday. His lock screen was a photo of me. His recent search history was a shrine to his obsession with me: “How to keep your wife’s attention?” “If my wife thinks I’m too clingy, is she seeing someone else?” “How to comfort my wife when she misses her late mother.” Even his Notes app was essentially a ledger of my emotional state: March 20: Brooke had a nightmare. Missing her mom. March 21: Brooke seems depressed lately. Stress is triggering her stomach ulcers. April 1: Tracked down Brooke’s old childhood nanny. Paid her to teach me how to make her mom’s signature tomato brisket. Brooke ate two bowls. She smiled. Reading those entries, a hot prickle of tears gathered in my eyes. I took a shaky breath, trying to convince myself that I was just being overly sensitive lately. He loved me. He was just intense. Then, a push notification slid across the top of the screen from his navigation app. “Based on your usual routine, a route home has been generated. ETA: 30 minutes.” The destination pinned on the map was The Belvedere, East Tower. We lived in the West Tower. My thumb hovered over the screen. My heart performed a slow, sickening roll in my chest. I tapped the notification. His location history loaded, laying out a damning, undeniable pattern. For the past three months, every single weekday at noon, his GPS routed him to the East Tower. He stayed there for exactly two hours. A memory clicked into place, cold and sharp. My stomach ulcers had flared up violently a few months ago. I’d lost eight pounds in a matter of weeks, unable to keep anything down except the meals Wes cooked from scratch. His office was all the way across the city. Every day, he would battle midday traffic to rush home, cook for me, feed me, and then rush back to handle the sharks on his board of directors, often staying at his desk until 2:00 AM to make up for the lost time. It broke my heart to see him so exhausted. I begged him to just stay at the office and rest during his lunch break. He had refused, taking it as a rejection. We had a massive fight. He accused me of not needing him anymore, his face pale and rigid, insisting he would keep cooking for me. It wasn’t until I pretended my stomach was completely healed—swearing up and down that I could take care of myself—that he finally relented and agreed to rest at the office. Except he wasn’t at the office. Every single day, he was in a luxury penthouse less than three hundred yards from our bedroom, keeping someone else company. I gripped the phone, my entire body beginning to tremble. A chill seeped into my bones. Suddenly, an iMessage popped onto the screen. “Wes, baby. I think you left with one of my panties in your pocket yesterday. Did she find it? I left it there on purpose for you. Unwashed.” “It’s my favorite set. You have to bring it back to me for my birthday.” I stared at the contact photo. My hand shook so violently I could barely tap the icon to enlarge the picture. It was Kelly. My father’s illegitimate daughter. The living, breathing embodiment of the affair that had shattered my family and driven my mother to suicide. Since we were children, Kelly had made it her life’s mission to take whatever was mine. My clothes, my toys, my father’s affection. Even my husbands. My first marriage had ended the day I walked into my own guest bedroom and found my ex-husband buried between Kelly’s legs. The day my divorce was finalized, I was a hollow shell of a human being. Wes had held me in the rain outside the courthouse, pressing his forehead to mine, his voice fierce and unwavering. “I will only ever love you, Brooke. For the rest of my life. I don’t care what games she tries to play, I will never so much as look at her. You have to believe me.” And for a long time, he proved it. When Kelly managed to get his number and sent him naked photos, Wes didn’t just block her. He called the police and filed a harassment report. He had her held in a precinct holding cell for 48 hours. He forwarded the police report to the dean of her university, resulting in her expulsion and effectively nuking her reputation. I truly believed that dragging myself out of the mud of my past and finding Wes was the universe’s way of rewarding me. So why her? God, why was it her again? Driven by a masochistic need to see the truth, I scrolled up through their chat history. I watched the man who called me his soulmate call her baby. I read texts where Kelly threatened to tell me everything, and I saw how Wes “punished” her—not by blocking her, but by throwing her onto a bed in a hotel room, fucking her into submission until she promised to keep quiet. I scrolled to the dates I had been in the hospital for my stomach biopsies, terrified and entirely alone. On those exact nights, they were in the apartment I had spent months decorating, and she was wearing my silk pajamas. A wave of pure, acidic nausea hit the back of my throat. I clamped a hand over my mouth, my whole body vibrating. Behind me, the mattress shifted. “Brooke?” Seeing my red, tear-streaked face in the dim light, Wes instantly reached out to pull me into his chest. As he moved, the faint, metallic scent of dried sweat and sex drifted off his skin. I shoved him back with all the strength I had and sprinted into the master bathroom, dropping to my knees as I dry-heaved over the toilet. “Baby!” Wes was right behind me. The second his hand grazed my spine, I recoiled like I had been electrocuted. I blindly grabbed the heavy glass apothecary jar from the vanity and hurled it at him. “Get away from me!” The thick glass clipped his temple, shattering against the tile. A bright ribbon of blood instantly welled up, sliding down his brow bone. Wes didn’t even flinch. He didn’t reach for his bleeding head. He just looked at me, his eyes wide with a frantic, overflowing panic. “Is it your stomach? Are the ulcers bleeding again?” “Brooke, where does it hurt?” I sat slumped against the cold porcelain bathtub, paralyzed, watching him scramble wildly out of the bathroom. He returned seconds later with a glass of water and my prescription bottle. The blood dripped steadily from his temple, landing on the crisp white collar of his pajama shirt, blooming into dark crimson stains. He was completely oblivious to his own injury. He just knelt in front of me, holding out the pill, his eyes fragile and terrified. “Open your mouth, baby. Take the medicine.” “Why?” I whispered. 2. I looked into Wes’s eyes—eyes that were so genuinely, thoroughly brimming with love—and the tears spilled down my cheeks, unstoppable. Just a few days ago, we had been curled up on the sofa, mapping out our future. We talked about retiring early. We talked about buying a house in Carmel-by-the-Sea, about traveling to Paris and Aspen, returning to every place we had ever kissed, just the two of us against the world. Just hours ago, he was making a fool of himself in an emergency room because he was terrified of losing me to a twenty-two-year-old intern. “Why would you betray me?” I looked at him, my vision blurring. Wes froze. The hand holding my medication slowly curled into a tight, white-knuckled fist. “You know.” I waited in the heavy, suffocating silence. I waited for his excuse. A pathetic part of my brain whispered that if he just gave me a good enough lie, I would swallow it. I would believe him. I would forgive him. “I’m sorry,” he breathed, his voice cracking. He took a hesitant step forward on his knees. “I know… I know you’d be furious if you found out I went behind your back and had Connor fired.” I stopped breathing. “But I couldn’t handle it, Brooke,” Wes rushed on, the words tumbling out in a desperate plea. “I couldn’t stand the thought of another man spending eight hours a day with you. Looking at your smile. Giving you coffee.” He tipped his head back, looking up at me with such a raw, pathetic reverence. “You don’t know what it took to get you. You don’t know the lengths I went to, the bridges I burned to rip you away from Ryan. To finally earn the right to stand beside you in the daylight.” A tear tracked through the blood on his cheek. “Why should some kid get to just walk into your office and have your attention without bleeding for it?” “I know I’m sick, Brooke. I know I’m not normal. But I will never regret protecting what’s mine.” He reached out, his bloody fingers hovering just inches from my knee. “Punish me however you want. Hit me again. But don’t hurt yourself, and please, God, don’t leave me. I won’t survive it.” He looked at me like a stray dog begging for a scrap of warmth. Staring down at him, clarity cut through the fog in my mind. I knew, with absolute certainty, that the only sane thing to do was stand up, pack a bag, and walk out the front door forever. But my heart physically ached. I didn’t want to let go. I didn’t want to lose the safety of his arms, or the beautiful, curated life we had built. The delusion settled over me like a warm blanket. If I don’t see it with my own eyes, it isn’t real. If I don’t catch them, I can pretend this is just about his jealousy. I forced the muscles in my face to move. I gave him a weak, trembling smile. “I want tomato brisket.” The sheer relief that washed over Wes’s face was blinding. He practically leaped to his feet, kissing my forehead before sprinting toward the kitchen. But seconds later, his phone buzzed on the counter. He glanced at the screen, and a shadow of manufactured guilt crossed his features. “I’m so sorry, baby,” he said softly. “There’s a massive crisis at the firm. The board needs me on a call. I promise I’ll make it for you the second I get back.” Before I could even respond, he was out the door. Twenty minutes later, I was sitting in my car, parked under the heavy canopy of an oak tree outside the East Tower of The Belvedere. I watched my husband wrap his arm around Kelly’s waist. I watched them walk into the glass lobby, leaning into each other like newlywed lovers. The moment the heavy glass doors swung shut behind them, I pulled out my phone and dialed his number. My eyes were fixed on the massive floor-to-ceiling windows of the second-floor mezzanine lounge. Through the glass, I saw Wes immediately stand up, reaching for his coat to step away and take the call. But Kelly grabbed his wrist. She pulled him down, straddling his lap, and crashed her mouth against his. Through the phone speaker pressed to my ear, I heard the wet, unmistakable sound of a heavy kiss. I heard the sharp intake of her breath. My knuckles turned white around the steering wheel. “Wes,” I forced my voice into a terrified whimper. “My stomach… it’s hurting so badly.” Through the glass, I saw Wes violently shove Kelly off him. He grabbed his coat, practically running toward the elevator. “Brooke, baby, hold on. Don’t panic. I’m coming home right now,” his voice panicked through the speaker. Suddenly, a muffled thud echoed over the line. Kelly had dropped to the floor, curling into a ball. The line went dead. 3. Ten seconds later, a text illuminated my screen: “Baby, the board just called an emergency vote. I have to stay. I’ve already dispatched my private physician to the house. He’s ten minutes away. I love you, don’t be scared.” I slowly raised my eyes to the window. Up in the penthouse, Wes was lifting Kelly into his arms, carrying her toward the bedroom. Something inside my chest, a fragile, deeply held hope, simply turned to ash. It was gone. I picked up my phone and dialed the number for my OB-GYN’s clinic. “Hello,” my voice was entirely devoid of emotion. “I need to cancel my consultation for the tubal reversal surgery. Permanently.” I put the car in drive. I just wanted to disappear. But as my headlights swept across the pavement, they illuminated a figure standing directly in my path. It was my father, Richard. We stared at each other through the windshield for a long moment. Eventually, I killed the engine and followed him into the house I had lived in for the first eighteen years of my life. The architecture of the living room was the same, but the soul of the house was entirely unrecognizable. The gallery wall that used to hold photos of my mother and me had been entirely replaced by portraits of Kelly and her mother. My mother’s beloved hydrangeas had been ripped out of the vases, replaced by ostentatious, suffocatingly fragrant red roses. I stood in the center of the Persian rug, feeling like a ghost haunting a stranger’s home. My father gestured to the leather sofa. I had barely sat down before he dropped the facade. “Leave Wesley.” “No,” I replied smoothly. “Wes is the one who can’t leave me.” It was the truth. Early in our marriage, I had found a text from Kelly on his phone. Devastated and feeling the familiar sting of betrayal, I packed my bags. Wes hadn’t argued. He hadn’t raised his voice. He simply locked the front door, walked into the kitchen, grabbed a paring knife, and drove it an inch into his own abdomen. Blood soaked his shirt, but he hadn’t even blinked. He just stared into my eyes, terrifyingly calm. “You want to leave me? You’ll have to step over my dead body to do it.” My father didn’t argue. He just looked at me with a profound, crushing pity. He pointed a finger at a massive framed collage leaning against the far wall. It was dozens of photos. Kelly and Wes. Cuddling on a gondola in Venice. Holding hands under the cherry blossoms in Kyoto. Kissing under the glittering lights of the Eiffel Tower. “He wasn’t on a business trip last week,” my father said quietly. “He took Kelly on a global tour.” My father stood up, walking heavily to the board and tapping the large, central photograph. “They eloped in Europe. They had a full ceremony. They invited everyone who mattered.” “Including his parents.” “To convince his mother and father to accept Kelly—to get them to attend the wedding—Wes knelt outside their front door for three days in the rain.” My father turned to look at me. “If I recall correctly, his parents didn’t even show up to your wedding, did they?” I opened my mouth, but no sound came out. The air in the room felt too thin to breathe. Wes’s old-money parents despised me. They believed I was a homewrecker who had seduced their golden boy, forcing him to betray his best friend and staining the family’s immaculate reputation. They had boycotted our wedding. They refused to even let me cross the threshold of their estate. Yet in the photo my father was pointing to, Wes’s mother was beaming, accepting a glass of champagne from Kelly with a look of pure, maternal adoration. “I heard you got into a minor car accident a few days ago,” my father continued, his voice relentless. “I handled it,” I whispered. “I didn’t want to worry Wes. I dealt with the insurance myself.” My father let out a dry, humorless laugh. “Do you know where your husband was when that truck rear-ended you?” “He was less than a block away. Buying an engagement ring with Kelly.” A high-pitched ringing started in my ears. “He watched the whole thing happen,” my father said, delivering each word like a physical blow. “He watched the truck driver get out and scream in your face. He watched the man shove you to the pavement. He watched you limping, pulling out your phone to call the cops with trembling hands.” “And he didn’t take a single step toward you. Because Kelly said she was thirsty, and he was too busy buying her a bottle of sparkling water.” “You’re lying!” I shot to my feet, my whole body shaking so hard my teeth rattled. I couldn’t believe it. I wouldn’t believe it. This was the man who would spend an hour icing my knee if I bumped it on a coffee table. He wouldn’t stand by and watch me be assaulted. “You’re making this up!” I screamed. “You just want me to divorce him so Kelly can have his money! You’re lying!” My father just stood there, watching my meltdown in stony silence. The pity in his eyes was agonizing. After a long time, he spoke. “Kelly is pregnant.” “They already picked a name. Jonah.” Jonah. Something inside my brain simply snapped. The tether keeping me anchored to reality severed completely. Jonah. It means dove. It means peace. Wes and I had spent an entire month poring over baby-name books, arguing and laughing in bed until 2:00 AM, looking for the perfect name. That was our baby’s name. That name belonged to me. “Men understand men, Brooke,” my father’s voice drifted through the static in my head. “What he feels for you now isn’t love. It’s just a sick sense of obligation. If you stay in this marriage, you are going to end up exactly like your mother.” My mother. When she found out my father had a mistress, she refused to sign the divorce papers. She fought, she screamed, she clung to the hollow shell of her marriage. So my father just moved his mistress into our house. He flaunted his new life in front of her until the humiliation broke her mind, and she swallowed a bottle of pills in the master bathroom. Was that my destiny? To be trapped in an endless, suffocating cycle of gaslighting, madness, and mutual destruction? I didn’t know. All I knew was that I was suddenly so, so tired. I didn’t say another word to the man who had destroyed my childhood. 4. I pushed the heavy oak door open and walked out into the afternoon. The California sun was beating down on the pavement, bright and blinding, but I couldn’t feel a drop of warmth. I was freezing from the inside out. My phone vibrated in my palm. A barrage of texts from Wes. “Brooke, baby, where are you? Why aren’t you answering?” “Please. Just send me a dot. Just let me know you’re safe. I’m losing my mind.” I stared blankly at the screen. In the span of an hour, he had called me forty-seven times. But my eyes drifted past his frantic messages, locking onto the automated calendar reminder at the top of my screen: Surgery scheduled for 8:00 AM tomorrow. The surgery to reverse my tubal ligation. The surgery to give him a child. Before I could even process the bitter irony of it, the roar of an engine shattered the quiet street. Blinding halogen headlights swerved directly toward me. There was no time to scream. The impact threw me into the air, the world spinning in a violently chaotic blur of sky and asphalt before pain exploded through my entire body. Blood instantly flooded my vision, warm and thick. I heard a car door slam. High heels clicking frantically against the pavement. Kelly crouched down over me. “Why won’t you just die?!” she hissed, her face contorting into an ugly, feral mask. “As long as you’re breathing, he’s never fully mine! Even when he’s inside me, he’s thinking about you!” She grabbed handfuls of my hair. With a guttural scream, she slammed my head against the asphalt. The sickening crack of my own skull echoed in my ears. She didn’t stop until my face was entirely slick with blood, my features unrecognizable. Panting, she dropped my head and fumbled for her phone. Her voice instantly morphed from a psychotic snarl into a high-pitched, trembling whine. “Wes! Wes, oh my god, I hit someone! I hit a pedestrian! I’m so scared!” Tires screeched to a halt seconds later. Wes’s black SUV. Kelly threw herself into his arms, sobbing hysterically, burying her face in his chest. “Wes, what do I do?! Am I going to prison? It was an accident, I swear, she just stepped out of nowhere!” Wes wrapped his arms tightly around her, burying his face in her hair. “Shh, you’re okay. I’m here. I’ll handle it,” he murmured, his voice steady and cold. He looked up, snapping his fingers at his private security detail stepping out of the trailing vehicle. “Grab the tequila from the trunk. Pour it down her throat. Make it look like a DUI.” The lead bodyguard hesitated, looking down at my broken, bleeding body. “Sir… she’s losing a lot of blood. She needs an ambulance.” Wes paused. For a fraction of a second, a flicker of unease crossed his face as he looked at the crumpled, blood-soaked woman on the ground. Sensing his hesitation, Kelly gripped his shirt tighter. “Wes, please! If the press finds out I was driving, my life is over. The baby’s life is ruined. I’d rather just kill myself right now!” Wes’s jaw clenched. “Pour it down her throat.” He kissed the top of Kelly’s head. “I’ll handle the fallout.” Strong hands pried my jaw open. The cheap, burning sting of tequila flooded my torn throat, choking me. The liquor spilled over my lips, mixing with my own blood and pooling on the asphalt. Searing, white-hot agony tore through every nerve in my body. I tried to fight. I tried to beg. “Wes… please.” But my voice was nothing more than a wet, gargling wheeze. Over the sound of Kelly’s theatrical sobbing, nobody heard me. But Wes stopped. He froze, his head snapping back toward where I lay in the street. “I thought… I thought I heard someone say my name.” Kelly immediately slapped a hand over her forehead, groaning loudly. “Wes, my head. I think I hit my head on the steering wheel. I feel dizzy.” The distraction worked perfectly. Wes’s attention snapped back to her. He scooped her up in his arms, carrying her toward the SUV. Before he closed the door, he shot a cold look at the bodyguard. “Keep an eye on the body. Once she reeks of alcohol and the BAC sets in, dump her at the ER.” The heavy car door slammed shut. I lay there in a pool of my own blood and cheap liquor, my vision fading to black as I watched the taillights of his car disappear into the twilight. When I finally opened my eyes again, the harsh glare of hospital lights blinded me. Wes was sitting in the plastic chair beside my bed, his hands gripping mine with a bone-crushing desperation. His eyes were bloodshot, rimmed with dark, bruised exhaustion. “Brooke. Oh my god, baby. How do you feel?” Tears spilled from his eyes, dripping onto my knuckles. “Does it hurt? Talk to me, please.” He was trembling, his voice cracking with what sounded like genuine agony. “The hospital called me… they said you were in a hit-and-run. I didn’t even know you had left the house.” His grip tightened, his eyes flashing with a terrifying, violent rage. “Who did this to you? Tell me. I’ll kill them. I swear to god, Brooke, I’ll tear them apart.” “It was you, Wes.” My voice was a raspy, broken whisper. I watched the color completely drain from Wes’s face. The sheer, naked terror that washed over his features sent a dark, euphoric thrill straight through my veins. “You ordered your men to pour tequila down my throat. You left me bleeding in the street,” I smiled, though it cracked my split lip. “Congratulations, Wes. You personally chose to murder the only person in the world who ever truly loved you.”

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