Category: English

1 My phone screen flickered to life against the unfinished wood of the coffee table. A single preview from Harper: “I rejected your promotion request. I gave the regional lead opening to Justin.” I sat back on the floor of my newly leased, four-hundred-square-foot studio, an Allen wrench dangling from my fingertips. Next to me sat the heavy-duty ergonomic desk chair Brett had helped me pick out, claiming it would save my lower back during late-night gaming sessions. I glanced at the screen, flipped the phone facedown, and went back to tightening the steel bracket under the seat. Brett, crouched on the rug passing me bolts, caught the notification out of the corner of his eye. His jaw twitched. “Jesus, Dean. She’s ruthless.” I kept turning the wrench. “What number is this?” he asked. I gave the final bolt a solid half-turn until it clicked into place, stood up, and took a seat to test the lumbar support. Firm. Just right. “Three,” I said. Brett blew out a sharp breath. “The performance bonus last winter? That was her too?” “Yeah. She told me it was about ‘maintaining corporate optics.’” “And two years ago, when you were up for team lead?” “Same script. Said if I moved up too fast under her operational umbrella, people would whisper about nepotism.” Brett tossed his wrench onto the hardwood with a dull clatter, popped the tab on an IPA, and took a long pull. “Look, man, I’ll say what nobody else will—for three years, she’s choked your promotions, blocked your bonuses, and reallocated your accounts. Is Harper your wife, or is she your parole officer?” “Both,” I said. It wasn’t bitterness; it was just an inventory of facts. Harper was the Vice President of People & Corporate Operations. Any lateral move, promotion, or headcount expansion across the business lines required her final stamp of approval. We had been married for four years. In the beginning, her rationale sounded almost reasonable: “Let’s just stay low-profile, Dean. We don’t want the board thinking we’re building an empire.” I loved her, so I swallowed it. Then it shifted to: “Just wait a little longer. The timing isn’t right.” I swallowed that too. Eventually, it morphed into: “Can you look at the bigger picture for once? If I push you through, how am I supposed to manage optics with executive leadership?” I kept taking the hit. Patience is like a phone battery. You see twenty percent in the corner and tell yourself you have plenty of juice to get home. You keep scrolling, ignoring the warnings, until the screen suddenly cuts to black. That’s when you realize you were running on fumes long before the display shut off. The quarterly review nine days ago had been my final one percent. I adjusted the chair’s armrests and looked around the sparse studio. It was small, but the exposed brick felt warm, and the single wide window looked out over the quiet bend of the river. Quiet. Untangled. “You draft the resignation?” Brett asked. “Done. Handing it in Monday.” “And the place across town?” “Cleared the last box from the study this afternoon. Packing my clothes tomorrow. Handing my key off Monday morning.” Brett looked at me like I’d just announced I was flying to Mars. “You’re really pulling the trigger on this, aren’t you?” I grabbed a cold bottle of water from the mini-fridge, twisted the cap, and took a sip. “When that text came through just now, Brett, do you know what I actually felt?” “What?” “Relief.” And it was the honest truth. For months, I had been waiting for the final push—that definitive, undeniable proof that the marriage was dead. Four years is a long time; you constantly second-guess yourself, wondering if you’re being petty, wondering if one more late-night conversation in the kitchen could fix the fundamental fracture between you. When her message popped up, there was no anger. No sting in my chest. Just a quiet, flat okay. It was like standing on a freezing train platform, watching the departure board blink from Delayed to Canceled. Fine. Time to walk away. Brett clinked his bottle against mine. “Here’s to the clean break, then. Oh—” A wicked grin crept onto his face. “When you grab your clothes tomorrow, you’re definitely taking the PS5, right?” “Bought it with my own money. Of course it’s coming.” “Is she going to lose her mind?” I thought about it for a second. “She won’t even know it’s gone until next month. She hasn’t set foot in my study in two years.” “Fair. Snatch the Wi-Fi router while you’re at it.” “Already swapped the account to this address. Modem’s going in my trunk tomorrow.” Brett stared at me for three full seconds, then slowly gave me two thumbs up. “You’re a cold bastard when you’re done, Dean.” I didn’t disagree. To the outside world, this looked like a nine-day standoff. But a man doesn’t dismantle his life over nine days of silence. It takes three years of slow, methodical freezing from the inside out. The phone vibrated again. Harper: “You don’t have to reply right now. I’m picking up that chestnut tart from the French bakery on 4th tomorrow on my way home.” Attached was an animated sticker of a cat holding a little pastry box with the caption: Call a truce? I looked at it for two seconds. Then I swiped left and cleared the notification. Brett leaned in. “What now?” “She’s bringing home a pastry tomorrow to smooth things over.” Brett scoffed. “A chestnut tart. She really thinks you’re just pouting in the corner.” Of course she did. In Harper’s worldview, my silence was always just a childish tantrum waiting to be managed. My concessions were simply her due. It had never once occurred to her that when a man stops arguing, stops negotiating, and stops asking for what he deserves—it doesn’t mean he’s pouting. It means he has already checked out. 2 Nine days ago. Friday morning, the executive boardroom on the thirty-second floor. Twenty-two people sat around the walnut conference table: three regional business directors, the VP of Sales, and the People & Strategy leadership team. I had spent an entire month building the Q4 Midwest expansion strategy. Three comprehensive data audits, execution milestones mapped down to the business day, and two contingency plans for market volatility. Jim, the Senior VP of Business Development, had emailed me at eleven the night before: Great deck, Dean. Deliver it clean tomorrow. The ninth floor is watching. I knew they were watching. And I knew Harper was sitting at the head of that table. By the time I hit slide three, the room had settled into an appreciative rhythm. Jim was nodding along, and our marketing lead was snapping photos of my pipeline projections. Then Harper cleared her throat. “Hold on a second, Dean.” The room went dead silent. She sat at the far end, legs crossed, lazily tapping an expensive rollerball pen against her legal pad. “Has the headcount allocation for this rollout cleared HR committee review?” I kept my voice even. “Jim approved the budget variance last Thursday.” “Jim approved the business case,” she said smoothly, offering a measured, corporate smile that didn’t reach her eyes. “My department hasn’t signed off on the organizational risk. According to standard protocol—” “The requisition requests were submitted to your desk two weeks ago,” I interrupted. The air in the room instantly turned brittle. Nobody was used to seeing me push back against Harper in an open forum. Everyone in that room knew we were married; corporate policy allowed it because we technically reported into separate executive pillars, but it was an open secret that colored every interaction. Harper’s practiced smile vanished. “Submitting a request two weeks ago does not guarantee authorization,” she said, setting the pen down with a sharp tap. She flipped through a printout in front of her. “I reviewed the staffing numbers. The current regional team still has capacity to absorb this workload. Adding three new full-time hires at this stage is… dubious at best.” Dubious. She used that exact word. In front of twenty-two of my peers and superiors. Dismissing thirty days of eighty-hour workweeks with a flick of her wrist. I didn’t argue. Not because she was right, but because I knew nobody in that room was going to step into the crossfire. She was the gatekeeper for every promotion, every equity grant, and every annual review. And more than that—she was my wife. To them, this wasn’t a corporate debate; it was domestic fallout playing out on company time. After the meeting adjourned, Jim caught up with me by the elevators and clapped a hand on my shoulder. “Don’t take it to heart, Dean. Just talk it through with Harper over dinner tonight. Smooth it over.” Talk it through. Always the same advice. Back at my desk, a Slack message popped up from Brett: “Heard she torpedoed your deck in the board meeting. You good, man?” I typed back three words: “Used to it.” Brett: “…So what’s the play?” I sat in my cubicle, staring at the presentation deck on my monitors. One month of prep. Three all-nighters. Six client visits across two states. Reduced to dubious. I took a slow, deep breath, opened a browser tab, and navigated to my LinkedIn profile. For three years, my status had been set to Not Looking. That afternoon, I clicked the toggle: Open to Work. Within five minutes, three corporate recruiters landed in my InMail. The first was from the VP of Talent Acquisition at Meridian Group. Meridian was a Fortune 500 firm, our primary market competitor, and a powerhouse in the commercial sector. The note was brief: Dean—We have an immediate opening for our Midwest Regional Managing Director. Double the compensation band, full P&L ownership. Let’s talk off the record. I stared at the screen for a long time. In the past, I had declined every outside inquiry without a second thought. My reasoning had always been loyalty to our household: Harper is building her executive track here; if I jump to a competitor, it’ll compromise her standing. Sitting there in the cold glow of the monitors, a new thought struck me: Why was I setting my career on fire just to keep her warm? Was I truly obligated to stay, or had she simply convinced me I had nowhere else to go? When I got home that night, Harper was already in bed—or pretending to be. I didn’t turn on the bedroom lights. I walked straight into the study, booted up my laptop, and began cataloging my portfolio of accounts and client performance metrics. That was Day One of the cold war. No slammed doors. No shouting match. No demand for an apology. Because I knew she genuinely believed she hadn’t done anything wrong. In her mind, my expansion plan really was dubious, my advancement really did need to wait, and every ceiling she placed over my head was for the good of our partnership. She truly believed her own PR. And that was the most terrifying part. It wasn’t malice. It was absolute, unshakeable entitlement. 3 Days Two through Eight. I called it my Quiet Eviction Week. During business hours, I played the part of the compliant manager. During my lunch breaks, I took confidential video calls with Meridian’s leadership team. The second interview was with their Executive VP of Operations. He didn’t beat around the bush. “Dean, I’ve tracked your regional numbers for the last eighteen months. That enterprise supply-chain deal you closed last November? The whole industry heard about that.” “I ran point on that account for eight months,” I told him. “I know. Come to Meridian, and I’ll give you total autonomy. A fifteen-person direct-report team. You build the roster from scratch.” When he quoted the base compensation and performance equity, the total package was more than double my current earnings. “Give me forty-eight hours to review,” I said. I didn’t need forty-eight hours to decide. I just needed two days to pack. On Day Three, Harper flew out to a corporate conference in Chicago. The moment her Uber cleared the driveway, the moving crew arrived. The foreman walked through the three-bedroom brownstone, scratching his beard. “Everything going?” “Just the study,” I said. “Plus the console, soundbar, and turntable from the living room, and my clothes and personal effects from the master closet.” The guy gave me a knowing look. “Divorce?” “Something like that.” “What about the kitchen? Cookware, espresso machine?” “The espresso machine comes with me. I bought it.” “Got it.” He pointed toward the entryway. “What about the cat?” Curled up on top of my running shoes by the door was a massive, twenty-pound orange tabby. I had found him shivering under my bumper during a downpour four years ago. I paid for his shots, cleaned his ears, bought his specialized kidney kibble, and scooped his box twice a day. Harper couldn’t even remember his name half the time—she just called him “that animal.” “He’s coming with me,” I said. “His name is Nugget.” Between Day Four and Day Six, Brett and I transported the smaller valuables in the back of his SUV after hours. Harper came back from Chicago exhausted, retreating straight to the master bedroom every evening to answer emails. She never glanced into the study. So on Day Four, every book, framed diploma, and collector’s edition sci-fi figurine disappeared. On Day Five, the multi-monitor rig, standing desk, and leather task chair were dismantled and loaded out. On Day Six, my custom sneaker rack in the hall closet vanished, alongside the gaming consoles and audio gear. She noticed nothing. For three days, she lived in that house and walked right past an entire empty room without once registering that half of our shared life had evaporated. Brett couldn’t wrap his head around it. “Man, are you positive you two were married?” “On paper.” “What about in reality?” “She lives inside her corporate ladder,” I said. “I checked out of the building a long time ago.” On Day Seven, Meridian sent over the formal offer letter. Position: Midwest Regional Managing Director. Base: $285,000 plus performance bonus and executive equity grants. Start Date: Next Monday. I signed the DocuSign within two minutes. On Day Eight, I printed my formal resignation letter and locked it in the desk drawer of my new apartment. Then I sent a text to Justin. Justin had been my associate for two years. Sharp, fiercely loyal, and one of the best analytical minds I’d ever mentored. Harper had chosen him to replace me for the promotion—a calculated move designed to rub salt in the wound by elevating my own protégé over my head. What she didn’t realize was that Justin and I talked every single day. My message was simple: “I’ve got an open Senior Associate seat for you at Meridian.” He replied in ten seconds: “Say no more, boss. Handing in my two weeks on Monday.” Which brought us to Day Nine. Today. The day she sent that smug text message from her executive desk: “I rejected your promotion request. I gave the regional lead opening to Justin.” Information asymmetry is a beautiful thing. She thought she was administering a lesson in humility. She had no idea she had just handed a corporate promotion to a guy who was walking out the door in ninety-six hours. I sat back in my new gaming chair, took another sip of water, and let out a quiet breath. Brett looked at me from the kitchen counter. “You don’t think this is a little… cold-blooded?” I looked at him. “Did she think about being cold-blooded when she tried to kill my career in front of twenty executives?” Brett didn’t answer. “Help me carry the last box of jackets tomorrow morning,” I said. “You got it.” He grinned again. “Router’s really coming?” “Already packed in my duffel. It’s an enterprise-grade mesh system I paid eight hundred bucks for out of pocket.” “So when she walks in tomorrow, the Wi-Fi’s just… dead air?” “Total dead zone.” Brett laughed so hard he choked on his beer. I managed a slight smile, but underneath it, a dull ache settled in my chest. Four years. I wasn’t a sociopath; of course it hurt to watch it end like this. But grief requires an object worthy of mourning. If someone truly loves you, they don’t humiliate you in a boardroom to flex their administrative authority. They don’t stall your life for thirty-six months under the guise of protection. And they certainly don’t use professional sabotage as leverage in a domestic dispute. She thought this was a tactical skirmish. She didn’t realize it was a funeral. 4 Day Ten. Saturday. Brett would later refer to what happened that morning as The Season Finale. I wasn’t there to witness it, but the sequence of events was easy enough to reconstruct. At nine in the morning, Harper left her high-end salon in the historic district. Fresh blowout, manicured nails, holding an iced oat milk latte. She was feeling generous. We know this because she texted her best friend, Gwen—a message Gwen would later screenshot and send to me during the fallout: “Going home to break the ice with Dean. Nine days is long enough for him to stew. Men just need an easy way out to save face.” Gwen had replied: “Exactly. Bring him something nice, be sweet, and he’ll fold immediately.” Harper: “Already picked up his favorite chestnut tart from the bakery.” Gwen: “You’re golden.” Golden. The absolute certainty of someone who has never faced a consequence in her life. At ten-thirty, Harper pulled into the garage. In the elevator up to our unit, she likely checked her reflection in the mirror, reapplied her gloss, and rehearsed her opening line—magnanimous, poised, the benevolent executive coming down to pardon the junior staff. She unlocked the heavy deadbolt, turned the handle, and stepped inside. The entryway was pitch dark. I never kept the foyer lights on during the day, so that wouldn’t have alarmed her. But as she slipped off her designer heels, the silence would have hit her first. The house was never silent. Normally, Nugget would lumber down the hallway, letting out a gravelly meow to demand his morning wet food. Normally, the low hum of my monitors or the faint click of a mechanical keyboard would drift from the end of the hall. Normally, the kitchen smelled like the dark roast I brewed every weekend morning. Today, there was only the dead stillness of an abandoned gallery. She walked into the open-concept living room. The hardwood floors were bare. The low-profile media console was wiped clean. No turntable. No high-end speakers. No gaming console. The custom reclaimed-wood sneaker rack by the coat closet was completely gone. Even then, panic probably hadn’t fully set in. She likely assumed I had packed my things into the guest room in a fit of dramatic protest. She walked down the corridor and pushed open the study door. That, I suspect, was the precise moment the bakery box slipped from her fingers, sending the pastry face-down onto the floor. The room was gutted. Completely, clinically empty. The walnut bookshelves: bare. The desk: gone. The leather task chair she had mocked as an eyesore: vanished. The three twenty-seven-inch monitors: gone. The glass display case housing my vintage scale models and autographed memorabilia: stripped to the baseboards. Even the heavy navy blackout drapes were gone, replaced by the cheap sheer white curtains that had come with the property. I had bought those drapes with my first bonus check; they belonged to me. Standing in that empty twelve-by-ten room, Harper must have realized for the very first time just how large that space actually was. When it was filled with my life, she called it cluttered. Now that it was empty, it was simply freezing. She turned and rushed into the master bedroom, yanking open the walk-in closet. My side was a ghost town. Suits, dress shirts, flannels, denim, running gear, socks, ties. Not a single hanger left on the rail. I had bought the cedar hangers myself. That was when the dam broke. Her first call hit my phone at 10:47 AM. I watched the screen pulse three times on my new kitchen counter, then laid it face down. Second call: 10:49 AM. Third call: 10:52 AM. On the fourth call, I held down the power button and shut the device off entirely. Then I picked up my drill and went back to mounting the floating shelves on my new living room wall. Brett glanced up from the floor. “No second thoughts?” “I left a folder on the kitchen island,” I said, lining up the spirit level. “The divorce papers?” “Signed, notarized, and clean.” Brett nearly dropped his beer. “You really went for the jugular.” I drove a drywall anchor into the plaster. “I left a sticky note on the cover.” “What did it say?” “Seven words.” Brett leaned in, eyebrows raised. “Thanks for the pastry, but I’m good.” Brett stared at me in stunned silence for five full seconds. Then he slapped his knee and roared. “Holy shit, Dean. You really burned the ships.” I brushed the drywall dust from my jeans. “Hand me that next bracket.” “You’re not worried she’s going to track you down and kick your door in?” “She doesn’t have this address. The lease is under my personal LLC.” Brett shook his head in quiet admiration. “You spent three months planning this exit, didn’t you?” I didn’t answer. Three years, actually. I was never a man for theatrical exits. If you’re going to walk away from a life, you do it cleanly. No lingering threads. No doors left ajar. At two in the afternoon, I walked down to the pet boutique on the corner to buy a bag of specialized calming treats for Nugget—moving stress can mess with an older cat’s digestion. When I powered my phone back on, the cellular network dumped a wall of notifications onto the screen.

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The day I found out I was swapped at birth，the test strip on my bathroom counter turned up with two stark pink lines. I was pregnant. If there was any silver lining to the wreckage of my life, it was that my baby’s father was Dominic Cross: an untouchable titan of the city’s criminal underworld, fabulously wealthy, and lethal enough to keep the rest of the world at bay. I was never built for struggle. I liked silk sheets, black credit cards, and effortless luxury. Swallowing my pride, I slipped the crumpled lab results into my designer coat, fully intending to corner him into a wedding ring. Then the air in front of my eyes fractured, and glowing lines of floating text scrolled across my vision like a toxic, translucent comment feed: [Does this disposable side-character really think getting knocked up means he’ll put a ring on her finger?] [LMAO. The boss only mistook a life-saving debt for love. She’s the only one dumb enough to believe it’s real.] [Our real female lead is the true heiress—the badass second-in-command who’s been disguised at his side for years! Once she finds out who her real family is, she’ll finally get the courage to drug him and claim her man!] [It’s hilarious how oblivious he is. He treats the real lead like a brother while convincing himself he loves this spoiled little brat. Just wait until the real heiress gets critically wounded trying to protect this useless parasite—he gets so furious he literally feeds her and the bastard in her belly to his pet lion…] 1 The crystal tumbler slipped through my fingers, shattering against the imported marble floor with a deafening crash. In the private courtyard of Dominic’s sprawling estate, there really was a full-grown white lion. And that lion had been a personal gift from Sloane—his ruthless, sharp-edged lieutenant, who had hated my guts from the second we met. “Baby? What did I do wrong this time?” Dominic had only turned his back for a split second. In that breath, my plan to shove the pregnancy test into his chest had dissolved into a full-blown breakdown amidst the glittering shards. A scream tore at the back of my throat—I wanted to screech at him to get rid of that terrifying beast immediately. The floating text flared across my retinas again, ruthless and mocking: [Stupid girl, go ahead and throw your tantrum! He hasn’t realized his own feelings yet. The moment you complain about that lion, he’ll realize the woman he truly cares about isn’t you!] [That lion is literally their token of unspoken devotion. He cherishes it.] [Trying to trap a syndicate boss with a baby? Idiotic. He doesn’t give a damn about an illegitimate kid. Once he finds out, he’ll probably snuff it out himself…] [Please keep pushing your luck, sweetie. Make him lose his temper so he can finally put a bullet through your head!] The demands and accusations died in my throat, choking me. Dazed, I stumbled back two steps, nearly planting my bare heel directly into the jagged glass. Dominic’s arm snaked around my waist, hauling me flush against his hard chest before I could touch the floor. He let out a ragged sigh of relief, his calloused palm gripping my hip as he leaned down to murmur against my ear. “Baby, I swear I didn’t miss that auction on purpose. Traffic held me up at the docks, and by the time I walked into the showroom, that vintage Patek Philippe was already hammered off to someone else…” “It’s—it’s fine! It’s not your fault!” Panic surged through me. My fingers crushed the medical report hidden deep inside my coat pocket, obliterating my usual demanding, imperious persona. “Dominic, you don’t owe me expensive watches. It was all my fault before… I was being selfish. I was asking for too much.” 2 Leaving those breathless apologies hanging in the air, I fled upstairs and locked myself inside the master suite. Leaning against the heavy oak door, my mind dragged me back to what the floating words had called a “life-saving debt.” Three years ago, when I first found Dominic, he was slumped beside a dumpster in a rain-drowned alley behind a downtown club, soaked in blood and barely breathing. I’ve always been squeamish, utterly repulsed by mess. But under the grime, his jawline was razor-sharp, his features striking enough to stop my heart. So I loaded him into my car and paid for the best private surgical suite in the city. The doctor said blunt trauma to the skull had caused temporary blindness. During those first weeks, Dominic was like a feral predator trapped in a cage. The moment he sensed me near the bed, he would snarl profanities. When I tried to feed him, he told me to get lost. When I tried to change his bandages, he threatened to snap my neck. I was furious. I had spent tens of thousands of dollars on this man only to be treated like dirt. So, at the end of that month, while he was drifting off under heavy painkillers, I slipped a mild sedative into his IV, tied his wrists to the wrought-iron headboard, and took petty revenge by teasing and tormenting him half to death. At first, he cursed me violently, his voice raw with fury. Halfway through, as my hands roamed his feverish skin, his curses died in his throat. By the time I was done, his Adam’s apple bobbed heavily, and his voice dropped to a dark, raspy growl: “Is that… all you’ve got?” His blind, unfocused eyes suddenly locked dead onto mine—predatory, lucid, and burning with terrifying hunger. “If your hands are tired, untie me. I’ll finish it.” …His eyesight had come back. A violent shudder racked my entire body. Legs trembling, I tried to scramble off the mattress, but he ripped through the bindings with terrifying ease. A large, scarred hand locked around my ankle, dragging me backward onto the sheets. Before I could scream, his mouth was on my throat, biting down on the sensitive hollow beneath my ear with bruising intensity. No one had ever touched me like that. Dominic held nothing back. As I sobbed and pleaded against his chest, he dragged me onto his lap, breaking me down until the morning light filtered through the blinds. 3 When it was over, I couldn’t stop crying. Losing my virginity to a bad-tempered, nameless stray… if my adoptive parents found out, they would disown me on the spot. My soft sobs eventually woke him. Terrified he would snap at me again, I slapped my hands over my ears and curled into the furthest corner of the bed. Instead, Dominic rose, shifted closer, and gently brushed away the tears streaming down my cheeks. His rough thumb was impossibly tender. “Don’t cry,” he murmured, his voice thick with gravel. “It’s on me. I was drugged, lost control… and took you.” He cupped my jaw, his dark gaze unwavering. “I’ll take responsibility. I’ll marry you.” A penniless drifter wanted to marry me? I wailed even louder, hiccuping between sobs that I’d rather die than move to some rundown trailer park, washing his dirty laundry and cooking his meals for the rest of my life. A week later, once he was discharged, he had a black town car pick me up and drove me straight to his estate. It was a private compound ten times larger than my family’s gated villa. The casual allowance he deposited into my account on day one was more than what my adoptive parents had given me in ten years. My attitude flipped in a heartbeat. I threw my arms around his neck, burying my face in his throat. “Honey… does that promise to take care of me forever still count?” Dominic’s breath hitched. He was entirely powerless against my tears, my face, and my body. From that day on, I became his little money-burning machine. I shopped recklessly, filling closets with couture, jewelry, and sports cars. Dominic never batted an eye. His only condition was that he collected his dues in our bed. Every night, he would coax whispered confessions out of me between breathless kisses, driving me to the brink of madness, only to shower me with more jewels the next morning to make me smile. Over time, I let myself believe that this was love. After all, people always say a man’s heart is wherever his money goes. So the moment I held that positive pregnancy test, my first instinct had been pure, unadulterated joy. I thought we were finally going to build a real family. Until the floating text shattered the illusion: [Think having a baby means a wedding? Dream on.] [If he wanted to marry you, he would’ve proposed years ago. Why wait?] [Annoying little parasite. The second he figures out who he truly loves, he’ll settle every single debt you owe him! When the real heiress cries, you’ll be thrown straight into the lion’s den…] For three years, I had been spoiled so thoroughly that I had forgotten the most basic truth: To the rest of the world, Dominic Cross was a cold-blooded killer who ran the city with an iron fist. 4 Dominic didn’t come upstairs that night. Crouched in the corner of the bedroom, watching the luminous text flicker and fade against the darkness, I clutched the crumpled sonogram and wept until dawn. By morning, I rubbed my swollen eyes and made up my mind. I couldn’t afford to be high-maintenance anymore. Before he woke up to his true feelings, I needed to gather whatever cash I could, keep my head down, and disappear. I walked downstairs, my mind heavy with dread, only to freeze near the grand entryway. Dominic stood near the foyer, radiating a chilling, lethal aura. He was casually wiping fresh, arterial blood from his forearm with a dark cloth, tucking a combat knife into his tactical belt. There was a streak of drying crimson along his sharp jawline. My knees nearly gave out. Before I could drop to the floor and beg for mercy, he reached into his leather coat, pulled out a velvet box containing a pristine, diamond-encrusted watch, and held it out to me with almost reverent care. “Baby. I convinced that old bastard to hand over the watch he bought for his daughter.” He stepped closer, his voice dipping low. “Can you… forgive me now?” He was covered in blood, but the watch in his palms was untouched by a single speck of dust. Looking into his dark, earnest eyes, something twisted painfully in my chest. The text flared in my peripheral vision: [Holy shit. He actually declared open war on Arthur Shaw, the second-most powerful boss in the city, just for a damn watch.] [Not just declared war—he breached their compound in the dead of night and hung Shaw by his ankles until he yielded. This blood feud is entirely on the side-character’s head.] [Too bad she’ll end up wearing that watch when they hack her hand off later… poetic justice, honestly.] My hand, which had just begun to reach out, recoiled violently. A ghost of phantom agony shot through my wrist. I rubbed it instinctively, my face draining of all color as I shook my head. “No… no, I don’t want it.” Dominic’s brow furrowed. “Why not?” He used his clean hand to gently stroke the edge of my eyelid, wiping away a stray tear. “What do I have to do for you to forgive me, baby?” “I’m not…” My fingers trembled uncontrollably. Pushing past the terror, I stood on tiptoe and pressed my lips against the corner of his mouth. “I’m not mad. And I don’t need the watch. I just… I just want you. Hubby.” In the past, I only ever called him that when he pushed me past my limits in bed. Dominic’s gaze darkened instantly. Dropping all questions, his hand locked behind my head, pulling me into a fierce, suffocating kiss. Right there in the bright morning light of the foyer, the kiss grew desperate and heavy. His large hand had just slipped under the hem of my silk sweater when the heavy front door swung open. “Boss.” The person who broke the kiss was Sloane. 5 The moment she stepped inside, the floating text exploded with excitement, praising her competence while tearing me to shreds. “Sorry, Boss. There’s an emergency at the docks that needs your personal attention.” Sloane’s eyes were slightly red as she held out a tactical folder. I took the opportunity to gently shove Dominic back. He ran both sides of the city—the legitimate corporate empire and the shadow syndicates underneath. “What could possibly be that urgent?” Dominic’s expression darkened with annoyance. He reached out, thumbing my swollen, reddened lower lip. Sloane leaned in, whispering a few terse sentences into his ear. Dominic clicked his tongue in irritation. He pulled out his phone, wired five hundred thousand dollars straight into my account for “shopping,” and only then reluctantly let me go. As he headed upstairs to change, Sloane stepped directly into my path. “Winter Holloway, when are you going to stop acting like a spoiled child?” She glared at me, the fury in her eyes barely contained. “Do you have any idea how much money the boss lost last night, how many enemies he made, just to get you that stupid piece of jewelry?!” Her voice rose, driving me back a couple of steps in bewilderment. I used to think she just hated how much Dominic indulged me. Now, I finally understood. She was a woman—and she was deeply in love with him. More than that, she was the biological daughter my adoptive parents had been desperately searching for. [Next month, when our girl gets recognized by the Holloway family, this fake heiress loses everything.] [That’s when Sloane takes back what’s hers, drugs the boss, and finally seals the deal…] 6 Her path sounded all too familiar. Wasn’t that exactly how I had started with Dominic? Terrified by the text, I spent the following weeks walking on eggshells. I stopped spending his money. I stopped complaining. When he called during the day to check in, I answered with polite, nervous monosyllables. At night, when his hand reached for my ankle, pulling me toward him, I’d shrink back with excuses: “I don’t feel well tonight. Please, not tonight…” Dominic had never forced me. Still, his appetite was relentless. Going two weeks without touching me was clearly pushing his absolute limit. Returning late from an overseas weapons deal, he didn’t wait. I woke up in the dark to the heavy weight of his body pressing down on mine, his hips already moving with relentless intent. Seeing my eyes flutter open in confusion, his breathing turned ragged, the grip on my waist tightening. “Sorry, baby. Did I wake you?” My morning temper was usually terrible. Instinctively, my hand flew up to shove his face away—then froze in mid-air. Don’t do it, I screamed at myself. Don’t hit him. You don’t want a bullet between the eyes. I slowly lowered my hand. Dominic’s eyes narrowed into dangerous slits, clearly sensing my restraint, and he drove into me even harder. Panic flared in my chest. What if this hurt the baby? Unable to kick him away, I clamped my teeth down on the back of my own hand, muffling my cries. “Dominic… please, go easy…” “You’ve been so quiet lately, baby. So obedient.” Dominic pried my hand away from my mouth, his tongue licking the bloody teeth marks on my skin before he nipped lightly at my wrist. “Problem is,” he murmured with a dark, low chuckle, “I think I liked you better when you were throwing fits.” 7 For three days straight, Dominic barely let me leave the bed. By the time he fell into an exhausted sleep on the fourth morning, I dragged my aching body up, threw on an oversized coat, and slipped out to the hospital. I had already looked into Sloane’s official records—her adoptive parents had died years ago, leaving her with no known relatives. Which meant that the moment my adoptive parents cast me aside, I would be completely alone. The only real family I had left was the tiny life growing inside me. I had to protect it. Rushing into the downtown medical center, fresh text scrolled across my eyes: [OMG, our girl’s identity got revealed ahead of schedule!] [Yes! The drugging scene must be happening tonight! The real couple is finally getting together!] [Once the boss gets a taste of the real deal, he won’t even look at the parasite. When the parasite throws herself at him later, he’ll just throw her to his men to play with…] My knees buckled. I stumbled, nearly crashing into the corridor wall. A steady hand caught my elbow. “Careful.” I swallowed hard and looked up, only to freeze. “Adrian?” He was a guy I had befriended while studying abroad in London years ago—one of the few genuine friends I ever had. Adrian stood tall in a white lab coat, his handsome face lighting up with genuine surprise. “Winter? What are you doing here?! I’ve been trying to track you down ever since I moved back…” Because of Dominic’s paranoia, my old social circle had been entirely severed. I never expected to run into an old classmate here. Abandoning my plan to bribe a random doctor, I pulled Adrian aside and begged him to run the prenatal checkup under a false name. When the ultrasound results came back, Adrian’s expression turned grim. My heart vaulted into my throat. “Is something wrong with the baby?” “The baby is fine, but…” Adrian frowned, his jaw tightening. “Winter, who is the father? What kind of monster treats a pregnant woman this roughly…?” Embarrassment burned my cheeks. I gave him a rushed, vague explanation before looking at him pleadingly. “Adrian, I heard you have connections. Can you help me get out of the country? Away from Dominic Cross…” “Baby, what did you just say?” A low, lethal voice sliced through the corridor behind me. The air instantly plummeted below freezing. I spun around to find Dominic standing at the end of the hall, his dark eyes fixed on Adrian with unadulterated venom. “Who the hell is he?” Dominic stepped forward, his tone dropping to a dangerous whisper. “And why are you in the obstetrics wing?”

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1 My best friend Serena blew up her own romantic life so spectacularly that her ex threatened to throw himself off the Brooklyn Bridge if she didn’t marry him. Terrified of a subpoena—and emotional accountability—she caught a midnight flight to Saint-Tropez. Before wheeling her luggage through TSA, she grabbed my shoulders and thrust a spare keycard into my palm. “I’m leaving my canary with you. Take care of him.” To be honest, I wanted to say no. Not because I was engaged. But because Serena’s taste in men had historically resided in the absolute gutter. Yet twenty minutes later, when I unlocked the heavy double doors of her Tribeca penthouse, I didn’t find some peroxide-bleached aspiring DJ sprawled across the velvet sectional. Instead, standing by the floor-to-ceiling glass, was a man in a bespoke three-piece charcoal suit. Broad shoulders, sharp jawline, and dark, hooded eyes that felt heavy with an almost predatory gravity. I froze. Since when had Serena’s aesthetic graduated from dumpster fire to the cover of Architectural Digest? Hearing the click of the lock, the man barely lifted his chin, his expression cool and unbothered. “Summer Ellis?” “Did she… talk to you before she left?” I asked, my voice hesitant. He gave a slow, measured nod. Good. That meant Serena had already briefed him on the handoff. That saved us both an awkward conversation. “Great. Pack your things,” I said briskly. “You’re coming with me. As of tonight, I’m your new benefactor.” A dark brow arched. “Excuse me?” I paused, letting my gaze drift over the immaculate cut of his Tom Ford blazer and the understated Patek Philippe resting on his left wrist. Then I looked down at my own twenty-dollar vintage tee and faded jeans. Right. He was worried I didn’t have the liquidity to maintain his lifestyle. “Relax,” I added reassuringly. “Whatever allowance she was wiring you each month, I’ll match to the cent. At the end of the day, this is purely transactional for you. Money is money, regardless of whose account it comes from.” A low, incredulous laugh broke from his throat. “Let me get this straight. You think I’m a kept man on her payroll? And that I’m being passed around on a rotation?” “Aren’t you?” “Miss Ellis, you have clearly made a severe mistake.” I rolled my eyes. I gave him credit for the aristocratic aloofness—it was a charming bit of roleplay. But the living room was littered with framed photos of him and Serena in intimate proximity, alongside a handful of leather accessories and novelty silk ties scattered near the bar cart. I was exhausted. Suddenly, Serena’s parting words rang in my ears: He’s terribly spoiled. If you want him to behave, you have to be firm. Take the upper hand. Trust me, he likes it rough. Right. If he wanted a dominant dynamic, I could play along. I stepped back to the doorway and waved in the two private security guards I’d hired for the move. Within three minutes, we had him subdued, bundled into my SUV, and hauled up to my high-rise apartment. By midnight, he was stripped down and securely cuffed to my brass headboard. Under the dim amber glow of the bedside lamp, his physique was breathtaking—sculpted, lean, and undeniably firmer than Grant Sinclair’s. Just thinking about Grant made my chest tighten with a sharp, familiar burn. Grant had been the one to pursue me first. When he caught wind of my parents setting me up on blind dates, he had stormed into our family home, dropping to one knee before our dinner guests to propose an alliance between our two families. Everyone in Manhattan’s upper crust murmured that a man as notoriously composed and stoic as Grant Sinclair wouldn’t drop to his knees unless he was profoundly, helplessly in love. I believed them. Until the night I finally let down my walls and climbed into his lap, only for him to shove me away with ice in his veins. He looked at me with open disdain and told me his heart belonged to someone else. The marriage was purely commercial; I was never to mistake it for love. 2 The memory tasted like ash. Wanting to erase it, I leaned down and pressed my lips against the man’s warm, bare chest, kissing the hard line of his collarbone. He smelled like vetiver and sandalwood. His jaw clenched hard. The effortless composure he’d worn in Tribeca was entirely gone, replaced by a dark, simmering fury. “Summer Ellis. Release these restraints right now.” “Or what?” I murmured against his skin. “I am going to say this one last time,” he growled, the steel in his voice vibrating against my cheek. “I am not a paid escort. I am Harrison Rhodes. Serena’s older brother.” He paused, letting the silence hang. “Have you lost your mind?” Harrison Rhodes. I jerked my head back, staring at him. The Harrison Rhodes? The ruthless titan of Rhodes Capital? The single most formidable predator Grant Sinclair had spent the last three years battling on Wall Street? I had heard horror stories about him from both Serena and Grant. A corporate executioner who left wreckage in his wake. Serena—a menace in her own right—walked on eggshells whenever he was in the room. Except there was one glaring flaw in his story. Serena had explicitly told me her older brother was horribly asymmetrical, with a face so aggressively terrifying it could ward off evil spirits if hung over a doorway. This man was an absolute work of art. Ah. He was leaning heavily into the roleplay. His acting was frankly Oscar-worthy. I almost bought it. Playing along, I brought my palm down across his flank with a sharp smack. The muscle beneath was dense and responsive. “Harrison Rhodes, hm? Perfect. You’re exactly who I wanted.” “What did you say?” “I’ve had my eye on you for a while,” I whispered, trailing my fingertips up his ribs. “Grant might fear you, but Summer Ellis doesn’t.” A dark flush crept up his neck. “You are completely out of your—” I pinched his jaw between my thumb and forefinger, cutting him off. “Beg nicely, and maybe I’ll let you loose.” His teeth ground together. “Not in this lifetime.” Eventually, after a relentless barrage of teasing touches and deliberate torment, he broke just enough to mutter a strained concession. But I didn’t untie him. My hand drifted lower. Above me, his voice dropped to a lethal frequency. “Ellis. Consider the consequences. Whatever you think you’re doing, your family cannot afford the fallout. Let me go now, and for the sake of your friendship with Serena, I won’t ruin you. This is your only warning.” His gaze was suffocatingly intense. For a fraction of a second, an icy chill skittered down my spine. The sheer gravity of his presence was terrifying. Could an amateur really fake an aura that commanding? What if he actually was Harrison Rhodes? Then I remembered the family lore Serena had drunkenly shared over martinis. Harrison Rhodes didn’t care for women. Back in prep school, he had supposedly been inseparable from a close male confidant—so close their grandfather caught them in an unmistakable position in the boathouse and tore them apart. Ever since, Harrison had sealed his heart in stone. I leaned my weight over him, capturing his lips in a deep, uncompromising kiss. Beneath me, the sudden, fierce rigidity of his body betrayed his purely physical reaction. I smiled against his mouth. Caught you. He was bluffing. I pulled back slightly, breath mingling with his, quoting straight from the pulp romance novels stacked on my nightstand. “Mr. Rhodes, the second I brought you here, I stopped caring about consequences. As long as I have you under me, whatever price I have to pay is worth it.” I tapped his cheek lightly. “Besides, chained up like this, you aren’t in much of a position to threaten anyone. If I were you, I’d cooperate.” Before he could unleash another string of threats, I silenced him again. He went rigid with fury, his fists clenching around the brass bars, powerless against the cuffs. I have to admit—spoiled though this canary was, the thrill of having total control was intoxicating. It was nearly dawn when I finally rolled off him, sated and exhausted. If forced passion felt this good, I should have stopped being a saint years ago. 3 Over the next several weeks, I kept the routine ruthlessly consistent. To maintain the fantasy, I confiscated his phone, restricted his movements to the penthouse, and posted round-the-clock security at the elevators. Every evening was an elaborate exercise in wearing down his stubborn defiance until his gaze went glazed and dark. Two months slipped by in a blur of silk sheets and quiet mornings. I had no idea how Serena was faring abroad, or whether her suicidal suitor had finally moved on. She had burner accounts for everything and rarely stayed reachable. Then, out of nowhere, my phone lit up with an international FaceTime call. “Darling!” Serena’s voice crackled through the speaker. “I’m coming home next week.” “Is the drama resolved?” “Hardly,” she whispered conspiratorially. “I’m only coming back because my brother vanished into thin air. The Rhodes board is on the verge of a coup, and my father ordered me back to New York on penalty of disinheritance.” I blinked, surprised. “Harrison Rhodes is missing? Was he kidnapped?” “Most likely. God help whoever took him, though. My brother is a sociopathic machine. If the kidnappers have any survival instincts, they’d better kill him now, because if he walks out of there alive, he will systematically erase their bloodlines from the earth.” I swallowed dryly. “…Is he really that terrifying?” “Worse!” Serena said fervently. “Anyway, how’s my little canary doing?” I glanced toward the half-open bedroom door, where the broad silhouette of my companion was peacefully asleep under the linen duvet. “Your advice worked like a charm. He’s thoroughly domesticated now. Passed out from exhaustion twenty minutes ago.” I sighed softly into the receiver. “I had no idea having a pet could be this… satisfying.” Serena sounded puzzled. “A bird gives you that much satisfaction?” “A bird? Honestly, one is more than enough to drain my energy.” “Wait, what?” Serena paused, sensing a strange disconnect, but brushed it off. “Whatever works for you, babe. Let’s catch up over cocktails next week.” After hanging up, I stared at the skyline, feeling a ripple of pity for the poor soul who had crossed Harrison Rhodes. Thank goodness I had always stayed far away from that man. Behind all my bravado, I was really quite fragile. 4 By Saturday afternoon, Grant Sinclair arrived at my apartment with the finalized prenuptial agreement. When our arrangement first began, the cold reality of a loveless marriage had gutted me. But when my father’s logistics firm faced a catastrophic liquidity crunch last winter, Grant had stepped in, deploying his capital to steady the ship. That was the day I realized that romantic idealism was a luxury. Going bankrupt was far more terrifying than marrying a man who didn’t love me. I picked up the Montblanc pen, scrawled my signature across the dotted line, and slid the leather folder back across the marble coffee table. “Your turn.” Grant didn’t sign immediately. His gaze drifted to my collarbone, lingering on a faint bruise peeking out from my silk blouse. His throat bobbed. Dressed in a tailored charcoal suit, he exuded his usual cool, untouchable aura. He flicked through the pages, surprised. “You’re signing without having your legal counsel review the terms?” “There’s no need,” I said evenly. “You wouldn’t shortchange me financially. You’re too pragmatic for that.” A flicker of something complicated crossed his eyes, swiftly masked by his standard detachment. “I’m glad you’ve come to your senses.” Just then, a distinct metallic click echoed from the master bedroom. Grant’s hand froze over the documents. His gaze snapped toward the closed door, his brow furrowing. “You have company?” “Not company,” I corrected lightly. “My kept man. If I recall correctly, you explicitly stated that our personal lives would remain independent after the wedding.” Grant didn’t speak. He stared at me, the sharp angle of his jaw tightening until the muscle twitched. Then, as if realizing how ridiculous the notion was, he gave a faint, mocking shake of his head. “Is Serena crashing here?” “Serena is in Europe.” “Summer, you don’t have to fabricate a lover to get a reaction out of me,” he said, his tone dripping with patronizing patience. “Frankly, I hope you do find someone. It would save us both the trouble of your misplaced expectations.” I looked down at the table. Around Grant, my confidence had always eroded into dust. Ever since our engagement became public, the social circuit had whispered that a plain girl like me was punching far above her weight. Hear it enough times, and you start to believe it. A sudden, sharp anger flared in my chest. I looked him dead in the eye. “It’s not Serena. It’s her brother. Harrison Rhodes.” Grant froze. A beat of pure shock hit his face, instantly followed by cold derision. “Impossible.” He appraised me from head to toe with insulting precision. “With all due respect, Summer… you are not his type.” Right. I wasn’t striking enough. Just quiet, ordinary, unremarkable. When Grant had offered the alliance, my parents didn’t even ask for my consent; they treated it like winning the genetic lottery. Before I could reply, Grant gathered his papers and stood to leave. At that exact moment, the bedroom doorknob turned. 5 We both stared at the doorway. The air in the foyer instantly turned thin. Then Grant’s phone shrieked in his pocket. He pulled it out, glanced at the caller ID, and his expression darkened significantly. “There’s an emergency at the office. We’ll finish this later.” He practically bolted toward the entryway. Just as the bedroom door swung open an inch, the front door slammed shut with a heavy thud. I let out a long, ragged breath. Good. If Grant had seen the man inside, he would have instantly recognized that it wasn’t Harrison Rhodes and mocked me mercilessly for the lie. Still, watching Grant hurry out was odd. Even during market crashes, Grant maintained an unnerving calm. The only person who had ever thrown him off balance was Harrison Rhodes. But Harrison was supposedly missing. Who else could be giving Grant such a massive headache? “Who was that?” A deep, gravelly voice broke my train of thought. I turned around. Standing against the doorframe was my houseguest, a charcoal robe loosely knotted at his waist, revealing the sharp, defined planes of his torso. A very tempting view. But I was too mentally drained to appreciate it. I collapsed onto the sofa. “My fiancé. He just left.” The man froze, his dark eyes instantly turning frigid. “You have a fiancé?” “I do,” I said simply. There was no reason to hide it. Grant didn’t care, and since this man was being paid, it shouldn’t matter to him either. Instead, his expression darkened into thunderous rage. “You’re engaged, and you’ve been keeping me here? What the hell do you take me for?” “My canary.” Wasn’t that obvious? “You made me your side piece?” His hands clenched into white-knuckled fists, pure fury radiating from him. “No one has ever dared treat me like this. Summer Ellis, you are out of your mind.” I blinked. His commitment to this dominant, high-handed billionaire persona was truly extraordinary. Even after two months, the sheer force of his presence could still make my pulse jump. “Don’t be dramatic,” I sighed. “If he hadn’t left in a hurry, I was going to introduce you two so things wouldn’t be awkward down the road.” “You were going to introduce me to your fiancé?” He sounded genuinely appalled. “Do you think this is something to be proud of?” “Why are you making it sound so scandalous?” I countered defensively. “When wealthy men keep someone on the side, society calls it a perk of success. When a woman does it, suddenly it’s a crime?” I leaned forward. “Besides, Grant and I are strictly business. No feelings involved. But with you—it’s purely about passion.” He let out a harsh, incredulous breath. “So I’m supposed to thank you for reducing me to an illicit affair?” I stood up, walked over, and patted his broad shoulder soothingly. “Look on the bright side. The man with the ring doesn’t mind, so why should the man in my bed be upset?” That did it. His composure shattered completely. “Upset? You think I’m upset?” “Fine. Are you jealous?” “A Rhodes does not get jealous,” he snarled, stepping into my space. “You think I give a damn about your pathetic domestic arrangements? You flatter yourself.” I spread my hands innocently. “See? Problem solved.” 6 My stomach gave a loud, unglamorous rumble. I was starving. Ignoring his simmering glare, I stepped around him toward the dining table, picked up my fork, and sat down. Behind me, the master bedroom door slammed shut with enough force to rattle the glass sconces. And he claims he isn’t upset? As the benefactor in this arrangement, I didn’t owe him emotional coddling. I finished my lunch, spent the afternoon getting a manicure with a friend, and lingered over iced lattes trading Upper East Side gossip. Predictably, when I returned home that evening, he gave me the absolute cold shoulder. I tried to coax him, but the softer I spoke, the colder he became. When I reached out to touch his arm, he knocked my hand aside. “I’m not in the mood. Go find your fiancé.” I sighed. A pampered pet really couldn’t be given too much leeway. I straddled his lap, catching his sharp chin in my hand, and reached beneath the pillow to produce the slender leather riding crop I’d stashed there weeks ago. “Don’t make me use force again.” He went entirely still. For a moment, I thought my authority had prevailed. Then, in a blur of motion, his hands locked around my waist and flipped me beneath him. The breath left my lungs as my back hit the mattress. Looking up into eyes blazing with raw, predatory dominance, a genuine shiver rippled through me. “What are you doing?” I whispered. “You,” he said darkly. His mouth crashed down on mine, rough, possessive, and entirely unyielding, his large hand anchoring the back of my neck with iron strength. The sensory overload was staggering. Three hours later, however, the thrill had completely evaporated into sheer exhaustion. He was relentless. I was convinced this was his calculated form of retribution. “Maybe…” I gasped, my fingers digging into his sweat-sheened shoulders, “maybe you should conserve your stamina?” “If you want me to stop, Ellis, ask properly.” “I’m not asking you to stop,” I wheezed, burying my face in the pillows. “I’m just worried you’ll collapse.” He didn’t stop. At the height of it, his fingers gripped my hips with bruising intensity. In the shadowed room, his voice sounded ragged and dangerous. “Do you love him?” When faced with an impossible question, the best defense is a distraction. I pulled him down and kissed him. It didn’t work. It only made him more punishing. 7 The next morning, I didn’t wake up until past two in the afternoon. The subsequent days blurred into the same exhausting rhythm. He seemed obsessed with proving a point I couldn’t decipher. When he brought up Grant again, I deflected casually. “Arranged marriages are stronger without love. Real romance makes business messy. Besides, Grant has zero interest in me—which is the only reason you’re here.” “So the person I should be thanking for this arrangement isn’t you, but your fiancé?” I pressed my lips together. He was exceptionally argumentative for someone on an allowance. Yet, irritatingly, I found it somewhat endearing. Grant had always been generous with material things. Before our engagement, the designer bags and jewelry arrived without pause. Afterward, he set up a monthly deposit that dwarfed my father’s allowances. Aside from his absolute lack of affection, he was an ideal partner on paper. I wondered how his office crisis was going. I hoped it wouldn’t disrupt my direct deposits. According to Grant’s personal assistant, the situation was brutal—an invisible corporate heavyweight was systematically dismantling their supply chain, forcing Grant to pull eighty-hour weeks. Feeling a pang of practical concern, I typed out a polite check-in text to Grant. Sensing my distraction, the man beside me leaned down, his lips brushing the curve of my throat. “What are you thinking about?” I sighed softly. “My fiancé.” The next second, sharp teeth bit into the soft skin of my neck. I barely survived the night. The following morning, a relentless pounding at the front door shattered my sleep. My phone on the nightstand was buzzing incessantly. Groggily, I answered. Serena’s voice boomed through the speaker. “Summer! Open the damn door! I just landed and I’m standing in your hallway!” My eyes snapped open. Carefully lifting the heavy arm draped across my waist, I threw on a silk robe and sprinted to the entryway. 8 “You’re finally back!” I cried, throwing my arms around her neck the second I opened the door. “I thought you abandoned me in New York!” Serena crossed her arms, narrowing her eyes. “If you missed me so much, why did you ignore six phone calls? What were you doing in there?” “Don’t be mad,” I groaned, leaning against the doorframe. “Your canary wore me out. My legs feel like lead.” Serena looked baffled. “Taking care of a bird wore you out that much?” “You know how much stamina he has. Come in, don’t stand out here.” Stepping inside, Serena immediately froze at the sight of two bulky security guards standing post near the hallway. “Did you get involved with a cartel while I was gone?” “I had to keep your pet contained,” I explained. “What if he tried to escape?” Serena stared at me, bewildered. “Summer, that’s absurd. He has a cage. You just lock the latch.” A cage? I paused, picturing the man inside. “I mean… ordering a custom iron cage of that size felt a little extreme.” “Custom? You buy a standard birdcage at Petco! If you don’t cage it, it flies around shitting on the upholstery!” A cold, creeping sensation prickled at the base of my neck. Before I could process the surreal nature of the sentence, Serena caught sight of the dark purple marks scattered across my collarbone. Her eyes narrowed playfully. “Well, well. Did Grant Sinclair finally lose his composure?” “It wasn’t Grant. You know he doesn’t touch me.” “Then who?” “Your canary.” Serena’s expression instantly morphed from amused to deeply concerned. She grabbed my shoulders, her voice dead serious. “Summer. I told you Grant wasn’t the only man on earth, but I didn’t think you’d completely lose your mind…” She trailed off, rubbing her temples. “Forget it. How’s the situation with my brother? Has anyone found him?” “Still missing,” I said. “Serena, if he doesn’t turn up soon, the board is going to find out. But let’s not dwell on that. Come see your canary.” “Fine.” We walked down the hall and pushed open the master suite door. Inside, the morning light spilled across the unmade bed, illuminating the broad-shouldered, disheveled man sitting upright, silver restraints gleaming around his wrists where they anchored him to the headboard. Serena’s jaw dropped so hard I thought it might hit the hardwood. “Why the fuck is my brother in your bed?!”

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1 For our fifth anniversary, Graham took me to an immersive, industrial-grade fire simulation escape room. I am a fire survivor. Even catching a glimpse of an accidental grease fire on a cooking show makes my pulse skyrocket and my hands tremble. Yet he steered me through the heavy metal threshold, brushing off my hesitation with an easy, dismissive smile. He said it was just a game. A harmless adrenaline rush. Behind me, my younger brother, Sam, clicked the latch into place and turned the deadbolt from the outside. “Don’t be a buzzkill, Nora,” Sam chuckled through the reinforced viewing slit. “Consider it exposure therapy. You need to build some grit.” Harper Reed leaned against Graham’s chest in the dim glow of the corridor, watching through the acrylic panel as my breathing began to fracture. Her eyes danced with delight. “Look at her face, Graham. It’s so raw. Way more thrilling than anything in the movies.” Graham let out a low, indulgent laugh, his fingers absentmindedly stroking Harper’s hair. “She’s your future sister-in-law, Harper. Entertaining you for an afternoon is the least she can do.” “Exactly,” Sam chimed in, eager to validate them. “My sister is dramatic to a fault. A little tough love will finally cure her princess complex.” A cold, sickening tremor tore through my limbs. They hadn’t brought me here to celebrate five years of shared history. They had weaponized the darkest trauma of my life, turning my visceral terror into a bespoke sideshow to make Harper smile. I was done playing. I spun around and grabbed the heavy brass handle, hauling back with all my weight. The lock held firm. From the outside, the deadbolt had engaged with a final, mechanical thud. High above, hidden projectors flickered to life, casting hyper-realistic tongues of crimson and amber across the floorboards. Industrial HVAC vents groaned overhead, blasting stifling, dry heat down the back of my neck. Logically, I knew the heat was electric, the flames merely light and pixels. But logic is the first thing stripped away when the nervous system remembers death. My knees buckled. I couldn’t stop the violent shivering that seized my shoulders. I threw my palms against the door, pounding against the solid wood. “Open the door!” I screamed, the sound tearing raggedly from my chest. “Graham! Sam! Let me out!” Static crackled through the intercom speaker in the corner, followed by Harper’s muffled, theatrical giggle. “Graham… Nora’s actually crying. Is she going to hate us when she comes out?” “She’ll be fine,” Graham replied, his voice smooth and untroubled through the speaker. “Give her five minutes. She just needs to get the panic out of her system.” “Come on, Nora, stop milking it,” Sam added, his tone brimming with adolescent exasperation. “There isn’t even a real spark in there.” My fingernails scraped raw grooves into the painted doorframe. In an instant, the flickering red light in the room dissolved into the suffocating reality of ten years ago—the four-alarm blaze that had swallowed our childhood apartment building in Boston. I was sixteen, choking on black soot, when my mother used her dying strength to shove me through the heavy firedoor into the concrete stairwell. She stood on the other side of the roaring heat, her face already obscured by dense, toxic smoke. Run, Nora, she had cried out, coughing up ash. Run and don’t look back. Since that afternoon, I hadn’t been able to light a scented candle. I couldn’t sit near a patio fire pit. I couldn’t even look at photographs of charred wood without my throat closing up. Graham knew that. He had driven me to trauma therapy every Tuesday for three years. He had held me through night terrors, wiping sweat from my forehead while whispering promises that he would never let anything burn me again. And Sam knew. Sam had clung to my waist in the funeral home, soaking my black dress with his tears, swearing that we were a team—that he would protect his big sister forever. Yet here they were, standing on the other side of a locked door, peering through the glass to watch me writhe like an insect pinned beneath a magnifying glass. Oxygen felt scarce, though the room held no carbon monoxide yet. My lungs simply refused to expand. If the men who claimed to love me wouldn’t open the door, I had to save myself. I staggered toward the center of the room, grabbed a heavy wooden prop chair by its backrest, and swung it with everything I had against the door’s lock mechanism. The speaker clicked again. The venue operator’s voice filtered through, sounding uneasy. “Uh, Mr. Reed? She looks genuinely frantic. Should we override the latch?” Graham’s tone was entirely detached. “Let her swing. If she breaks the prop, put it on my American Express.” Harper let out a soft, rehearsed whimper. “She looks so terrifying right now, Graham. What if she bursts out and attacks me?” Sam didn’t miss a beat. “She wouldn’t dare touch you, Harper.” With a guttural scream, I brought the chair down on the strike plate one last time. Crack. The wooden frame splintered; the metal latch sheared off with a sharp snap. The door gave way, and I stumbled out into the cool, fluorescent-lit hallway, crashing onto my hands and knees. The rough wood had gouged deep, bleeding scrapes across my palms. A few yards away, Harper stood watching me, draped in Graham’s tailored wool coat. Seeing me crawl out, she stepped closer, a mocking smile tugging at the corner of her lips. “Wow, Nora. That was quite a performance. Graham said you looked like a lunatic in there.” I looked up at her, my vision swimming, my voice a jagged rasp. “Get out of my face.” Harper scoffed, but before I could even push myself off the floor, she let out an ear-piercing shriek and threw herself backward onto the carpeted hallway floor. “Graham!” she cried out. Graham burst out of the control room instantly, crossing the distance in three long strides. “Harper! What happened?” Harper curled into a pathetic ball, tears welling instantly in her wide eyes as she looked at me with manufactured terror. “I—I just wanted to help her up. But she hates me… she shoved me down.” She buried her face in Graham’s sweater. “It’s okay, Graham, it barely hurts. Please don’t be mad at Nora.” Sam sprinted over right behind him. Neither of them looked at my bleeding palms or my dust-streaked face. Their eyes were fixed entirely on Harper. “Nora, what the hell is wrong with you?” Sam snapped, stepping aggressively into my space. “Have you completely lost your mind?” My throat burned as if I had swallowed glass. They had locked me in an artificial inferno, and now they were painting me as the aggressor. “You trapped me in there,” I choked out, pointing a trembling finger at the splintered door. “You locked me in a cage and watched me suffocate for your amusement. And I’m the crazy one for getting out?” “It was a game!” Sam retorted, rolling his eyes in disgust. “We were literally on the other side of the monitor. You were never in any actual danger.” Graham finally looked at me, but his gaze held neither remorse nor affection—only cold, patronizing reprimand. “Nora, you know Harper has a congenital heart condition and fragile health. You pushed her to the floor over a harmless anniversary stunt. Do you have any idea how spiteful you look?” I stared at him, stunned into silence. “You locked me in a fire simulator to entertain her,” I whispered, the words tasting like poison. “And you’re calling me spiteful?” Graham pinched the bridge of his nose. “You’re out, aren’t you? You’re perfectly fine.” A bitter, broken laugh escaped my chest. “So as long as I don’t die on your watch, you haven’t committed a sin?” Harper began to sob softly, clinging tighter to Graham’s neck. “It’s all my fault… I planned this escape room because I thought it would be a memorable anniversary surprise. If Nora hates me, blame me, Graham. Please don’t fight with her because of me.” She made a show of trying to stand, only to gasp and collapse back against Graham’s chest, clutching her ankle. Graham scooped her effortlessly into his arms. Sam stepped between me and Graham, cutting off any exit. “Nora, drop the attitude. Harper went out of her way to set this up for your five-year milestone. Instead of thanking her, you threw a tantrum and hurt her. Do you just enjoy ruining everything for everyone?” I looked at my brother’s face—the high cheekbones, the stubborn jaw he had inherited from our mother. I remembered him at nine years old, clutching my hand by our mother’s open casket, sobbing that we were the only two left in the world, promising that he would grow up big and strong so he could keep me safe. Now, for the approval of Graham’s wealthy, spoiled stepsister, he had locked me in my living nightmare. “Sam,” I said, my voice barely above a whisper. “You know what fire does to me. You know why.” His jaw tightened, a brief flicker of guilt crossing his features before he hardened his expression and looked away. “That was ten years ago, Nora. Mom died a decade ago.” Graham adjusted Harper in his arms, stepping toward the main corridor. “Enough. We’re taking Harper to the clinic to get her ankle wrapped. Nora, you stay here, wash the dirt off your hands, and figure out how you’re going to apologize to Harper. Once you apologize, we’ll consider this matter closed.” I looked up at him. “You want me to apologize to her?” “You laid hands on her,” Graham said flatly. “She was hurt.” I took two steps back, shaking my head in disbelief. “I didn’t touch her. I will never apologize to that manipulative brat. If anyone owes an apology, it’s the three of you on your knees to me.” “I don’t have time for your childish ultimatums,” Graham said, his voice dropping an octave, turning razor-sharp. “I’m giving you one last chance. Apologize to Harper right now.” The coldness in his eyes sent a chill straight down my spine—a chilling realization that five years of partnership meant nothing against Harper’s whim. I took a deep, steadying breath, turning to walk toward the exit. Sam grabbed my wrist, his grip bruising. “Let go of me, Sam,” I warned, my voice shaking with rage. Sam didn’t budge. “Nora, just say you’re sorry. Is your ego really worth making this huge of a scene?” “Sam, let me go!” “It wasn’t even real fire!” he yelled back, looking at me with undisguised contempt. “Every single time something doesn’t go your way, you bring up Mom! Do you expect the entire world to tiptoe around your trauma for the rest of your life? If Mom were alive, she’d be ashamed of how pathetic and bitter you’ve become!” My hand moved on instinct. Slap. The crack of my palm across his cheek echoed through the corridor. Sam’s head snapped to the side. Graham’s face darkened completely. “Nora Collins, that is enough.” Harper buried her face deeper into Graham’s collar, weeping softly. “Graham, please, let’s just go. Nora clearly despises me. It’s my fault for thinking we could be family. Now Sam got hit because of me…” Graham looked down at Harper, his expression softening into tender reassurance. “None of this is on you, sweetheart. Nora has simply let her pride run wild.” He shifted his gaze back to Sam, his tone commanding. “Put her back in the room.” Panic flared in my chest. I jerked my arm, trying to sprint for the emergency exit, but Sam lunged forward, catching me around the waist and hauling me backward. My knee slammed hard against the metal doorframe, sending a white-hot jolt of pain through my leg. I collapsed onto the floor inside the simulation room. Harper peeked out from Graham’s arms, her voice dripping with faux concern. “What if she breaks another chair and attacks us again?” Graham’s voice was as cold as a winter frost. “Barricade it.” Two staff members, clearly intimidated by Graham’s wealth and authority, hurried over, dragging a heavy oak prop wardrobe and an iron-framed sofa across the threshold. I scrambled forward, throwing my body against the narrowing gap. “Graham! Graham, don’t do this!” He stood in the hallway, looking down at me through the crack. The man I had loved for five years didn’t flinch. There was no warmth left in his eyes—only an icy, punitive detachment. “When you’re ready to give a sincere apology,” Graham said smoothly, “you can come out.” Sam reached in and brutally pried my bleeding fingers off the door jamb. The heavy door slammed shut. Immediately, the metallic scrape of the wardrobe and sofa being wedged tight against the exterior handle reverberated through the walls. Inside, the automated simulation restarted. The overhead projectors flashed on, painting the room in simulated crimson. The vents began to pump stifling air. “Let me out!” I screamed, slamming my fists against the wood until my knuckles split. “Let me out!” After a moment, the wall speaker hummed to life. Harper’s voice drifted down, sweetly frail. “Graham, my ankle throbs so badly. When Nora shoved me, I think she really sprained it.” “I’ll ice it right now,” Graham answered gently. “Don’t worry, Harper,” Sam added over the line. “My sister is just spoiled rotten. Give her half an hour in the dark to cool off, and I’ll personally make sure she gets on her knees to apologize to you.” I froze, my hands slowly dropping from the door. My brother. The boy I had raised after our mother’s death, working two part-time jobs in college to pay for his lacrosse gear and SAT tutors. He was comforting another girl’s imaginary scrape while locking me inside my deepest hell. Suddenly, the overhead fluorescent tube flickered. A sharp, violent pop snapped above my head. A shower of orange sparks rained down from the ceiling junction box. Within seconds, a genuine, licking flame crawled out of the electrical wiring, catching onto the cheap acoustic ceiling tiles. The acrid, chemical stench of burning synthetic foam instantly flooded the small room. My heart seized. “Fire!” I screamed, throwing myself at the barricaded door with wild, primal terror. “Graham! Sam! The ceiling is on fire! Real fire!” Sam’s voice came over the intercom, dripping with irritation. “Nora, will you cut the crap? Stop performing! Can you not make everything about yourself the second Harper is hurt?” “I’m not lying!” I shrieked, coughing as grey smoke began to drift down from the ceiling. I grabbed the remains of the broken chair, battering the heavy door in a frenzy. But the oak wardrobe and iron sofa on the other side didn’t give an inch. Flames spread rapidly along the corner molding, greedily consuming the dry theatrical props. The heat pressed against my face—not the dry warmth of an HVAC vent, but the searing, predatory heat of a real blaze. My eyes burned, tears streaming down my soot-stained cheeks. “Sam! Sammy, please!” I sobbed, reverting to the childhood nickname I hadn’t used in years. “Open the door! It’s burning! The whole ceiling is burning!” Through the speaker, Harper’s voice piped up, innocent and dismissive. “Is she trying to trick us into opening the door so she doesn’t have to apologize?” Then came Graham’s voice, cold, measured, and utterly unyielding. “Nora, I gave you a way out. Stop this ridiculous theatrical routine. Say you’re sorry to Harper over the speaker, and I’ll have the staff clear the door immediately.” A fit of violent coughing tore through my chest. “Look at the monitor! Graham, look at the camera! There are real flames!” “Harper’s ankle is swollen,” Graham cut in flatly. “I don’t have time to watch your little drama.” The speaker clicked off. The smoke thickened at an alarming rate, turning from light grey to an opaque, suffocating black. Burning plastic dripped from the ceiling, igniting the curtains and the faux rug. Through the dense haze, the room warped. I was sixteen again, standing in that burning apartment hallway, watching the world turn to ash. Mom, I thought, choking as the toxic fumes seared my windpipe. Mom, help me. My trembling fingers reached for my wrist, finding the worn, red braided bracelet tied there. It was the only piece of my mother I had left—a simple cord bracelet she had woven for me the summer before she died. The red threads were already darkening with soot, but it remained anchored to my skin. I pulled my iPhone from my back pocket with shaking hands and dialed 911. I can’t die here, I told myself through the haze. I cannot die as a prop in their sick little game. I gasped my location and situation to the dispatcher, my voice cracking under the assault of the smoke. By the time the building’s real fire alarms finally began to wail down the hallway, the escape room was completely engulfed in darkness and heat. Outside the door, I heard frantic shouting and the heavy scraping of furniture being dragged across the floor. The lock, warped by the heat and jammed by my initial blows with the chair, refused to budge. Sam’s voice finally penetrated the door, stripped of all arrogance, trembling with raw panic. “Nora?! Nora, can you hear me?!” I raised a weak hand, striking the blistered wood one last time. “Help me… Sammy… please…” Heavy thuds slammed into the door as someone tried to kick it open. “Is there an oxygen mask or a respirator?!” Graham yelled from the hallway. “There’s only one emergency respirator at the front desk!” an employee shouted back in a panic. For a brief, naive second, I thought Graham would demand they slide it under the door or smash the viewing panel to get it to me. Then Harper’s choked sobs broke out in the corridor. “Graham… I can’t breathe… the smoke out here is making my chest hurt… am I having an attack?” The hallway had barely any smoke—just the faint wisps escaping through the door jamb. Yet Graham didn’t hesitate for a single second. “Don’t panic, Harper. I’m putting the mask on you right now.” My bloody fingers slid down the burning doorframe. Through the crack, I heard Sam’s voice waver. “Graham… my sister is still trapped in there.” Harper began to cough violently, her voice breathy and desperate. “Sam… I’m so sorry… my heart… it feels like it’s stopping…” Sam panicked instantly. “Nora can hold on for a couple more minutes! Let’s get Harper outside to the paramedics first!” The frantic footsteps outside receded down the hall. Silence fell over the corridor, broken only by the roar of the flames devouring the ceiling above me. They had chosen her. Even when the fire was real, even when the smoke was killing me, they chose her. I slid down onto the burning floorboards, curling my knees to my chest. My phone screen glowed in the darkness. The 911 call had disconnected. The screen defaulted back to my favorites list. At the very top was Graham’s contact. I had saved him under the label: My Home. Looking at those two words through the stinging haze, a wave of bitter revulsion washed over me. With the last strength in my trembling thumb, I pressed call. It rang four times before he answered. “Nora? Are you okay?!” “The door won’t open,” I murmured, my voice a hollow, raspy whisper. “I know, I know, the lock is jammed,” Graham said, his voice breathless as he moved. “The fire department is on their way. They’re two minutes out.” “There’s so much smoke, Graham. It burns.” “Cover your mouth and nose. Stay low to the ground.” I let out a soft, broken laugh. “Where are you right now?” Graham hesitated. In the background, Harper’s delicate whimper drifted through the receiver. Graham, hold my hand, I’m scared… Graham’s voice turned rushed and soothing. “I’m carrying Harper out to the ambulance. The second the paramedics take her, I’m coming right back in for you.” “How long is ‘right back’?” “A few minutes, Nora. Just hang on.” “Earlier, you said if I apologized, you’d let me out,” I whispered, feeling the heat blistering the skin of my arms. “What if I apologize now, Graham? Will you come back right now?” His breath hitched over the line. “Nora, this isn’t the time to play games.” “Graham… what if I die in here?” His voice spiked with sudden, angry defensiveness. “Stop talking like that! You’re not going to die!” In the background, Sam’s voice cut in, frantic and loud. “Graham, Harper’s lips are turning blue! Where is the damn ambulance?!” Graham cursed under his breath. “Sam, hold her head up! Don’t let her pass out!” A single tear tracked through the soot on my cheek. “Graham.” He sounded distracted, his attention completely pulled away. “Nora, just hold on! I’ll be back the second Harper is in the ambulance!” “Will you really come back?” A split-second pause hung in the air. That one heartbeat of hesitation was all the answer I would ever need. “Yes,” he said, the word hurried and hollow. “I swear I’ll come back.” Harper’s loud cry of pain erupted through the phone again. Graham’s voice pulled away from the microphone. “Harper, stay with me. Look at me, keep your eyes open…” He didn’t hang up the call. He simply forgot I was still listening. I dropped the phone onto the charred floorboards. I didn’t need to listen to him save someone else while I burned. I dragged myself toward the corner of the room, curling into a ball. I unfastened the blackened red cord from my wrist, clutching the frayed threads tightly in my palm. In the roar of the fire, my mother’s voice seemed to echo from the smoke. Run, Nora. Don’t look back. “I’m sorry, Mom,” I whispered into the darkness. “There’s nowhere left to run.” The flames crested the ceiling, dropping burning debris around me. My vision began to tunnel. On the floor nearby, the phone screen remained lit. Graham’s distant voice still drifted from the tiny speaker: Harper, don’t sleep, look at me… How pathetic. Five years of devotion, and I was dying alone in a locked room while he played the savior for another woman. BANG. A thunderous crash shook the door. “Structure breached! Search and rescue, move in!” Heavy boots pounded through the debris. A gloved hand cut through the thick black smoke, and a cool, pressurized silicone mask was firmly sealed over my nose and mouth. “Miss, can you hear me? Stay with me!” a firefighter shouted, lifting my limp upper body. I reached up with my last ounce of consciousness, grabbing the firefighter’s turnout coat with bleeding fingers. “Don’t…” I rasped through the mask. The firefighter leaned down close. “What did you say, ma’am?” “Don’t tell them…” I whispered, my chest heaving with cold oxygen. “Don’t tell Graham Reed… that I’m alive…” My grip slipped. Darkness rushed in to claim me. The charred red bracelet tumbled from my fingers, disappearing into the ash—a remnant of a past life, left behind in the ruins.

🌟 Continue the story here 👉🏻 📲 Download the “MotoNovel” app 🔍 search for “560780”, and watch the full series ✨! #MotoNovel

In my fifth year as a prisoner of war, my memories were little more than shattered glass, scrubbed and rewritten by enemy neuro-scramblers. When the System finally rebooted in my head, I was squatting in the camp yard with a dozen other starving inmates, scraping gray slop from a rusted trough. “Host! Gideon Cole’s corruption index has hit ninety-eight percent. He is on the verge of triggering the Fourth Interstellar War. You are the only one who can stop him!” Gideon was my husband. Of course I wanted to go back. But I looked down at my emaciated wrists, then reached up to touch the jagged, hollow scar at the base of my neck. I gave a dry, inward shake of my head. “I don’t have a scent gland anymore. I can’t calm him down with pheromones. Besides, he’s moved on. He doesn’t love me anymore.” The System wailed in absolute panic: “You can! You have to! You’re the only one!” 1 What was I supposed to do? I scraped the last stringy bit of wild greens from the bottom of the tin bucket, sucked the grease from my dirty fingers, and lay back down on the cracked concrete floor. Five years ago, Tessa Ward had been top-tier—a rare, radiant Omega with a future and a gentle scent of sweet clover. Now, I was just Inmate 89757. A broken husk rotting in the mud. Saving the galaxy was far beyond my pay grade. In my mind, the System kept pitching desperate promises: “Host! If you just get close to him, if you wake up whatever conscience he has left, I can restore your appearance! I can even rebuild your scent gland!” I stared into a stagnant puddle beside my shoulder. The reflection staring back was horrifying: hair like brittle straw caked with grime, hollow cheeks smeared with grease, collarbones protruding like dry branches. My teeth were loose from years of scurvy. “Forget it,” I replied. I scooped a mouthful of murky water with my chipped tin bowl, swished it around my gums, and swallowed. “He’s the Supreme Marshal of the Coalition now. He’s surrounded by pristine, soft Omegas smelling like expensive perfume. What am I going to do, crawl up to him like a beggar just to be humiliated?” “Only your pheromones ever worked on his mental instability!” “I told you, the gland is gone. It was carved out. I don’t even remember what I used to smell like. Right now, I smell like sour mud and pig feed. If he caught a whiff of me, he’d vomit.” “He is going to incinerate entire star systems!” “Let him,” I muttered, tucking the tin bowl under my shirt against my bare ribs. It was my only worldly possession. If I fell asleep without guarding it, another inmate would bash my skull in to take it. “This universe has been rotten for a long time anyway.” The System wouldn’t let it go: “Host, this is a galactic crisis! Tell me what cheat codes you want—invulnerability, physical enhancement—I’ll authorize anything!” I let out a faint, dry scoff. Eight years ago, when it forced me into Gideon’s bed with electric shocks, it hadn’t spoken to me with anywhere near this level of deference. 2 Eight years ago, I was just an ordinary civilian who had barely stepped foot onto a college campus when the “Villain Redemption System” latched onto my spine. I asked why it chose me. Back then, the System didn’t bother answering. It simply set a timer in my skull and pulsed high-voltage current through my nervous system, forcing me onto a transport ship bound for the outer rim—a wasteland scrapyard planet where an eighteen-year-old Gideon Cole was surviving on scraps. I had soft hands back then. I was terrified of pain, terrified of dying. So I went looking for him in tears, offering to share half my ration packs. At the time, Gideon was an untouchable pariah, kicked into the dirt by every scavenger in the yard. His gaze was feral, shadowed, and dead. I was scared to death of him. But I was more scared of the System’s shocks. When the voltage surged from the base of my spine into my brainstem, it caused complete motor failure. Once, I lost control of my bladder right in front of him. Gideon crouched beside me in the rust and watched me for a long, quiet minute. Then, without a word, he unzipped his heavy canvas jacket and tied it around my waist. The jacket was filthy, stiff with engine oil and patched ten times over, but it hid the stain on my trousers. He stood up, dusted the rust from his knees, and walked away without looking back. I sat in the dirt and wept for half an hour. Then I wiped my face, chased after him, and handed him my ration pack for the next day, too. I later learned he had been on that scrap planet for thirteen years, since he was five years old, digging through the carcasses of downed battleships just to trade for nutrient paste. He didn’t trust a soul. He didn’t need anyone. The System’s directive was clear: Make Gideon Cole dependent on you. I thought it was impossible. But I went to him every single day. If I didn’t go, I was shocked; after being shocked, I dragged myself back. I had nothing clever to say, so I just sat by the stripped hull of whatever freighter he was salvaging, chewing my hard biscuits. He worked with his wrench; I chewed in silence. One afternoon, I fell asleep leaning against a bulkhead. When I woke up, someone had propped a slab of corrugated metal over my head to shield me from the sulfur wind. It took three months of this before Gideon spoke a complete sentence to me. He stared down at me and asked, “What do you actually want from me?” I opened my mouth, nearly blurting out that a machine in my head was torturing me. In the end, I swallowed the truth and whispered, “I think you’re handsome.” It wasn’t a lie. Gideon froze, his dark eyes locked on mine for an eternity. Then he turned on his heel and walked away. The next morning, he left a sealed canister of purified water by my boots. On a junk planet, clean water was worth more than human life. I held that canister against my chest, my throat aching with unshed tears. In my mind, the System chimed: “Affection +5! Host, keep up the good work!” I cursed the voice silently and drank the water. 3 After that, things moved quickly. Gideon was conscripted during the border mobilization. I followed him from the scrap wastes to the Coalition’s forward military perimeter. He was born for war. Taking apart enemy squads came as naturally to him as stripping starship carburetors. Within two years, he rose from an infantry private to a major. I was registered as his dependent, working twelve-hour shifts in the field hospital changing bandages for the wounded. It wasn’t an easy life, but at least we weren’t eating hard biscuits in the dust anymore. Sometimes I felt a pang of regret about my abandoned medical degree. But then I looked at the triage ward and thought: wasn’t the point of studying medicine to keep people alive? It felt like enough. 4 The day Gideon marked me, acid rain was dissolving the outer plating of the garrison. He had just pulled back from a catastrophic breach on the perimeter. His combat uniform was half-burned away, exposing raw, blistered flesh across his chest and shoulders. When I started yelling at him for throwing his life away, he grabbed my wrists, pinned me against the concrete wall, and sank his teeth straight into the scent gland at the nape of my neck. The pain turned my vision white. But the moment his dark, heavy Alpha pheromones flooded my system, my knees buckled. He caught me, burying his face in my hair. He smelled of burnt polymer and ozone, his entire body trembling with the aftershocks of battle. I asked him why he marked me so suddenly. He didn’t answer. Later, I dragged the truth out of his adjutant: during that morning’s vanguard assault, Gideon’s entire squad had been wiped out. He was the only one who crawled out of the crater. I never brought it up again. If he didn’t want to talk, I didn’t ask. That was our rhythm. He fought on the line, and at night, he slept with his arms locked around me. I heated his rations, dressed his chemical burns, and shook him awake whenever the night terrors took over. The System’s mission parameters had long been cleared. His affection rating was maxed out; his villain index was flatlined at zero. Yet I stayed. The System asked me why I wouldn’t leave. “Get lost,” I told it. When it pressed, I told it I would find a way to rip it out of my brain. It finally shut up. The truth was simple: I loved Gideon Cole. I couldn’t pinpoint the exact moment it happened. Maybe it was the rusted sheet of metal blocking the wind, maybe it was the canister of clean water, or maybe it was the way his eyes searched for me first the second his boots touched the hangar floor. 5 The Third Interstellar War ignited the year Gideon made colonel. The air-raid sirens wailed seven or eight times a day. At first, people scrambled for the deep shelters. Eventually, when everyone realized the orbital plasma strikes penetrated the bunkers anyway, we stopped running. During those months, the System remained completely silent. Even an artificial intelligence seemed to recognize that face-to-face with absolute annihilation, metrics like “affection points” were a bad joke. Then high command issued the final breakout order. Gideon was appointed commander of the vanguard spearhead. It sounded like an honor; in reality, it was a suicide detail. His task was to punch directly into the enemy’s main fleet to draw their fire, buying time for the evacuation transports carrying the political brass and core scientists to slip through the secondary jump gate. As a low-level military dependent, I wasn’t on the passenger manifest. I never expected to be. 6 That night, the sirens were eerily quiet. The horizon glowed a dull, apocalyptic orange from distant atmospheric fires. The barracks door clicked open. Gideon stepped inside carrying the scent of cordite. He wasn’t wearing his formal tunic, only a black combat tank top. He walked over to my cot without turning on the lamp. I sat there in the shadows, looking up at him. He had lost weight; his jawline was razor-sharp, his dark eyes threaded with burst capillaries. We stared at each other in the dim light for a long moment. Suddenly, he bent his knees and buried his face against my stomach. It was an awkward, desperate posture. He was too tall, his broad shoulders hunched rigidly, his short, coarse hair prickling against my thin shirt. His arms wrapped around my waist, locking so tight it bruised my ribs. “Tessa… I’m terrified,” he whispered. I froze. I had never heard Gideon Cole use that word. To the brass and his men, he was an unfeeling, lethal machine. The System had once classified him as a predatory sociopath. Yet here he was, shaking like a child against my lap. I realized then that he was only twenty-one—younger than me. He had spent thirteen years crawling through trash heaps, clawed his way up through blood and fire, only to be handed a death warrant. Of course he was scared of dying. “Tessa,” he choked out, his voice muffled against my clothes. “They refused my transfer request for you. They won’t let you on the ships. I’m afraid… I’m terrified I can’t protect you.” Something inside my chest cracked open—raw, heavy, and aching. I raised my hands and cradled the back of his head. “Don’t be scared, Gideon. I swear to you, I’ll survive.” He lifted his face slowly. “You don’t hate me for being useless?” I reached around his neck, pulled him down, and kissed him. He stiffened, instinctively pulling back so he wouldn’t crush me. But I didn’t let go. That night, I climbed into his lap. And that night, I let him complete a permanent mating bond. Before that, he had only ever given me temporary marks. He used to say that in a war zone, if he died, a permanent bond would leave me an outcast—incapable of accepting another Alpha, suffering through fatal withdrawal agony. But he was marching into the slaughter. I needed him to understand: there was no one else. He had to stay alive to come back to me. 7 When I woke, Gideon was fully geared. He pressed his heavy silver dog tags into my palm and whispered, “Wait for me.” I clutched those tags and waited in the sub-level bunker for seven days. On the eighth day, the garrison fell. The enemy breach teams found me, and they found the deep mating scar at the base of my neck. To an invading force, the bonded partner of a notorious Coalition vanguard commander was a prized trophy. The interrogators demanded to know the deployment coordinates of Gideon’s surviving battlegroup. I told them I didn’t know. They beat me until my ribs cracked. When they asked again, I gave the same answer. Eventually, they grew tired of asking. They strapped me down to a cold steel table and cut the scent gland from my neck. No anesthesia. When the scalpel severed the nerve cluster, I bit clean through my tongue. The taste of hot copper filled my mouth, but it couldn’t drown out the agony. The moment the gland was torn free, the invisible tether linking my mind to Gideon snapped. The low hum in my blood went dead. The silence in my head was terrifying. I couldn’t feel him anymore. Through the ringing in my ears, I heard the officer drop the bloody instrument into a metal tray with a sharp clatter. “I really don’t understand what she was holding out for,” the man said, wiping his fingers. “Word just came through from our forward scouts. Her Alpha abandoned this perimeter days ago and broke through with the high-command transport.” A guard handed him a towel. “Sir, why leave her behind if he had clearance?” “Why do you think? Are you stupid?” The officer let out a contemptuous laugh. “He made brigadier general on the other side. Three different senate families are already lining up their purebred Omega daughters for him. You think an ambitious war hero wants a low-born stray with an unregistered bond dragging down his political career?” 8 The System had long vanished after fulfilling its protocol. Yet somehow, I stayed alive in the labor camp. I survived on a single, stubborn breath of something I couldn’t name. Every day, I hauled debris with the other prisoners, fought for scraps of rotten broth, and slept on frozen concrete. When someone died, their body was dragged out at dawn, and a new prisoner took their cot by dusk. I held on like that for five years. Until today. I was chewing on a raw, frozen tuber when static crackled through my auditory cortex. For a second, I thought I had finally lost my mind, which felt like a relief—insanity meant no more remembering. Then the synthetic voice boomed: “Host! I’m back!” I swallowed the bitter pulp and said, “Get lost.” The System didn’t leave. It began blaring updates about Gideon: his corruption rating was at 98.7% and climbing. It claimed he was mobilizing the entire Coalition armada against the neutral sectors, that a Fourth War would turn billions into ash. It babbled on, offering to unlock god-tier perks. “What good are perks?” I asked quietly. “When someone stops loving you, no cheat code will make them look at you twice.” Beside me, a prisoner missing an ear rolled over in the dirt. He dug grime from between his bare toes and sniffed his fingers. I turned my back to him, staring at the gray wall. “He’s the Supreme Marshal now. If I tried to get near him, his honor guard would shoot me into red mist.” “Don’t say that! He’s your husband! If you can’t reach him, no one can!” “Gideon announced his engagement a year ago. It was broadcast on every interstellar relay. You’re a supercomputer—didn’t you see the holovids?” There was a cracked, low-res monitor in the camp yard that occasionally played Coalition surrender terms. A year ago, standing in line for spoiled grain bread, I looked up. Gideon was standing at the top of the senate steps in a black ceremonial uniform. Beside him stood an Omega in white silk—fair skin, glossy hair, a delicate hand resting on his forearm. Gideon looked down at him. The resolution was terrible, so I couldn’t see his eyes. But he didn’t pull his arm away. That was all I needed to see. I took a bite of the sour bread that day. The sand in the flour ground hard against my molars, but it was fine. Gideon had made the sensible choice. Who would remember a rotting, broken corpse in a trench when they had a pristine life waiting for them? “That engagement was a political cover! He’s only ever cared about you!” the System shrieked. “Trust me, he’s about to glass three colonized planets!” “Then I definitely shouldn’t go,” I thought, closing my eyes. “I don’t want to get caught in the blast radius.” Suddenly, the perimeter sirens tore through the camp. My body reacted before my mind did, jerking upward. My spine struck the concrete wall, sending a dull ache through my ribs. All around me, crippled inmates scrambled to their feet—men with missing limbs, blind eyes, hollow bellies—all bowing their heads in practiced terror. Blinding spotlights swept across the yard from the main gates. I raised a dirty forearm to shield my eyes. The heavy chain-link fences were obliterated as armored personnel carriers smashed through the perimeter. Mud and black water sprayed into the air. Troopers in matte-black tactical armor swarmed the compound, their rifles raised, red laser sights painting the mud. “Down! Hands behind your heads! On your knees!” 9 I dropped instantly, pressing my forehead against my knees and locking my fingers behind my neck. When my dirty nails brushed the cratered scar on my nape, I flinched. The one-eared man beside me was shaking so violently his teeth clicked. “What’s happening?” he whispered. “I don’t know,” I murmured. “Probably an execution detail.” “I still have half a crust left in my pocket.” I glanced at him sideways. “If they shoot you first, can I have it?” He muttered a curse under his breath. A pair of high-gloss combat boots stepped down from the lead vehicle into the mud. The camp director came sprinting across the yard, slipping in the slurry and dropping directly onto his knees before those boots. “M-Marshal Cole, Sir!” Even across enemy lines, raw military power demanded absolute subjugation. “Host! Host! It’s him! Your husband is here!” the System screamed in my ear. “Stand up! Run to him! Hug him!” I buried my face deeper into my knees, shifting slightly behind the one-eared man. Run to him? The twelve guards flanking him with heavy assault rifles would vaporize me before I took two steps, scraping my remains into the slop buckets. “The registry.” The voice cut through the rain. I held my breath. I had lived with that low, rasping timbre for three years; I would recognize it through a planetary bombardment. Gideon was standing less than sixty feet away. The director scrambled with a datapad. “Right here, Sir! The third transfer batch of laborers and prisoners—four hundred and twenty-one total. All accounted for.” The yard was dead silent except for the low idle of the armored carriers. “Four hundred and twenty-one,” Gideon repeated flatly. “Yes, Sir. Two died of infection last week—cremated immediately. We haven’t purged them from the central ledger yet—” “Purged?” Gideon stepped forward, his voice dropping to absolute zero. “Who gave you permission to purge anyone?” Crack. A single shot echoed. The director collapsed into the mud with a strangled gasp. Through the gaps in my tangled hair, I saw the director’s wide, unseeing eyes staring directly toward my patch of ground. My breath hitched. “Go now!” the System urged. “Just say ‘Gideon, it’s me,’ and he’ll drop his weapon and hold you!” “Shut up,” I snapped internally. “He’s executing people. I’m not trying to die today.” Gideon didn’t look at the corpse. He turned slowly, his gaze sweeping over the hundreds of shivering figures kneeling in the muck. I pressed my forehead flat against my knees. “Line them up,” Gideon ordered his lieutenant. Soldiers shoved through the crowd, slamming rifle butts into our shoulders, herding us into rough, trembling rows. Gideon started from the front, walking down the line. “Look up.” A prisoner raised his head in terror. Gideon glanced at him and moved to the next. “Look up.” My heart began to hammer against my ribs like a trapped bird. He was looking for someone. Who? Certainly not me. Perhaps an allied officer, or an undercover asset who had been captured. 10 “Host, he’s coming! Five yards! Three yards!” The heavy footsteps slowed in the mud. The one-eared inmate was on my left. Gideon stopped before him. “Look up.” The man snapped his head back, his facial muscles twitching in spasms of fear. Gideon paused for a second, then took one step to the right. The black boots entered my field of vision. “Look up.” I didn’t move. My neck felt like lead. At that exact moment, the phantom itch flared in my severed scent gland. I wanted to scratch it, but with rifles pointed at my back, I kept my hands locked behind my head. “I said, look up.” A soldier stepped forward, his heavy palm striking the back of my skull. “The Marshal gave an order! Are you deaf?!” The blow landed directly on the jagged scar tissue. A sharp, nauseating pain shot down my spine. I lost my balance and tumbled sideways into the freezing sludge. “Defiant piece of trash,” the guard spat, unholstering a shock baton. “Stand down!” Gideon’s arm shot out, catching the baton mid-swing. The guard went pale, immediately stepping back into a rigid salute. Gideon slowly crouched down in the mud. His gloved hand reached out, fingers closing firmly around my chin, forcing my face upward. My greasy, matted hair fell away from my cheeks. I opened my eyes. His face hadn’t changed much in five years, except the shadows beneath his cheekbones were deeper, his gaze colder than space. I blinked through the rain. His fingers tightened around my jawbone until it popped, the pressure making me wince. “Name.” I parted my cracked lips. My loose teeth knocked together. “Eight-nine-seven-five-seven.” His hand froze. His pupils dilated, his gaze locking onto my face—tracing my eyes, the bridge of my nose, down to the corner of my mouth where a rat had bitten me two winters ago. “Are you insane?!” the System screamed. “Tell him you’re Tessa! Why are you giving him a prisoner number?!” “He doesn’t recognize me,” I thought dull-eyed. “I don’t even recognize this face in the water.” I looked at him and rasped, “Officer… Inmate 89757. I haven’t had dinner today.” If this was the firing squad, my only wish was a piece of bread first. Gideon’s breath hitched. He abruptly let go of my jaw, and I slumped back into the mud. He stood up, turning his back to me. “Adjutant.” “Sir!” “Take her.” The adjutant stepped forward to haul me up. Before the officer could lay a finger on my rags, Gideon let out a vicious curse: “Goddammit.” He spun back around, shoved his aide aside, and scooped me up into his arms. His jaw was clenched so hard the muscles jumped. “I owe you everything, don’t I?” “See?!” the System cheered. “He knows it’s you! He’s taking you home!” I rested my dirty forehead against his shoulder and sighed. “He’s probably taking me to an interrogation cell to harvest my retinas.” “Do you have anything in your brain besides paranoia?!” “A crust of bread.” The System: “…”

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My little garden was completely decimated by bugs. In a sheer panic, I texted my long-distance online boyfriend for help. “Babe, disaster. I wasn’t careful and my little garden got infected. Bugs everywhere. What do I do?” The “typing…” bubble on my screen danced for a solid ten minutes before his reply finally popped up. “Babe, I’m clean. Just use mine from now on, okay?” A second later, an image loaded. It was a photo of his bare torso, a black lace ribbon tied strategically around his… anatomy. I stared at my phone, absolutely petrified. Turned to stone. Ever since that day, my online boyfriend made it his daily mission to send me an endless stream of unhinged, heavily curated thirst traps. It was a routine I had almost gotten used to—until my older brother, Darren, dragged me to an off-campus pub with his friends, and I laid eyes on a man so stunningly gorgeous it felt like a personal attack. When he leaned over to pull out a chair, a silver chain slipped from beneath the collar of his Henley. I froze. Wasn’t that the heavy-link collar I took off my Golden Retriever and mailed to my online boyfriend? I couldn’t help myself. I clicked my tongue against the roof of my mouth in two sharp, familiar bursts. Without missing a beat, the gorgeous man subconsciously let out a low, breathless, “Woof…” 01 I couldn’t shake the feeling that I knew this guy from somewhere. It was the mole on his hand that gave him away. The exact same placement, the exact same long, elegant fingers as the hands I’d watched for hours on video calls as my online boyfriend built custom mechanical keyboards. Darren noticed me staring a hole into the guy’s skull and leaned in, offering some well-meaning brotherly advice. “Don’t let the brooding Abercrombie model look fool you, Quinn. He’s a total headcase.” Darren took a swig of his beer. “His online girlfriend cheated on him a while back, and now he spends his days trying to win her back by sending her dirty photos. If it were me, I would’ve dumped a girl like that eight hundred times over.” I choked on my ice-cold Coke, nearly spitting it across the table. Darren thumped me on the back. “Jesus, Quinn. You’re twenty years old, learn how to swallow a beverage.” I finally caught my breath, wiping my eyes, only to find his roommate looking at me with a sharp, suspicious glare. A memory slammed into me. The first time my online boyfriend had ever sent me a faceless video, I had choked on my drink exactly like this. My stomach plummeted. Something was terribly, impossibly wrong. Beneath the table, I pulled out my phone and texted my online boyfriend: “Thought you said you were going out with the guys tonight?” A split second later, the roommate’s phone lit up. My heart hammered against my ribs like a trapped bird. I stared at him, unblinking. He picked up his phone, his thumbs flying across the screen. Almost instantly, my phone buzzed in my lap. “Babe, don’t worry. There’s no other girls here, just my roommate’s little sister.” “I’m a good boy. You know I don’t go to parties with other girls.” “Babe… are you missing me?” I went entirely rigid. My intensely devoted, borderline-obsessive online boyfriend was my brother’s roommate. If my memory served me right, Darren only had one roommate. Judson Wright. The same Judson Wright who Darren constantly complained about because they were always neck-and-neck for the top spot in their engineering cohort. The same Judson Wright who was notoriously adored by half the female population on campus. Rumor had it he never so much as looked at another woman, maintaining a strictly enforced, ten-foot perimeter around anyone with a pulse and a Prada bag. But online? He had a girlfriend he worshipped like a religion. And as it turned out, I was the religion. We had been dating for nearly two years, and he had never once shown me his face. I’d always assumed it was because he was insecure about his looks. Now, sitting across from a face carved from marble—a sharp jawline, a high, aristocratic nose, and lips that looked entirely too soft—I felt my brain short-circuit. He was wearing a loose white button-down slung casually over a fitted ribbed tank top, the thin material doing absolutely nothing to hide the heavy contour of his chest. I’d seen it all in photos, sure. But having the flesh-and-blood reality sitting mere feet away from me was entirely different. I swallowed hard. My fingers twitched. God, I wanted to touch him. 02 “Daddy, I want to sleep with you.” I rested my chin in my hand and typed out the text, a sudden, wicked surge of adrenaline taking over. I blamed the unhinged romance novels I read; they had thoroughly corrupted me. Across the table, I watched Judson’s ears turn a violent, violent shade of red. He snatched up his water glass and practically inhaled half of it, his Adam’s apple bobbing sharply with the frantic swallows. It was a deeply distracting sight. Yet, when he lowered the glass, his face was a mask of utter, infuriating indifference. My phone buzzed. “Babe, behave. I’m out in public.” I bit the inside of my cheek, fighting a smile. “But I wanna see your abs, Daddy.” Judson stared down at his phone for a long, agonizing minute. His thumbs hovered, tapped, deleted, and tapped again. Finally, two words came through: “Tonight. Promise.” I let my eyes drift over him again. He was looking down, his dark, thick lashes casting faint shadows over his cheekbones. He wasn’t even doing anything, yet that aura of cold, untouchable restraint was intoxicating. It made you want to reach out and snap the wire, just to see what he looked like when he lost control. “No. I want to see them now.” Judson abruptly pushed his chair back and stood up. His voice was tight, the fraying edges of his composure barely concealed. “I need to use the restroom.” Two minutes later, my phone buzzed. It was a photo. In the dim, fluorescent lighting of the dive bar bathroom, he had the hem of his shirt caught between his teeth. His belt was unbuckled, the leather loose, revealing the sharp, downward V of his obliques disappearing into the waistline of his denim. And his hand—the veins thick and prominent against his pale skin as he gripped his phone. I actually gulped. “Babe, is this okay?” “I’m afraid if I have to hold back much longer, I might actually cry.” All the blood in my body rushed to my face. My ears felt like they were on fire. Darren frowned at me. “What is wrong with you? Why is your face the color of a stop sign?” I quickly turned away, frantically fanning myself with a cocktail napkin. “N-nothing. It’s just stuffy in here. They need to fix their AC.” With trembling fingers, I slowly typed back to Judson: “It’s okay.” 03 It took Judson twenty minutes to emerge from the bathroom. When he finally returned, he looked completely refreshed. There were still damp droplets of water clinging to the ends of his hair and his fingertips. He had slipped perfectly back into his untouchable, icy persona. His spine was ramrod straight; he moved through the crowded bar like royalty parting the sea. I watched him approach, a hysterical little voice in my head screaming: “How on earth does this man toggle between these two personalities without suffering whiplash?” “Have you stared enough?” I blinked, suddenly realizing I had been tracking his every move for far too long. He was looking down at me, and his eyes were laced with pure, unfiltered disdain. I quickly averted my gaze. “I have a girlfriend,” he said, his voice cold and flat. “Don’t even think about it.” Before my brain could even process the audacity, the phone in my pocket vibrated. “Babe, my roommate’s little sister hasn’t taken her eyes off me all night. She’s definitely into me.” “But don’t worry, babe. I shut it down. I told her straight to her face that I have a girlfriend.” “Aren’t I a good boy, babe?” “Babe, I’m highly coveted on the market. When are you finally gonna lock this down?” I stared at the endless stream of “babes” filling my screen. Then I looked up at the man sitting across from me. My brain felt like it was melting out of my ears. Was the wildly needy, desperate golden retriever on my phone truly the same person as this glacial, arrogant prick sitting at the table? As the night wound down and people started grabbing their coats, Judson leaned over to push his chair in. That was when the chain slipped out from his collar again. I stared at it. It was the literal dog chain I had mailed him. Months ago, his insecurity had spiked. He was constantly begging me to make it official, demanding to know when I was going to give him a title. I had lied, telling him my parents were strict and wouldn’t let me date. He had been relentless, begging for a physical token—something to prove he belonged to me. I had been staring at my dog’s spare collar at the time. In a moment of sheer, chaotic impulsivity, I tossed it in a padded envelope and shipped it to his P.O. box. The day he received it, he had been borderline euphoric. He kept texting me, saying he had no idea I was “into that sort of thing.” He had spent the entire night sending me voice memos of him barking. I had never in a million years imagined he would turn it into a necklace and wear it under his clothes. As the group funneled out the door, I hung back, unable to resist the urge to mess with him. I clicked my tongue again. The exact same command I used for my dog. Right on cue, Judson’s breath hitched, and he let out two low, conditioned barks. He immediately whipped his head around, eyes wide, but the hallway was empty. I was hiding behind the heavy oak door, pressing my hand over my mouth to keep from laughing out loud. A second later, my phone vibrated. “Babe, I miss you so much I think I’m hallucinating. I just heard your voice.” 04 After we left the pub, Darren suggested we hit up the street fair set up near the campus green. The night market was packed shoulder-to-shoulder. Darren practically had me in a headlock, terrified I was going to get swept away by the crowd. Judson, on the other hand, maintained a rigid, three-yard distance from me at all times. I secretly smiled to myself. “Look at him, keeping his boundaries. I’ll have to reward him for this tonight.” But that fond thought was instantly obliterated a second later. I had stopped at a vendor’s table, my eyes landing on a vintage, pastel Sanrio keychain. I reached for it, but another hand shot out and snatched it first. The moment our fingers brushed, Judson recoiled like he had just touched a hot stove. He practically jumped back. He glared at me, his brow furrowed in deep annoyance. “Excuse me. I saw this first. My girlfriend loves Hello Kitty.” He had my love for Sanrio carved into his DNA. The very first gift he had ever sent me was a pink care package tied with a lace ribbon, overflowing with Hello Kitty merchandise. “Whatever,” I thought reasonably. “He’s buying it for me anyway. Considering how fiercely loyal he’s being, I’ll let him have it.” I was actually grinning as we walked away. Until my phone buzzed. “Babe, my roommate’s sister might actually be mentally unstable.” “I explicitly told her I was taken, and she just tried to grope my hand at a vendor stall.” “I’m so disgusted. I wouldn’t touch a desperate fangirl like her if she were the last woman on earth. I only have eyes for you, babe.” “Don’t worry, babe. As soon as I get back to the dorm, I’m sanitizing my hands ten times.” “Babe, I’m only yours to touch…” “Babe, what if I wear the black silk tonight so you can look?” I saw red. My fingers flew across the keyboard. “Touch my ass! We are DONE. We’re breaking up.” Ten feet ahead of me, Judson tripped over his own feet and nearly face-planted into a churro stand. His spine curved, his shoulders instantly hunching as they began to shake. He looked utterly, devastatingly pathetic. Darren rushed forward and grabbed his arm. “Whoa, man, you good? What the hell just happened to you?” Judson sniffled, his voice cracking with a very real, very audible sob. “My girlfriend… she just dumped me…” Darren frowned, his face twisting in disgust. “Bro, I told you, that girl is for the streets. She’s probably playing five other dudes right now. You’re the only idiot treating her like royalty.” Judson’s head snapped up. His eyes were bloodshot and feral. He shoved Darren backward. “Don’t you ever speak about my girl like that!” I was already vibrating with rage, and seeing him defend me while simultaneously calling me a stalker in my DMs pushed me over the edge. I marched up and punched Darren square in the arm. Darren clutched his bicep, looking at me like I had lost my mind. “What the hell was that for?!” I planted my hands on my hips, chest heaving. “We are no longer speaking!” 05 When I finally got back to my apartment, I couldn’t stop myself from opening the app. “99+ Unread Messages.” “Babe, what did I do? Tell me what I did wrong.” “I reported everything to you tonight! I was so good!” “Babe, please don’t ignore me…” “Babe, is it the black silk? Do you hate the black? I can wear the white!” “Babe, we are not breaking up. I refuse.” “Babe, it’s been two hours, 45 minutes, and 6 seconds since you looked at me.” “Babe, are you busy?” “Babe, please answer me. I’m begging you…” I stared at that last message, a traitorous wave of affection washing over me. “Is your roommate’s sister pretty?” I typed. “I don’t know, probably ugly.” “Does she have a good body?” “Not interested. Didn’t look.” “Did you feel even a tiny spark when you saw her?” “I feel absolutely nothing for anyone on this earth except you.” “If someone forced her to be your wife, would you do it?” “I’d rather they shoot me in the head.” “You are going to deeply regret everything you just said.” “I have no regrets, babe. You’re the only woman I’m ever going to marry.” Naturally, he never saw my reply to that, because I blocked his number and deleted the app. Not ten minutes later, a text from Darren popped up on my screen. “Holy shit, you know what? Judson actually got dumped!” “But he doesn’t even seem that sad this time. He’s been furiously online shopping for the past hour. Buying nothing but lingerie and toys!” They broke up, why was he buying all that? Was he planning to use them for his “crafts”? He always was a bit too enthusiastic about that stuff. “I bet his ex dumped him because he was too boring in bed,” Darren texted. “He’s probably gearing up to impress the new girl!” Wait, what? “What new girl?” I typed back furiously. Darren replied instantly: “Who else? His new prospect! His parents set him up on a blind date last week. Apparently, she’s drop-dead gorgeous.” “He was just talking about taking her to the movies tomorrow.” Last week? Last week, he told me his younger cousin had just gotten accepted into our university, and he was taking her out for a celebratory dinner. He went on a blind date?! That absolute bastard. He was playing me this whole time, keeping me on the hook while he entertained other women in the real world! 06 The next evening, I stood in the lobby of the local multiplex. Sure enough, I spotted Judson standing by the concession stand with a beautiful brunette. He was holding a massive tub of popcorn and chivalrously carrying her designer purse. He looked attentive. Perfect. When the girl excused herself to the restroom, he stood dutifully near the corridor, waiting for her. My eyes burned, hot tears threatening to spill over. I had never experienced this version of him. I only ever got him through a glowing screen, feeding me pretty words and empty promises in the dark. Suddenly, he turned around. He spotted me. His brow instantly furrowed, his expression morphing into pure, unadulterated disgust. “What are you doing here? Are you following me?” I flinched at the harshness of his tone. I sniffled, crossing my arms over my chest. “Do you own this theater? Am I not allowed to buy a ticket?” He raised an eyebrow, a cruel, mocking smirk twisting his perfect mouth. “Don’t think I don’t know exactly what you’re doing.” He took a step closer, his voice dropping. “How long have you been standing there, creeping on me?” My throat closed up. I couldn’t find a single word to defend myself. I just glared at him, my eyes shining with unshed tears. My silence only made him more arrogant. “Struck a nerve, didn’t I? I’ve dealt with desperate, obsessive girls like you before.” He looked at me like I was something scraped off the bottom of his shoe. “I’m already taken. So do yourself a favor and drop the pathetic fantasy. Out of respect for your brother, I won’t cause a scene. Now leave.” It was the second time he had called me desperate and obsessive. My entire body was trembling with rage. His mouth was so incredibly venomous. I opened my mouth to tear him a new one, but before I could make a sound, the shrill, deafening shriek of the fire alarm tore through the lobby. Panic erupted instantly. The crowd surged, morphing into a chaotic stampede. Someone slammed into my shoulder, and I lost my footing, crashing hard onto the carpeted floor. On pure instinct, I reached a hand out toward Judson. His gaze swept over me, clinical and precise, and didn’t linger for even a fraction of a second. It was as if I were nothing but a smudge of dirt on the floor. I watched as he sprinted toward the women’s restroom. The strobe lights of the fire alarm flashed violently overhead, bathing the panicked faces of the crowd in harsh, strobing red light. It painted Judson’s retreating back in a cold, unforgiving hue. I scrambled to get my hands under me, but before I could stand, another panicked moviegoer plowed into me. This time, I went down hard. My temple slammed into the sharp edge of a display stand. My vision went black for a terrifying second. The acrid, chemical smell of smoke invaded my lungs, and I started to cough violently. Tears streamed down my face, entirely out of my control. I couldn’t see anything. I was just crawling forward on my hands and knees through a forest of trampling legs. Through the blur of smoke and tears, I saw Judson emerge from the hallway, holding the brunette tightly against his chest, shielding her from the crush of the crowd. He walked right past me. His stride didn’t even break. In that moment, for the very first time, I felt the physical sensation of a heart breaking. All those books and movies that described heartbreak as a suffocating, physical agony—they weren’t lying. The girl in his heart was her. So what did that make me? Just a digital distraction for his lonely nights? Just one of a dozen girls he kept in his phone to feed his ego?

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Five years into our relationship, David instituted what he called the “Relationship Penalty System.” If I took more than ten minutes to reply to a text, that was fifty dollars. If I cooked dinner and forgot to include a dish he liked, that was one hundred dollars. If I accidentally offended his mother, that was three hundred dollars. He framed it with the persuasive charm that had seduced me in college. “Think of it as our Future Fund, Jo,” he’d say, kissing my temple. “It’s just tough love to help you build better habits. Every cent goes into our joint account for the down payment on our dream home.” And because I was desperate to keep him, I believed every word. I spent years tiptoeing around his endless rules, transferring chunk after chunk of my hard-earned salary as a corporate payroll specialist into that locked high-yield account. Until the afternoon my father suffered a massive hemorrhagic stroke, and the neurosurgeon needed a hundred and fifty thousand dollars upfront for the emergency surgery and ICU care. I ran to the bank with our joint card, only to find that out of the three hundred and fourteen thousand dollars I had painstakingly deposited over five years, the remaining balance was thirty-five cents. When I called David, hyperventilating in the hospital corridor, his voice was smooth, detached, and entirely devoid of panic. “I wired that money yesterday for my brother’s down payment,” he said. “Besides, Jo, your dad’s condition is a money pit. We can’t throw our future down a drain.” Later, when his corporate embezzlement and identity fraud caught up with him, leaving him facing a decade in federal prison, he fell to his knees in a visitor room, clawing at my jeans through the partition, begging me to sign a plea leniency waiver. I pulled a thick, worn leather notebook out of my bag and slammed it against the glass. “According to your rules, David, every time you make me unhappy, it’s a thousand-dollar fine.” I leaned into the microphone, my voice dead air. “You tell me—how many years of your life does it take to clear your balance?” … It was ten-thirty on a frigid November Tuesday when I stepped out of my office building, shivering as the damp city wind cut through my coat. My phone vibrated in my palm. A text from David: “You’re thirty minutes late.” My stomach dropped into a familiar, nauseating knot. I quickly hit dial, putting the phone to my ear as I hurried toward the subway entrance. “David, I’m so sorry,” I breathed, trying to sound repentant, hated how small my voice sounded. “The quarterly audit ran over. I didn’t mean to miss your text.” David’s voice on the line was colder than the slush beneath my boots. “Joanna. How many times have we talked about accountability?” “I know, but—” “No buts. A relationship without boundaries falls apart. If you can’t respect my time now, how are you going to manage a household when we have kids?” He paused, letting the silence heavy with disappointment stretch between us. “Standard penalty: fifty dollars per ten minutes. You’re thirty minutes late. That’s one hundred and fifty dollars to the account. Now.” I swallowed back the iron taste of anxiety, my eyes stinging. “David… my rent is due this week, and after my car payment, I barely have two hundred left in my personal checking. Can we please—” “No,” he cut in, sharp and final. “If I make an exception, the system fails. Are you saying you think I’m stealing from you, Jo? That money belongs to “us”. It’s for our home. If you aren’t committed to our future, maybe we shouldn’t be talking about marriage at all.” The word “marriage” was the leash he used to pull me into line. I was an endlessly anxious woman, damaged by an upbringing where love was scarce. My parents had divorced when I was six, and my father, a quiet, gentle mechanic, had raised me alone in a drafty small town upstate. David had been the shining, structured light of my senior year at university—handsome, impeccably organized, always knowing exactly what to do. I was terrified of losing him. “I’ll transfer it right now,” I whispered into the freezing night. Standing under the neon glow of a subway sign, fingers numb, I opened my banking app and sent my last hundred and fifty dollars into the account labeled “Our Future”. Once the transaction cleared, I reflexively opened a password-protected note on my phone. As a payroll specialist, my brain was wired for numbers. I couldn’t help it. For five years, I had kept an exact, immutable ledger of every penalty David had levied against me. “Nov 12: Late response to text — $150. Total cumulative: $314,500.” Three hundred fourteen thousand, five hundred dollars. It represented every bonus, every overtime check, every birthday gift from my father, and every penny of savings I had generated since turning twenty-two. When I unlocked the door to our rented apartment, David was sprawled on the Italian leather sofa, playing Xbox. He didn’t look up. “There’s cold takeout in the fridge,” he said, his eyes glued to the TV screen. “Heat it up yourself. And do the dishes in the sink before you come to bed. Next time you’re late, the fine doubles.” I didn’t argue. I set down my bag, walked into the kitchen, rolled up my sleeves, and plunged my hands into the greasy water. I told myself what I always told myself: “He loves you. He’s just disciplined. He’s building a life for us.” I had no idea I was simply fattening a wolf. … The following weekend, David’s mother, Patricia, and his younger brother, Tyler, arrived at the apartment. Tyler was graduating from community college, and Patricia had declared that as the eldest son, David was responsible for helping Tyler secure a down payment for a condo in the city. “A young man can’t get a proper girl without real estate,” she liked to say. “Joanna, go prep some fruit,” Patricia commanded the moment she stepped through the door, dropping her designer handbag onto the kitchen island. “Make sure you slice the imported ones, not those cheap apples you usually buy.” I smiled politely, walked into the kitchen, and carefully washed and arranged the Cotton Candy grapes and organic cherries I had bought yesterday. I brought the platter out and set it on the coffee table. Tyler scooped up a handful of cherries, popped three into his mouth, and immediately spat them into a napkin on the table. “Ugh, gross! Jo, where’d you get these? They taste sour as hell.” Patricia’s face instantly hardened. She slammed her teacup down. “Joanna, what is the meaning of this? We drive two hours to visit, and you serve my son trash? Are you disrespecting me on purpose?” I froze, my hands trembling against my thighs. “Mrs. Robert, no, I bought those at Whole Foods yesterday. They were sixteen dollars a pound—” “Don’t talk back to my mother!” David’s voice cracked through the room like a whip. He stood up, stepping between me and his family, looking down at me with contempt. “Apologize to my mother. Right now.” “David, I didn’t do anything wrong—” “I said, apologize!” He stepped closer, lowering his voice into a dangerous hiss. “Have you forgotten the rules? Disrespecting family is a three-thousand-dollar fine. You want to add disrespecting “me” on top of that?” My heart plummeted. “David, my account is empty. I don’t have three thousand dollars.” “Then take out a cash advance on your credit card!” he snapped. “I am not going to let your pathetic attitude humiliate me in front of my family. Not one cent less.” Tyler smirked behind his mother’s back, taking another bite of the fruit he had just called sour. Patricia crossed her arms, looking at me like I was grease under her shoe. Standing there in the middle of the living room, under the cold, united gaze of the Robert family, hot tears welled in my eyes. I walked into the bathroom, locked the door, opened my credit card app, and executed a three-thousand-dollar cash advance directly into the “Our Future” fund. I opened my ledger. “Total cumulative: $317,500.” That afternoon, I cooked a four-course dinner. I sat quietly at the end of the dining table, picking at dry rice while the three of them laughed, drank wine, and discussed real estate listings. As Patricia was leaving, she grabbed David’s arm at the door. “Davey, that condo in the West End requires a hundred and fifty thousand for the down payment. You need to lock that down this week. Tyler’s engagement depends on it.” David patted her hand confidently. “Don’t worry, Mom. I’ve got the money lined up. I’ll make the deposit next week.” At the time, I foolishly felt a flicker of admiration for David, thinking he was a devoted older brother. I never stopped to wonder how a mid-level procurement manager on an eighty-thousand-dollar salary was casually sitting on a hundred and fifty grand. The nightmare struck three days later. … It was a rainy Thursday afternoon. I was in the middle of reconciling quarterly tax forms when my phone went off, buzzing frantically across my desk. It was Mrs. Oscar, my dad’s neighbor upstate. “Joanna! Sweetheart, you need to come home right now!” Her voice was shrill with panic. “Your dad collapsed in the driveway! The ambulance just took him to the regional trauma center—they say it’s his brain!” My mind went completely blank. The pen in my hand clattered to the floor. I didn’t even pack my bag or request time off. I sprinted out of the building, flagged a cab, and bought a train ticket straight upstate. When I arrived at the hospital, my dad was already in the Intensive Care Unit, hooked up to a maze of monitors. A neurologist met me in the hallway, his expression grave. “Massive hemorrhagic stroke,” the doctor said, holding up an MRI scan. “The pressure on his brain stem is critical. We need to perform an emergency craniotomy immediately, followed by specialized neurological ICU care.” He looked at me sympathetically. “Because your dad’s rural insurance package doesn’t cover this high-tier trauma center out-of-network, you need to settle the initial deposit. It’s going to be roughly one hundred and fifty thousand dollars to clear the surgical team and the bed.” “One hundred and fifty thousand,” I repeated, the number echoing like a death knell in my ears. “We need your authorization and payment confirmation within the hour, Joanna. Every minute we wait, brain tissue dies.” I stumbled away from the doctor, ducking into a stairwell. My hands were shaking so violently I could barely unlock my phone. I dialed David. “David! David, my dad had a stroke!” I sobbed into the receiver, grasping at him like a lifeline. “He’s in surgery prep! I need you to wire a hundred and fifty thousand from the Future Fund to the hospital right now! Please, David, hurry!” The line was quiet, save for the distinct, rhythm of David clicking his computer mouse. “A stroke?” his voice was flat. “How bad is it?” “It’s critical! They need the money now to start the operation! I’m sending you the hospital’s routing info—” “I can’t move that money, Jo.” The world seemed to pause. The hum of the fluorescent lights above me grew deafeningly loud. “What do you mean, you can’t?” “I wired the funds yesterday,” David said casually. “I used it for the down payment on the West End condo.” Blood rushed to my ears with the sound of a roaring ocean. “You… what? David, that’s “our” money! That’s “my” money! I paid every single dollar into that account!” I shrieked, my voice breaking in the concrete stairwell. “Joanna, stop shouting,” David’s tone turned instantly sharp and reprimanding. “We established the rules. That money is the Family Building Fund. Helping my brother secure an asset is a family priority. Besides, let’s be realistic—your dad is over sixty, he’s had a massive brain bleed. Even if they save him, he’s going to be a vegetable. Throwing a hundred and fifty grand into a lost cause is irresponsible.” I squeezed my eyes shut, my chest heaving so hard I couldn’t catch my breath. “David… that’s my father. He’s all I have. Pull the deposit back! Cancel the contract! Give me my money!” David let out an irritated sigh. “The contract is signed, Jo. The earnest money is non-refundable. You’re completely out of control right now, screaming at me like a crazy woman.” He took a breath, his voice dropping into that terrifyingly calm, authoritarian tone. “That’s a five-thousand-dollar penalty for emotional instability and verbal abuse. Call me back when you’ve pulled yourself together.” “Click.” The line went dead. I stared at the black screen of my phone, my soul crumbling into ash. I sprinted out of the stairwell, down the block to the nearest Chase branch. I pulled the joint debit card out of my wallet—the card David had given me years ago, the one he claimed was connected to our high-yield account, though he had always managed the online access himself. I shoved the card into the ATM with trembling fingers. I entered our anniversary date. “Invalid PIN.” I entered my birthday. “Invalid PIN.” I entered “his” birthday. The screen flickered, loaded, and displayed the account overview. “Available Balance: $0.35.” I slid down the cold side of the ATM machine, collapsing onto the tiled floor of the bank vestibule. He hadn’t just used the money. He had changed the security credentials. He had stripped the account bare. For five years, I had been paying a predator to slowly starve me alive. … There was no time to process the betrayal. My father was dying. I sat on a wooden bench in the hospital corridor, frantically making phone calls. “Aunt Susan, please, my dad needs surgery… I just need ten thousand…” “Oh, Jo, honey, you know Uncle Mark lost his job last month…” “Sarah, I’m so sorry to ask, but it’s an emergency…” “Joanna, I can wire you two thousand, but that’s literally all I have in savings…” By midnight, after begging every acquaintance, colleague, and distant relative I possessed, I had raised barely twenty thousand dollars. A drop in the ocean. In utter humiliation, I texted David: “I’m begging you. Please. I’ll sign whatever contract you want. I’ll pay you back with interest. Just lend me thirty thousand so they can do the procedure.” He never replied. Desperate, I called Patricia. The moment she picked up, her voice dripped with annoyance. “Joanna, David told me everything. Stop harassing my son! Your father had a good run. It’s God’s will. Why are you trying to drag our family down into financial ruin over a dying old man?” “That thirty thousand was MY money!” I screamed into the phone, my nails digging into the palm of my hand until I felt wet blood. “I paid those fines! It was my salary!” “Fines?” Patricia scoffed maliciously. “That was penalty money for your failures as a woman! Once you paid it, it belonged to the Robert family. Stop calling us, you ungrateful little brat!” She hung up. I pressed my forehead against the icy hospital glass, tears streaming silently down my face. Because I couldn’t produce the deposit, the hospital could only administer palliative care. They kept him comfortable, but they couldn’t stop the pressure in his skull. At four in the morning, the heart monitor beside my father’s bed dragged into a long, flat, agonizing tone. I knelt by his bed, too exhausted to cry. My father died hard. His fingers were locked around the bedsheets, his dull eyes half-open, staring at the ceiling as if he were still worrying about how his weak, timid daughter would survive in this cold world without him. I gently reached up, closed his eyelids, and wiped the moisture from my cheeks. In that quiet, sterile room, as the harsh morning light began to bleed through the blinds, the weak, eager-to-please Joanna died right alongside him. What was left behind was an empty shell—devoid of love, devoid of fear, driven entirely by a cold, mathematical rage. … It took three days to arrange my father’s cremation and pack up his modest belongings. During those three days, David didn’t call once. He didn’t text. To him, I was an obedient dog that had run away temporarily and would inevitably crawl back when it got hungry. On the train back to the city, I opened Instagram. The very first post on my feed was from David. It was a gallery of nine high-definition photos: a sun-drenched floor-through condo with floor-to-ceiling windows, hardwood floors, and a sweeping view of the city skyline. In the center photo, David, Patricia, and Tyler were standing on the balcony, holding champagne glasses, radiant with joy. Caption: “Major milestone! Closed on the new luxury condo today. As the head of the family, taking care of my little brother is my ultimate duty. Onward and upward! #Blessed #FamilyFirst #RealEstate” The comments section was flooded with praise from his colleagues and friends. I stared at the sparkling champagne glasses in the photo. Every square foot of those hardwood floors was paved with my father’s life. I didn’t like the post. I didn’t comment. I closed my phone, leaned back against the train seat, and looked out at the passing grey landscape. I was going to make them bleed. I was going to make them choke on every single dollar they had stolen from me.

🌟 Continue the story here 👉🏻 📲 Download the “MotoNovel” app 🔍 search for “560145”, and watch the full series ✨! #MotoNovel

My husband, Scott, suffered from selective amnesia. Conveniently, he only ever managed to forget the things I said. On our third wedding anniversary, after placing the final dish on the dining table, I leaned in and whispered softly to him, “My stomach’s been acting up again. I made an appointment for an endoscopy tomorrow morning. Could you drive me?” He looked up at me, his eyes blank and bewildered. “Huh? What did you just say?” Beside him sat his childhood best friend, Taryn. She let out a small, quiet laugh that sounded entirely like a deliberate provocation. She cleared her throat with an exaggerated cough. “Oh gosh, I think I’m coming down with something.” Scott instantly turned to her, his posture tight with concern. “A cold? Did you kick off your blankets again last night?” Then, as if suddenly remembering my presence, he turned back to me with a look of practiced remorse. “I’m so sorry, Cassie. You know how my brain is. I just can’t seem to retain anything you tell me.” I didn’t say a word. I simply stood up and quietly left the table. The next morning, I went to the hospital alone. The diagnosis wasn’t a stomach issue. It was a threatened miscarriage. Sitting on the cold paper of the examination table, I dialed Scott’s number. “The doctor says I might lose the baby.” His voice came through the line, smooth and effortless as always. “Huh? What did you just say?” Before I could answer, Taryn’s giggles echoed from his end of the line. He hadn’t bothered to mute the call. “Shut up, that’s hilarious,” Taryn was saying, her voice dripping with amusement. “Is she seriously making up stories now just to get your attention?” “I swear,” she added with a snicker, “I bet she’ll go her whole life without realizing this is all just a game.” … Then came Scott’s voice, warm and laced with quiet amusement. “It really is the perfect excuse. Remember when her mom was in the hospital? I took you to Disneyland for the weekend, came home, told her my amnesia flared up and I forgot, and she didn’t even get mad.” Taryn couldn’t stop laughing. “Next time she has her period, hand her a glass of ice water and tell her you forgot! God, I would pay to see the look on her face. Hahaha!” I gripped the phone, a bone-deep chill spreading through my chest until my whole body went numb. A game? Shortly after we got married, Scott told me he was diagnosed with intermittent amnesia. He would forget things I told him, forget my birthday, forget my severe seafood allergy. We visited countless specialists across the state, but none of the scans showed any structural damage. The head of his department at the hospital eventually sat me down, looking grave, and explained it was likely a rare, stress-induced psychological condition. I had been terrified. Panicked, even. I abandoned my plans for graduate school so I could stay home full-time to manage his routine, carefully curating his daily life, tracking his meals, walking on eggshells every single day. And all of it… was just a game to them? I didn’t make a sound. I pulled the phone from my ear and quietly tapped the red button to end the call. A single tear slipped down my cheek and splashed onto the back of my hand. The OB-GYN quickly pulled a tissue from the box on her desk and handed it to me. “Oh, honey, don’t cry just yet. A threatened miscarriage doesn’t mean it’s over. If you get plenty of bed rest and follow the treatment plan, there’s still a really good chance we can save the pregnancy.” I stared at the doctor, forcing my lips to curve into a pale, hollow smile. “No, thank you, Doctor.” “Please schedule the surgery. I don’t want this child.” When I stumbled out of the clinic, I had to lean against the cold hallway wall. My stomach twisted into sharp, violent cramps. To get pregnant with this child, I had spent two grueling years suffering through medical intervention. My stomach had been bruised black and blue from daily hormone injections. I had swallowed bitter herbal concoctions until my taste buds went numb, spending half my mornings hunched over the toilet bowl dry-heaving. The fertility treatments destroyed my immune system. I suffered from chronic stomach pain and nighttime migraines that kept me awake for hours. On so many late, dark nights, I had curled into a tight ball on the mattress, tears soaking the pillow. I used to shake Scott awake, gasping, “My head hurts so bad… Could you please just get me a glass of warm water?” He would simply roll over, turning his back to me, his voice heavy with sleep. “What did you just say?” His amnesia was acting up again. Every time he had one of his “episodes,” he wouldn’t just forget my words—he would become impossibly short-tempered. I would grab his arm, sobbing, begging him through the pain. “I’m suffering so much… I just asked if you could get me some water…” He would yank his arm out of my grip and pull the comforter over his head. When the sound of my weeping finally became too loud to ignore, he would sit up, glaring at me with utter annoyance. “Can’t you be a little more mature?” he would snap. “The doctor specifically said you need to keep your stress levels low while trying to conceive! You throwing these hysterical fits every night—who do you think is going to suffer if it affects the baby?” “You know I have a condition! If you keep keeping me awake and my health gets worse, who do you think is going to end up taking care of me?” Back then, I swallowed the agony. I endured it all for the sake of the baby, and for him. And to think, from beginning to end, it was nothing more than an inside joke. Since he chose to forget, then there was no longer any need for me to speak. I opened my phone and sent a short text to my former university advisor: [Dr. Bowen, is that East African field research position still available? If so, I’d like to accept.] By the time the procedure was over, evening had fallen. I unlocked the front door and stepped inside. Laughter and loud chatter spilled out from the living room. Scott and Taryn’s entire circle of friends were gathered in our house. They had all gone to middle school together and had been an impenetrable clique for over a decade. Years ago, when Scott’s “doctor” suggested he spend more time around familiar faces to help stimulate his memory, I made them feel as welcome as possible. To support his recovery, I let them turn our carefully decorated home into their personal clubhouse, coming and going as they pleased. At the sound of the front door closing, every head turned toward me. A series of knowing, shared glances passed between them. Taryn intentionally cleared her throat, letting out a bright, sugary laugh. “Speaking of which, Scott and Cassie have been married for three years now, haven’t they? Since someone’s amnesia never seems to get any better, why don’t I help jog your memory a bit?” Scott popped a mandarin orange segment into her mouth. “Jog my memory about what?” “About how ridiculously sweet you used to be to her!” Taryn covered her mouth, giggling. “Back in the day, you were so eager. You used to drive across town every single evening just to pick her up from work, and you’d wait in line for half an hour at that bakery just to buy her those hot almond pastries.” Scott looked at Taryn, his expression morphing into blank confusion. “Huh? What did you just say?” The game had started again. Taryn widened her eyes in exaggerated disbelief. “No way! You seriously don’t remember any of that?” He shook his head slowly, looking utterly baffled. “Not a clue. Did I really do shit like that for her? Man, I must have been so pathetic.” I stood at the threshold of the entryway, watching him. A tight, suffocating knot pulled tight around my chest. To think that the love and thoughtfulness he had once shown me—the genuine effort he had put into our early days—was now casually dismissed by his own mouth as a embarrassing joke. His friends finally finished laughing before one of them called out to me lazily. “Hey, Cassie, you’re finally back! Where’s the takeout Scott asked you to pick up?” “Yeah, where are my street tacos?” another chimed in. “Did you get the sourdough from that bakery downtown? You didn’t forget, right?” I stood there, silent. I thought back to how I used to view these people. I thought they were coming over out of genuine concern for Scott’s health. I had tried so hard to win their approval, bending over backward to do whatever they asked. I had noticed it before, of course—how Scott’s amnesia only ever seemed to strike when he was dealing with me. When Taryn had a mild cold, Scott would remember to remind her to wear a scarf a whole month later. When his buddies wanted specific favors, he never once forgot. So why was it that when I was hospitalized with severe pneumonia, he couldn’t even remember my room number? When I had asked him about it back then, he had looked at me with eyes so full of guilt and sorrow, whispering, “Cassie, I’m so sorry. I’m trying so hard to get better. Please don’t give up on me.” Later, as if to prove to me that his condition was unpredictable, he started playing out his “episodes” in front of his friends, too. I remembered one afternoon while I was chopping vegetables in the kitchen, listening to the chatter from the living room. “Honestly, I don’t get what Scott sees in her,” one of his friends had sneered. “She’s so bland and overly sensitive. Always walking around with a long face like some tragic martyr.” “Right? And zero sense of style,” another added. “That dress she wore to the dinner last week looked like something out of a thrift bargain bin.” Scott had just sat there, smiling casually, saying nothing. Only when he noticed his friends looking at him expecting a response did he slowly blink and ask, “Huh? What did you guys just say?” He “forgot” those insults, too. He conveniently “couldn’t hear” them belittling his wife. It was all a game. A game crafted specifically to isolate me, humiliate me, and mock my presence. “Hey, Cassie! I’m talking to you, did you hear me?” a guy named Chad yelled out, his voice sharp and aggressive. “Where’s the beer we asked for? Why are you standing there empty-handed?” I lowered my head numbly and pulled out my phone. Scott had indeed sent me a text two hours ago—a laundry list of errands and food orders. At that exact moment, I had been lying on an operating table, feeling the quiet, agonizing void as a three-month-old life was surgically scraped from inside my body. “I didn’t see the message,” I said softly. Scott’s face darkened instantly. “You didn’t see it?” “You carry your phone around like a prop! Everyone’s been sitting here starving, waiting on you for hours, and all you have to say is ‘I didn’t see it’? Can you do “anything” right?” Right on cue, Taryn pressed a hand to her chest, letting out a sharp, dramatic gasp as if she were about to faint. Scott panicked immediately, leaning over her. “Taryn? What’s wrong?” “It’s nothing…” she murmured weakly. “I think… I think my blood sugar just dropped because I haven’t eaten in so long…” Scott’s expression hardened with panic. He stood up, marched over to the dining room sideboard, and pulled out a decorative gift box from the bottom shelf. It was a box of artisanal, hand-crafted nougat—a specialty gift my former professor had brought back for me, something I had been saving for a special occasion. Instinctively, I took a step forward. “Please don’t open that.” “It was a gift from my advisor. I have regular fruit candies in my purse—” “What does it matter who gave it to you?” He glared at me, his voice sharp with hostility. “Because you couldn’t be bothered to pick up food, Taryn is practically passing out! Severe low blood sugar can be dangerous, don’t you know that?” He tore open the packaging without hesitation, unwrapped a piece of candy, and delicately fed it to Taryn’s mouth. I stood frozen, watching him. Dangerous? So he “did” know that low blood sugar could be dangerous. Yet, during the months I was taking aggressive fertility medication, my stomach was so torn up that I couldn’t keep food down for days. One night, I woke up drenched in a cold sweat, shaking violently from severe hypoglycemia, sobbing as I begged him to go to the kitchen and grab me a piece of candy. What had he done back then? His amnesia had conveniently flared up. He had squinted at me through half-lidded eyes in the dark, murmuring, “What did you just say?” I watched as the decorative box was ripped apart, the friends laughing as they passed my specialty candy around like party favors. Taryn looked up at me, her eyes wide with innocent distress. “Cassie, please don’t be mad at me. My blood sugar really dropped, I didn’t mean to take your candy… I’ll buy you another box to make it up to you, okay?” Scott patted her head gently. “Why are you explaining anything to her? Her heart is the size of a needle’s eye.” His friends chimed in with easy agreement. “Seriously, Cassie, you’re being way too petty. It’s just a box of candy, how much could it possibly cost? It doesn’t even taste that good anyway.” “Taryn isn’t feeling well, and as the host, you don’t show an ounce of care.” “Scott, you really need to get your wife under control. That sour face of hers is an absolute buzzkill.” Feeling his authority challenged in front of his peers, Scott cleared his throat with a stiff frown. “Alright, that’s enough. She’s pregnant, so her mood is unpredictable. Don’t hold it against her.” He turned to the guys. “Give me a minute, fellas. I’ll drive her out to grab some food, and then we’ll come back and drink properly.” Without waiting for my response, he grabbed my arm and dragged me toward the door. A dull, tearing pain throbbed in my lower abdomen. I stumbled from the sudden movement, but he roughly shoved me into the passenger seat anyway. As he slammed the car into drive and yanked the steering wheel, he began a relentless tirade: “Cassie, are you trying to humiliate me on purpose?” “Taryn and the guys come over to help me work through my condition! Would it have killed you to pick up a few errands?” “Those are my closest friends. You married me—is showing a little basic hospitality to my friends really that much to ask?” I kept my eyes fixed on the dark road ahead, saying nothing. He really was deeply committed to this game of his. I knew why he was acting like this. Within his social circle, Scott occupied the very bottom of the food chain. Taryn was the golden center—wealthy, attractive, and surrounded by people constantly vying for her attention. The rest of the guys all came from prominent, well-off families. Scott was the only one who had tagged along behind them since middle school, accustomed to playing the desperate court jester just to stay included. Deep down, he was consumed by an overwhelming insecurity. And to curry favor with them—to prove to them that he was a man of importance—he established his dominance by mistreating me. He wanted to parade me in front of them: “Look, my wife obeys my every command. I hold absolute authority in my house.” “Say something! Are you mute?” Scott yelled, slamming his hand against the steering wheel when I remained silent. “Where the hell were you all afternoon anyway?” I took a quiet breath. “I had surgery today.” He hit the brakes at a red light, his brow furrowing. “Surgery? You mean the endoscopy?” “God, stop being so theatrical. Taryn had an endoscopy last year and she didn’t throw a dramatic fit over it.” I turned my head to look at him. “You remembered?” He froze for a fraction of a second, realizing he had slipped up. But his ego quickly took over, and he sneered defensively. “Yeah, I remembered. That’s how my condition works. Besides, isn’t it a good thing that I remembered? It means my brain is actually recovering.” I looked away and didn’t utter another word. The day Taryn had her endoscopy was my birthday. He had forgotten my birthday entirely to stay by her bedside for twenty-four hours straight. When he finally came home, he had used that same remorseful look to tell me he couldn’t remember. I followed him quietly through the grocery store as he picked up takeout and snacks. When we reached the apartment building lobby, I instinctively reached out to take one of the heavy bags from his hands. Scott pulled his arm back. “Forget it. You’re pregnant, don’t go lifting stuff. I’ve got it.” Hearing those words, an overwhelming sense of irony washed over me. I suppose that was the single crumb of pity he had left for me—or rather, for the child he thought I was carrying. When he pushed open the apartment door, the living room was thick with a haze of cigarette smoke, empty beer cans littering the rug. Seeing us return, Chad immediately raised his voice. “Hey! Drinking on an empty stomach is boring. We want homemade dumplings!” Scott grinned easily. “No problem. Cassie can whip some up.” He turned to me, his tone commanding. “Go on into the kitchen. Make a few different fillings—make sure to do a separate batch of shrimp ones for Taryn, she loves those.” I walked into the kitchen without arguing. The local anesthesia from the procedure had completely worn off. A sharp, twisting pain radiated through my lower belly, sending cold sweat dripping down my back. I gripped the chef’s knife, forcing myself to chop the vegetables, but my vision began to blur into dark spots. “Thump.” The blade slipped, slicing deep into my left index finger. Crimson blood surged out instantly, dripping onto the wooden cutting board. I stared at the wound in a dull daze. Strange. I didn’t feel any pain in my finger at all. Perhaps when a person is hurting badly enough somewhere else, a minor cut no longer registers. I stepped out of the kitchen, intending to grab a bandage from the hallway cabinet. But as soon as Taryn saw the blood on my hand, she suddenly let out a sharp, dramatic squeal. “Ouch! That hurts!” Scott rushed to her side first, taking her hand in his with frantic concern. “What happened? Did you get a splinter?” He looked down at her faintly pink fingertips with immense heart-wrenching worry, then whirled around and screamed at me: “Cassie! When you brought out the wooden chopsticks earlier, couldn’t you have rubbed them down first to smooth out the splinters?” “Taryn has delicate skin! She’s not built coarse and tough like you!” Only after he finished shouting did his eyes finally land on my blood-soaked hand. His brows pulled together in deep irritation. “Why are you so uselessly clumsy? How do you manage to slice your hand wide open just chopping vegetables?” “Go clean it up right now. Don’t get blood in the dumpling filling—how is anyone supposed to eat that?” I stared at him. His attention had already returned to Taryn’s finger. The rest of the group crowded around her, some offering tissues, others blowing gently on her hand to soothe her. I pulled out a small bandage, wrapped it tightly around my finger, and turned back into the kitchen. They ate the meal with loud, boisterous delight. After dinner, they lounged across our couch. Someone casually suggested, “Now that we’re full, Scott, how about we help you jog a few more memories from the past?” Taryn giggled softly. “Oh, I love this! Who’s going first?” Chad glanced at me, deliberately raising his voice so it echoed across the room. “I’ll go!” “Scott probably doesn’t know this, but a while back, I saw some explicit videos online that looked just like his wife.” “You know why she was willing to marry you despite your brain issues, Scott? Because she was out sleeping around, and a dumbass like you wouldn’t even know the difference!” Laughter erupted around the room, growing louder and more unrestrained as they all turned to look at Scott. This game had likely started as a private joke between Scott and Taryn to mock me. But over time, the group had discovered a far more malicious way to play. Under the rules of the game, Scott had amnesia. That gave them the perfect cover to hurl cruel, degrading insults at me under the guise of “helping him recover.” If I cried or got angry, they would laugh it off, calling me overly sensitive, reminding me that the “doctor” said aggressive stimulation therapy was good for Scott’s brain. Back then, because Scott was a medical professional himself, I had never doubted them. I had forced myself to swallow the humiliation, plastering on a fake smile to play along. But I wasn’t going to swallow it anymore. I stood up, my voice entirely flat. “I’m not feeling well. I’m going to sleep. You guys can keep helping him remember.” Seeing that I refused to play my part, Chad slammed his hand onto the coffee table. “Go to sleep? Everyone’s having a good time, who are you giving attitude to?” “Don’t think just because you’re pregnant we all have to bow down to you. Unless you’re planning on popping out a kid for every single one of us here, shut up and sit down! Hahaha!” Feeling his authority challenged in front of his friends, Scott joined in, barking at me: “Cassie, did you take the wrong meds today? Sit back down!” “You’re three months along, well past the delicate stage! I’m the doctor here, don’t you think I know what’s safe?” I looked at the face of the man I had once loved with everything I had. Without a word, I reached into my bag, pulled out the official hospital discharge summary and surgical consent form, and laid it flat on the glass coffee table. Under the stunned glares of the room, I kept my eyes locked on Scott. “The baby is gone.” “When I said I had surgery today, I meant an abortion.” “Scott, I want a divorce.”

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Eight years of long-distance had turned my heart into a fragile, hyper-vigilant thing. To ease my constant anxiety, my mother and my best friend volunteered to keep tabs on him for me. “Don’t worry, Gina,” they’d say. “We’ve got your back. We’ll make sure he stays in line.” Whenever my boyfriend had a company dinner, my best friend would text me photos from the venue. “Gina, sweetie, I’m right here. I won’t let a single female mosquito get within three feet of him.” When he was swamped with work and went dark for an entire day, panic would claw at my chest, making me want to buy a last-minute ticket and fly across the country. My mother would go over to his place to check on him for me. “Gina, look, Devin’s just working late in his office. Stop overthinking.” And slowly, the tight, terrified knot in my chest would loosen. Until I finally handed in my resignation, packed up my life, and moved back to his city. I was sitting at his desk when I noticed his laptop was still logged into his messaging app. Right at the top of his pinned chats was a group named “Happy Family”. Inside were my mother, my best friend, and an account with a cute cat avatar—a woman who wasn’t me. I was nowhere in the group. The last message sent was from Devin: [I’ve uploaded a batch of pre-staged photos to the shared drive. Just drop those into your chats with Gina whenever she asks.] [Oh, and give her that necklace I bought to hit the free-shipping threshold when Kendra was buying her designer bag. That’ll keep her quiet for a while.] My hand froze over the mouse. A violent tremor ran down my arm, and a searing heat surged behind my eyes. I sat there, paralyzed in the quiet apartment, for a long time. Then, I raised a hand, wiped away the unshed tears, and opened my work email to revoke my resignation request. The photos were pre-staged. The gifts were minimum-spend fillers. And I was just a nuisance to be managed. … I gathered every gift Devin had given me over the past few years and started visiting the local boutiques, tracing them by the logos stamped on their boxes. My first stop was a high-end leather goods store. The gift was a sleek coin purse. Tucked inside was a tiny framed photo of the two of us. At the time, Devin had pressed it into my hand and whispered, “This way, every time you spend money, you’ll see my face.” I placed the purse on the counter and showed it to the sales associate. “Could you look up the purchase record for this, please?” She typed into her terminal for a minute before her eyes lit up. “Ah, found it! Purchased three years ago. I actually remember this transaction quite vividly.” She smiled warmly, misreading my expression. “The gentleman’s girlfriend was making a massive purchase that day—bought half the display case. If I recall correctly, this little coin purse was just an add-on item he tossed in at checkout to qualify for our VIP gift package.” My hand clenched around the counter edge, then slowly uncurled. “Thank you,” I murmured. I went to the second store. Then the third. The answers were always the same. Every keepsake I had treasured, every item I had cradled to my chest during lonely nights, was nothing more than a threshold filler—a throwaway item bought to snag a discount or hit a minimum spend for another woman. A suffocating, icy rage swept over me as I walked back into Devin’s apartment. “Gina? I saw your suitcase in the hall and thought you might be back.” Devin was coming out of the kitchen, his voice soft and smooth as velvet. “Is your company on holiday? Why didn’t you tell me? I would’ve picked you up from the airport.” He stepped forward, effortlessly chivalrous as he took my purse, then pulled a fresh pair of house slippers from the closet. “You caught me off guard, babe. I didn’t have time to buy you a proper pair of slippers yet.” I put them on in silence. My heel hung over the back edge by a good inch. They weren’t my size. Devin noticed and patted my shoulder gently. “I’ll take you shopping for a new pair tomorrow. Just make do for today, okay?” “Okay,” I whispered. He bustled into the bathroom. “I don’t have your usual skincare line stocked up here either. Why don’t you just use these disposable travel kits for now?” He set the cheap, plastic disposable toiletries next to a plush, high-end set sitting on the counter. The contrast was stark, like a chasm carved between two worlds—between him and me. “Sure.” Devin paused, turning to look at me with a flicker of surprise in his eyes, as if expecting me to push back. He opened his mouth to say something, but the front door chime chimed, and the smart lock clicked open. “Devin, I came to grab the clothes I left here last week!” A woman walked in, her movements practiced and familiar. She reached into the shoe rack and pulled out a pair of slippers—a matching set to the ones Devin was wearing. Devin stepped forward quickly, putting himself slightly between us. “Gina, let me introduce you. This is Kendra. She’s the new senior accountant at my firm.” He smiled smoothly. “Last week, I got completely plastered at a client dinner, and she was kind enough to drive me home. I threw up all over her jacket, so she had to borrow something clean before heading out.” Kendra. “The Kendra.” I observed the way his body subtly leaned back toward her, an instinctive, protective posture. “Nice to meet you, Kendra,” I said, my voice flat. “Thank you for looking after him.” “Oh, it was no trouble at all, Gina. Just doing my job,” she replied smoothly. Without a hint of self-consciousness, she walked straight into the master bedroom and emerged a moment later holding an item of clothing. It was a black silk slip nightgown. I saw it clear as day. As Kendra swapped her slippers back for her heels, she turned to Devin with a pout. “Devin, if you’re not too busy, could you come over and help me set up the venue for the wedding? I’m completely drowning in decorations, and I can’t manage it alone.” “Of course,” Devin agreed instantly. “I’ll be right there.” Once the door clicked shut behind her, a flicker of guilt finally crossed Devin’s face. “Gina, I am so sorry. You just got here, and now I have to run out…” He apologized with his lips, but he didn’t offer to stay. He didn’t even pretend to reconsider. “It’s fine,” I said, keeping my head down, my hands trembling deep inside my coat pockets. “Go ahead. I understand.” Devin leaned down, gave me a brief, superficial hug, grabbed his car keys, and was gone. Ten minutes later, I took a cab and followed his car at a distance. He pulled up to the grand ballroom of the St. Regis Hotel. Through the floor-to-ceiling glass doors, I saw the team of people busy setting up floral arches and silk drapes. I recognized every single one of them. My mother was there, handing out favor boxes. My best friend, Lydia, was laughing while adjusting a banner. The only person missing from that ‘happy family’ was me. I pulled out my phone and sent Devin a message: [Are you hiding anything from me?] He replied almost instantly: [Gina, why are you being paranoid again? Have I not given you enough peace of mind?] A second later, a flurry of five or six photos flooded my screen. They were all selfies of him sitting at a cluttered office desk, framed carefully so no background detail could be identified. Pre-staged. Ready to deploy. I stared at the screen, a sick, hollow ache swelling in my chest. He always claimed he loved me. He pretended to be the patient, long-suffering boyfriend who tolerated my LDR insecurity and laughed off my constant check-ins. And all the while, he was building an entirely separate life—a life so real he was stepping up to the altar for it. I gripped my phone until my knuckles turned white, turned on my heel, and fled. In the hotel lobby restroom, I gripped the edges of the marble sink and leaned in close to the mirror. The woman staring back at me had bloodshot eyes and skin as pale as chalk. My phone vibrated. It was Lydia. “Gina! Devin told me you’re back in town! Why didn’t you tell me, you brat?” Her voice was bright, energetic, and completely unbothered. “Anyway, I’m just calling to check in and tell you—relax, okay? I’m watching your man like a hawk. No woman is getting within a mile of him, promise!” Her tone was so fiercely sincere it made my stomach turn. Lydia and I had been best friends since high school. We had made a pact on our graduation day to be each other’s maid of honor. When Devin and I were forced into a long-distance arrangement, she had pointed a finger at his chest and threatened, “If you ever do anything to hurt Gina, I will personally ruin your life.” And now, she was ringleader number two in the circus of my humiliation. “Thanks, Lydia,” I whispered, and hung up. I cupped my hands under the tap and splashed freezing water over my face, forcing the numbness away. When I pushed open the bathroom door, Kendra was standing right there. “Oh, Gina! What a coincidence,” she said, her smile perfectly poised. “You must be looking for Devin. It’s completely my fault for dragging him away to help with the venue setup. Come on, let me take you to him.” She didn’t flinch. There wasn’t a flicker of guilt in her eyes. She took my wrist with easy familiarity and led me straight into the grand ballroom. “Look who I found!” Kendra called out cheerfully. The bustling room went dead silent. Devin turned, his composure cracking for a fraction of a second. “Gina? What are you doing here?” He stepped forward swiftly, positioning his broad shoulders to block my view of the main stage. My mother and Lydia froze, terror flashing across their faces. “Gina!” My mother hurried over, her voice unnaturally fast and high-pitched—the exact nervous cadence she always adopted whenever she was lying. “Why didn’t you tell me you were coming today? Oh, you haven’t met Kendra yet, have you? We’re just… helping her set up her wedding venue!” Lydia stammered, her eyes darting everywhere except my face. “Yeah, Gina! Oh my gosh, I missed you so much! Kendra is a new friend of ours, and since she was doing this all on her own, we thought we’d lend a hand.” The four of them stood in a neat, cohesive line. A family unit. And I was the intruder crashing their party. My body went rigid. A bitter, agonizing sorrow choked my throat, demanding to be screamed out loud. I wanted to tear down the floral arches, to demand how they could do this to me. But when I opened my mouth, all that came out was a quiet, empty whisper. “Right. I see.” Devin kept Kendra firmly behind him. “Well, we’re pretty much wrapped up here anyway. Let’s head back. I’ll drive your mother and Lydia home first—their place is close by—and then you and I can…” “I’ll take a cab,” I interrupted softly. Devin swallowed the rest of his sentence. “Okay. If you’re sure.” He walked out to the hotel entrance, opened his car door, and naturally ushered Kendra into the front passenger seat. He glanced back at me, suddenly realizing how bad it looked. “She gets terrible carsickness,” he offered smoothly. “She can’t ride in the back.” Kendra didn’t even look up. She sat down, pulled open the center console, and pulled out a designer lipstick to touch up her makeup with practiced ease. I looked down at the pavement. “Right. You don’t need to explain.” Devin visibly relaxed. “I’ll see you at the apartment.” I watched his car pull away into the afternoon traffic. And only then, standing alone on the curb, did the tears finally spill over. …… I made it back to the apartment before Devin. I gathered every single item from the stash of minimum-spend gifts, dumped them into a heavy paper tote bag, and walked out. I found a high-end luxury consignment store three blocks away and emptied the bag onto the plush velvet counter. “I want to sell all of this,” I said. The appraiser pulled on a pair of white cotton gloves and began inspecting the items one by one. It took him nearly half an hour. “Well, ma’am, these are all in pristine condition,” he said, looking up with a sympathetic smile. “Unfortunately, none of these pieces hold high intrinsic value. In our industry, we call these ‘threshold fillers’—items purchased simply to bump a receipt up to a higher tier.” “Threshold fillers.” The words pierced my heart like a needle. “I’ll take whatever you offer,” my voice rasped. “I can give you thirty-eight hundred dollars for the lot. Does that work for you?” “Yes.” When I walked out of the store, the bag was empty, and my bank balance was thirty-eight hundred dollars heavier. When I returned to the apartment, Devin was waiting in the kitchen. “Gina, tomorrow is your mother’s birthday dinner. You’re still coming, right?” My mind went blank for a second. It had been years since I had been home to celebrate a birthday with her. “Yes,” I said. “I’m coming.” “Good.” That night, Devin and I lay in the same bed. But between us lay a silent, invisible abyss that neither of us dared to cross. …… The next evening, Devin and I walked into the private dining room at the restaurant. My mother sat at the head of the long table. Seated directly to her left was Kendra; to her right sat Lydia. When we walked in, Kendra made a theatrical move to stand up and offer me her seat, but my mother caught her arm and pressed her back down. “Stay put, sweetie,” my mother said gently. Then she gestured toward the far end of the table, near the service door. “Gina, sit over there.” After the meal, I pulled an envelope of cash from my purse and handed it to my mother. “Happy birthday, Mom. I’m sorry I haven’t been around much these past few years.” My mother took the envelope, her expression cool and distant. “Thanks. You don’t need to feel guilty, Gina. I was busy when you were growing up, too. It’s only natural that we aren’t particularly close.” She smoothed the paper envelope with her thumb. “You’re a smart girl. Some things don’t need to be spelled out for you to understand. My life is very peaceful right now, and I’d like to keep it that way. Don’t ruin it.” A sharp pain hit my chest. I fought to keep my expression completely still. “I understand.” I backed away toward the quiet corner of the room. A moment later, Kendra slid over, a sweet, triumphant smile playing on her lips. “Gina, your mother is such a wonderful woman,” she purred. “She actually offered to officially adopt me as her goddaughter today. You don’t mind, do you?” I stared at her, my mind numb. She leaned in closer, dropping her voice to a whisper. “Oh, by the way, how long is your visit? Will you be able to stay for my wedding? I wanted to wait until after the baby was born to hold the ceremony, but Devin was just so impatient.” My eyes slowly dropped to her lower abdomen. “A baby.” So that was it. That was why they were rushing the wedding. Why my mother and my best friend were keeping me at arm’s length. She was carrying his child. “Congratulations,” I said, my voice terrifyingly calm. “I won’t be able to make the wedding. I have to get back to work.” I turned to leave, but as I passed her, Kendra suddenly threw herself backward, tumbling hard onto the floor with a dramatic gasp. Before I could even process what happened, Lydia rushed forward and shoved me violently out of the way. “Gina! What the hell is wrong with you?!” Lydia screamed. “Why did you push her?!” My spine slammed into the sharp edge of the drywall corner, a blinding flash of pain searing across my back. Devin rushed over from the other side of the room, seeing both of us on the floor. “My stomach… Devin, it hurts so much! Is the baby okay?!” Kendra sobbed, cold sweat breaking out on her forehead. Devin dropped to his knees beside her, scooping her into his arms. “It’s okay, it’s okay, I’ve got you. The baby will be fine, I won’t let anything happen to you!” He didn’t cast a single glance in my direction. He carried her out of the restaurant at a run. Lydia glared at me with pure venom before turning to follow them. My mother walked over, staring down at me as I struggled to pull myself up off the floor. “Crack.” Her hand flew across my face, the sharp blow echoing through the private room. “If anything happens to Kendra’s baby,” my mother hissed, her voice trembling with rage, “you are no daughter of mine.” Everyone left. I pressed my back against the wall, biting down hard on the inside of my cheek until I tasted copper, refusing to let a single sob escape into the empty room. …… I limped back to the apartment. The dull, throbbing ache in my spine served as a constant reminder of what had transpired. I sat on the dark sofa for hours, my legs going numb, until the front door finally unlocked and Devin walked in. “Devin,” I said into the darkness, my voice raspy. “I didn’t push her.” My words seemed to ignite something dangerous inside him. His face twisted in dark, ugly fury. “Gina, stop lying! There was nobody else near her except you! Are you telling me she threw herself on the ground on purpose?! She’s pregnant with a human life! The doctor said she almost suffered a miscarriage!” I opened my mouth, desperate to defend myself. I wanted to ask him why he trusted her so easily, why he refused to listen to me. But my silence only stoked his rage further. “Say something!” he roared, stepping into my space. “Why are you playing the quiet victim now?! I never thought you could be this cruel—to attack a pregnant woman! How could you?!” A lump lodged firmly in my throat. He didn’t believe me. In his mind, I had already been tried, convicted, and sentenced. Anything I said now would just sound like a desperate excuse. “Devin,” I whispered, looking straight into his furious eyes. “No matter what you believe… I didn’t do it.” He stared at me, his eyes dark and icy. The next second, his hand flew out, landing a heavy slap across my cheek. The impact snapped my head to the side, filling my vision with blinding white spots and a burning pain across my jaw. “You are utterly unhinged,” he spat. The front door slammed shut with a deafening bang. Devin was gone. …… He didn’t return for three days. He ignored my calls, left my messages on unread, and vanished completely from my world. The only way I knew he was still alive was through Lydia’s social media updates, which showed him dutifully sitting by Kendra’s hospital bed. On the eve of the wedding, a single text arrived from Devin: [Stay home and reflect on what you’ve done. And don’t you dare show your face around Kendra tomorrow. She’s terrified of you.] Every word dripped with tender concern for Kendra—and cold disgust for me. My hands shook violently as I held the phone. A single tears finally slipped down my cheek and splashed onto the illuminated screen. …… On the morning of the wedding, my bags were packed. I threw the cheap, plastic travel toiletries into the trash bin. The house slippers—the ones that didn’t fit—were left neatly by the door. I pulled the matching promise ring from my finger and placed it on the dining table, resting it directly on top of a thick Manila folder containing the evidence I had printed out. I walked out, flagged a taxi, and sat in the back seat, ready to leave this city forever. My phone rang. It was a video call from Kendra. When I picked up, she didn’t say a word. She simply pointed her phone camera toward the front of the altar. Through the small screen, I heard Devin’s clear, resonant voice: “I do.” I saw Lydia, glowing in her bridesmaid dress, excitedly catching the bridal bouquet. I saw my mother sitting in the front row, clapping tears of joy from her eyes. I flipped the phone face down onto the vinyl seat, buried my face in my hands, and let the silent tears flow. The taxi driver caught my eye in the rearview mirror. “Hey, kiddo… you alright? Look, whatever it is, no heartache lasts forever. Tell you what—this ride’s on the house.” I wiped my face with the back of my sleeve and swallowed the hard lump in my throat. “No, thank you, sir. I appreciate it, but I can pay.” I ended the video call, deleted the app, and walked into the terminal. Security. Gate. Boarding. As the plane lifted off the tarmac, the sudden weightlessness caused a sharp, familiar pressure in my ears. I went through the motions of swallowing to pop them, staring out the window as the city shrank into a grid of tiny, meaningless blocks. All of them—and all their cruelties—were left behind in the clouds. Three hours later, the plane touched down in my home city. I pulled my suitcase from the baggage carousel, stepping out into the familiar, crisp air of a place where I actually belonged. My floating, anxious heart finally settled back into my chest. I took my phone out of airplane mode. The screen immediately lit up with dozens of missed call notifications.

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My husband walked into our living room with his ex-girlfriend trailing a step behind him. Seconds later, both of them dropped to their knees on the polished hardwood floor. “Laura, please,” Brian begged, his eyes glistening with unshed tears. “Amber’s been diagnosed with acute leukemia. You’re the only bone marrow match in the regional donor database. I’m begging you—donate to her. It’s a simple procedure. It won’t hurt your body at all.” My mother-in-law, Patricia, rushed over, dabbing her tear-stained cheeks with a tissue. “Amber is like a daughter to me! You have to save her, Laura! Where is your heart?!” I felt a sudden, dangerous flicker of pity and was about to nod when a streak of neon-red text flashed sharply across my vision, levitating in the air right before my eyes: [RUN! Do NOT get on that operating table! She doesn’t have leukemia—she’s in end-stage renal failure!] [Your husband is trying to kill you! That donor match report is completely forged. The moment you’re under anesthesia, the crooked doctor they bribed is going to harvest your kidney!] [When you wake up, Brian and Amber will have gutted your company and left you to starve to death locked in a basement! Your parents will die in a staged car crash on their way to look for you!] I stared at the kneeling couple. Cold sweat drenched my spine, freezing the blood in my veins. “I can’t,” I blurted out, my voice raspy and flat. “I just tested positive for Hepatitis B. I’m legally barred from donating.” … Silence descended on the living room like a heavy, suffocating shroud. Patricia’s weeping stopped instantly. Her face contorted into ugly, raw fury. “Hepatitis B?!” She scrambled to her feet, pointing an accusatory finger at my face. “It’s just a bone marrow pull! It’s not going to kill you!” She spat the words at me, screeching, “Amber has no one else in this world! She finally gets a matching donor, and you’re going to be this wicked? You’re just going to sit there and watch her die?!” I narrowed my eyes, holding her glare. “Do you even understand basic medicine, Patricia? Injecting marrow or transferring fluids into someone who is severely immunosuppressed means an infection could be fatal.” “Are you trying to save her, or accelerate her death?” Amber chimed in right on cue, letting out a fragile, shuddering cough. A single tear hung poetically on her chin. “Mrs. Rodney, don’t blame Laura… it’s just my cursed fate…” She looked up at Brian with big, pathetic eyes, then gave me a meek, trembling glance. “Laura is so lucky to have a husband like Brian. I’m already envious enough. I wouldn’t dare ask her to risk her life for mine.” Brian cupped Amber’s face gently, his heart visibly bleeding for her. Then he spun around to face me, his brow heavily furrowed. “Babe, Hepatitis B is manageable. We can just run a quick blood panel to check your viral load,” he pressed, his tone dripping with desperate affection. “If your counts are normal, you can still save her. You rescue stray cats off the street, Laura! This is a living, breathing human being. You can’t just turn your back on her!” Patricia snorted, folding her arms over her chest. “Selfish, that’s what she is! Making up pathetic excuses!” “Enough,” I interrupted, my tone icy cold. “My body belongs to me. If I say I’m not donating, I’m not donating.” Another line of glowing text drifted lazily across my field of vision: [Good. Don’t listen to them—they’re guilt-tripping you.] [Do NOT drink the water Brian is about to hand you. It’s spiked with liquid Midazolam. He plans to knock you out and haul you straight to an underground chop shop!] [He already changed the beneficiary on your $20 million accidental death policy to his name this morning.] I dug my fingernails deep into my palms until the sharp sting of pain kept me anchored in cold, calculating reality. Seeing my unyielding posture, Brian’s rigid expression suddenly softened into practiced tenderness. “Okay, honey, don’t be mad,” he said, taking a step back and sounding contrite. “I was just overly anxious. I didn’t stop to consider your health.” He turned and walked over to the water dispenser, filling a tumbler with lukewarm water before walking back to stand over me. “Drink some water and relax. We’ll figure out the marrow situation tomorrow.” “Fine,” I said, staring up into his soft, devotion-filled eyes. I took the glass and pretended to take a long, deep gulp. The second he turned his back to comfort his mother and Amber, I pulled a crumpled paper napkin from my coat pocket, spitting every drop of liquid straight into it under my breath. I purposely left a tiny residue of water at the bottom of the glass. When five minutes passed and I showed no sign of slipping into unconsciousness, a shadow of suspicion flickered across Brian’s eyes. But as I sat there calmly, he eventually excused himself with his mother to drop Amber off at her clinic for her “medication.” The instant the heavy front door clicked shut, I bolted it from the inside. I didn’t cry. I didn’t break down. Confronting him now would only blow my cover. I pulled out my phone and dialed my best friend, Rachel, a senior partner at the city’s top litigation firm. “Rachel. Bring your most ruthless investigator and come to my apartment right now.” “What happened?” I stared at the smudged glass sitting on the coffee table. “Someone is trying to murder me.” When Rachel arrived with her team, I carefully sealed the tumbler into a clear evidence bag and handed it over. “Take this to the top toxicology lab in the state,” I instructed coldly. “Rush order. I need to know every chemical compound in this glass.” Rachel took in my pale face and gasped. “Brian did this?” “Yes.” I opened my laptop, logged into my company’s enterprise network, and pulled up Brian’s entire financial approval history. “I need another favor, Rachel. Subpoena or pull his personal bank records from the last six months, plus our corporate ledgers. Look for off-the-books wire transfers to illicit medical clinics or offshore entities.” Rachel’s expression grew grave. “You think he’s embezzling?” “Worse,” I laughed bitterly. “I think he’s using my money to bribe corrupt surgeons to harvest my kidney.” That night, the toxicology report came back. When Rachel emailed me the encrypted PDF, her voice was shaking over the speakerphone. “The residual fluid contained high-concentration Midazolam—a medical-grade surgical anesthetic. Anyone who drank that would be completely unconscious within ten minutes! Is Brian insane?!” I stared at the chemical compound listed on the screen. The last lingering ember of affection I held for my husband died right then and there. I saved the report to an encrypted cloud drive. “He’s not insane. He just thinks I’m stupid.” The next morning, Brian returned home and handed me a thick folder. “Honey, I felt terrible all night,” he said softly, leaning over my chair. “I haven’t paid enough attention to your health over the years. I set up an appointment at a private clinic—if you sign these intake forms, you can skip the waitlist for a full executive health checkup today.” I took the clipboard. A row of bright red neon text flared before my eyes: [DON’T SIGN! It’s a trick! Tucked between the intake forms is a fake ‘Organ Donation Consent Form’!] [If you sign, once you’re inside the black-market clinic, they’ll use it as legal cover to say you voluntarily surrendered your kidney!] [Flip to page three and hold it up to the light! Look for the watermark from ‘Crestview Medical’!] My fingers tightened on the pen. I turned to page three, angling the paper toward the morning sunlight streaming through the window. Sure enough, faint, dark watermark seals from the illegal clinic bled through the back of the page. I sneered. “I’m not signing this. I just had a comprehensive physical last month.” Brian’s face turned pale. Panic flashed in his eyes before he snapped, raising his voice defensively: “Laura, what is your problem?! I stayed up all night begging specialists for this appointment, and you throw it back in my face? Have you been keeping secrets from me this whole time?!” His eyes reddened with manufactured hurt. “Amber is hanging by a thread! I just wanted to check your liver and see if there was any way to save her… I’ve been married to you for years, and I’m only now realizing how heartless you are!” Patricia jumped out of her armchair, screeching, “Exactly! Act like a checkup is gonna kill you! Amber is dying in the hospital while you sit here making excuses! You evil woman!” The same old moral blackmail. “Say whatever you want,” I said softly, dropping the papers back onto the table. “I’m not signing a single line.” The following morning, Brian acted as if nothing had happened, making breakfast and bringing a plate of scrambled eggs and milk to me with an anxious, gentle look. “Babe, I was too hasty last night. I’m sorry. But if you have Hep B, getting treated is urgent. I reached out to a contact at an elite private hospital—ultra-discrete, with specialists trained overseas.” The floating text burst onto the screen violently: [DON’T GO! That private clinic, ‘Crestview Medical,’ is an illegal chop shop he secretly bought shares in last year!] [They already have the OR set up and the organ transport box prepped! The second you step inside, they’ll put you under and cut out your kidney!] I took a sip of milk and looked up. “A private hospital? No.” Brian froze. “Why? Their equipment is top-of-the-line—” “I only trust top-tier public academic medical centers,” I said, wiping my lips with a napkin. “For infectious diseases, if a private clinic isn’t fully compliant, I run the risk of surgical malpractice.” A flicker of panic crossed his eyes. “Honey, public hospitals are packed. You’ll wait for hours. And what if we bump into someone we know…?” “So what if we bump into an acquaintance? Is being sick something to hide?” I locked eyes with him. “Or does this private hospital of yours have something to hide?” His throat bobbed violently as he swallowed hard, forcing a tight smile. “Of course not. I was just thinking about your comfort. If you prefer the university hospital, then we’ll go there. I’ll drive you.” I nodded, my defenses fully raised. At three o’clock that afternoon, I got into Brian’s car. I quietly flipped the switch on the voice recorder hidden in my coat pocket and shared my real-time GPS location with Rachel. Halfway through the drive, Brian glanced at the navigation screen, his brow furrowing deeply. “Babe, there’s a multi-car pileup on the highway. We’re going to miss our appointment at the medical center. Let’s just pivot to that private facility. The specialists there are incredible.” “No,” I snapped, my tone icy and resolute. “If we miss it, we reschedule.” Seeing my unwavering stance, the last remnant of Brian’s hypocritical warmth shattered. “You don’t get a choice anymore!” With a sharp click, Brian locked all the doors and windows from the master control. Simultaneously, a pungent, sweet-smelling vapor began pouring from the AC vents! The floating text screamed: [HOLD YOUR BREATH! IT’S HIGH-CONCENTRATION ANESTHETIC SPRAY!] [YOU’RE IN DANGER! THIS ROAD IS A DEAD ZONE WITH NO CELL SIGNAL! RACHEL CAN’T TRACK YOU!] “Brian! Unlock the doors!” I slammed my hands against the window, but my head immediately began to spin, heavy and numb. Brian watched me through the rearview mirror, his soft eyes now black with cold cruelty. “Stop fighting it, Laura. Amber can’t wait any longer. If she doesn’t get a transplant now, she’s dead. Don’t worry… once I take your kidney, I’ll take real good care of you… if you survive.” When my consciousness slipped away, the car pulled into the loading dock behind the illegal clinic. Corrupt doctors swarmed the vehicle, pulling my limp body onto a gurney. “Get her to the basement OR! Prepare full anesthesia!” When I woke up, strapped to a cold metal operating table, my eyes burned red with rage. I roared through gritted teeth, “Brian! This is murder!” Brian leaned down, patting my cheek with an eerie, dark smile. “Murder? Don’t use such dramatic words. The insurance company and the police will only hear that a loving wife bravely risked her life in a private procedure to save her husband’s ex… and tragically died on the operating table.” Amber walked out from the shadows in hospital scrubs, her face glowing with triumphant malice. “Thanks for the kidney, Laura. When you get to the other side, don’t hold a grudge against Brian and me.” They wheeled me into the freezing OR. The surgical lights flashed on, blinding me with brutal brilliance. A disgraced doctor stepped forward, holding a long, heavy syringe filled with clear fluid, advancing toward my neck. “Prep the ice container. Commencing nephrectomy.” The floating text flashed violently one last time: [IT’S OVER! THE OR IS LOCKED FROM THE INSIDE! ONCE THAT ANESTHETIC HITS YOUR BLOODSTREAM, YOU WILL NEVER WAKE UP!] [THE BUILDING IS SURROUNDED BY BRAVO-LEVEL MERCENARIES HE HIRED! THIS IS A DEAD END!] The needle hovered centimeters from my carotid artery. I could feel the sharp tip nicking my skin— BOOM—!!! The heavy reinforced steel door of the underground OR was blown off its hinges with a deafening blast!

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