I was on a FaceTime call with the version of Chris from ten years ago. I had just sent him a photo of himself—or rather, the man he was destined to become—wrapped around another woman. He took one look and denied it instantly. “That’s not me. I could never stop loving you, Natalie. A Henderson man doesn’t cheat. We don’t do things like this.” His eyes through the screen were fierce, steady, and filled with the exact kind of integrity I remembered. He was the patient, gentle Chris I had fallen in love with. Filled with a desperate, creeping doubt, I turned to the Chris of the present day, testing him on the intimate details of our history. He couldn’t answer a single question. The realization hit me like ice water: the man standing in my house was not Chris. … “Why are you bringing up ancient history?” Chris looked down at me, a flicker of disgust crossing his face. “It was a decade ago, Natalie. I don’t remember.” I grabbed his wrist, my fingers digging into his skin. “How can you say you don’t remember? You swore to me you’d never forget.” “I don’t love you anymore, okay?” He ripped his arm away, his sharp eyes tightening with irritation. “I’m sick of looking at you. I despise you. Why the hell would I want to remember anything associated with you?” My body went completely rigid. Years ago, he had held me under the same ceiling, looking at me with absolute devotion, promising he would spend the rest of his life making me happy. “Oh, Natalie, face it—you’re getting old,” Zoe said, a cruel, mocking smile playing on her lips as she leaned against the counter. “Men like novelty. Don’t be so desperate for a wedding ring. You’re practically begging him to stay, and for what? Your mother is still rotting in a hospital bed.” My eyes stung, turning a furious, bloodshot red as I glared at her. “She is your mother, too! Your actual, flesh-and-blood mother!” The only reason our mother was hooked up to life support in an ICU was because of what happened on my wedding day. Right before I was supposed to walk down the aisle, highly intimate, compromising photos of me were projected onto the giant screens at the reception hall. My mother had a massive brain hemorrhage on the spot from the shock. And Chris? Chris had brushed it off with a sickeningly light shrug. “It was just a game of Truth or Dare with your sister,” he’d said. “The dare was to play a prank on you. Zoe’s young, Natalie. Don’t be petty. I’m still willing to marry you, aren’t I?” “Come on, Natalie, it was just a joke,” Zoe had chimed in back then, wearing a look of calculated innocence. “Don’t tell me you’re going to be a sore loser.” I remembered wiping the tears from my face, my voice shaking but resolute. “I don’t want your pity. The wedding is off.” “Look at yourself,” Chris had sneered, his voice dripping with condescension. “Your reputation is in the gutter. Everyone in this city has seen your body now. Who else is going to take you if I don’t?” I had been too choked with tears to speak, but then the hospital called about my mother, and the world collapsed around me. I didn’t have time to process the betrayal. Meanwhile, my sister had slipped right into Chris’s arms, the two of them whispering and laughing, completely indifferent to whether our mother lived or died. I couldn’t comprehend how they had turned into monsters. It was as if, overnight, they had simply ceased to be the people I knew. My fiancé had once been the most attentive, respectful partner. My sister had been sweet, bookish, and fiercely protective of me. There was no universe in which she would ever sleep with my fiancé. But people change. That was the only explanation I had lived with. I pulled myself back to the present, staring at Chris, still trying to grasp at some shred of logic. “Why? You used to love me so much.” “I loved the eighteen-year-old version of you,” Chris said, his voice flat and bored. “The young, beautiful version. But look at you now. You’re neither.” “I see.” Without another word, I picked up my phone—which had been quietly running a live video call the entire time—and walked upstairs to the bedroom. I dragged my suitcase out of the closet and began throwing my clothes inside. Through the phone speaker, Chris’s voice from ten years ago echoed in the quiet room. “Where are you going? Why are you packing?” I picked up the phone, looking at the screen. The young man staring back at me was vibrant, fierce, and entirely untainted by the rot of the present. “You saw him, didn’t you?” I whispered, struggling to keep my voice from breaking. “He doesn’t love me anymore. I have to leave him. I have to end this.” “That is not me,” past Chris said, his voice steady, his dark eyes burning with a desperate intensity through the screen. “I swear to you, Natalie, I could never treat you like that.” “The evidence is right in front of me,” I said, a tear finally escaping and slipping down my cheek. “You think it’s impossible because you love me right now. But that doesn’t mean your heart won’t rot ten years down the line.” “But he didn’t know the answer to your question,” past Chris argued, leaning closer to his camera. “Our first kiss was on your eighteenth birthday, right under the old oak tree by the lake. I would never forget that. It’s burned into my mind. Why didn’t he know?” Even if he was right, it didn’t change my reality. I had never doubted that his eighteen-year-old self loved me. But human hearts are volatile things. The man downstairs simply did not care about me. “Hey, why are you being so weird lately?” a sweet, familiar voice interrupted from his side of the call. “Why are you constantly staring at your phone? The housekeeper said you’ve been on video calls for days.” It was me. The nineteen-year-old version of me. Past Chris quickly tried to tilt his screen away, but he wasn’t fast enough. I caught a glimpse of her. She looked so young, so untouched by grief. She leaned her chin on his shoulder, smiling playfully. “Don’t tell me you’ve found someone else already. If you’ve replaced me, your little sister is going to be heartbroken.” “Never,” past Chris said, his face softening instantly as he looked at her. “Even if I did find someone else, it would only be a future version of you.” “Oh, please. Don’t tell me you actually believe those rumors about the temporal anomaly app…” Before she could finish her sentence, I spoke directly into the microphone. “Break up with him. In ten years, he is going to cheat on you.” Past Chris panicked, instantly reaching to mute the call, but my past self was quicker. She snatched the phone out of his hand, her brow furrowing as she stared at the screen. “Who are you?” she asked, her voice laced with confusion. “Why do you… look so much like me? My dad never said anything about having another daughter.” I took a deep breath, forcing myself to be concise. “I am you, ten years in the future. In ten years, Chris will betray you. He will project your private, intimate photos at your own wedding reception.” “What?” She blinked, turning to past Chris with a laugh. “Wow, Chris. I knew you were possessive, but I didn’t know you liked to share. Exposing my private photos? Generous of you.” I could hear the disbelief in her voice. She didn’t take it seriously. And why would she? The Chris of ten years ago was a gentleman who treated women with absolute respect. To her, the idea of him doing something so vile was a physical impossibility. “I would never!” past Chris protested, rubbing his temples in frustration. “If I ever did something like that, my dad would drag me into his study and disown me before the sun went down.” “Your father dies in two years,” I said coldly. “You kill him, Chris. You hand over the majority of the family company’s shares to a competitor just to please my sister. The shock gives him a fatal coronary.” “What did you just say?” Past Chris’s playful demeanor vanished. His face went entirely pale. “You ruin the family,” I said, my voice trembling with a decade of suppressed rage. “You sleep with my sister, and you drive your own father to his grave.” Past Chris fell completely silent. He stared at his desk, his eyes dark and unreadable. I knew that look. It was how he processed intense emotion. He always bottled up his grief, hiding it from the world, and I was always the only one who noticed. When he finally looked up, his voice was tight. “But even if a man changes… his fundamental morals, his basic sense of decency—those things don’t just evaporate. Even if I grew to hate you, I could never publicly humiliate a woman like that. It goes against everything I am.” “But you did,” I said. “You did exactly that.” “Wait, why on earth would I even want to be with my brother-in-law?” My sister’s face suddenly popped into the frame. She was only thirteen back then, her eyes wide, round, and full of childish curiosity. My chest ached. “Just trust me,” I said shortly. “Both of you will betray me.” The line went quiet for a long moment. Finally, the past version of myself spoke up. “What if… what if that man down there isn’t actually Chris? And what if your sister isn’t actually your sister?” I stopped packing, standing up slowly. “What do you mean?” My thirteen-year-old sister leaned into the camera. “Natalie, go to Instagram. Search for an anonymous account called `@SunnyDays_Z`. That’s me. I use it like a digital diary, posting updates every single week. Check when the posts stop. Whoever took over my life… that’s probably when they did it.” My hands shook as I unlocked my tablet and opened the app. I searched the handle. It existed. There were hundreds of posts—photos of books, skylines, small daily reflections. No faces, which explained why the account had almost no followers. The posts stopped abruptly exactly three years ago. Through the phone, past Chris spoke up. “Did I change around that time too?” I frowned, thinking back. “I don’t know the exact date. But your behavior… you became a completely different person about two years ago.” Just then, a floorboard creaked outside my bedroom. I quickly muted the phone, laid it face down on the bed, and crept out of the room. I followed the faint sound of whispering down the hall to Chris’s bedroom. Through the narrow crack in the door, I saw my sister and Chris. Chris was lounging on the armchair, a sinister, mocking smirk on his face. “Can you believe it? Even after all of this, her affection rating is still at 100. I told you, she’s like a stray dog. You can’t kick her out.” “Oh, honey,” Zoe purred, wrapping her arms around his neck and kissing his cheek. “As long as we keep breaking her spirit, her misery index will peak. Once she’s completely broken, my mother can finally take over her body. Then our family will be whole again.” Chris chuckled, running a hand through her hair. “The ashes from that occult ritual—slipping them into her food every day worked perfectly. That’s exactly how we stole her sister’s and her fiancé’s bodies without anyone noticing a thing.” “I spent years scrubbing her floors as her housekeeper, Martha,” Zoe—no, Martha—said, staring at her reflection in the vanity mirror with a manic, ecstatic grin. “But now? I’m the young, beautiful heiress. This body is absolutely perfect.” Behind the door, my heart stopped. She wasn’t Zoe. She was Martha, our former housekeeper whom I had let go years ago because of her sticky fingers, only to hire her back when “Zoe” insisted on it. And the man posing as my fiancé wasn’t Chris. He was Martha’s husband, Walter—our former family driver. A vulgar, heavy-drinking man who had somehow stolen Chris’s body. My mind raced as the pieces of the puzzle violently snapped into place. They were deliberately torturing me. The more I suffered, the weaker my soul became, making it easier for Martha’s mother to possess me. But there was a catch: my “affection rating”—my love and trust for Chris—had to remain intact. If my affection dropped to absolute zero, the spell would break, the vessel would reject the host, and Walter would be obliterated. But if he was obliterated, would the real Chris actually come back? Or would his soul be lost forever? Until I had a definitive answer, I couldn’t risk letting the rating hit zero. I couldn’t lose Chris forever. “Wait,” Walter’s voice suddenly sharpened with panic. He sat up straight. “What the hell? Her affection rating just dropped to ninety! I have to go find her.” “No, stay,” Martha whined, pulling at his arm. “You promised you’d spend the night with me.” Hearing him stand up, I turned and bolted back up the stairs. I ran into my room, my eyes sweeping over the closet until they landed on a vibrant, crimson slip dress. Walter had bought it for me months ago, demanding I wear it, but I had always refused, finding it vulgar. I swallowed my disgust, stripped off my clothes, and pulled the red silk over my head. A second later, the door was flung open. Walter stood on the threshold, breathless. When his eyes landed on me, he froze. “Hey, handsome,” I murmured, my voice dropping to a low, sultry register. I walked over to him, wrapping my arms gently around his neck. “It’s freezing tonight. Why don’t we sleep together?” Walter’s body went rigid. He stared at me, his chest rising and falling rapidly before a greedy, satisfied grin broke across his face. “Yeah. Yeah, let’s do that.” He glanced back and gave Martha a sharp look, gesturing for her to leave. Martha’s eyes flared with rage. She grabbed Walter’s arm and dragged him out into the hallway, slamming the door halfway shut. I crept quietly to the door, listening. “What the hell are you doing?” Martha hissed, her voice vibrating with anger. “You said we were going to humiliate her tonight! Now you’re going to sleep with her?” “Did you not see her affection rating drop?” Walter whispered back fiercely. “If it hits zero, I’m dead! The vessel will destroy me!” Martha clenched her fists. “What about my mother? If you don’t break her spirit, my mother’s soul will fade before she can take her over!” “Her affection rating has been stable for two years, which is why we could play those games,” Walter snapped. “But it’s fluctuating now. I have to secure it.” “I don’t care! I want my mother! She sacrificed everything to raise me—” “Shut up,” Walter interrupted, his voice dripping with impatience. “We’ll figure it out later.” “You’re getting tired of me, aren’t you?” Martha sneered, hitting his chest. I smiled in the shadows. Step one: divide and conquer. “Chris?” I stepped out into the hallway, widening my eyes in mock confusion. “What are you and Zoe talking about?” “Nothing,” Walter said quickly, straightening his posture and stepping away from Martha. “It’s late. Let’s go to bed.” “Actually, Chris, Zoe looks really upset.” I reached up, gently tracing his jawline with my index finger. “Why don’t you spend the night with her instead? I don’t mind.” Walter swallowed hard, his eyes darting from my collarbone to Martha’s murderous glare. He was caught in a trap of his own making. He wanted me, but he didn’t want to push Martha too far. “He’s staying with me,” Martha said sharply, stepping forward and grabbing Walter’s wrist. Without waiting for him to reply, she dragged him toward the staircase. “We have things to discuss upstairs.” “Let go of me!” Walter hissed, but he followed her anyway. I watched them disappear up the stairs. I went back into my room, picked up my phone, and unmuted the call. “Chris,” I said to the boy from ten years ago. “Fire Martha the housekeeper and Walter the driver immediately. Do not, under any circumstances, eat or drink anything they give you.” “Who are Martha and Walter?” my sister’s young voice asked from the speaker. I pinched the bridge of my nose. Right. They hadn’t even hired them yet. Preventing it in the past wasn’t going to solve my present reality. Before I could explain, a violent scream echoed from upstairs, followed by a heavy, terrifying thudding sound. I rushed out of the room and looked down the hallway. There, at the bottom of the stairs, lay Zoe’s body, surrounded by a rapidly spreading pool of dark blood.
🌟 Continue the story here 👉🏻 📲 Download the “MotoNovel” app 🔍 search for “535046”, and watch the full series ✨! #MotoNovel
Leave a Reply