1 For three years of marriage, Adrian Hayes rotated women through his life like cheap seasonal coats. I looked the other way, playing the quiet, dutiful wife, pouring his morning black coffee, smoothing the lapels of his bespoke suits, and pretending the scent of unfamiliar expensive perfumes wasn’t clinging to his skin. Until today. Today, he brought Kendall Moore home. Standing on the second-floor terrace of our estate, the brutal midday sun burned into my retinas. Down by the manicured boxwood hedges of the driveway, Adrian had Kendall pinned against the side of his Aston Martin, kissing her with an unrestrained, breathless desperation I hadn’t seen in him since the day we met. In my mind, a mechanical, synthetic chime rang out with terrible clarity. [Secondary Target Salvation Mission: Failed.] [Host, please select your final protocol—] [Option 1: Reset the timeline. Restart the mission from Day One to rewrite the secondary target’s tragic fate.] [Option 2: Terminate the mission. Return to the Prime Core. The secondary target’s original scripted fate will resume: complete bankruptcy and irreversible paralysis in ninety days.] I looked down through the wrought-iron railing at the two of them, their bodies tangled in broad daylight. My voice was quiet, hollowed of everything that had once anchored me to this earth. “Two.” Kendall caught sight of me first. She pushed playfully against Adrian’s chest, leaning back with a coquettish pout that was pure performance. “Adrian, stop it,” she purred, loud enough for her voice to float up through the warm air. “Your wife is watching.” She looked up, meeting my eyes. Her smile was soft, angelic, and dripping with venom. “I’m so sorry, Nora,” she called out, tilting her head with practiced innocence. “I took my breakup really hard yesterday, and Adrian stayed out drinking with me. He just brought me back to grab my things. You aren’t upset, are you?” Adrian frowned, visibly annoyed by the mention of me. He threw a single, dismissive glance up at the balcony before pulling Kendall back into his arms, tucking a strand of blonde hair behind her ear. “Don’t waste your breath on her, Kendall,” he murmured, his tone loud and deliberate. “You know damn well I don’t love her. You’ve always known who holds my heart.” Kendall feigned mild distress, tapping his shoulder with faux reproach. “Adrian, don’t say that in front of her. Go apologize. If she gets mad, you’ll be in real trouble.” “Let her get mad,” Adrian scoffed, his grip around Kendall’s waist tightening possessively. “Where’s she going to go? The Hayes estate is the only roof she has in this life. She stays because I let her stay.” Inside my head, the mechanical voice confirmed the extraction: [Host request approved. Extraction protocol initialized. The temporal gateway will open in seven days. If the Host experiences regret during this window, the protocol may be revoked.] Two tracks of silent tears slipped down my cheeks, burning against the dry heat of my skin. Regret? No. Never again. The only thing I would ever regret was three years ago, when I allowed myself to fall in love with Adrian Hayes—so thoroughly, so foolishly, that I chose to surrender my cosmic agency and remain in this world just to be his wife. The moment the ink on our marriage license dried, Adrian turned into a stranger. On our wedding night, while I sat waiting in my white silk slip, he brought an escort home. He dragged her into our master suite, locking the door and turning our bridal bed into an altar of raw, shameless infidelity. In the months that followed, he abandoned all pretense. He paraded a succession of models, heiresses, and socialites through galas, country clubs, and high-profile charity events across the city. The tabloids tore my dignity to shreds week after week. To the entire upper crust of the city, Nora Hayes was nothing more than a pathetic, live-in joke. In the beginning, I was shattered. I spent nights curled on the bathroom floor, drowning in my own tears, begging him to tell me what I had done wrong. Until the night I finally confronted him, and he struck me across the face with enough force to send me crashing into the hardwood floor. “Isn’t this what you wanted, Nora?” he had snarled, towering over me with eyes burning with loathing. “You and that twisted system of yours plotted behind my back to run Kendall out of the country. You trapped me into this ring just so I would look at you. You thought you could force me to love you?” He had leaned down, his voice trembling with spite. “Keep dreaming. In this lifetime, I will only ever love Kendall.” Lying on the freezing floor, blood pooling at the corner of my split lip, a deep, bone-chilling dread had settled in my chest. I had tried to scream the truth at him. I tried to tell him about the Bureau, about the universal laws of cause and effect, about why Kendall had to leave. But the system’s gag order paralyzed my vocal cords instantly, shocking my nervous system into silence. The cosmic rules forbade breaking character or revealing extradimensional realities. I had to swallow the agony whole. From that night on, Adrian made our home an open playground for his cruelty. The master bedroom, the leather sofas in the living room, the marble kitchen island, the sunroom out by the pool—he turned every corner of our shared sanctuary into a backdrop for his affairs. Sometimes I stumbled upon them accidentally; more often, he engineered the encounters, leaving doors ajar, waiting for me to walk by so I would hear the wet, breathless sounds of his betrayals. He would catch my eye through the open doorways, watching my skin go ash-white, his jaw tightening with a sick, triumphant thrill. Bit by bit, my love was pulverized. My dignity was ground into dust. And in that dust, the resolve to leave finally took root. Adrian genuinely believed I orchestrated Kendall’s departure to conquer his heart. He thought that by trapping me in a hollow marriage, he was exacting the ultimate revenge. His entire proposal had been the opening move in a protracted game of vengeance. What he never understood was that my assignment was never to seduce him. It was to save him. In the original narrative of this world, Kendall Moore wasn’t a fragile, tragic heroine. She was a sociopathic parasite, a ruthless social climber who used every man within her orbit as a stepping stone to elevate herself toward the billionaire heir Harrison Price. This was my very first field mission. Even if I failed, there were no cosmic penalties. Yet because it was my first, I poured my entire soul into it. I had read his file—how his mother had died in neglect, how his tyrannical father had openly despised him, how Adrian had crawled through blood and boardrooms to wrest control of the Hayes legacy from his father’s illegitimate sons. He had survived so much hell only to walk straight into Kendall’s trap: a woman who would systematically bleed him dry, transfer his assets, saddle him with nine-figure debts, and abandon him to Harrison Price’s retaliatory hit, which would crush his spine and leave him paralyzed in a wheelchair for the rest of his short, ruined life. Adrian had mistaken Kendall’s poison for salvation. And he had mistaken my salvation for a cage. A violent banging on my bedroom door shattered the silence. I took a breath, smoothed down my linen shirt, and opened it. Adrian stood in the doorway, his arm slung heavily over Kendall’s shoulders. His eyes were dark, insolent, and cruel. “Are you deaf?” he sneered. “I’ve been knocking.” Before I could answer, he shoved past my shoulder, dragging Kendall inside toward the bed. The nausea hit me in a violent wave. “Get out of my room. Both of you.” He had desecrated the rest of the house. This single guest room, with its narrow mattress and plain cotton sheets, was the only space left that didn’t smell of his debauchery. Adrian didn’t even look at me. He reached over and casually began unbuttoning Kendall’s silk blouse. “Adrian, please, don’t…” Kendall whispered, pressing her hands against his chest in a show of delicate modesty that fooled no one. “Your wife is right there…” Adrian seized her chin, tilting her face up and kissing her hard, deep and bruising, until Kendall gave a soft, yielding moan. When he finally broke away, he cast a cold, mocking gaze over his shoulder at me. “What’s the matter, Nora? Want to stay and take notes?” My fingernails dug into my palms until the skin nearly broke. I forced my breath to stay even, refusing to give him the satisfaction of a breakdown. I stepped out and pulled the heavy oak door shut behind me. Within seconds, the muffled sounds of Kendall’s breathy cries and Adrian’s low groans seeped through the wood. I leaned my forehead against the cool hallway wall and closed my eyes, letting the tears fall freely. The senior dispatchers back at the Prime Core had warned me during orientation: Never invest real emotion into a narrative target. The moment you give your heart to a variable, you become the casualty. A sharp, searing agony ripped through my chest. The metallic tang of blood surged up my throat, hot and sudden, and I coughed into my hands. A dark splatter of crimson stained the clean white floorboards. Trembling, I pulled a tissue from my pocket and wiped the wood clean. To maintain the structural stability of this world as the portal aligned, my physical vessel had already begun to deteriorate. Over the next seven days, my internal organs would shut down, simulating a rapid, untraceable medical decline until final biological cessation. It was nearly an hour before the bedroom door opened. Adrian and Kendall strolled down the hallway, Kendall adjusting her collar with a smug flush across her cheeks. Seeing me standing quietly by the banister, Adrian’s mouth curved into a sneer. “I really underestimated your stomach, Nora,” he said, adjusting his watch. “Even after all that, you still have the nerve to loiter around my house.” I kept my face entirely blank, my voice dead. He had posted guards at every gate of the estate. Even if I tried to walk out through the front driveway, his security team would drag me right back inside to satisfy his sick need for an audience. There was no point in giving him another opportunity to humiliate me. My complete lack of reaction seemed to grate on his nerves. The smirk vanished, replaced by an ugly flash of rage. Adrian crossed the landing, his large hand snapping out to clamp roughly around my jaw, his fingers biting into my bone. “Look at you,” he hissed, glaring into my eyes. “Look at that miserable, pathetic face. You look like a corpse.” I stared back into the dark irises of the man I had once loved with every fiber of my being. For a brief, agonizing second, the ghost of the man who had knelt in a field of wildflowers, trembling as he slid a diamond onto my finger, flashed across my mind. The man who had held me against his chest in the rain, swearing he would build us a home where no one could ever hurt us again. “Speak, damn it!” Adrian growled, his grip tightening until my teeth clicked together. “Did you lose your tongue?” The sharp pain in my jaw pulled me back to the grotesque reality before me. The man holding me wasn’t Adrian Hayes. The man I loved had died the moment he let Kendall back into his head. The creature standing here was nothing more than an arrogant, hollow shell. I met his gaze and gave him the exact script he craved. “You already know,” I whispered flatly. “Unless I die, I’ll never leave you.” Adrian let out a dismissive snort, his expression turning bored as he shoved me away. I stumbled back against the console table. “If it wasn’t for your meddling, Kendall and I wouldn’t have lost three years,” he said, turning his back on me. “You brought this on yourself, Nora. And listen carefully: Kendall is staying in the master suite. If you try a single one of your pathetic little tricks on her, I’ll make sure you regret the day you were born.” Rewriting a secondary character’s tragic fate was supposed to be an uphill battle against cosmic law. But doing it for someone you loved gave you an inexhaustible reservoir of endurance. To save Adrian from the ruin waiting for him, I had spent two years working eighteen-hour days behind the scenes, untangling the financial mess left by his father, establishing offshore accounts, restructuring Hayes Corp, and systematically neutralizing every predatory contract Kendall had tried to plant before she left the country. When Kendall originally boarded that one-way flight to London, my mission progress meter had hit 99%. In my naive foolishness, I assumed that remaining in this world as his wife would naturally let that final 1% click into place over time. I thought the tragedy had been averted. I thought we were safe. Then, yesterday morning, Kendall walked back into the city. And my mission progress meter instantly plummeted from 99% straight down to 1%. The love was dead. And this time, I had zero desire to save a man who took pleasure in ripping my soul apart. A sudden, sharp spasm seized my heart. The world tilted dangerously; my vision swam with black spots. I sank onto the living room sofa, gasping for air, clutching my ribs as the temporal friction chewed through my physical form. Several times in the last twenty-four hours, I had felt my consciousness slipping, teetering on the edge of premature dissolution. By the time the vertigo receded and I managed to sit up, Kendall was walking back into the living room, swinging a leather portfolio in her manicured hand. “Forgot my paperwork,” she said casually, shooting me an amused look. I didn’t answer. I didn’t even shift my eyes. Kendall smiled, leaning against the archway. “Do you know what’s in this folder, Nora? It’s the full equity transfer agreement for Hayes Corp. Thirty percent of the core voting shares, reassigned to me.” My eyes flickered toward the embossed leather folder. Kendall took a few slow, deliberate steps toward me, her heels clicking against the marble floor. “Adrian told me you were the one who arranged that little overseas fellowship that forced me out of town three years ago. I really should thank you.” She laughed softly, a low, mocking sound. “Haven’t you ever heard that absence makes the heart grow fonder? The harder you tried to push me out of his life, the more obsessed he became with me.” She leaned in slightly, her perfume sickly sweet. “You’ve been playing the devoted little housewife for three years, and you walk away with nothing. You really are completely useless, aren’t you?” I looked at her, unblinking. “If that’s what makes you happy, go for it. But if I were you, I’d spend less time gloating to me and more time keeping Adrian wrapped around your finger. The more you flatter him, the more he’ll hand over.” Kendall reached out, patting my cheek with two sharp, humiliating taps. “Adrian is a stray dog. You throw him a bone once in a while, and he rolls over. Flatter him? Please. Who does he think he is?” “Careful,” I murmured. “Aren’t you afraid I’ll tell him what you really think?” Kendall stared at me, her eyes calculating, entirely devoid of warmth. Then, without warning, her expression twisted into pure terror. She threw herself backward, deliberately tumbling down the two marble steps leading to the sunken foyer, letting out a sharp, theatrical scream. I didn’t even have to look. “Kendall!” Adrian’s roar came from the hallway behind me. He blew past me like a gale, dropping to his knees beside Kendall on the floor. “Kendall! Are you hurt? What happened?” Kendall was already sobbing, curling into his chest like an injured bird. She subtly shifted her skirt, revealing a raw, red scrape blooming across her knee. “It’s not Nora’s fault,” she choked out through her tears, trembling violently against his shirt. “She saw the equity papers… she must have gotten upset. I didn’t mean to provoke her, Adrian, really. It’s my fault. You two are married. I shouldn’t be taking these shares…” Adrian’s head snapped toward me, his face contorted in pure, unadulterated fury. “Nora, do you really think you have any say in this family?” he bellowed. “You won’t see a single cent of Hayes Corp equity! Not a dime! My money, my company, my life—everything belongs to Kendall!” He looked down at the scrape on Kendall’s knee, his rage boiling over. “Security!” he roared toward the entrance. Two burly guards rushed in immediately. “Adrian, don’t—” Kendall started, burying her face in his shoulder with a faint smirk I could see clearly over his back. “She needs to learn her place,” Adrian snarled. “Force her down. Make her kneel.” Before I could move, the two guards grabbed my arms, wrenching them behind my back and kicking the backs of my knees. I crashed violently onto the bare marble floor. The impact split the skin over my kneecaps; warm blood seeped immediately through the fabric of my trousers, staining the polished stone. The physical pain was blinding, but it was nothing compared to the vast, freezing void expanding inside my chest. I clamped my jaw shut, staring at the floor, refusing to give them a single cry. Adrian stepped forward, his leather shoe slamming into my shoulder, kicking me flat onto my stomach. “Apologize to her!” he barked. I lay there on the cold marble, bruised and bleeding. Adrian brought his heavy oxford down onto the back of my right hand, grinding his heel into my knuckles until the bones ground together in agony. “I said apologize!” The metallic taste of blood filled my mouth again. Every shred of pride, every memory of who I had once been, was being crushed beneath his shoe. “I’m sorry,” I whispered through gritted teeth. He kicked my ribs again. “Louder! Say it like you mean it!” I looked up at him. His eyes held nothing but contempt—no trace of the man who had once promised to protect me from the world. Driven to the absolute edge of my endurance, I let out a raw, ragged scream from the depths of my lungs: “I’m sorry!” The sheer desperation in my voice seemed to startle him. Adrian froze for a fraction of a second, his foot lifting off my hand. He looked down at the blood on the floor, then at my hollow, burning eyes, and took a small step back, pulling Kendall closer. His face shifted through a brief, uncomfortable hesitation before he masked it with cold authority. He turned to the guards. “Keep her on her knees right there. She doesn’t stand up until sunset.” Adrian carried Kendall upstairs. Less than twenty minutes later, my compromised body gave out entirely. My vision went black, and I collapsed sideways into the pool of my own blood. When I opened my eyes, the sterile smell of antiseptic washed over me. I was in a private hospital room, an IV line taped to the back of my bruised hand. Adrian was sitting in the armchair beside the bed, his eyes bloodshot, his tie loosened. Seeing my eyelids flutter, a flicker of something raw crossed his face—before Kendall stepped into view from the adjoining bathroom. “Adrian, you can stop worrying now,” Kendall said softly, placing a comforting hand on his shoulder. “The doctor ran all the labs. He said there’s nothing physically wrong with her bloodwork. She just needs a good night’s sleep.” The cold mask slipped back over Adrian’s features, his lip curling into a familiar sneer. “You really missed your calling, Nora,” he said coldly. “You should have gone to Hollywood. Fainting just to get out of an apology?” The modern medical equipment in this world could never detect what was wrong with me. My biological shutdown wasn’t a disease; it was the cosmic tether unraveling. Kendall sighed gently, playing the voice of reason. “Adrian, don’t be too hard on her. She probably just wanted your attention.” Adrian’s gaze hardened into ice. “Since you’re awake and fully functional, get dressed. You can finish your punishment at home.” That night, they locked me in the old stone wine cellar beneath the Hayes manor—a cavernous, pitch-black space used for deep storage. A solitary guard sat outside the reinforced steel door at the top of the stairs, checking through the narrow glass slat to ensure I remained kneeling on the concrete floor. In the dark, the synthetic chime resonated in my ears, tinged with uncharacteristic sympathy. [Host, would you like to activate the neural pain-blocker?] I stared into the absolute blackness and whispered, “No.” I needed to feel every single nerve firing in agony. Only when the pain was unbearable would I be completely cured of my stupidity. Only when I was broken beyond repair would I guarantee that in my next mission, I would never, ever make the mistake of loving a variable again. The system paused, then added quietly: [Endure just a little longer, Host. The gateway opens in forty-eight hours.] In the silence that followed, a faint, dry rustling sound echoed against the stone floor. It was subtle at first, like dry leaves scraping across concrete. Then a sudden, freezing glide brushed against the bare skin of my ankle. My breath caught in my throat. I looked down. In the faint beam of light leaking from the ceiling vent, multiple pairs of vertical, slit-pupil eyes gleamed in the dark. Snakes. Dozens of them. Writhing, thick, scaled bodies slithering across the cold floor, surrounding my knees. A primal, suffocating terror seized my throat. Of all the phobias hardwired into my mortal vessel, reptiles were the one thing that reduced me to pure hysteria. I tried to scramble backward, to stand up and run, but my legs were completely numb from hours of kneeling. The lack of circulation caused my knees to buckle, and I crashed face-first onto the damp floor. The movement startled the nest. Within seconds, cold, heavy coils dragged across my arms, my back, my neck. Sharp, needle-like fangs sank into my calves, my shoulders, my hands. A ragged shriek tore from my throat: “Help! Somebody help me—!”
🌟 Continue the story here 👉🏻 📲 Download the “MotoNovel” app 🔍 search for “557590”, and watch the full series ✨! #MotoNovel
Leave a Reply