When I opened my eyes again, I was standing outside a private suite in a five-star hotel, clutching a delivery tray. My blue courier windbreaker was stained with grease, and on the tray sat two plastic cups of cheap lemonade—supposedly the “hangover cure” for the two power players inside. The memories of my previous life hit me like a physical blow. In that life, my boss had slammed those cups against my chest, the lukewarm liquid soaking through my shirt. “Who told you to bring this garbage? I ordered the Lobster and Truffle Bisque!” his roar had vibrated in my eardrums. His assistant, Lexi, had immediately chimed in with a shrill sneer. “He probably drank it himself and replaced it with this swill. Make him pay for it!” I had pulled out my phone with trembling hands to show them the order on the app—it clearly showed her handle, PrincessLexi, had placed the order for the lemonade. But she didn’t even look. She swiped my phone out of my hand, and the screen shattered into a spiderweb across the marble floor. Then, she called dispatch to file a formal complaint. I was fined a week’s wages and fired on the spot. My mother was in the hospital, waiting for that money to stay alive. I was left penniless, forced to watch her take her last breath in a cold hospital ward. Worst of all, a video of that night—maliciously edited—went viral. Under the headline Delivery Thief Drinks Customer’s Soup, a million strangers cursed me with the most vile language imaginable. The despair drowned me like a rising tide. Eventually, I walked into the river. But now, the door opened. Howie, the man who had ruined me, beckoned me inside. A cold smile tugged at the corner of my mouth. In this life, I wasn’t going to be the sacrificial lamb. This business negotiation was about to get very “interesting.” 1 “Excuse me, I have a delivery for ‘Princess Lexi’?” I stood before the two executives and Lexi Brooks, the assistant, holding out the paper receipt. In my last life, I hadn’t been prepared; the paper slip had vanished in the chaos. This time, as long as she acknowledged the name, the receipt would be my ironclad proof. Lexi offered a saccharine smile. “That’s me. My favorite hangover cure. Bring it over.” There was a glint of anticipation in her eyes. She hadn’t made a mistake. She had ordered the lemonade on purpose, setting a trap for a reason I had yet to fully grasp. Clatter. I set the two plastic cups on the mahogany table. Both men immediately frowned. “What is this? Lexi, didn’t I tell you to order the Truffle Bisque?” Howie Briggs, her boss, demanded. Lexi was still playing her part. “Oh, Howard, honestly, the lemon enzymes are actually better for—” Thud! Howie slammed his hand on the table. “Don’t be ridiculous. Do you know what kind of meeting this is?” He turned to the other man, an intimidating figure in a charcoal suit. “Mr. Wolfe took time out of his insane schedule to meet us, and you’re serving him ten-cent lemonade? This is a business dinner, not a high school picnic!” Realizing Howard was actually furious, Lexi’s face paled. She lunged for the paper receipt. “Let me see that. There must be a mistake.” I moved to show the receipt to Howard, but Lexi was faster. She “accidentally” dropped the slip into the decorative fireplace beside the table. It turned to ash in a heartbeat. “Oh no! Boss, I’m so sorry. I did order the bisque. This boy must have swapped the orders. I was just trying to be nice and cover for him!” Lexi stepped toward me. Her makeup was flawless, but her eyes were like a predator’s. “Sweetie, why don’t you go back and get the real order? I won’t report you if you hurry.” When I didn’t move, she gasped, covering her mouth. “Oh my god. You’ve never seen soup that expensive, have you? Did you drink it and buy this cheap stuff to replace it?” I opened my mouth to speak, but Howard cut me off. “Drinking my food? I know how to handle thieves.” He slowly poked a straw through the plastic lid of the lemonade. He lifted the cup and, without warning, poured the icy liquid directly over my head. “You think you can touch Howard Briggs’ property?” He sneered as the ice cubes slid down my neck. “You have two choices. You buy me two new orders of that bisque right now, or you pay me the full cash value. Otherwise, one call to your head office and you’re blacklisted for life.” I knew how the corporate office worked. They wouldn’t listen to a courier. A complaint from a man like Howard meant a ten-fold fine or immediate termination. And I needed every cent to save my mother. “I’ll pay,” I said, my voice steady despite the dripping lemonade. I glanced at the silent partner across the table—Sebastian Wolfe, the CEO of the company Howard was desperate to sign with—and then at Lexi, whose breathing was shallow with guilt. To break this, I had to go through her. “But I’ve never even seen a hundred-dollar soup. If I go to the wrong place, I’ll just waste more of your time. Lexi, could you show me the order confirmation on your phone so I know exactly where to go?” Howard nodded curtly. “Show him, Lexi. Let him see what real luxury looks like.” Lexi reached for her phone, her fingers—manicured in a deep, blood-red—trembling violently. 2 I watched her screen like a hawk. As she unlocked it, I caught a glimpse of her wallpaper: a selfie of Lexi and Howard, their faces pressed together, surrounded by heart stickers. So, she wasn’t just his assistant; she was his mistress. It explained why Howard had never questioned her in my previous life. You don’t blame the woman you’re sleeping with. As for the lemonade? She was likely trying to play some “thrifty, down-to-earth girl” persona for Mr. Wolfe and it had blown up in her face. Now, I was the fall guy. She fumbled with the phone, scrolling frantically. Under Howard’s impatient gaze, she finally opened a luxury food app and pointed at a listing for a gold-leaf garnished bisque. “That’s the one,” she said, trying to pull the phone away. I grabbed her wrist. “Wait, I didn’t see the ‘Ordered’ tab. Did you actually hit buy?” “Hey! Let go of me!” she shrieked, ducking behind Howard. “Howard, look! He’s assaulting me! My wrist is going to bruise!” Howard didn’t hesitate. He barked into his intercom, and seconds later, two hulking security guards burst in. They tackled me, twisting my arms behind my back and slamming me onto the cold floor. “You dare touch my woman?” Howard spat, standing over me. He raised his foot. The sole of his expensive Italian leather shoe, covered in street grime, pressed into my cheek. A wave of humiliation crashed over me. My whole life, I had never stolen a thing. Even when my mother got sick, I didn’t beg. I worked three jobs, day and night, to pay the bills. I walked the straightest line possible, yet here they were, crushing me. Just because they had money? I struggled, but the guards were too strong. My face was mashed against the freezing marble. The commotion drew a crowd—hotel staff and curious diners peered through the open door. Lexi began to perform for them, her voice trembling with fake tears as she painted me as a thief and a harasser. The whispers started. They felt like needles. “The poor have no shame. Stealing is one thing, but getting handsy?” “He shouldn’t even be in a hotel like this. Typical bottom-feeder behavior.” “Just pay the man and get out of here before you lose your job, kid.” Blacklisted? I looked up at Lexi. She was holding her phone up, livestreaming the whole thing. This was it. This was how the video started in my last life. She would edit it to make it look like I was a criminal and they were the “gracious” victims. “Fine!” I shouted. “I’ll admit to whatever you want. But on one condition!” Howard laughed, a harsh, grating sound. “Conditions? From you? Fine, let’s hear it.” I looked at the guards. Howard gave a slight nod, and they hauled me up. My shoulders screamed in pain. If they had actually broken something, I could have sued, but I couldn’t wait for a legal battle. I had to end this now. “The condition is—I want everyone in this hotel and everyone watching that stream to witness my ‘confession.’” 3 Lexi visibly relaxed the moment I agreed to confess. Don’t get too comfortable, I thought. The show hasn’t even started. The hotel manager, who had clearly been tipped by Howard, gathered the staff to provide “security.” Howard was throwing around hundred-dollar bills like confetti to keep the crowd engaged. A man worth hundreds of millions was trying to destroy a delivery boy over a soup order. That was the reality of the “elite.” The hallway was packed now. People were filming on their phones. Lexi’s livestream numbers were hitting record highs for her account. “Wait, is that the guy from the nursing home?” a comment flashed on her screen. The internet was already doing what it does best: doxing. Courier Ben Sullivan. Mother has end-stage renal failure. He dumped her in a state-run home two years ago. A nursing home? Wow. His mom raised him alone and he just shoves her in a hole? What a piece of trash. Total scumbag. No wonder he’s stealing soup. The vitriol poured in. They didn’t know I had spent a year sleeping on a hospital chair, or that I had sold everything I owned to pay for her dialysis. I had moved her to the facility because I had to work twenty hours a day to afford the transplant she needed. I was so close. In my last life, I was so close to the surgery fee. These people, with their keyboards and their “morality,” were the ones who had helped kill her. Not this time. Seeing me cornered, Lexi whispered to Howard, “Let’s get him to apologize on camera. It’ll look great for the brand. We’ll look like the bigger people.” Howard pinched her nose playfully. “Always thinking of the PR, babe. Once we’re done with this loser, I’ll show you how much I appreciate your ‘creative’ ideas tonight.” Lexi blushed. “Stop it, Howard.” Howard cleared his throat and looked at the camera, his chin held high. “I’m Howard Briggs. I’m not a man who likes to punch down, but theft and harassment cannot go unanswered. However, I’m a man of mercy. If this boy gets on his knees and apologizes right now, I won’t file the police report. I’ll even let him pay only half the damages. What do you say, kid?” He had already sentenced me without a trial. “Mr. Briggs,” I said, my voice echoing in the quiet room. “If it turns out Lexi actually ordered the lemonade, what then?” Howard looked at Lexi for a fraction of a second. She puffed out her chest. “Howard, don’t you trust me?” That was all he needed. “If we’re wrong, I’ll fire her on the spot and pay you ten thousand dollars for the ’emotional distress.’ Deal?” “Deal.” The paper receipt was gone. My only proof was the digital record. I reached into my pocket for my phone, but my heart skipped a beat. It was gone. “Are you looking for this?” Lexi smiled, holding up my phone. It was dripping wet. “You’re so clumsy. You dropped it right into the lemonade.” I grabbed it and tried to wake the screen. Nothing. It was fried. 4 The hotel staff started chanting. “Just kneel! It’s a thousand bucks!” “Don’t be an idiot, you’re gonna get fired anyway!” “Kneel! Kneel!” The pressure was a physical weight, a roar of sound designed to break a man’s spirit. “Someone will prove it,” I whispered, but my voice was drowned out. Howard shook his head with mock disappointment. “I tried to be nice. Time for the call.” He dialed the dispatch center. The manager there, a man I knew to be cold and calculating, answered with a voice like honey. “Mr. Briggs! What an honor. How can we help you today?” Howard smirked at me. “Your courier, Ben Sullivan? He swapped a high-end order for some trash lemonade, probably drank the original, and now he’s harassing my assistant. I want a formal termination.” The manager didn’t hesitate. “Consider it done, Mr. Briggs. I am so sorry for the inconvenience. He’s fired, and we’ll be docking his final pay for the damages. Anything else?” The manager could have checked the back-end system. He could have seen the truth with two clicks. But Howard Briggs was a “Diamond Tier” client. His companies used our service for everything. One courier’s life was a small price to pay for Howard’s continued business. “Manager! Wait!” I screamed. Howard put the phone on speaker. The manager’s voice turned venomous. “Ben? You still there? You’ve got a lot of nerve. Pack your locker. You’re done.” Tears blurred my vision, but I wiped them away. “If I have proof that I’m innocent, what will you do then?” The manager laughed. “If you have proof, I’ll personally apologize to you on a public stage and pay you a bonus. But you don’t. So get out.” He felt safe. The evidence was in his hands, and he wasn’t going to look for it. “Fine,” I said. I looked at the clock on the wall. Five minutes until 8:00 PM. The internet was still tearing me apart. Just kneel, you idiot! Are you really going to waste your mom’s medical fund on pride? He doesn’t care about his mom. He’s a narcissist. Lexi was tagging her own company in every post, basking in the “positive” attention they were getting for being “merciful.” Orders for Briggs Appliances were reportedly spiking. Howard put his arm around Lexi. “My patience is wearing thin. Kneel or get dragged out by the cops.” I held up a finger. “Three minutes.” They exchanged a look. “Three minutes for what? You losing your mind?” I held up two fingers. “Two minutes.” The crowd started to murmur. They didn’t understand. “Final minute countdown!” I shouted. The commenters on the stream started joining in, thinking it was a joke. 30 seconds! 20! Is he gonna do a backflip? “Ten, nine, eight…” I led the room in the count. “Five, four, three, two, one!” I stood up straight and pointed at Lexi’s phone. “Check your comments now.” She looked down. Within seconds, the blood drained from her face.

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When I opened my eyes again, the sterile scent of floor wax and the hum of the hospital’s HVAC system hit me like a physical blow. I was back. Right in front of me, Bonnie was clutching her hands together so tightly her knuckles were white. Her eyes were wide, brimming with that carefully practiced desperation, searching mine for a lifeline. She told me, with a voice that trembled perfectly, that if only someone would buy her cottage, she might finally have the money to survive. I knew what came next. In a few days, she’d be diagnosed with terminal stage-four cancer. Or so the charts would say. In my previous life, I was the fool. To save her, to give her the chance at the surgery she supposedly couldn’t afford, I offered to buy her place at a premium. But within days of me moving in, a “miracle” occurred. Bonnie’s cancer vanished—utterly, impossibly cured—while I was the one suddenly staring at a terminal diagnosis. I had tried to be the bigger person. Through the agonizing pain, I squeezed out a smile to congratulate her on her recovery. And how did she repay me? She filed a formal complaint with the Board of Ethics. She accused me of forging her medical records to scam her out of her property. She stood in the hospital lobby and shrieked, asking if I wasn’t afraid of divine retribution for preyed on a dying woman. I fought back. I pulled every chart, every bank transfer, every scrap of evidence to prove I had acted out of mercy. She just sneered. She told the board that everyone knew a good con artist plays the long game. She asked the room, “If I really had terminal cancer, how could I be standing here perfectly healthy?” Even Scott, my boyfriend of three years, turned on me. He looked at me with such profound disgust it felt like a knife to the ribs. He claimed I had nearly destroyed a family for a piece of real estate. He told the board he’d checked the accounts—that the money I claimed to have paid Bonnie never actually reached her. I was blacklisted. Fired. The families of former patients threw stones at my windows, screaming for “justice” for their loved ones. Scott took every penny of my savings, claiming it was “restitution” for Bonnie’s suffering. In the end, the cancer ate me alive. I died in a puddle of my own cold sweat in a cramped studio apartment, forgotten and hated. This time, I’m not playing the martyr. 1 Listening to Bonnie’s thinly veiled hints, the realization that I had been given a second chance settled into my bones like ice. In the old life, I fell for it. I offered her twenty percent over market value for that house. She had dropped to her knees, sobbing her thanks, calling me her “guardian angel.” Then, forty-eight hours after the keys changed hands, she was at the administration office, tearing me apart. “The second she got the deed, the Chief told me there was nothing wrong with me,” she had told the investigators. “Isn’t that convenient? Scott always told me how badly Claire wanted a house she couldn’t afford. She just waited for me to be vulnerable.” I died a pariah. And I never understood how a healthy thirty-year-old woman like me suddenly developed a late-stage malignancy overnight. Not this time. I didn’t bite. I shoved my hands into my lab coat pockets and offered a tight, professional smile. “If things are that dire, Bonnie, have you considered a GoFundMe? Or maybe listing the house on Zillow? If the price is right, I’m sure a developer would snap it up in a heartbeat.” Bonnie’s smile faltered. She stood up abruptly, a flash of genuine indignation crossing her face. “Dr. Whitfield… Claire. I’m trying to sell my home, not beg for scraps on the internet. I have some dignity left.” “I’m just a doctor,” I said, my voice flat. “But if you’re that sick, you don’t have time to be picky about where the money comes from, do you?” She bit her lip, her eyes darting toward the door. “Scott’s girlfriend is supposed to be my friend. We have history. I thought you’d want to help me out of this hole. I thought maybe…” She trailed off, waiting for me to fill the silence with an offer. Instead, I pulled a drawer open and slid a stack of business cards for local real estate agents across the desk. “These guys are the best in the city. Fast closings, aggressive marketing. List with them today, and you’ll have your surgery money by the end of the month.” Bonnie looked like she’d swallowed a wasp. “Are you serious? You’re throwing me to the sharks? These agents will take a massive commission. How am I supposed to pay for treatment if I’m giving six percent to some guy in a suit?” She leaned in, her voice sharpening. “I’m saying, if you buy it, I wouldn’t have to deal with any of that.” “Find another way,” I said, leaning back. “I’m broke.” Her face darkened instantly. She reached out, grabbing my wrist with a grip that was entirely too strong for a “dying” woman. “You have the money, Claire. Don’t lie to me. It’s only seven hundred thousand. You can swing that. Let’s go to the title company. Right now.” I looked down at her hand, a cold laugh bubbling in my chest. She wasn’t asking; she was demanding. I wrenched my arm back. Bonnie’s eyes welled with tears instantly. “I know you think I’m pathetic because I’m sick, but the house is fine! Please, don’t make me list it. I can’t wait for a buyer. I need the surgery now!” Before I could respond, the door burst open. Scott Bennett stormed in, looking every bit the white knight. He moved to Bonnie’s side, supporting her as she “wavered” on her feet. “Claire, for God’s sake,” he snapped. “She’s just trying to survive. Why are you being so heartless?” 2 I kept my expression stone-cold, the picture of professional detachment. “As her attending physician, my job is to treat her. I am under no ethical or legal obligation to fund her lifestyle or her real estate transactions.” Scott waved a hand dismissively, as if my career-long commitment to ethics was just a minor personality flaw. “You want a house. She needs to sell. It’s a win-win. Why do you have to be so difficult? Why drag a middleman into this?” He sighed, shaking his head at me. “You’re so petty, Claire. Always looking for an angle, even with family.” Watching him, I felt a wave of nausea. This was the man I thought I’d grow old with. In the last life, when Bonnie accused me, he had used that same “disappointed” tone. ‘I’ve known Bonnie for fifteen years, Claire. She doesn’t lie. Just apologize. Give her the house back and let her keep the money. It’s a small price to pay for your reputation.’ He never believed me. Not for a second. The urge to scream was almost overwhelming. “Scott, we’re through—” But he cut me off, pulling a set of keys from his pocket with a triumphant flourish. “Luckily, Bonnie wanted to surprise you. She already signed the deed over to me to give to you. Your ‘dream home’ isn’t going anywhere.” He tossed the keys onto my desk. They hit the wood with a sharp clack. He didn’t even look at me; he was too busy checking his watch. “Now, quit the drama and transfer the funds to Bonnie. She needs to be in pre-op by tomorrow.” The blood drained from my face. My breath hitched in my throat. “You… you bought her house?” Scott shrugged. “I put it in your name. We’re getting married eventually; it’s our future home. Consider it a favor to a friend. Now, pay her. Don’t be cheap.” I picked up the keys and threw them back at his chest. “I don’t want the house. You want to be a hero? You keep it. You live in it.” Scott’s face turned a mottled purple. “We’re a team, Claire! This is for us! And more importantly, it’s for Bonnie’s life. Stop being a selfish brat and send the money!” I said nothing. Bonnie suddenly collapsed to her knees, her voice rising to a theatrical wail that carried into the hallway. “Dr. Whitfield, please! I’m begging you! I just want to live! You can hate the house, but don’t kill me because of a deed! I need that money for the operation!” Scott jumped in, his voice loud enough for the patients in the waiting area to hear. “She’s a fraud, isn’t she? You gave her your word and now you’re backing out when her life is on the line?” I could hear the murmurs from the hallway. “I wouldn’t want a doctor like that,” a woman whispered loudly. “Who knows if she’d hold back my meds if she didn’t like my attitude?” “Unbelievable,” another man added. “She’s probably overcharging us just to pay for her vacations while her friend dies.” The noise grew. People were calling for the Chief. Bonnie looked up at me, a tiny, smug glint in her tear-filled eyes. She held up her phone, the Venmo QR code ready, her chin lifted in a silent challenge. I straightened my coat, took a breath, and pulled out my phone. But I didn’t open a banking app. I tapped a recording I’d started the moment she walked in. “From the start of this conversation,” I said, my voice cutting through the noise, “I have never agreed to buy your property. In fact, I’ve repeatedly advised you to seek professional real estate counsel. Are we really suggesting that because a person is poor or sick, they have the right to commit identity theft and financial coercion?” The hallway went dead silent. 3 Bonnie’s eyes darted around, her lip trembling. “Claire… I know you’re worried about setting a precedent, but you have the keys. You can’t deny it now!” Scott stepped forward, his jaw set. He looked like he wanted to be proud of himself, convinced that if he just pushed hard enough, I’d fold like I always did. “In your dreams,” I spat. Scott’s composure broke. He lunged forward and slapped me—hard. The crack of his hand against my cheek echoed in the small office. “Claire, the money is gone anyway! Quit being a bitch! You’re taking this house, and you’re paying for it. Bonnie already put it in your name. You have no choice!” I clutched my stinging cheek, staring at them. They were so desperate to tie me to that house. Why? In my last life, my cancer was stage four by the time it was found. My mentor, Dr. Sutherland, had been devastated. He said if we’d caught it even a month earlier, I might have stood a chance. But I’d had no symptoms. None. Is it possible to go from perfectly healthy to terminal in a week? My phone buzzed in my pocket. A text from Dr. Sutherland with my routine physical results. Claire, you’re healthy as a horse. I think you’re just burnt out. Stop imagining symptoms and take a vacation. See you Monday. The weight in my chest evaporated, replaced by a cold, sharp clarity. If I wasn’t sick now… then what happened last time? I looked at Scott, forced a shaky breath, and feigned a look of defeat. “Fine. If you’re going to force my hand… I’ll take the house.” Their faces softened instantly. Relief washed over Bonnie’s features. “But,” I added, “the title goes in Scott’s name. Since it’s ‘for our future’ and he’s the one so eager to help, it’s only fair he holds the deed.” Scott froze. His eyes shifted. “The loan… it’s already tied to your credit, Claire. We can’t change the paperwork now.” His voice lost its humility, turning sharp and demanding again. “We’re going to be family. My debt is your debt. Just pay her and let’s move on!” ‘I’m doing this to atone for your sins,’ he had told me in the other life as he emptied my bank accounts. ‘You owe Bonnie everything. This money is nothing compared to her life.’ The rage finally broke through. I didn’t scream. I kicked—hard—landing a blow right on Scott’s kneecap. He buckled with a groan. “You used my identity to take out a loan for your mistress’s house? You want to talk about ‘good deeds’? Take the loan yourself, Scott. Either the house goes in your name, or…” I turned to Bonnie, giving her a terrifyingly sweet smile. “You return every cent of that ‘sale’ money to the bank immediately. I don’t care if you die on the sidewalk.” Scott looked away, silent. Bonnie began to sob hysterically. “Claire, you’re just saying my house is ‘dirty’ because of me! I’m sick, but my house isn’t! If I have to die to make you happy, fine! I’ll do it!” Before anyone could move, Bonnie scrambled toward the window. She threw it open and hauled herself onto the ledge, staring down at the concrete five stories below. 4 The hallway erupted. Screams of “Don’t do it!” and “Look what you did!” pelted me from all sides. “It’s just a loan!” a nurse shouted. “You’re going to be married! Why are you killing her over a credit score?” “She’s trying to prove her house is clean!” a patient yelled. “You should be ashamed!” Scott scrambled up, gasping in pain, and tackled Bonnie away from the ledge, pulling her back into the safety of the room. He held her shaking body and glared at me with pure, unadulterated hatred. “This house is her legacy, Claire. You’re losing a bit of money; she’s losing her life! Even if you don’t want it, you don’t drive a dying woman to suicide! Just sell it yourself later if you hate it so much!” Bonnie’s wails intensified. She clung to Scott’s shirt. “No! I won’t let her sell it to a stranger! It has to be Claire. Only Claire. I don’t have much time left… please, let this be my final wish.” I looked around the room. Every eye was a judge. Every mouth was a weapon. If Bonnie was this insistent on me living in that house… there had to be a reason. Something she couldn’t risk a stranger finding. “Fine,” I said, my voice steady. “I’ll move in.” Bonnie’s crying stopped as if a switch had been flipped. She blinked, her face lighting up with an eerie, manic glow. “You won’t regret it, Claire. But… I want to see you there. I want to know you’re settled.” Scott nodded quickly, speaking for me. “Whatever you want, Bonnie. Claire will do it.” “I want you to send me videos,” Bonnie whispered, her voice honey-sweet now. “Every day. I want to see you living there. I want to see you sleeping in that bedroom. It’ll make me feel like I’m still part of the world.” She paused, her eyes narrowing slightly. “And I want Scott to stay there with you. To make sure you’re… safe. But you take the bed. Scott can sleep on the floor. I want to know you’re comfortable.” I agreed, the hair on my arms standing up. Within hours, they were “helping” me move. Bonnie was practically vibrating with excitement as Scott hauled my suitcases into the master bedroom. She spent the whole time fussing over the furniture. “That bed was a fortune, Claire. Best sleep of your life, I promise. Don’t you dare replace it.” She patted the mattress with a strange, reverent intensity. “The mattress is custom-fitted. Don’t move it. Don’t even flip it. Just… rest.” I nodded absently, watching her. As she stood by the door to leave, her face looked gaunt, almost grey in the hallway light. “Watch your health, Claire. Cancer is a sneaky thing. It would be a tragedy if you ended up like me because you waited too long to get checked.” A cold shiver raced down my spine. How does she know? Once they were gone, I stood in the center of the silent house. Everything was fresh, newly renovated, smelling faintly of paint and expensive wood. But there was something else—a metallic, ozone-heavy scent that didn’t belong. I called a professional to test for formaldehyde and lead. Nothing. The house was “clean.” I tore through the closets, checked the vents, looked for hidden cameras. Nothing. I sat on the edge of the bed, my mind racing. ‘Sleeping on a patient’s bed… aren’t you afraid of the bad juju?’ a friend had joked once. I looked down at the mattress. ‘Don’t move it. Don’t flip it.’ I stood up, gripped the edge of the heavy custom mattress, and heaved it off the frame. When I saw what was taped to the slats underneath, a jagged, terrifying laugh escaped my throat. I finally understood how Bonnie’s terminal cancer had “disappeared.”

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Boris Montgomery was the secret I kept buried under my skin for years. He never knew that the man who orchestrated his family’s ruin, the one who pulled the rug out from under their empire, was my father. Before he fled the country five years ago, the last words he threw at me were like shards of poisoned glass: “Sylvia, you’re just like your father. You make me sick.” Thinking about it now still makes my chest tighten, a phantom pain that never quite dulls. In the hollow years that followed, I started hunting for traces of him in a revolving door of strangers. I looked for his jawline, his gait, the way he’d tilt his head when he was thinking. Wyatt Beckett was the one who came the closest. I gave Wyatt everything. Every resource, every luxury, every piece of myself I could spare. To the world, I was the devoted girlfriend; to myself, I was just curating a masterpiece in Boris’s image. Wyatt, blinded by his own sudden fame, used to smirk at me and ask, “Sylvia, are you honestly this obsessed with me?” Sometimes he’d push further, testing the leash. “If I ever walked away, would you just crumble? Would you cry your eyes out for me?” I would just smile, a quiet, practiced thing. I never said a word. Because we both knew—or at least I did—that the game was only fun until the original came home. And then, the news broke: Boris Montgomery was back. 1 When the headline about Wyatt’s latest scandal hit the tabloids, I was in the middle of closing a massive brand deal for him. The CEO of the company was Howard, an old friend of my father’s. He’d known me since I was a child; he was the one who taught me how to hold a fountain pen when I was six. We were at a private dinner—steaks and expensive red wine—when I asked if he’d consider making the star of my agency the face of his new luxury line. He agreed almost too easily. “Howard, please,” I said, sliding the dossier across the mahogany table with a soft smile. “Don’t just do this because we’re family friends. Look at the data first.” I pointed to the highlighted sections. “His commercial value, the social media engagement, the projected ROI… I’ve mapped it all out. I want this to be a win for your brand, not a charity case for me.” Howard blinked, clearly surprised by my preparation. He chuckled and turned to his teenage grandson, who was sitting at the end of the table. “Logan, take notes,” Howard said. “You see how Sylvia works? She’s built a powerhouse from the ground up. Out of all the kids in our circle, she’s the one who’s actually made something of herself.” I offered a modest smile, but kept my thoughts to myself. Howard didn’t know that my “powerhouse” agency only had one client: Wyatt Beckett. Or, to be more precise, I had only built the agency because of Wyatt. The data was undeniable. Wyatt’s numbers were staggering; he was the “It Boy” of the moment, with a fanbase that would buy anything he touched. Howard liked what he saw. To show his support, he had his legal team bring over the finalized contract before dessert was even served. The terms were more generous than I had dared to ask for. Before I could even start my polite refusals, my father leaned back and smiled. “Go on, Sylvia. Go take care of your business,” he said. “I’ll settle up with Howard here. Consider it a favor I’ll owe him.” I knew they had things to discuss that didn’t involve me. I thanked Howard, took the contract, and headed back to my suite. I pulled out my phone to tell Wyatt the good news, but my screen was already flooded. My friend Lexi had sent a dozen screenshots of the trending topics an hour ago. Below them was a link to a video. And then, her usual unfiltered commentary: Seriously, Sylvia? What is Wyatt doing? Talk about biting the hand that feeds you. You’re out there grinding for his career, and he’s out there making you look like a fool? Is this a PR stunt or is he actually this stupid? I’m telling you, you can’t spoil men like this. He needs to remember he’s a project, not a god. Don’t let him disrespect you like this… I scrolled past her rant and clicked the link. It was classic paparazzi footage—grainy, long-lens, but the two people in the frame were clear as day. It looked like a scene from a high-budget romance. The evening breeze was catching the hem of Tinsley Hart’s white silk dress. She was laughing, her hands full with a latte and a stick of cotton candy. When the wind blew a bit too hard, Wyatt was there in a heartbeat, his hand reaching out to press the fabric of her skirt back down against her thigh. They were bent over, laughing together. The camera zoomed in. Tinsley pointed toward the lens, whispering something to Wyatt, and a second later, Wyatt looked directly at the camera. He didn’t pull away. Instead, he draped an arm over Tinsley’s shoulder, pulled her close, and threw a mocking, defiant smirk at the photographer. I didn’t even need to check Twitter to know it was a bloodbath. #WyattBeckettTinsleyHart #WyattDefiesPaps #SummerGardenTryst #JustFriends? The threads were a war zone between fans trying to “clear the search terms” and shippers going wild. They were both rising stars, young and beautiful. The fans didn’t want a dating scandal to ruin their “clean” images, but the chemistry was undeniable. Still, the video wasn’t “incriminating” in a legal sense. No kissing, no disappearing into a hotel room for six hours. It was deniable. Wyatt’s PR team—the one I paid for—could handle it in their sleep. I closed the app, unfazed. I took a photo of the contract and sent it to Wyatt. Just landed you the luxury line deal. The contract is signed. When do you have a minute to go over the details? His reply came hours later. It was curt, dripping with the arrogance of someone who thought they were untouchable. Busy. Bring it to the set tomorrow. I stared at the screen for a long beat before typing a single word back. Okay. 2 Wyatt had grown comfortable giving me orders. He treated me like a glorified assistant, someone he could beckon with a snap of his fingers, rather than the woman who had built his throne. He had forgotten I was his girlfriend, and more importantly, he had forgotten I was his boss. I suppose it was my fault. I had been too good to him. Back in college, I was famous for two things: my family’s quiet wealth and the speed at which I cycled through boyfriends. I had a “type,” but no one could figure out the pattern. I dated guys with beautiful hands, guys with gentle eyes, guys with a specific, sharp profile. I once dated a guy for two weeks just because he had a tiny mole on the left side of his nose. I’d fall fast, or at least pretend to, and then end things just as abruptly. There were threads on the campus forum about me, claiming I was “collecting” parts of people, like a scavenger hunt with no prize. But despite the turnover, no one had a bad word to say about me. I was generous, I was kind, and I never made a scene. Then came Wyatt Beckett. He was the jackpot. He had every single feature I had been hunting for. Long, elegant fingers with prominent knuckles. Amber eyes that looked cold until he smiled. The perfect height. And there, on the bridge of his nose, the exact same mole. I dove into “loving” him like a woman possessed. I became the girl who would do anything for him. To be fair, Wyatt was a challenge. He was colder than the others, more guarded. He held the record for the longest I’d ever pursued someone without success. The first time I introduced myself, he frowned and told me flat-out: “Look, rich girl, I’m not interested in being your flavor of the month. Go find someone else to play with.” I remember looking into his eyes—those amber eyes—and feeling a chill go down my spine. “You’re special, Wyatt,” I whispered. “You’re not like the others.” He wavered then. After that, the “collection” stopped. I didn’t look at another man. I stayed by his side, but I didn’t crowd him. I played the long game. I showed up at group dinners as a friend. I kept a respectful distance. I gave him birthday gifts that weren’t expensive, but were exactly what he needed. When he ended up in the hospital during junior year, I was the one who cleared my schedule to stay with him. He didn’t want to worry his parents, and his roommates had finals. I hired the best private nurses, but I sat in the corner of the room every single day. One afternoon, while he was napping, the room was bathed in the amber glow of the setting sun. I sat there for hours, just watching his silhouette against the pillow. For a split second, I let myself believe the ghost had finally come home. When Wyatt woke up and saw me still there, his expression shifted. “Sylvia,” he said, his voice raspy. “Do you actually love me this much?” He’d seen how I treated my exes—the casual indifference, the easy goodbyes. With him, I was different. I was devoted. I blinked, coming out of my trance. He was looking at me with a mix of confusion and something that looked like guilt. “Sylvia,” he said, his tone sharpening. “Love isn’t a debt. You can’t force it with kindness. If this is just a game to you, pick a different target.” I almost laughed. I looked at him softly and said, “Don’t worry, Wyatt. I’m not asking for anything.” He looked away, his ears turning a deep shade of red. As I stood up to leave, he spoke to the wall, his voice muffled like a stubborn child admitting defeat. “If you’re serious… then fine. Let’s try it. Let’s be together.” And that was it. The campus forums went wild, taking bets on how long we’d last. Three months? Six? A year? But as the months turned into years, everyone eventually decided I had finally found “The One.” The truth was, we did have good moments. Wyatt had a streak of stubborn pride that I admired. In the beginning, he never let me pay for anything. He’d put his hand over mine when I reached for my phone at a restaurant and say, “I’ve got it,” with a finality that brooked no argument. Once we were official, he took his role seriously. He went everywhere I wanted to go. He wore the clothes I picked out for him. He replied to my texts within five minutes, every single time. Eventually, we fell into the rhythm of a normal couple. We studied together, ate together. I learned to hide price tags so he wouldn’t feel uncomfortable. I started memorizing his specific likes and dislikes—the things that were actually him, not just the man he reminded me of. I’m a creature of habit. I don’t like change. If things had stayed stable, I probably would have stayed with him forever. But then, he met Tinsley Hart. 3 In a cruel twist of fate, I was the one who introduced them. It was senior year. Wyatt had been scouted by an agent. He had the face for it, but he was green. He fell into a trap—a predatory contract with a bottom-tier agency that specialized in “influencer houses” and shady livestreams. By the time I found out, Wyatt was drowning in debt, trying to find a way to pay a massive kill-fee for a contract he’d barely read. His roommate told me the truth: “Wyatt didn’t want you to know. He’s humiliated. But Sylvia, he’s in over his head. They’re trying to force him into these… weird ‘fan meetups’ and scripted ‘dating’ streams.” I fixed it. The problem that had been crushing his spirit was solved with one phone call from my father’s legal team. I tried to be discreet, but Wyatt wasn’t stupid. He saw the shift in the agency’s attitude. The predatory manager suddenly became a groveling assistant, handing over the release papers with a trembling hand and even offering a “settlement” for the trouble. When he got home that night, he didn’t look happy. He looked small. “Was it you, Sylvia?” he asked. I hesitated. “Would you have preferred I did nothing?” He didn’t answer. The silence was heavy. I wanted to tell him that if he chose to be with me, he had to accept the reality of who I was—and what I could do. He needed to get used to the power imbalance. But the words felt too cruel. Instead, I kept it light. “Do you really want to be in this industry? Because if you do, I’ll just start a company for you. We’ll do it right.” He looked at me and laughed, a bitter, mocking sound. “I guess I’d be a fool to turn down a silver platter, wouldn’t I?” “Think of it as an investment,” I said. “We’ll sign a real contract. Who knows? Maybe you’ll be the one making me rich in five years.” That seemed to soothe his ego. His face softened. “Does it really pay that fast? The entertainment business?” I didn’t answer. He let out a self-deprecating snort. “Right. Even ‘fast’ isn’t your kind of fast. Your trust fund probably grows by a house every minute.” His debut project was a high-end indie romance. I made sure he was the male lead. And I chose Tinsley Hart to be his co-star. Tinsley was the “National Sweetheart.” She was talented, she had a massive following, and everyone loved her. I thought her star power would rub off on Wyatt. I went to the set on the first day of filming. The cast and crew were gathered for the kickoff. Wyatt stood next to Tinsley, looking striking in the morning light. His amber eyes caught the sun, and for a moment, he was so beautiful it hurt to look at him. He completely outshone the veteran actors around him. I didn’t expect him to become a superstar overnight. It was a small film. But when it was released, Wyatt was the only thing anyone talked about. He became the internet’s new obsession. The “shippers” started editing videos of him and Tinsley, crying over their “tragic” onscreen chemistry. And that leads us to now: their second project together. A project I explicitly told him not to take. A project he signed onto behind my back. Our first real fight was about that script. “The fans want this, Sylvia,” Wyatt had argued, his confusion genuine. “Why wouldn’t I give them what they want? The buzz is already insane.” It wasn’t just that the script was a repetitive teen drama. I had worked my connections to get him an audition for a major director’s new feature. If he did the show with Tinsley, he’d have to pass on the movie. It was the difference between being a flash-in-the-pan idol and a serious actor. I tried to explain the long-term strategy. Wyatt just laughed coldly. “You’re just jealous of Tinsley, aren’t you?” I froze. Jealousy was an emotion I didn’t know how to process. I didn’t like Tinsley, that much was true. The first time I met her on set as Wyatt’s manager, she had looked at me with this long, searching expression. Then she turned to Wyatt and said, “I know you were a ‘civilian’ before this, so having a girlfriend makes sense. But why are you letting a girl who knows nothing about the industry handle your career?” “Wyatt,” she had continued, “some girls just want to cling to someone famous to feel important. They’re afraid you’ll outgrow them. You have so much potential; you don’t need an anchor dragging you down.” The “National Sweetheart” wasn’t so sweet when the cameras were off. She looked like a classic mean girl. But I could see why she was confused. I kept a low profile. Most people thought Wyatt had built his own studio with his own money. Everyone assumed he was some “Secret Billionaire’s Son” playing at being an actor. Wyatt had started to explain who I was, but I cut him off. “Miss Hart,” I said coolly, “your acting in real life is much more convincing than your acting in the script.” Tinsley glared at me, then turned back to Wyatt, grabbing his arm and whining in a playful, sugary voice, calling him by his character’s name. “Liam, look at her… she’s so mean to me!” Wyatt didn’t pull away. He looked at me, frowning. “Enough, Sylvia. She’s just blunt. She’s a ‘free spirit.’ Don’t be a bully.” I looked at his hand on her arm, then up at his face. I wondered if he was lost in the role or if he was just losing his mind. They were “method” during filming, which meant a lot of flirting off-camera. It was blurring the lines of what was acceptable for a man in a relationship, but there was never any “proof” of an affair. I had tried to be the “cool girlfriend.” I tolerated it. But I didn’t like it. I told him as much. I suggested he keep a professional distance. Wyatt’s response was a cold sneer. “Sylvia, I’m not your property. Why don’t you just buy a leash and lock me in your basement?” “Is this because you love me so much? Or are you just that possessive?” “If I ever left you,” he said, mocking me, “would you actually die of a broken heart?” He thought he’d found my weakness. He thought he could use my “devotion” to buy his freedom. “If you don’t want me to leave, Sylvia,” he said, “then stop trying to control me.” I looked at him—at the makeup, the stylized hair, the arrogance in his eyes—and I realized he looked less and less like the man I was trying to remember every day. 4 I drove to the set to deliver the contract myself. When I arrived, Wyatt and Tinsley were rehearsing a scene. The set was a chaotic mess of grips and PAs, so no one noticed me. I stood in a corner, watching them. Wyatt was leaning down, tilting his head to catch Tinsley’s lines. She was looking up at him, radiant and glowing. The midday sun was brutal, and I noticed Wyatt shielding her with his script, creating a patch of shade for her. It was a small, thoughtful gesture. It was a level of tenderness he hadn’t shown me in months. They looked perfect together. A matched set. For a second, I felt like laughing. Wyatt must have felt my gaze, because he suddenly looked over. He didn’t look guilty. He looked expectant. He said something to Tinsley, she glanced at me, and then he started walking toward me. We went to his luxury trailer. I handed him the contract. As he flipped to the final page, his eyes widened. He knew what this meant. Howard’s brand was a household name. They didn’t need “influencers.” Getting this deal was a massive coup for Wyatt’s prestige. A smug smile touched his lips. But then, he looked at me and asked, “Sylvia, can we turn this into a joint endorsement? For me and Tinsley?” He asked it casually, but the air in the trailer shifted. I stared at him. He was wearing colored contacts for his role—dark, flat brown. The amber was gone. I let out a short, sharp laugh. “What did you just say?” If he were smart, he would have dropped it. But he doubled down. “I want to do this with Tinsley. Our ‘couple’ brand is at an all-time high. It’s better for the company if we do it together.” He paused, then added the ultimatum: “If it’s not a joint deal, I’m not signing.” The smile stayed on my face, but the light in my eyes went out. I looked at him for a long time—or maybe it was only a few seconds—and then I set the contract down on the table. I stood up and walked to the door. I gripped the handle and looked back at him. I had never used this tone with him before—polite, distant, and utterly final. “Wyatt,” I said, nodding toward the paper. “That contract isn’t a career move. It’s a parting gift. You’ve been a decent distraction these past few years, and I wanted to settle the bill. Whether you sign it or not is entirely up to you.” I watched the color drain from his face. “There is no third option,” I said.

🌟 Continue the story here 👉🏻 📲 Download the “MotoNovel” app 🔍 search for “424267”, and watch the full series ✨! #MotoNovel

Even though Belinda and I were identical twins, no one ever put us in the same category. She practically lived on a diet of fried chicken and soda, yet her body remained as slender and willowy as a runway model, her legs growing longer by the day. I counted every single calorie, starved myself on wilted lettuce, and yet my body bloated like a waterlogged balloon. She baked under the harsh summer sun without a drop of SPF, yet her skin stayed as luminous and flawless as freshly poured cream. I hid from the daylight, slathered myself in sunscreen year-round, yet my complexion grew dull, broken, and bruised. She skipped class daily to get high with bleach-blonde dropouts behind the bleachers, yet she consistently pulled straight As and ranked first in the district. I slept three hours a night, my textbooks highlighted until the pages tore, and I still managed to fail every math exam handed to me. Eventually, I contracted a horrific, unspeakable disease. My skin blistered, weeping and rotting from the inside out. I died utterly alone on a sterile hospital bed. But after I died, my soul didn’t disperse. I lingered, floating in the cold, antiseptic air of the room. That was when I watched Belinda suddenly change. She stopped binge-eating junk food. She blocked the numbers of her dropout boyfriends. She began living a quiet, meticulously clean, and disciplined life. It was only then, suspended in the ether of the afterlife, that the horrifying truth clicked into place. The reason I had lived like a grotesque, suffering monster was entirely because of her. So, I spent my afterlife clawing through the dark, bargaining with whatever forces govern the dead, saving up enough karmic currency for one thing: a second chance. When I finally opened my eyes again, I was back on the exact day Belinda sat in front of her ring light, binge-eating for thousands of viewers. 1 I pushed open the bedroom door and saw Belinda mid-livestream. Every agonizing memory from my past life slammed into my skull—the weeping, rotting sores, the nights I spent screaming into my pillow from the pain, the thousands of comments online calling me a disgusting freak, telling me I deserved it. A loud, piercing ring echoed in my ears. I lunged toward the dining table, grabbed a paring knife from the fruit bowl, and brought it down hard across my own cheek. Blood welled up instantly, a hot, dark red line tracking down my jaw and dripping onto the floorboards. I didn’t care about the pain. I kept my chin high, staring dead into Belinda’s eyes. A flicker of mild surprise crossed her flawless face. “Whoa, why are you being so dramatic? Why would you do that to yourself? Go to the ER or something.” Without missing a beat, she turned her bright, camera-ready smile back to her phone. She picked up a massive, grease-dripping slice of pepperoni pizza. “Sorry about that, guys! Anyway, let’s keep going!” I stood frozen. Drops of my blood patterned the floor. I felt utterly, hollowly cold. Why? Why didn’t the gash on my face appear on hers? Was the transfer strictly one-way? No. In my previous life, there was a brief window where my body had actually started to heal. The transfer wasn’t a one-way mirror. There had to be a mechanism, a set of rules governing this sick magic. I was going to figure out how it worked. I refused to die as a sacrificial lamb again. Just then, our mother, Diane, stepped out of the hallway. She took one look at my face and let out a bloodcurdling scream. “Are you out of your mind?! Why would you do this to your face?!” She was screaming at me, but her hands were trembling violently. She frantically grabbed a clean dish towel and pressed it hard against my bleeding cheek. “Does it hurt? Shh, it’s okay, Mom’s here. We’re going to the hospital right now.” She practically dragged me to the ER. They cleaned the wound. Ten stitches. Through the entire procedure, Diane stood in the corner, crying into her hands as the doctor spoke. When we left the hospital, she drove straight to a high-end department store. She bought the most expensive scar-fading serums on the market and dragged me to a luxury beauty counter to color-match an array of heavy concealers. “With these, you won’t even be able to tell,” she whispered, her voice tight. Then, we went to an organic grocery store, loading the cart with lean proteins and dark greens. “Don’t worry, honey. Mom is going to diet right alongside you!” Later that night, I lay in my bed, the rhythmic throbbing of my stitches syncing with my heartbeat. Inside, my chest was a cavern of ice. I had been dead wrong. I thought hurting myself would finally make Belinda feel the pain. But I had ten black threads holding my face together, and she hadn’t so much as winced. The damage I inflicted on myself didn’t magically bounce onto her. I closed my eyes, forcing myself to sift through every microscopic detail of my past life. 2 In my previous life, I remembered a man visiting our house. He looked like one of those hollow-eyed street psychics—a drifter who claimed to read auras. Ever since the day he walked through our front door, the gravity in our house shifted. Belinda suddenly started doing “mukbang” livestreams, rebranding herself as an internet personality. On camera, she would tear into buckets of fried chicken, chug two-liter bottles of soda, and inhale entire frosted cakes in minutes. The more she ate, the less she studied. Her backpack gathered dust in the corner of her room. Her channel was called “The Honor Roll Glutton.” Her comments were flooded with people obsessing over how she could be so impossibly gorgeous, eat like a linebacker, and still be the smartest girl in school. But I knew the truth. She hadn’t opened a book in months. One evening, I watched her pull open a greasy cardboard box holding another massive pizza. I couldn’t help myself. “You really shouldn’t eat that. It’s garbage. And finals are coming up—you can’t just stream every night. You need to study.” Belinda looked up at me, a slow, mocking smirk stretching across her lips. “Why are you so obsessed with what I do? I’m naturally gifted. I can pass without even trying.” She dismissed me with a wave of her hand and turned back to her phone, her voice instantly dropping an octave into that sweet, breathy influencer tone. “Okay besties, time for the family-sized bucket challenge!” I bit my tongue and retreated to my room. But the moment I sat down at my desk, my stomach seized. A violent wave of nausea hit me. I barely made it to the bathroom before I was hunched over the toilet, dry-heaving until I threw up bitter, burning bile. From that day forward, my weight skyrocketed. I could breathe in the vicinity of a carb and put on three pounds. My face erupted in deep, painful cystic acne that sat under my skin like angry red bruises. Diane dragged me to every specialist in the county. Every doctor gave us the exact same speech: My diet was terrible, I was consuming too much sugar and oil, and my hormones were severely imbalanced. They prescribed a pharmacy’s worth of pills and handed me strict, joyless meal plans. Diane hyper-fixated on my recovery. She spent hours in the kitchen prepping my “clean eats.” Boiled, unseasoned chicken breast. Sad, limp broccoli. Salads dressed in nothing but a squeeze of lemon. She maxed out her credit cards on skincare. My vanity was buried under glass droppers and frosted jars. “My friend at the med-spa said this is the holy grail,” she’d tell me, carefully lining them up. “Acne-clearing, brightening, cell-renewing. It has everything.” I looked at the price tags left on the bottles and felt a sickening knot of guilt in my stomach. “Mom, how much did all this cost? It’s too much.” “Don’t say that!” Diane snapped, though her eyes were shining with tears. “If it fixes you, I’d sell this house. You know that.” I swallowed the guilt and became a militant soldier for my own health. I kept a dedicated journal. I tracked every ounce of my weight, every fraction of an inch on my waist. I documented whether the swelling of my acne had gone down or flared up. But no miracle ever came. My weight didn’t just plateau; it climbed relentlessly, expanding me like a balloon hooked to a helium tank. Across the hall, Belinda strutted around in denim cut-offs, her skin taut and glowing, her legs perfectly straight and devoid of a single flaw. I stood in front of my mirror, staring at my heavy, swollen body, trailing my fingers over the bumpy, inflamed terrain of my cheeks. A violent concoction of grief and rage bubbled up in my throat. “I’m so jealous of you,” I muttered to her once. “You eat whatever you want, and your skin is perfect.” Belinda just smiled at me. It was a smile that didn’t reach her eyes. “Good genetics, I guess. You can’t force what Mom and Dad didn’t give you. I mean, sure, we’re twins… but at the end of the day, some people are just built different. Right?” 3 My weight continued its terrifying, uncontrollable ascent. Diane was frantic. She pulled strings to get me into an exclusive endocrinologist. The specialist stared at my bloodwork and my painstakingly detailed food logs, his brow deeply furrowed. “Are you absolutely certain you’ve adhered to this diet and exercise regimen?” “Yes! Doctor, we follow it like it’s the Bible!” Diane’s voice pitched up in desperation. She pulled out her phone, aggressively swiping through a photo album documenting every single miserable meal I had eaten, alongside screenshots of my Apple Watch fitness rings. The doctor scrolled through the evidence, looking profoundly disturbed. “This doesn’t make physiological sense. Even with severe metabolic resistance, under this caloric deficit and cardiovascular strain, her weight should have stabilized. It certainly shouldn’t be climbing like this.” He looked up at me, his eyes entirely blank with confusion. “Your regimen is flawless. Scientifically, this outcome should be impossible.” I felt like I was drowning in wet concrete. Even the experts didn’t know what was wrong with me. Why couldn’t I lose a single pound? Why was I living in a state of constant, grueling deprivation for absolutely nothing? And then there was Belinda. Screaming at her camera while shoving fistfuls of frosted cake into her mouth. She never moved faster than a slow walk. She didn’t even take the stairs if she could avoid it. Yet she looked airbrushed in real life. Glowing. Perfect. A dark, deeply unsettling thought wormed its way into my brain. Was it possible… that the “health” I was starving myself for, and the “results” of the grueling workouts I put my body through… were being transferred? Siphoned off, straight into Belinda? I shook my head violently, trying to rattle the insane theory out of my skull. It was ridiculous. I was just looking for a scapegoat for my own broken biology. But something in me snapped. I was done. If I was going to look like a monster anyway, I might as well stop torturing myself. That night at dinner, I shoved the plate of boiled, pale vegetables away. “I’m not eating this. Don’t cook it for me anymore.” Diane froze, her fork suspended in mid-air. “Are you out of your mind? You can’t just give up!” “I eat this garbage and I get fatter! I work out and I get uglier! What is the point?!” I yelled. “Paige, don’t do this.” The voice came from across the table. Belinda. She was staring at me, her voice laced with a frantic, desperate urgency I had never heard before. “You just have to keep going. It’s going to work. Look how hard Mom is trying for you.” I stared at my sister. Her shoulders were rigid. There was real, undeniable panic in her eyes. Belinda never looked at me. She treated me like furniture. Why on earth did she suddenly care if I ate my broccoli? She was overreacting. It wasn’t natural. She was hiding something. I swallowed the suspicion rising in my throat and forced my shoulders to drop, faking defeat. “Fine. You’re right. I’ll keep trying.” Diane let out a massive sigh of relief, and the visible tension completely drained from Belinda’s posture. But from that moment on, I lived a double life. When Diane brought me my diet food, I waited until she turned her back and flushed it down the toilet. Then I’d sneak out the fire escape, buy a massive bag of fast food, and eat it in the dark of my closet. During the hours I was supposed to be doing HIIT workouts in my room, I lay flat on my back, scrolling on my phone. I did this for four days. When weigh-in day arrived, I stepped onto the scale. I hadn’t gained a pound. In fact, I had dropped weight. As I stared at the digital numbers in shock, a furious shriek echoed from the living room. “Mom! Why the hell am I up two pounds?! And what is this massive zit on my chin?!” 4 I spent an entire week living like a total slob, and I dropped twenty pounds. Belinda was the first to realize something was wrong. “You haven’t been eating Mom’s food, have you? And you’re skipping your workouts.” I didn’t answer her. She immediately shot a sharp, panicked look at Diane. Diane practically lunged at me, gripping my upper arms tightly. “Paige, you can’t do this to me! We are so close to a breakthrough, you just have to push through the plateau!” I ignored her. So, Diane became my warden. She shadowed me. She watched me swallow every single bite of unseasoned spinach. She stood in the corner of my room, counting aloud while I jumped rope until my lungs burned. Two days later, I stepped on the scale. The twenty pounds were back. Belinda, meanwhile, walked out of her bedroom with glass-like skin, looking radiant and utterly refreshed. Word around the house was that she had connected with a “top donator” from her livestream—some rich older guy she was calling her Sugar Daddy—and she had started spending most of her nights out. Simultaneously, my body started failing again. My skin blistered and wept. A searing, agonizing itch spread across my most private areas. Diane rushed me to the clinic. When the lab results came back, the diagnosis hit me like a physical blow: an STD. Inside the small examination room, the way the doctor and the attending nurse looked at me made my skin crawl. It was a mix of clinical pity and profound, undisguised disgust. I sat on the paper-covered table, staring at my swollen, scabbed hands, wishing the floor would open up and swallow me whole. When we got home, Diane placed the orange prescription bottle on the kitchen island. “You probably picked it up from a public restroom or something, honey. I know you’re a good girl. Just take the pills.” I swallowed the heavy antibiotics, but they didn’t do a damn thing. The itching grew worse, the festering sores spreading further across my thighs. That evening, Belinda actually graced us with her presence for dinner. Diane served her a bowl of rich, savory stew. As I watched Belinda lift the spoon to her perfect lips, a dark, intrusive thought bloomed in my mind and took root. When she got up to check her phone, I grabbed the heavy antibiotic pills the doctor had given me, crushed them into a fine white powder, and dumped them straight into her leftover broth. The next morning, I woke up, and the maddening, skin-crawling itch was practically gone. But that night, a video of me crushing the pills went live on Belinda’s social media. Diane had installed a nanny cam in the kitchen to make sure I wasn’t cheating on my diet. It had caught my exact, calculated movements. The video went viral within hours. The internet tore me to shreds. “Ugly on the outside, evil on the inside. She caught a nasty disease and tried to poison her sister with it!” “Looking like a literal troll and acting like a psycho.” “Belinda is an angel. Imagine living with a monster like that, praying for her.” “We love you, Belinda! Stay safe!” Diane watched the video and didn’t offer a single word in my defense. Belinda’s follower count exploded overnight. She hosted a livestream, sobbing beautifully into the camera, dabbing at her dry eyes. “I just… I never thought my own flesh and blood would try to hurt me like this.” Donations, super-chats, and digital gifts rained down across the screen. She trended on Twitter. #ProtectBelinda. #MukbangQueen. Talent agencies started sliding into her DMs, offering her brand deals and reality TV spots. The timeline was flooded with photos of her looking fragile, gorgeous, and “brave.” And I was the grotesque villain in her origin story. My face was photoshopped into horrifying, demonic caricatures, placed side-by-side with her angelic selfies. After that night, the last thread of my compliance snapped. Fuck the diet. Fuck the medication. Fuck the jumping rope. Diane cried. She begged. She screamed. She even slapped me across the face. “Are you trying to kill yourself?! Why can’t you just be good?!” I didn’t care. I barricaded myself in my room. I ordered greasy takeout, I refused to move, and I threw the medication in the trash. And, like clockwork, the numbers on my scale began to drop. The weeping sores on my skin finally began to scab over and heal. 5 When Diane realized I was fully refusing to eat her boiled garbage, she lost her mind. She went out to the garage and came back with a thin, flexible fiberglass rod used for tomato plants. “You are going to eat!” she screamed. “You are not leaving this table until that plate is clean!” I clenched my jaw and shook my head. She swung it. The rod sliced through the air and struck my arm right through my thin pajama shirt. It burned like a line of liquid fire. Tears streamed down my face from the shock of the pain. Sobbing, I grabbed handfuls of the cold, wet lettuce and shoved them into my mouth, chewing through my own tears. She stood over me until I swallowed every bite, then pointed to the jump rope. “Jump! One thousand times! If you stop before a thousand, I will beat you until you can’t stand!” I jumped. My heavy body shook with every landing, the tears blinding me. Every time I slowed down, the rod snapped against my back. But I didn’t lose weight. I only gained it back, heavier than before. I couldn’t take it anymore. While they were taking a nap the next afternoon, I slipped out the front door and sprinted all the way to the local police precinct. The desk sergeant looked over the counter at me, bewildered. “Can I help you, miss?” “I need to report an assault!” I gasped, out of breath. “My mother and my sister! They’re abusing me! She hit me with a fiberglass whip and forces me to exercise until I pass out!” The officer’s face hardened. “Do you have proof? Where are the injuries?” “Right here!” I violently shoved my sleeves up, then yanked up the legs of my sweatpants. “Look! She hit me so hard, I swear!” I looked down. My arms and legs were covered in soft, heavy flesh. The skin was completely clear. Not a single red mark. Not a single bruise. The officer frowned deeply. Before I could speak, the precinct doors burst open. Diane and Belinda rushed in. The second Diane saw me, she burst into theatrical, heartbroken tears, running over to wrap her arms around me. “Officer, I am so, so sorry! Please excuse this!” she wept, sounding entirely devastated. “My daughter… she’s very sick. She’s refusing her treatments. I’m just at my wit’s end!” She pulled her phone out, aggressively swiping to show the officer her meticulously curated photo album of my “health food,” along with a thick stack of printed medical records. “The doctors told her if she keeps gaining weight, her heart is going to give out! But if I don’t force her, she just lays in bed eating herself to death! What is a mother supposed to do?!” The officer looked through the medical files. His stern expression melted into sympathetic understanding. He turned to me, his voice taking on a firm, patronizing tone. “Listen to me, young lady. Your mother is trying to save your life. You need to cooperate. Put down the junk food, get some exercise, and get healthy.” Belinda stepped forward, placing a gentle, perfectly manicured hand on my shoulder. She looked at the officer, then at the small crowd of onlookers in the lobby. “Don’t worry, Officer. We’re going to get her the help she needs. Paige, please don’t give up. We’re family. We love you.” The bystanders nodded approvingly. “That poor mother.” “She’s lucky to have a sister who cares that much.” “Kids these days have no idea how good they have it.” Belinda’s face was the picture of sorrowful concern, but as she looked at me, the extreme corner of her mouth twitched upward in a smirk. To punish me for my little stunt, Belinda kicked her lifestyle into overdrive. 6 Belinda’s streams became unhinged. She booked a flight to a developing country on a whim. She went live while wading waist-deep into a highly polluted, trash-filled river, eating greasy street food with unwashed hands. When she got thirsty, she cupped her hands and drank the brown, murky river water right on camera. Her chat went nuclear. “OMG is she insane??” “Bro that water is toxic waste!” “She’s got a stomach of iron, absolute legend.” “Instant follow.” The shock value worked. She hit a million concurrent viewers. She stood dripping wet on the riverbank, proudly showing off her impossibly flat stomach and glowing, untouchable skin. Ten minutes after she ended her stream, I was sitting in my bedroom when my stomach cramped so violently I fell out of my chair. I crawled to the bathroom, gripping the toilet bowl, and vomited. It wasn’t food. It was pitch-black, rancid sludge that smelled like decaying meat. I collapsed onto the bathroom tiles, gasping for air. As my vision cleared, I looked into the bowl. Tiny, pale white parasites were writhing in the dark water. Something inside me shattered. I bolted out of the apartment. I didn’t know where I was going, I just ran until my lungs burned, blindly forcing open the roof access door of our apartment building. The wind hit my face. I stepped up onto the ledge. Just as I shifted my weight forward, a hand—bony but incredibly strong—clamped around my bicep and yanked me backward. “What the hell do you think you’re doing, child?!” I hit the gravel roof, curling into a ball, sobbing hysterically. It was Alma, an older woman who sometimes stayed with our neighbor, Martha. She was deeply spiritual, an old-school holistic healer who practiced out of a small apothecary downtown. Without asking, she dropped to her knees, grabbed my wrist, and pressed her fingers hard into my pulse points. Her silver eyebrows knitted together. “What have you done to yourself, girl?” she demanded, her voice sharp with authority. “Your pulse is a chaotic mess. It’s weak, completely hollowed out. This is the pulse of someone who has been ingesting literal filth and entirely depleted their life force! And the infections—are you living on the streets? Have you no self-respect?” “No! No, I haven’t!” I screamed, grabbing the hem of her cardigan like a lifeline, my voice cracking. “Please believe me! I swear! I only eat boiled vegetables! I’ve never even held a boy’s hand!” “What on earth is going on up here?” Martha, our neighbor, stepped out onto the roof, her eyes widening when she saw me on the ground. She listened to Alma’s harsh assessment, then looked down at me. Martha hesitated for a second before softening. “Alma, I’ve watched this girl grow up. She was always the quiet, sweet one. She’s not out there living wild. If she says it’s the truth, I believe her.” After all these years. Finally. Someone said they believed me. The dam broke. The years of gaslighting, the physical torture, the crushing isolation—it all flooded out. I wailed, my body shaking so hard I couldn’t catch my breath, the last remaining threads of my sanity snapping. Alma’s stern face softened. She pressed her fingers back to my pulse, muttering to herself. “It makes no sense. You carry all this weight, but your energy is entirely drained, like a hollow shell. A body this size shouldn’t be starving to death from the inside. Something here is deeply unnatural.” Martha gently helped me to my feet. “Come on, sweetheart. You’re coming to my place.” Inside Martha’s apartment, it felt like stepping into a different universe. She set a steaming bowl of rich, savory beef stew in front of me, alongside a plate of buttered rolls. I hadn’t tasted real salt or fat in so long. The first bite made me weep silently into the bowl. When I finished, she pulled a cold, perfectly ripe peach from the fridge and placed it in my hands. “I remember you used to love these when you were little.” I held the fuzzy skin against my palm. I did love them. But years ago, Diane suddenly declared I was deathly allergic to peaches and forbade me from ever eating one again. I took a massive bite of the sweet fruit. With my other hand, I pulled out my phone and tapped into Belinda’s livestream.

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I suffered every imaginable torment in that foreign penitentiary, waiting for a justice that never came. When the embassy finally contacted Chloe to claim my body, she laughed. She told the magistrate it was a sick prank, a silicone dummy I’d commissioned just to torture her. “That piece of trash violated me,” she sneered through the phone, her voice dripping with a cruelty that used to break my heart. “Even if his rotting corpse gets flushed down a storm drain, I wouldn’t waste a single breath looking at him.” What she didn’t know was that I wasn’t hiding. I was really, truly dead. Three years ago, after she was assaulted on that yacht, her trauma fractured her reality. She became hysterical, pointing a trembling finger at me, accusing me of being the monster who ruined her. Both of our families knew the truth. They knew the real culprit was inextricably tied to Brady—the golden boy, the untouchable center of her universe. Yet, they all looked away. They fed me to the wolves to satisfy her need for vengeance. They left me to rot in a sun-baked hellhole halfway across the world. And while I was bleeding on concrete floors, Chloe liquidated the tech company I had built from nothing, using my money to bury the evidence and keep her true love out of prison. I often wondered what she would do when she realized the truth. I imagined her holding my skeletal remains, laughing in manic triumph. I imagined her laughing so hard that eventually, the laughter would break, and the tears wouldn’t stop falling. 1. My remains were extradited back to the States. My wife, Chloe, received the formal notice to identify the body. She walked down the stark, fluorescent-lit hallway of the county morgue. As they approached the heavy metal doors, the faint, unmistakable stench of decay leaked into the air. She hesitated. Her stunning features twisted into a mask of pure revulsion. “Does he really think this is going to work?” she muttered, her heels clicking aggressively against the linoleum. “He fakes his death to guilt-trip me into forgiving a rapist? In his dreams.” In the end, she only made it through the doors because Brady had his arms wrapped securely around her waist. My soul drifted silently behind them. I watched, numb, as Chloe playfully bit Brady’s neck, right there in the morgue, as if she were trying to purge the sterile air from her lungs. Then, realizing she might have bitten too hard, she soothed the red mark with her tongue, letting out a soft, breathy giggle. A phantom pressure seized my chest. I couldn’t breathe, even though I had no lungs left to fill. She was flirting with her lover mere feet from my corpse. The medical examiner shifted uncomfortably, clearing his throat to enforce some semblance of respect. Chloe pulled away from Brady, rolling her eyes. She spat a curse under her breath and finally yanked back the white sheet covering the steel table. Just one look. My nonexistent breath hitched. It wasn’t just that I was dead. It was that I had died with zero dignity. My remains were grotesque. “A rotting silicone dummy, Holden. Really?” Chloe’s voice was sharp, bouncing off the tiled walls. “You think you’ve fooled everyone, don’t you? You’re probably hiding in some pathetic little motel right now, laughing at my family. Laughing at the woman you brutalized. You make me sick!” “You might fool the embassy, Holden, but you can’t fool me!” she screamed at the mutilated flesh. “I wish you were dead. I wish you died so thoroughly that your soul wouldn’t even dare cross the border back into this country!” No, Chloe! I’m not lying to you! I surged forward, desperate, reaching out to grab her shoulders. But my translucent hands passed right through the expensive wool of her coat. She turned away from the table and buried her face in Brady’s chest, pressing a lingering kiss to his collarbone. “Let him play dead,” she whispered. “At least now we don’t have to hide anymore.” Brady carried her into the morgue, and he carried her out. The entire walk back to the administrative desk, she stroked his jaw, his neck, kissing him repeatedly as if demanding compensation for having to look at my face. At the front desk, the clerk handed them a thick manila envelope containing my autopsy reports and biometric data. Dozens of pages of irrefutable DNA matches and dental records. If she had bothered to look at even the first page, she would have known the body couldn’t be faked. Instead, Chloe shoved the envelope into her designer tote like it was garbage. Brady stroked her hair, his eyes heavy with practiced sorrow. “Three years ago, Holden almost dragged me down with him. If it weren’t for you fighting for me, exhausting yourself to clear my name… I would have been ruined. I owe you everything.” Chloe shook her head, her gaze softening. “Don’t say that. It wasn’t a big deal. I just spent a little money… liquidated a few of Holden’s start-ups. It didn’t cost my family a dime.” The tech firm I had bled for. The company I worked hundred-hour weeks to build from a garage to a high-rise office—gone in an afternoon. Sold off by my wife to buy the freedom of another man. The dead aren’t supposed to feel anything. So why did it hurt so much? Why did the sheer memory of her voice feel like glass in my veins? Forget it, I told myself. I built that company to afford the experimental treatments for her severe respiratory condition anyway. At least the money was used. “Holden owed me,” Chloe gritted her teeth, her eyes darkening. “Selling off his little vanity projects was letting him off easy.” Brady glanced back down the hallway toward the cold storage rooms. “Are you sure you don’t want to take one last look? Once you sign the release, they’ll bury him. Whatever he did, he was your husband once. He loved you in his own way.” Brady sighed, running a hand through his perfectly styled hair. “Man to man… I almost pity him.” Chloe spat on the ground, her face contorting with disgust. “God, Brady, you’re too kind for your own good. Why are you defending a monster who tried to destroy us? He forced himself on me! Marital rape is still rape!” Her voice trembled, pitching up with genuine, manufactured trauma. “You fought him off. You saved me, and you almost went to prison for assault because of it! He doesn’t even deserve to have his name spoken.” The heavy doors of the morgue slowly swung shut. The clerk slid a clipboard across the counter. “Ma’am, I just need your signature on the release forms.” Chloe picked up the pen. Then, suddenly, her hand froze. She slammed the pen down and backed away. “I am not tying my name to that man.” “Excuse me?” the clerk asked. “Even if he is dead—which he isn’t—I will not put my name on a document as his wife. I have nothing to do with him!” She spun on her heel and stormed out. The clerk looked bewildered and chased after her. “Ma’am! You are legally married. By state law, the spouse must claim the remains—” Chloe paused at the automatic doors. She didn’t look back. “I don’t have a husband. Let his body rot in there. Let the rats eat him. It’s exactly what he deserves.” She threw open the door of her Porsche 911, slammed it shut, and peeled out of the parking lot, the engine roaring in defiance. In the passenger seat, Brady’s phone began to ring incessantly. The police. The morgue. Chloe glanced at the caller ID and shook her head sharply. “Ignore it. Just thinking about him makes my skin crawl. Every time I close my eyes, I’m back on the deck of that yacht, crying, begging him to stop, and he just… he didn’t care. I could kill him myself.” My spirit trembled. Watching the absolute, venomous hatred radiate from her eyes, listening to her rewrite history until it justified grinding my bones to dust—it was a bitter, suffocating pill to swallow. Chloe was my wife, yet she had convinced the world, and herself, that I was a rapist. But I wasn’t. It happened shortly after our wedding, on a luxury cruise through a lawless stretch of international waters in the Caribbean. Armed mercenaries boarded the ship. Chloe was dragged up to the upper deck. By the time I tore through the ship like a madman and finally found her, it was over. She was catatonic, bleeding heavily onto the teakwood floor. The ship’s doctor later told me the trauma had been so severe, the internal damage so catastrophic, that she would never be able to carry a child. I was consumed by a blinding, agonizing guilt. I wanted to rip my own heart out and give it to her if it would make her whole again. But when Chloe finally woke up in the hospital, her mind had snapped. She screamed the moment she saw me. She threw things. She clawed at her own face, demanding that I die to atone for what I had done to her. Her trauma had completely rewritten her memories. She truly believed I was the one who had attacked her. I closed my ghostly eyes, letting the memory wash over me. To give her peace, I let her and her influential family lock me away in a brutal offshore prison. It was a cage built for the worst of humanity. Cartel enforcers, murderers, monsters. And in a place like that, a convicted rapist is the lowest link on the food chain. For three years, I was subjected to torture that defied human comprehension. And on the very night I was finally scheduled to be released, I was given my final release. I died in unimaginable agony. My body was beaten until it was no longer recognizable as human. … Brady drove like a maniac, eventually pulling up to the driveway of my sprawling estate in the suburbs. As Chloe stepped out into the freezing rain, he pulled her flush against his chest, kissing her deeply, hungrily. “It’s okay. Shhh, it’s over now. You’re safe,” he murmured. They held each other tightly in the downpour. I remembered my final moments on earth. I had begged a sympathetic guard to let me make one last phone call. Please… I had choked out into the receiver, blood bubbling in my lungs. Please, just pick up. I’m dying. This is my last chance, Chloe. My last chance to hear your voice… If she had answered. Even if she had picked up just to tell me how much she hated me. Even if she called me pathetic, manipulative, a coward trying to play the victim! If I had just heard her voice, I would have fought. I would have clawed my way back to life just to breathe the same air as her. But the phone just kept ringing. I died in absolute, suffocating despair. I died one day before my sentence was up. Now, I was a wandering ghost. An exile, tethered to the woman who put me in the ground. 2. My soul followed Chloe into the house. I stood in the corners of my own home, watching her and Brady live as husband and wife. They shared coffee in the mornings. They tangled their limbs together at night. Once, I watched Brady carry a heavily intoxicated Chloe through the front door. A visceral, territorial jealousy flared up inside me, and I glared at him, wishing I could tear him apart. But then I remembered Chloe’s sharp slap to my face years ago, her voice ringing in my ears: “Brady and I are just childhood friends! Only someone with a filthy mind would see something dirty in that!” But… do friends sleep in the same bed? Do friends kiss each other with that kind of desperate hunger when no one else is looking? Under the warm glow of the living room lamps, Chloe meticulously ironed Brady’s suit for the next day, folding it neatly over the back of the sofa. She looked like the perfect, devoted wife. That used to be my job. Before every gala, every board meeting, I would lay out her dresses. I would curate her jewelry, making sure every diamond and pearl perfectly complemented her mood. Chloe had always dismissed my efforts with a scoff. “You can take the boy out of the trailer park, but he still acts like the help,” she used to mock me to her friends. “He calls himself a Montgomery, but he has the soul of a butler.” Yet here she was, doing the exact same ‘servant’s work’ for Brady, and looking at him like he hung the moon. I guess that was the difference between being tolerated and being loved. Brady took her hands, bringing her knuckles to his lips for a soft kiss. Chloe closed her eyes, letting out a contented sigh. “Brady, I’m coming with you to the Montgomery estate tomorrow,” she whispered fiercely. “You are the true son of that family. No one is going to take that from you anymore. I’ll stand by you while you take back everything that belongs to you.” Watching her declare her absolute loyalty, I caught a fleeting, calculating shadow cross Brady’s face. I suddenly remembered how it all started. For twenty-something years, Brady was the pampered, adored heir to the Montgomery fortune. Until the day I was found in a dusty Appalachian town and brought back to the sprawling Boston estate. I remembered the look of profound disappointment in my biological parents’ eyes when they saw me in my faded flannel and scuffed boots. They couldn’t believe this rough, quiet mechanic was their actual flesh and blood. That afternoon, Brady had dramatically packed his bags, standing in the foyer with tears in his eyes. “I know we don’t share the same blood,” he had told my parents, his voice breaking perfectly. “But I’ve been a Montgomery my whole life. Even if you cast me out, I will always pray for your health and happiness.” We had been switched at birth. The rundown farmhouse I grew up in—the one with the leaky roof and the endless chores—was where Brady truly belonged. Tom and Mary O’Connor were his parents. But when the Montgomerys looked at me, their eyes begging me to be the bigger person, I caved. “If you want him to stay, let him stay,” I had said, shifting uncomfortably in my cheap sneakers. “Having two sons to take care of you isn’t a bad thing.” I meant it back then. But I regretted it almost immediately. Because Brady became a ghost that haunted my life, a shadow I could never escape, especially when it came to Chloe. At every high-society event, every charity gala, the moment Brady walked into the room, Chloe’s eyes would lock onto him like a magnet. Standing beside her, I—the actual heir to the Montgomery dynasty—faded into a pathetic, invisible joke. Chloe opened her eyes, her gaze practically overflowing with adoration. “It was always supposed to be you,” she told Brady, her voice thick with emotion. “We grew up together. You were the one I was supposed to marry. If that redneck hadn’t shown up and ruined everything, we would be married by now. We would have kids.” Her face hardened. “He stole my future. But it’s not too late. I’m going to divorce him, Brady. I’ll drag him out of hiding and force him to sign the papers, and then we can finally be together.” They stared into each other’s eyes, the air between them growing thick and heavy. Soon, the quiet whispers turned into heavy breathing. Watching them tear at each other’s clothes on the rug of my living room, I closed my eyes and let out a bitter, silent laugh. I always knew she didn’t love me. Her marriage contract was forged with the Montgomery heir. When my identity was revealed, she was legally bound to me. She was Boston royalty—cold, brilliant, and breathtakingly beautiful. I was a grease monkey who didn’t know which fork to use at dinner. How could I ever expect her to love me? I was so naive. I used to tell myself that if I just loved her hard enough, if I was patient and kind, year after year, maybe, just maybe, she would eventually look at me and smile. I was so incredibly wrong. When Chloe was assaulted, her parents had come to me. The aristocratic, untouchable Lynn family had fallen to their knees on my hardwood floor, weeping. “Please, Holden,” her father had begged. “Chloe is too proud. Her mind is shattered. If she knows she was taken by random thugs, she’ll kill herself. She has completely blocked out the real attackers!” “If you just confess,” her mother sobbed, clutching my pant leg. “If you let her believe it was you… her anger will keep her alive. She’ll have someone to hate. Please… it’s the only way she survives this.” Human nature is inherently selfish. If I confessed to a crime I didn’t commit, my life was over. I would be a pariah, a monster in the eyes of the world. I told them no. But I underestimated the depths of my own family’s betrayal. When I went to the Montgomery estate for help, my father locked himself in his study and refused to look at me. My mother threw herself on the floor, weeping hysterically, before swallowing a handful of sleeping pills right in front of me. As she was being pumped full of charcoal in the ER, she confessed the sickening truth. The attack on the yacht hadn’t been random. Brady had gambling debts. He had made a deal with the mercenaries, giving them the security codes to the yacht. It was his fault the pirates boarded. “I raised Brady,” my mother wept, clutching my hands with a desperate, bruising grip. “I love him more than my own life. If he goes to federal prison for this, Holden… I will kill myself. I swear to God, I will die.” Cornered by the people who brought me into the world, suffocated by the tears of the family I had married into, I broke. I took the plea deal. I “confessed.” And I died for it. I paid for their sins with my blood, dying alone in a country where I didn’t even speak the language. If my body hadn’t been deported by a bureaucratic technicality, my soul would have been lost in the dark forever. I tried to find comfort in the finality of it. I’m dead, I told myself. The truth is buried with me. Chloe will never know, and so she will never have to bear the pain of reality. But the phantom knife in my chest kept twisting. After the “incident,” Chloe had developed a severe psychological block. Her doctors called it trauma-induced delusion. Her subconscious had actively rewritten the narrative, turning me into the ultimate villain so she didn’t have to face the chaotic, senseless horror of what actually happened. Her parents enabled the delusion. My parents endorsed it. I did nothing wrong. I loved her perfectly. But the world decided that sacrificing Holden O’Connor was the easiest way to keep everyone else’s lives immaculate. During the private hearings, Chloe hired a ruthless legal team to crucify me. But the American judges weren’t blind. The evidence was circumstantial, the forensics didn’t match, and her case was thrown out repeatedly. Frustrated by the law, the two families pooled their vast resources. They used offshore connections, pulled political strings, and had me illegally extradited and thrown into that South American hellhole. My parents personally flew down to see me handed over to the guards. On that final day, my mother touched my face, her eyes brimming with sorrow. “Just hold on, sweet boy. Three years. We’ll bring you home, and you’ll go back to being a Montgomery.” My father patted my shoulder awkwardly. “Adversity builds character, son. I took my lumps building the empire. A few years roughing it won’t kill you.” As the heavy iron gates slammed shut, I saw Brady standing by the black SUV, waiting for them. He turned his head and looked at me. It was just one look. But it was entirely composed of arrogant, sneering triumph. He had stolen my parents. He had stolen my wife. And he left me to be devoured by the monsters in the dark. And everyone lived happily ever after. Because the right person had been sacrificed. 3. For weeks, my soul drifted aimlessly behind Chloe. I watched her move through the house I had meticulously designed for her, sleeping in the bed I had picked out, laughing with another man. Every corner of the house, right down to the ornate bronze oil diffuser in the hallway, had been placed there by me. Brady stepped out of the shower one evening, toweling his hair. As he walked past, his foot shot out, casually kicking the heavy bronze diffuser. It clattered against the wall, the glass reservoir shattering across the hardwood. “What happened?” Chloe called out, stepping out of the bedroom. Brady looked down at the mess, his expression the picture of innocent dismay. “Oh, damn. This was one of Holden’s little projects, wasn’t it? Supposed to be romantic or something. My bad, Chloe. Total accident.” Chloe stared at the broken glass for a moment. Then, she let out a dismissive scoff. “Typical Holden. Always wasting his time on useless, flashy garbage just so he could play the martyr. He loved putting on a show to prove how much he ‘suffered’ for me. Never once stopped to ask if I actually wanted his help.” My spectral hands curled into fists. The ache in my chest was a physical, pulsing thing. I just loved putting on a show? Chloe had severe, chronic asthma, complicated by a rare allergy. Whenever the seasons changed, or when the stress of running her company peaked, she would spend nights gasping for air, her face pale, terrifyingly close to suffocation. I hated seeing her in pain. I scoured the country for holistic specialists, finally tracking down a retired herbalist in the Pacific Northwest who formulated a customized, eucalyptus-based medicinal wax. Every night, I would set it in that diffuser, letting the slow heat fill the room with a vapor that opened her lungs. Once, after a brutal business trip, she collapsed from a severe respiratory attack, burning with a high fever. I lit the diffuser and sat by her bed, trying to keep the vapor near her face. But she was delirious, thrashing wildly, cursing my name, refusing to let me near her. Terrified she would knock the scalding oil onto her face, I took the medicinal wax, smeared it directly onto my own forearm, and held it over the open candle flame, letting the heat vaporize the medicine from my skin. I sat there like that all night, breathing with her. The hot wax and the open flame blistered my arm terribly. But I would have set myself on fire if it meant Chloe could breathe. When she woke up the next morning, her lungs were clear. My arm, however, was covered in weeping, agonized burns. I didn’t complain. A husband is supposed to protect his wife. You don’t hand the woman you love an invoice for your sacrifices. But when Chloe saw my bandaged arm, she simply rolled her eyes, told me I was clumsy, and walked out of the room. Now, I watched Chloe nudge a piece of the broken glass with her slipper. “Sweep it up and throw it out,” she told the maid coldly. “Holden is trash, everything he touched is trash. It all belongs in the dumpster.” She turned and curled into Brady’s chest, smiling up at him. “He’s such a coward. He doesn’t even have the guts to face me. Going through all the trouble to fake a corpse, just because he knows the second I see him, I’m shoving divorce papers down his throat.” “He knows his entire status in Boston rests on his marriage to me. His parents tolerate him because he’s tied to the Lynn family. If I dump him, he’s back to being nobody.” She laughed, a sharp, brittle sound. “But he’s an idiot if he thinks hiding in some rat-infested motel will save him. I’ll drag him back by his hair if I have to.” I listened to her speech with a tired, hollow smile. I gave her my soul, and in return, she saw me as a pathetic, gold-digging coward clinging to her coattails. Brady’s eyes flickered, calculating. “Have your private investigators found anything yet? Chloe… is it possible the body was real? What if he actually is…” “Impossible!” Chloe snapped, suddenly stepping away from him, her body rigid. “If it weren’t for him, I never would have endured what I went through! Dying is too easy for him! He doesn’t get to just die!” She paced the room, her chest heaving. “That thing in the morgue was a prop. It’s a sick joke. He’s probably watching from somewhere, getting off on my reaction.” Suddenly, she spun around, throwing her arms around Brady’s neck and pressing her lips aggressively against his. “Distract me, Brady. Wash the thought of him out of my head. He makes me sick.” Brady let out a low laugh, scooping her up into his arms and carrying her toward the bedroom. “Happy to oblige.” They crashed onto the mattress, tearing at each other with a frantic, desperate energy. Chloe’s screams of pleasure echoed off the vaulted ceiling. I stood by the doorway, gripping the frame. I thought I had run out of tears. I thought ghosts couldn’t cry. But the agony tearing through me was so absolute, it felt like I was dying all over again. 4. Chloe’s private investigators turned up nothing. Naturally. My body was still lying in the cold storage drawer at the county morgue. The precinct captain and the medical examiner called her constantly, pleading with her to sign the paperwork so I could be laid to rest. But Chloe lived in a reality of her own making. She was fundamentally convinced the corpse was a fake, and that I was playing a cruel game of hide-and-seek. After hanging up on the police for the fourth time that week, Chloe threw a crystal vase at the wall, shattering it into a thousand pieces. My parents, Richard and Patricia Montgomery, visited the house shortly after. They had no idea I was dead. They assumed I had been quietly released from the offshore prison and was just laying low. They believed that because I loved Chloe so much—because I was willing to go to jail for her—I would inevitably come crawling back. But Brady handled their visit beautifully. He poured their tea, he reminisced about his childhood in their home, and he spun a masterful web of casual lies. “You know how Holden is,” Brady chuckled warmly. “He probably needed to blow off steam after everything. He’s out in Europe somewhere, spending money, enjoying the beaches. He’ll come home when he gets bored.” My mother smiled, completely reassured. “Well, he always was a bit… wild. Growing up in that rural environment, he never really learned responsibility. Let him get it out of his system. It’s good that he’s exploring the world.” My spirit froze. For three years, I was beaten with lead pipes. I was starved. I froze in the winters and baked in the summers. I lived a reality so horrifying it stripped away my humanity. And in my mother’s mind, I was just a wild kid backpacking through Saint-Tropez. “We’re getting older,” my mother continued, reaching out to pat Brady’s hand. “Honestly, having you here to take care of us is a blessing, Brady. You understand tradition. You understand duty. You’ll be the one to look after us when we’re gone.” My parents left the estate in good spirits. They never mentioned my name again. But Chloe was unraveling. Every day her investigators came back empty-handed, she grew more frantic. By day, she screamed at her staff. By night, she dragged Brady into her bed, demanding a physical intensity that was bordering on violent. You could see the exhaustion settling into Brady’s bones. She even posted a bounty on her social media. Ten thousand dollars to anyone with a confirmed sighting of Holden O’Connor. 5. After a particularly aggressive session in the bedroom, Brady collapsed back against the pillows, gasping for air. He pulled Chloe to his chest. “Chloe… I don’t think he’s hiding from you on purpose. What if he’s in trouble? Maybe he owes money to the wrong people abroad? Maybe he’s too scared to come back?” “Bullshit!” Chloe shrieked, shoving him away and sitting up violently. “If he needed money, he’d crawl back here! It’s not like the Montgomerys would let him starve. And if they did, he’d beg me for it!” She dug her nails into her palms. “He loves me! He’s obsessed with me! The only reason he’s staying away is because he knows I’ll divorce him the second I see his face. He’s dragging this out!” Her eyes darted around the room, manic and bright. “Fine. If he won’t come out, I’ll start burning down everything he cares about. He still has those hillbilly adoptive parents, doesn’t he? Go get them. Lock them in the basement. Let’s see how long he stays hidden when they start starving.” Brady stared at her, a flicker of genuine unease in his eyes. “Chloe, are you… are you starting to care about him? Is this about getting a divorce, or are you just desperate for him to look at you again?” I held my breath. For a split second, a pathetic, dying ember of hope flared in my chest. “Are you insane?!” Chloe roared, her face flushing with pure rage. “I just want this over! I want the divorce finalized so I never have to look at his disgusting face again! I want to be entirely clean of him!” Brady reached out, cupping her cheek, playing the wounded lover to perfection. “You’ve been acting so erratic lately. If… if you really still have feelings for him, Chloe, just tell me. I’ll pack my things. I’ll walk away and let you two fix your marriage.” “I am not married to him! Who in their right mind would love a piece of white trash like that?!” She caught herself, taking a deep breath to rein in her hysteria. She leaned down and kissed Brady’s forehead. “I’ll prove it to you, Brady. I’ll prove exactly how much I hate him.” I found out very quickly how she planned to prove it. That night, Tom and Mary O’Connor—the gentle, quiet people who had raised me—were dragged out of a black van, black hoods pulled over their heads. They were thrown onto the marble floor of Chloe’s living room like sacks of garbage. “D… daughter-in-law?” my mother stammered, her voice shaking violently as the hood was yanked off. She had lived a quiet life in rural Ohio. She was terrified. “Don’t call me that!” Chloe snatched a heavy crystal tumbler off the table and hurled it. It shattered against my mother’s forehead, drawing a sharp line of blood. My father let out a raw, guttural cry and threw himself over his wife, using his broad shoulders to shield her head. Chloe sneered, her eyes locking onto my father’s hands—hands that were permanently calloused and stained with engine grease and soil from working three jobs to keep me fed. “Filthy,” she muttered in disgust. She crossed her arms, looking down at them like insects. “Your pathetic son is hiding from me because he refuses to sign the divorce papers. Since he clearly has no spine, I’m holding you responsible. You’re not leaving this house until he shows his face.” My father looked up, his weathered face tight with indignation. “Holden is a good boy! He spent his whole life breaking his back to help us put food on the table! You don’t get to talk about my son that way!” Chloe’s eyes went dead. “Holden is a rapist. He violated me. It cost me millions in legal fees just to get him locked in a foreign cage where he belonged! His three years are up. He should be on his knees outside my door, begging for my mercy. But he’s too much of a coward to even face me. Calling him half a man is giving him too much credit!” “No! You’re lying! My boy would never do that! I don’t believe you!” My father, a man who had never raised his voice in his life, suddenly surged forward, his face red with protective fury. Chloe stumbled back, startled. But her security team reacted instantly. Three massive bodyguards tackled my aging father to the ground, slamming his face into the marble. Brady hurried down the stairs, tying his robe. “Chloe, what’s going on? Should we really be doing this? They’re old…” Chloe’s voice was ice. “Trash breeds trash. Break his legs.” “Chloe, wait—” Brady started. “If you raise a monster, you pay the price,” she barked at the guards. “Do it! It’s a public service!” No! Don’t touch them! Leave them alone! Rage, hot and blinding, erupted in my chest. My vision went entirely red. I threw myself at the guards, swinging wildly, screaming at the top of my lungs. But my fists just passed through empty air. I was forced to stand there and watch as they took a baton to my father’s knees. The crack of his bones echoed through the cavernous room. He didn’t scream. He just bit down on his lip until it bled. The jagged white edge of a fractured bone pierced through the fabric of his jeans. My mother began to scream—a high, piercing wail of absolute agony—before her eyes rolled back into her head and she collapsed, coughing up blood. Chloe watched the entire scene with dead, bored eyes. She even gestured for her assistant to pull out a phone and start recording. The anger inside me was so absolute it felt like it was tearing my soul apart. How could I have ever loved this woman? How could I have ever thought there was a heart buried beneath that ice? Suddenly, the front door exploded inward. “Police! Nobody move!” A SWAT team flooded the foyer, assault rifles raised. “Chloe Lynn! We received a tip about a kidnapping at this residence. Drop the phone and put your hands behind your back!” Paramedics rushed in behind the cops, immediately swarming my parents. My father had passed out from the shock. My mother regained consciousness as they loa

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I have always possessed a heart made of spun glass. The slightest tremor, the quietest rejection, and the fractures would spiderweb through my chest until I simply didn’t want to exist anymore. Once, when I caught my boyfriend with the girl I called my best friend, the betrayal shattered me so thoroughly that I decided we should all just leave this earth together. When my mother, suffocating and controlling, secretly logged in and changed my college applications to suit her own desires, the despair was so heavy I simply walked up to the roof and stepped into the open air. When my father, a man made of debts and empty promises, accused me of stealing the grocery money he had actually gambled away, the injustice of it burned so hot that I threw myself headfirst into the drywall. That was the pattern. Over the years, I had racked up a staggering tally: one hundred and eight attempts to end it all. One hundred and eight times I should have died. And then, one day, the wealthiest man in the country—a man I’d only ever seen on the covers of financial magazines—kicked down my door and begged to marry me. On my first day living in his estate, his socialite ex-girlfriend stormed in, painting her lips crimson and pointing a manicured finger at my face, calling me a homewrecker. The familiar sting of injustice flared. My chest tightened. Almost on autopilot, I reached for the silver fruit knife resting on the mahogany table, ready to drag it across my wrist. The billionaire didn’t hesitate. He lunged across the room, slapping the woman’s hand away with a fury that made the windows rattle. “If anyone so much as looks at her wrong,” he roared, his voice trembling with a terrifying rage, “I will dismantle their entire life.” Then, he turned to me. The most powerful man in the city dropped to his knees, his expensive suit pooling on the hardwood. He wrapped his arms around my legs, burying his face in my skirt. “Christ, Cheryl,” he choked out, sounding utterly broken. “You’ve died a hundred and eight times already. Please, I am begging you. Just let me keep you alive.” 1 I was born with a fatal flaw in my psychological wiring. Whenever the world pushed back, even slightly, my instinct was to pull the ripcord. To fade out. To die. It started small. When I was a little girl, a neighbor offhandedly mentioned that I was “such a solemn, unsmiling child.” My fragile little ego fractured. I ran home, hid beneath my quilt, and genuinely lay in the dark calculating how to slip away without it hurting. In middle school, an older girl got jealous that my essay won the district competition instead of hers. She cornered me in the alley behind the gymnasium, shoving me against the brick. I cried hot, humiliating tears and shoved the certificate into her chest. Walking home, the shame fermented into a dark, heavy sludge. I stared at the rushing traffic, thinking how easy it would be to just step off the curb. But the real breaking point came during my freshman year of high school. My father, a degenerate gambler, stole my mother’s emergency cash and blamed it on me. My glass heart didn’t just crack that day; it pulverized. I turned and rammed my head into the living room wall with everything I had. But the strange thing was—while the drywall dented, peeling away in chalky white flakes, and the room spun dizzily, I was perfectly fine. Not a drop of blood. Not a concussion. Once you realize you can survive the impossible, the barrier to trying again drops drastically. When a teacher humiliated me in front of the entire class, I went on a hunger strike. Five days without a drop of water, yet I woke up on the sixth day feeling energized and completely hydrated. When I bombed my SATs, I filled the bathtub, submerged myself, and waited for the dark. Hours later, I woke up beneath the water, having simply taken a peaceful nap. Not a single drop had entered my lungs. Then came the college application disaster. My mother altered my choices, forcing me into a teaching program I despised. I sobbed until my throat bled, tuned out her suffocating lectures, ran up the stairwell of our apartment building, and threw myself off the twentieth floor. I didn’t turn into a smear on the pavement. I didn’t even cough up blood. I just stood up, dusted off my jeans, and walked away. Pills, carbon monoxide, leaping—nothing worked. I was entirely, frustratingly immortal. My one hundred and ninth attempt was catalyzed by catching Charles, my college boyfriend, tangled in the sheets with my supposed best friend. I didn’t say a word. I just walked to the kitchen, grabbed the sharpest paring knife I could find, and charged back into the bedroom, my vision tunneled in red. Just as the tip of the blade was about to graze Charles’s bare chest, the apartment door exploded inward. I whipped around to see Berton Sinclair. The Berton Sinclair. Tech mogul, billionaire, a man whose face I’d seen on billboards in Times Square. He was sprinting down the narrow hallway of my cheap apartment, trailing a team of frantic paramedics in white coats. When Berton saw the knife in my fist, the blood drained from his face. He stumbled toward me, his hands raised in surrender. “Cheryl, please. Stop. Just put the knife down,” he pleaded, his voice cracking. “Think about your parents. If you die, think of what it would do to them.” I paused for exactly two seconds. I thought about my father, shaking me down for casino money. I thought about my mother, checking my phone logs and dictating my breathing. The memory made the knife feel lighter. I adjusted my grip. Seeing the shift in my eyes, the billionaire looked like he was about to weep. He threw out a lifeline, desperate and frantic. “Whatever you want,” Berton gasped out. “As long as it’s legal, I will give it to you. A penthouse, sports cars, blank checks. I don’t care. Just… please don’t kill yourself.” I stared at him, my mind short-circuiting. Was he just so obscenely wealthy that he played vigilante savior for fun? Sensing my hesitation, Berton doubled down. “Money solves ninety-nine percent of the world’s problems, Cheryl. Stay alive, and I swear on my life, you will never want for anything again. Hell, if you want to work at my company with your boyfriend, or just sit on the payroll and collect a massive salary, it’s yours.” That last sentence was a mistake. I glared at Berton, the betrayal twisting tight in my gut. He was in on it. He was friends with my cheating scum of a boyfriend. Without a fraction of a second’s hesitation, I turned the blade inward and drove it straight into my own chest. Hot blood rushed over my fingers, blooming instantly across my shirt. Pain, sharp and blinding, ripped through me. The world tilted, and I collapsed against the cheap linoleum. As the darkness swallowed me, I heard Berton’s voice, thick with agony and absolute despair: “A hundred and eight times… wasn’t that enough? Why do you want to die so badly?!” 2 When I opened my eyes, I was drowning in the softest Egyptian cotton sheets I had ever felt. For a brief, euphoric moment, I thought the afterlife had excellent thread counts. Then, my eyes focused on Berton Sinclair’s exhausted, furious face. Seeing me awake, he rolled his eyes toward the vaulted ceiling, but the irritation quickly melted into a hyper-vigilant stare. He watched my hands, my breathing, as if terrified I might spontaneously combust. The disappointment settled heavy in my bones. I was still alive. I ignored his glare, overwhelmed by a wave of exhaustion and self-loathing. What kind of cosmic joke was I? I had plunged a knife directly into my heart, and the universe had just spit me back out. The harder it was to die, the more the obsession clawed at me. I scanned the luxurious bedroom. No sharp objects. No glass vases. Berton followed my gaze, his jaw ticking. “What are you looking for? Are you hungry?” he demanded, his voice tight. “Tell me what you want. I’ll have the private chef make it right now.” I didn’t want to talk to this bizarre, intrusive billionaire. I just wanted to find a solid surface, shatter my skull, and leave this miserable, disappointing world behind. I threw off the covers, planted my feet, and sprinted full-force toward the pristine white wall. Thud. The impact didn’t feel like drywall. It was warm. It smelled of cedar and expensive cologne. And it let out a sharp, winded gasp. Had Berton’s house come alive? I opened my eyes in a panic, only to realize something far worse. I hadn’t hit the wall. I had rammed headfirst into Berton’s chest. No wonder it hadn’t cracked my skull open. But Berton looked like he was in agony. Tears actually pricked the corners of his eyes. Mortified, I rubbed my nose and tried to step back. He wasn’t having it. His hand shot out, wrapping around my wrist with an iron grip. When he spoke, it was through gritted teeth. “What the hell is wrong with you?” I gave a weak tug, but he wouldn’t let go. Defeated, my shoulders slumped. “I want to die.” The words seemed to ignite something volatile inside him. “You are in your twenties! Why is your first instinct always to end it? Do you have any idea what this does to your parents? What it does to… to the people who care about you?” I looked up at him, genuinely bewildered. Why was he weaponizing the people who broke me? My father didn’t care about me; he cared about his next hand of blackjack. The dull ache in my ribs on rainy days was a permanent reminder of the time he kicked me for refusing to hand over my paycheck. And my mother? She controlled me like a puppet. Growing up, I was only allowed to speak to children with high GPAs. In college, she demanded my passwords to read my texts. When I finally graduated, she threatened to swallow pills if I didn’t move back home, take a mundane office job, and marry a man of her choosing. When I didn’t answer, Berton’s anger seemed to evaporate. He leaned in, his eyes scanning my pale face with an intensity that made my breath hitch. I took a defensive step back. I didn’t know this man. Why did he care? “Because I… I have more money than I know what to do with, and I want to play savior. Is that a crime?” I blinked, realizing I had spoken my thoughts out loud. Too much money and wants to play savior. What an utterly bizarre, detached reality the one percent lived in. Seeing my lingering suspicion, Berton sighed, reached into the inner pocket of his tailored suit, and pulled out a card. It was sleek, heavy, and matte black. My eyes locked onto it. Was that an actual, no-limit Centurion card? Berton let out a breath, looking almost relieved. Thank God she still cares about money, his eyes seemed to say. He pressed the cold metal into my palm. “It’s yours. Buy whatever you want. Max it out. I don’t care.” My heart gave a violent, pathetic flutter. Damn it. Was this the corrupting power of capitalism? It was incredibly tempting. Maybe dying could wait until the weekend? I immediately pulled out my phone, opened the voice memo app, and shoved it toward his face, looking at him with bright, expectant eyes. Berton coughed, suddenly looking very awkward. He raised a brow. “What? You want my number?” “No,” I said, entirely serious. “I need you to repeat what you just said on the record. Otherwise, you’re going to claim it was a loan and sue me for the balance later.” Berton’s face darkened with a mixture of disbelief and offense, but he grumbled into the microphone, repeating his offer. Satisfied, I slipped the phone into my pocket and followed him downstairs to the dining room. Over the next few days, Berton went full Mother Teresa on me. He handled the fallout with my ex, broke my lease, and absolutely refused to let me return to my cramped apartment. He insisted I stay in his sprawling, quiet estate. Between the exhaustion of fighting him, the undeniable comfort of the mansion, and the fact that it was a much shorter commute to my job, I gave in. For almost a week, the quiet luxury of the house worked like a balm. The urge to fade away dialed down to a low hum. Then, on a Tuesday afternoon, my boss called me into his glass-walled office. For two grueling hours, he stood over my desk, screaming at me, waving a pitch deck I had revised thirty-six times. He tore my work apart, calling me incompetent, lazy, and a waste of payroll. The kicker? The client ended up choosing my very first draft. How was that my fault? I had lost sleep, skipped meals, and bled over those revisions because he told me to. I hadn’t even raised my voice, and here he was, humiliating me in front of the entire bullpen, accusing me of wasting his time. The injustice of it felt like shards of glass in my throat. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t take it anymore. When the clock struck five, I walked out of the office, took the elevator up to the roof, and stepped off the ledge. 3 I woke up in Berton’s guest room. Again. I threw a pillow across the room and screamed at the ceiling, “I hate corporate America! They treat us like absolute livestock!” From the dark corner of the room, a low, moody voice replied, “So, you want to be the boss.” I jumped, clutching the duvet to my chest. Berton stepped out of the shadows. He looked exhausted, his handsome face tight with frustration. “I gave you an unlimited credit card, Cheryl,” he said, pacing toward the foot of the bed. “If you want to be the boss, buy a damn company. If someone yells at you, yell back. You have me backing you, and you’re still letting these mid-level managers walk all over you? Have you never learned how to throw your weight around?” I paused. He made a fair point. Then, my shoulders slumped. “Forget it. I don’t know the first thing about running a business. And I couldn’t be ruthless. If I can’t be a cutthroat capitalist, I’d just ruin the market.” Berton let out an exasperated sigh, pulled out his phone, fired off a rapid series of texts, and shoved it back into his pocket. He caught me staring and scowled. “Go to sleep. Now.” I flinched, stuttering slightly. “I… I can’t sleep with you standing there.” Usually, Berton was the picture of refined elegance, treating everyone from board members to the housekeeping staff with polite detachment. Right now, he looked like a powder keg about to blow, glaring at me with zero gentlemanly restraint. “I am not moving from this chair,” he snapped. “I am staying right here so you don’t decide to fling yourself out a window over some microscopic inconvenience at 3 A.M.” My throat tightened. A familiar prickle of tears burned my eyes. It wasn’t like I enjoyed wanting to die. It was just that the world always felt too heavy, too loud, too cruel. Nothing ever went the way it was supposed to. Seeing my eyes well up, the powder keg instantly deflated. Berton scrubbed a hand over his face, walked over, and half-knelt beside the bed. His voice dropped to a low, desperate murmur. “Cheryl… please. Stop overthinking. Just close your eyes. When you wake up, I’m going to take you to get your revenge.” Revenge? My curiosity spiked. I wanted to ask what he meant, to tell him I wasn’t tired, but one look at the sheer exhaustion lining his eyes made me swallow the words. I lay down and squeezed my eyes shut. Oddly enough, within minutes, a heavy, dreamless sleep pulled me under. When I woke up, the sunlight was streaming in, and Berton was gone. I padded down to the dining room. He was sitting at the head of the long table, sipping black coffee. He slid a thick manila folder toward my plate. “Sign,” he said simply. I frowned, opening the cover. My eyes went wide. It was an acquisition contract for the marketing firm I worked for. Berton made a soft clicking sound with his tongue, looking at me like I was a feral cat he’d just brought indoors. “Sign the paper, Cheryl. The company becomes yours. When you walk in there today, your boss will have to bow to you. I shouldn’t have to teach you how to make his life miserable, right?” I tried to refuse, stammering about the cost, but his glare grew so intensely impatient that I finally picked up the Montblanc pen and scribbled my name, my hand shaking. But as the ink dried, I couldn’t stop the corners of my mouth from ticking upward. News travels fast. By the time I walked through the glass doors of my former purgatory, the atmosphere was electric with panic. My boss—my former tormentor—was practically sweating through his suit. He bowed, ushering me into the conference room and pouring me a cup of his prized, ridiculously expensive loose-leaf tea. The other employees watched through the blinds, their eyes wide with envy and shock. I took a sip of the bitter tea. It tasted like absolute victory. Being a cutthroat capitalist? Maybe not so bad after all. When I finally left the building, Berton was idling by the curb in his sleek black SUV to pick me up. My phone buzzed. I pulled it out. The company group chat, which I hadn’t been removed from yet, had over 99 unread messages. Thinking I was gone, they were tearing me apart. Did you see her? Definitely a sugar baby. Slept her way to the top, obviously. Someone had even posted screenshots of Charles’s Instagram story. My ex was claiming that my “sudden wealth” was the reason I had coldly abandoned him after years of dating. The air rushed out of my lungs. That absolute bastard. He cheated on me, and now he was playing the victim to make me look like a gold digger? The rage blinded me. Without a second thought, I turned toward the concrete wall of the parking garage and launched myself forward. Through my peripheral vision, I saw Berton leap out of the SUV, his face twisted in horror. As my skull connected with the concrete, the world didn’t go black for me. Instead, I saw Berton clutch his forehead, his knees buckling as he collapsed limply onto the pavement. 4 When I opened my eyes next, I was back in Berton’s bedroom. He was sitting on the edge of the mattress, scrolling through his phone. There was a stark white gauze bandage taped over his forehead. He looked up, catching me awake, and shot me a glare. But beneath the anger, there was a profound, aching resentment in his eyes. I shrank back. Why was he looking at me like I had just broken his heart? The memory of the group chat flooded back, and that familiar, suffocating weight settled on my chest. I wanted to disappear again. Berton let out a breath that sounded more like a groan. He leaned over, gently catching my chin in his hand, forcing me to look at him. “Alright. Let’s hear it. Who pissed you off this time and made you want to die?” The warmth of his fingers made my eyes well up. I looked at the bandage on his head. “What happened to your forehead? Did you trip trying to catch me?” Berton’s expression darkened. He lifted a finger and flicked me sharply on the forehead. “You have a lot of nerve asking me that!” I winced, rubbing my head, feeling guilty but also strangely… cared for. I spilled the entire story—the group chat, the rumors, Charles’s pathetic Instagram posts. Berton sat in silence for a long time, his jaw working as he processed it. Just when I thought he might lecture me again, a slow, dark smile spread across his face. It was completely out of character. “Perfect timing,” he murmured. “Your ex-boyfriend interviewed at my company a few days ago. He’s up for a final round. You want to ruin his day?” Berton Sinclair rarely smiled. When he did, it was usually the polite, polished curve of a CEO navigating a gala. But this—this was wicked, vengeful, and devastatingly attractive. I couldn’t look away. Knowing Berton was actively handing me the weapon to exact my own revenge sparked a fire in me I hadn’t felt in years. For the first time, the will to survive overshadowed the urge to die. I stopped sighing around the house. I even asked for seconds at dinner. A few days later, Sinclair Enterprises held their final executive interviews. From the security feeds in the lobby, I watched Charles stride in, his chest puffed out, an arrogant smirk on his face. He looked like a man who believed the world owed him a favor. When he finally walked into the boardroom, I was already seated at the center of the interview panel. I wore a dark blazer, a low-brimmed cap, and kept my head down, pretending to review his file. He didn’t even look at me. He just launched into his rehearsed, self-aggrandizing speech about his “visionary marketing strategies.” When he finally paused for breath, I slowly lifted my head. The color drained from his face so fast it was comical. I leaned back in the leather ergonomic chair, a sweet, venomous smile on my lips. “I’m sorry, Mr. Charles,” I said, my voice dripping with faux regret. “But you simply do not meet the standards of this company.”

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When my consciousness finally clawed its way out of the fog, I found myself in the body of a broke college student about to sign her life away as a billionaire’s kept woman. My supposed best friend was currently standing flush in front of me, her chest heaving with righteous indignation as she glared at the man across the table. She declared loudly that even if the Sinclair family went entirely bankrupt, Megan would never stoop so low as to become his trophy pet. The man sitting opposite us possessed a dark, volatile energy. A cynical smirk played on his lips as he picked up the sugar-baby contract, his long fingers gripping the heavy parchment, ready to tear it to shreds. I stared at his face. It was a face etched into the deepest marrow of my bones. A suffocating wave of grievance crashed over me. My vision immediately blurred with hot tears. Before anyone in the opulent VIP room could process what was happening, I lunged across the mahogany table and desperately tore at his tailored shirt. “Where did you go? I’ve been starving to death!” I wailed, my voice cracking. In my past life, I was one of the infected. The walking dead. A monster. Yet, I had kept a human as a pet. During the day, he would brave the apocalyptic wasteland to scavenge for supplies. At night, he would wash himself spotless, climb into bed, and obediently let me pin him down to drink his blood. Then, one day, he just vanished. I starved until I was nothing but a husk. Driven by the agonizing hollow in my gut, I finally gathered the courage to push open the heavy apartment door and search for him. But the second I stepped out, a voice screamed: “That human traitor was harboring a monster! Kill it!” I wanted to explain that they had it backwards. I was the one harboring the human. But when I opened my mouth, the only sound that scraped from my dead throat was a guttural, wet groan. Before I could articulate my defense, a bullet tore through my skull. … 1 A suffocating, eerie silence descended upon the VIP room. Gideon violently snapped out of his shock and shoved me away. A deeply mocking sneer twisted his handsome features. “Just a minute ago, you were playing the tragic martyr, ready to die before submitting. What happened? Decided to just throw yourself at me instead?” Beside me, the original owner’s so-called best friend, Valerie, let out an ear-piercing shriek. Her eyes bulged as she stared at me. “Megan Sinclair! How could you degrade yourself like this? You’re actually agreeing to be Gideon Mercer’s kept woman?” “No! I forbid it! You are leaving with me right now.” She grabbed my arm, attempting to drag me out of the suite. I stumbled a few steps, then violently wrenched my arm free. I spun around, threw my arms around Gideon’s waist, and locked my grip, refusing to let go. I glared at Valerie, thoroughly annoyed. Was this girl out of her mind? I had finally—finally—found my pet human. I hadn’t even taken a single bite yet. Why the hell would I leave? “I’m hungry!” I announced loudly. A low, dark chuckle rumbled from the chest pressed against my cheek. Gideon clapped his hands. The heavy mahogany doors swung open, and a line of servers filed in, carrying silver platters of Michelin-starred cuisine. The room filled with the rich aromas of truffles and seared Wagyu, but I didn’t spare the feast a single glance. My eyes remained locked, utterly fixated, on Gideon. “I don’t eat that.” Gideon’s brow twitched with impatience. “Then what do you want? Pretty demanding for a girl who just sold herself—” “I want to eat you,” I said, pointing a finger squarely at his chest. Gideon choked on his own breath, his eyes widening in sheer disbelief. Beside us, Valerie practically vaulted into the air. She stomped her foot, her face flushed with fury. “Megan! You were an honors student! Did you leave your brain in the gutter? How can you say something so utterly shameless?” “If your parents knew you were whoring yourself out for money like this, they’d jump off a building out of sheer humiliation!” My patience was fraying. Before the original Megan had left the house today, her parents had explicitly instructed her to do whatever it took to please Gideon Mercer. Valerie knew perfectly well that offending Gideon would mean the final, crushing nail in the Sinclair family’s coffin. She also knew the original Megan was fiercely prideful. She was saying these things on purpose, trying to trigger a reaction. Even with a brain that had once been rotting inside a zombie’s skull, I could tell this girl was bad news. I ignored her completely. Instead, I reached my arms up toward Gideon, demanding to be held. “I’m tired. Take me home.” Back in that cramped, apocalyptic apartment, Gideon used to carry me around on his back all the time. He was my human. Bossing him around was my absolute right. Gideon stared at me, uncomprehending for a second. When my demand finally registered, a vein throbbed visibly at his temple. He shrugged off my grip, adjusting his ruined cuffs. “Keep up, then.” I bared my teeth at his retreating back. Just as I thought. Humans needed to be disciplined daily. Leave them outside for too long, and they go completely feral. My stomach gave a violent, hollow rumble. Seeing that Gideon had absolutely no intention of stopping to carry me, I swallowed my pride and trailed after him. I had barely taken two steps when Valerie lunged forward and seized my wrist. Her face was a mask of exaggerated, frantic concern. “Megan, I can’t let you be alone with a man like him. We’re best friends. Don’t worry, I will protect you.” She positioned herself slightly in front of me, a tragic heroine protecting the weak, and lifted her chin defiantly at Gideon. “I am moving into the mansion with Megan. Otherwise, you aren’t taking her anywhere.” Gideon’s dark, predatory gaze swept over the two of us. A slow, enigmatic smile curved his lips. “Fine.” 2 The new house was a sprawling, gated estate—exponentially more magnificent than our old, dingy hundred-square-foot apartment. I nodded in deep satisfaction. The moment we stepped into my assigned bedroom, Valerie’s mask of concern morphed into a severe interrogation. “Megan, you were just putting on an act today to pacify him, right? Someone as proud as you would never willingly be his little toy.” I stared at her, blinking slowly. Toy? Captive? My tongue darted out to lick the corner of my mouth. Whatever it was called, it sounded delicious. I nodded firmly. “I’m doing it.” Valerie looked like she might actually pass out from the sheer audacity. She dug her manicured nails into my shoulders, her eyes burning with a manic intensity. “Are you insane? I’ve told you the rumors! Gideon Mercer is a psychopath—” She dropped her voice to a theatrical, trembling whisper. “He drinks raw blood. He eats raw meat.” I swallowed audibly. A phantom drop of drool practically pooled at the corner of my mouth. I hadn’t tasted blood in three months. Shortly after the apocalypse began, I had found Gideon and hoarded him for myself. Because of him, I never had to roam the dangerous streets hunting humans. I had a steady, warm supply of fresh blood. But ever since he vanished, I hadn’t had a single drop. Now, I had finally found him, but it seemed he had entirely forgotten his place as my pet. Feeling a profound sense of melancholy, I gave Valerie a dismissive wave. “Don’t kink-shame, Valerie. We should respect other people’s dietary preferences.” Valerie’s jaw practically unhinged. “I’m going to sleep. Get out,” I said, shoving her out the door and locking it. When I stepped out of the en-suite bathroom, enveloped in a cloud of steam, I found Gideon lounging on my bed, smoking a cigar. His shirt was half-unbuttoned, his dark, brooding features partially obscured by the curling gray smoke. Seeing me frozen in the doorway, he exhaled a slow plume of smoke, his eyes glinting with dark amusement. “Didn’t you say you wanted to be my devoted little captive? What are you standing there for? Come here and entertain me.” I wrinkled my nose, my expression instantly souring. “Throw it away.” Gideon’s hand stalled mid-air. He looked at me, a dangerous edge sharpening his gaze. “Are you giving me orders in my own house?” I marched over, leaned over him, and pressed my nose to his neck, taking a deep inhale. Just as I suspected. That intoxicating, mouth-watering scent was completely buried under the stench of ash. My scowl deepened. I grabbed his arm and began dragging him toward the bathroom. “Go wash yourself right now. How am I supposed to take a bite out of you when you smell like this?” Gideon’s intimidating aura shattered into sheer bewilderment. Before he could process what was happening, I had shoved him into the master bathroom. A few moments later, the sound of the shower echoed through the door. I stood right outside, waiting with the agonizing anticipation of a starving dog. The second the door clicked open, I pounced. I practically tackled him, tearing at the lapels of his plush bathrobe. I aimed straight for the firm expanse of his chest and sank my teeth in. “Hiss!” Gideon flinched in pain and violently shoved me off him. “What the hell are you doing?” he demanded, his voice thick with anger. I couldn’t tell if it was from the steam of the shower or the shock, but the tips of his ears, hidden beneath his damp hair, were burning red. I looked up at him with total self-righteousness. “I’m entertaining you.” In our past life, Gideon always took the initiative to strip down and lie on the bed waiting for me. Now, I was the one doing all the heavy lifting to undress him. How was that not entertaining him? Gideon let out a harsh, incredulous laugh at my twisted logic. But when his eyes dropped to the faint smear of crimson at the corner of my mouth, his gaze suddenly darkened, shifting into something entirely unfathomable. He snatched the discarded bathrobe from the floor, threw it over my head to cover my face, and spoke in a voice that was suddenly tight and gravelly. “Wipe your face.” By the time I frantically wrestled the heavy terrycloth off my head, Gideon was already under the covers, lying as far away from me as possible, wrapped up tighter than a mummy. He was firmly refusing to be my dinner. Brimming with absolute grievance, I curled up on the opposite edge of the mattress, pulled out the new phone he had given me, and angrily typed into an anonymous forum: [What do you do when the human you keep as a pet goes on strike and refuses to let you drink his blood?] 3 The comment section immediately flooded with replies: [Damn, you guys play rough.] [Roleplay level: Expert.] Furious, I tossed the phone aside. As I lay there staring at the ceiling, my consciousness began to drift, and I felt a long-forgotten sensation: sleepiness. Hovering in the liminal space between waking and dreaming, a memory from my past life violently pierced my mind. I had just finished my nightly feeding. I was sitting by the cracked window of our apartment, bathing in the moonlight to absorb the night’s energy. (Mostly because zombies didn’t need to sleep, and I literally had nothing else to do with my time). As I sat there with my eyes closed, Gideon, who was sitting quietly beside me, suddenly spoke. “Little Fang, I wish I could just turn into one of the infected. That way, we could be together forever.” I opened my eyes and looked at him, completely baffled. He smiled, that soft, sad smile of his, and reached out to ruffle my messy hair. “But if I turned, what would happen to you? Who would take care of you then?” I bared my teeth at him in absolute outrage. The sheer audacity! My pet human thought he was the one taking care of me? To prove my dominance, I had immediately tackled him and bitten his chest again. Gideon had been so obedient then. He hadn’t dared to dodge. He just lay there, perfectly still, letting me take what I wanted. I slowly opened my eyes in the dark bedroom. The corners of my eyes felt strangely damp. After staring blankly into space for a moment, I scrambled across the massive mattress and crept right up to Gideon’s ear. His eyes snapped open instantly. He stared at me with hyper-vigilance, his hand instinctively flying up to grip the collar of his pajamas. “Gideon,” I whispered conspicuously, “do you like drinking blood now too?” In a fraction of a second, the last dregs of sleep vanished from his eyes. The vigilance on his face melted away, replaced by a terrifying, volatile darkness. His hand shot out, his long fingers wrapping tightly around my throat. The air supply cut off instantly. Heat rushed to my face as I choked. “What are you doing?!” I slapped at his hand, glaring at him with maximum intensity. “Let me go!” A visible twitch spasmed across Gideon’s brow. He clearly hadn’t expected me to look at him with such utter lack of fear while he was literally strangling me. Subconsciously, his grip loosened. I shoved his hand away, coughing violently for a few seconds before puffing my cheeks in irritation. “You’re so stingy. I was just asking if we share the same dietary preferences now. It’s not like I’m going to steal your food.” Gideon froze completely. For a long, suffocating moment, he just stared at me. Then, he doubled over, letting out a raw, manic laugh that bordered on unhinged. “God, Megan, you truly are a piece of work.” He looked at me, his eyes dripping with pure venom and mockery. “The lengths you’ll go to secure your place here. The lies you’ll spin to cater to my… reputation.” “Did you honestly think that pretending to share my madness would make me fall in love with you?” Looking at his twisted, self-deprecating smile, a surge of profound irritation flared in my chest. He was the one who had literally said he wanted to be a monster with me. I didn’t bother arguing. I just flipped over, pinned him to the mattress, and ripped his silk pajama shirt open, exposing the faint red crescent of teeth marks on his chest. I swallowed the heavy pool of saliva in my mouth, my eyes practically glowing green with hunger in the dark. “If you don’t believe me,” I whispered, “let me take one more bite.” Faced with the naked, primal hunger in my eyes, Gideon fell dead silent. After a heavy pause, he abruptly flipped us over, dumping me onto the mattress. Without a word, he pulled his shirt tightly shut. “Go to sleep.” His voice was harsh, defensive. “If you say one more insane thing, or try to pull another stunt like this, I will have my men throw you out onto the street.” Suitably chastised, I retreated to my side of the bed, pulled out my phone, and typed: [My pet human is trying to stage a coup. He won’t let me strip his clothes off anymore. Help! Emergency!] The same degenerates from earlier replied instantly. [If he won’t let you take off his shirt, it’s obviously a psychological block. Try taking off his pants instead. He’ll definitely surrender.] I locked the screen, deeply in thought. 4 When I woke up the next morning, Gideon’s side of the bed was cold. The moment I wandered down the grand staircase, the estate’s impeccably dressed head butler greeted me. With a warm, practiced smile and a respectful bow, he said, “Miss Sinclair, before Mr. Mercer departed this morning, he arranged for several boutiques to send over their latest collections for your selection.” He clapped his hands gently. A line of estate staff marched into the grand foyer, carrying velvet trays and garment bags. Brooches, diamond earrings, heavy sapphire necklaces, tennis bracelets. The sheer brilliance of the jewels in the morning light was almost blinding. Following the jewelry came rolling racks of haute couture and limited-edition handbags that practically swallowed the massive living room. Just then, Valerie stepped out of her guest room. The moment her eyes landed on the display of wealth, her face twisted into something ugly. “Gideon gave you all this?” she asked, her voice cracking up an octave. The butler offered her a deeply unimpressed, fleeting glance. Valerie struggled to forcibly mold her raw jealousy into a mask of sisterly outrage. She pointed a trembling finger at the racks. “Megan, he is deliberately humiliating you! You absolutely cannot accept these things, or you will never be able to hold your head up in polite society again!” I couldn’t help but slowly tilt my head, stretching my neck as I looked at her like she was an alien. The butler dropped his polite smile entirely. His tone laced with polite poison, he said, “Miss Valerie, Mr. Mercer only permitted you to stay on these grounds out of respect for Miss Sinclair. If you continue to make highly inappropriate remarks, I will be forced to have security escort you off the premises.” Valerie snapped her mouth shut, her eyes burning with resentment. She waited until the butler stepped away before sidling up to me. Leaning in close, her voice tight with a sick, eager anticipation, she whispered: “Did Gideon have an episode last night?” I used my previously-rotted zombie brain to process the question. In my past life, I opened my apartment door and caught a bullet to the brain instantly. The lesson was clear: in this life, I had to guard the secret of my true nature with my life. And since Gideon had clearly developed the same hunger, he was my kind now. I had to protect him, too. I looked her dead in the eye and shook my head with absolute solemnity. “No.” Valerie’s face immediately fell in deep disappointment. “How is that possible?” she muttered to herself, turning away in bitter frustration. For a zombie who had spent three years locked inside a hundred-square-foot apartment without taking a single step outside, this sprawling estate was a paradise. I wandered the gardens, explored the massive library, and tested the bounce of every sofa. The day passed in a blissful blur. That evening, Gideon returned to the estate. I was just about to run over and greet my food source when Valerie beat me to it. Carrying a heavy, covered silver cloche, she intercepted Gideon in the grand hallway, a secretive, malicious gleam in her eyes. My nose twitched. The heavy, metallic tang of fresh blood hit the air. Gideon, whose steps had been light, stopped dead in his tracks. His eyes locked onto the silver tray in Valerie’s hands. With a sickeningly sweet smile, Valerie lifted the lid. Sitting on the pristine silver platter was a massive cut of raw, bloody beef, practically swimming in its own juices. Next to it sat a crystal tumbler filled to the brim with fresh, dark venison blood. Staring at that glass of blood, the whites of Gideon’s eyes slowly bled red. His classically handsome face contorted into something vicious and terrifying. “Get out!” He suddenly snapped, violently backhanding a priceless Ming vase off a nearby pedestal. It shattered into a thousand pieces. “Everyone, get the fuck out!” I was still busy drooling at the sight of the venison blood when Gideon’s sudden violent outburst made me jump. Before I could react, Valerie grabbed my arm and practically dragged me out of the room. But instead of fleeing the house, she pulled me toward the veranda, pressing me against the French doors and leaving a tiny crack open so we could see inside. “See?” she whispered frantically, her voice trembling with morbid triumph. “I didn’t lie to you. He is a literal monster.” Inside the room, Gideon was staring at the glass of blood, his eyes locked in a violent war between desperate craving and agonizing self-loathing. I could see his throat working as he swallowed heavily. Suddenly, he snatched a steak knife from the tray and viciously drove it into his own forearm. Blood sprayed across the marble floor. The intense physical pain seemed to momentarily ground him, bringing a desperate clarity to his eyes. But it didn’t last. Within seconds, his breathing turned ragged and heavy. Unable to fight the overwhelming compulsion any longer, he dropped the knife, grabbed the raw, bloody slab of meat with his bare hands, and began tearing into it with a ravenous, animalistic desperation. “Oh my god!” Valerie shrieked, stumbling back. Even though she had orchestrated the entire scene, witnessing the sheer, grotesque reality of it broke her nerve. She let out a scream of pure terror. Gideon’s head snapped up. His eyes, devoid of any human warmth, locked dead onto my face through the glass. Valerie’s grip on my wrist tightened painfully as she yanked me toward the front gates. “Run!” “Stop them.” The chilling, dead voice drifted out from the house. Instantly, a wall of heavily armed security guards materialized, blocking our path. A moment later, Gideon stood before me. The dark, manic energy radiating from him was suffocating. His cold, bloodstained hand slowly reached up to wrap around my throat. A fractured, psychotic smile stretched across his face. “You lied to me. You want to leave me too, don’t you?”

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My husband once handed me a “Permission to Stray” agreement. It was a cold, clinical piece of paper with one particularly grotesque clause: he was allotted twelve “incidents” of infidelity per year. Any unused credits would be converted into a cash payout at the end of the fiscal year. I didn’t scream. I didn’t throw a glass. I simply offered him a faint, practiced smile and signed my name in elegant cursive. From that day on, I became the ghost of his penthouse. I was the one who stripped the silk sheets after his “guests” left, the one who bleached the scent of foreign perfume out of his Tom Ford shirts, and the one who stocked the bedside drawer with the finest Italian prophylactics. I took care of him and his revolving door of mistresses with the kind of devotion usually reserved for the dying. Those women loved to parade their youth in front of me. They’d whisper just loud enough for me to hear, mocking the “high school sweetheart” who had withered into a “hollowed-out trophy wife.” They thought they were winning. They thought they were the reason Steven stayed. I endured every insult with a spine of steel. I never cried, and I never sought revenge in the arms of another man. I just waited. Every year, I quietly accepted the thirty-six-million-dollar “payout” for his unused indiscretions. I hoarded that money like a dragon in a cave. I was waiting for the clock to run out. Every second of every day, I was praying for Steven Blackwood to die. There was one thing he didn’t know, though. His latest blood work? It had already come back positive for HIV. … Incident number sixty-eight. The sickening, rhythmic sounds from the master suite finally faded into a heavy silence. I swallowed my dose of PEP—the post-exposure prophylaxis I took religiously—and pulled on a pair of medical-grade latex gloves. Only then did I dare push the door open to scrub away the remains of his afternoon tryst. A second later, the frosted glass door of the walk-in shower slid open. Steven emerged, shirtless and radiating a dark, satisfied energy. He had his arm looped around a young girl who looked like she could barely stand on her own two feet. “God, I told you it was my first time,” she whimpered, a half-smile playing on her lips. “You didn’t have to be so rough.” It was Lesleydsay, the new intern at the firm. She was fresh, radiant, and sharp—like a rose that hadn’t realized its thorns were being clipped. They were flirting, lost in their own world, until Steven’s eyes landed on me. The warmth in his gaze vanished instantly, replaced by a chilling frost. “You’re fast today,” he noted dryly. He reached for his wallet, pulled out a black Amex, and tossed it onto the tangled, sweat-stained sheets. There was a small, dark smear of blood near the pillow. “Get the most expensive thread count you can find to replace these. Use the rest to buy yourself a couple of Birkins.” His voice carried the casual dismissiveness of a man tossing a coin to a beggar. I walked over, moved with a numbness that had become my second skin, and picked up the card. I didn’t cry. I didn’t make a scene. Because Steven had no idea. Six months ago, I had intercepted the medical report of his sixty-seventh mistress. Positive. I hadn’t said a word. Instead, I spent my days in a state of quiet, prayerful observation, waiting until the day I finally got my hands on Steven’s own secret labs. Positive. We were the “Golden Couple” of the city. We had built an empire together. After seven years of marriage, I never thought I’d be the one counting the days until his funeral. Seven years ago, Steven had used half of my family’s estate as seed money to become the king of the Chicago tech scene. Back then, he had knelt before me, swearing I was the only woman he would ever see. He once flew twelve hours through a blizzard just because I mentioned I missed the way he made pasta carbonara. But as soon as my father’s business collapsed, the man who worshipped me disappeared. In his place was a stranger who handed me an “infidelity contract” and turned me from a queen into a janitor for his sins. If love could be faked, then I would win an Oscar. I would play the doting, pathetic wife until he was bled dry. The countdown was in its final month. I was one step away from total annihilation. “Finish up here. I have a call,” Steven said, his phone buzzing. He gave Lesleydsay a lingering, deep kiss, ignored me entirely, and disappeared into his study. The vast bedroom fell silent, leaving me alone with Lesleydsay. She didn’t even try to cover herself. Instead, she sat at my vanity, picking up my expensive serums and slathering them onto her neck—the same neck Steven had just been biting. I forced a smile. “If you like them, take the whole set.” Lesleydsay looked at me through the mirror, her eyes full of a cruel, youthful triumph. “At least you know your place. What was it they called you? The high school sweetheart? Honey, you’re just a relic now.” She leaned back, admiring her reflection. “Steven told me that since I gave him my ‘first,’ I’m his only real love. He said he’d rather die than lose me.” “So, Lydia,” she sneered, using my name like an insult, “did you really think a marriage license was enough to keep a man like him?” Real love… I almost laughed. Didn’t she realize? She was Steven’s sixty-eighth “real love.” I looked at her young, ignorant face. I thought about the “first time” she was so proud of. For a fleeting second, a shred of pity pierced through my cold heart. “Steven has had too many women, Lesleydsay. He’s… not clean,” I said, my voice raspy. “If you’re smart, you’ll pack your things and never look back.” The words hit her like a physical blow, but not in the way I intended. Lesleydsay lunged to her feet, her pretty face contorting into a mask of rage. She swung her hand and caught me squarely across the jaw. Slap! The sound echoed in the empty room. My cheek burned, and the metallic tang of blood filled my mouth. “Leave? You bitch! You’re just jealous! You can’t stand that he actually loves me!” She started screaming, her eyes welling with crocodile tears. She turned and sprinted toward the study, wailing at the top of her lungs. “Steven! She’s being mean to me! She called me disgusting! She’s trying to kick me out!” The study door slammed open. Steven stormed out, his face a map of irritation and simmering fury. He didn’t ask for an explanation. He saw Lesleydsay sobbing and he saw me holding my face. He didn’t hesitate. He swung his hand and struck my other cheek, harder than Lesleydsay had. “Lydia, I don’t care how jealous you are. You will fulfill that contract! I pay the bills, you do the cleaning. Do you understand?” I fell to the floor, my ears ringing. Through a blur of tears, I watched Lesleydsay throw herself into his arms, wrapping her limbs around him with a smug grin. “Steven, don’t be mad. Let’s go back inside… I want to give you a baby. I want us to have a family.” “Anything you want, sweetheart,” Steven murmured, kissing her forehead. Before they retreated back into the room, he looked down at me as if I were a piece of trash caught on his shoe. “When we’re done, make sure those sheets are bleached. I want them spotless.” “I will,” I whispered, nodding slowly. If Lesleydsay wouldn’t listen to a warning, then whatever happened next was on her. That night, after the professional sanitization crew had finished with the penthouse, I had just changed into my silk robe when the front door clicked. Steven was back. He smelled of heavy cologne, expensive bourbon, and the lingering scent of another woman. He stumbled slightly as he walked. I tried to slip away into the guest room, but he lunged forward, catching me from behind. He pressed his hot, bourbon-laced breath against my ear, his voice dropping into that predatory husk he used when he wanted something. “Lydia… watching me with her today… did it make you miss me?” He squeezed me tighter. “Tonight, I’ll take care of you. How does that sound?” He turned me around, his mouth crashing down onto mine. In that instant, my stomach did a violent somersault. It wasn’t just disgust—it was pure, unadulterated terror. I knew better than anyone how poisoned his blood was. “I’m… it’s that time of the month,” I gasped, shoving against his chest, my nails digging into my palms. Steven froze. I took the opportunity to slide out of his grip, keeping my voice low and steady. “I’m messy right now. You wouldn’t like it.” He stepped back, the lust in his eyes instantly replaced by a cold, sharpened loathing. “Always an excuse. You think you’re so pure, don’t you?” He tugged at his collar, scanning me from head to toe like I was a piece of expired produce. “Fine. You don’t want me? There are a thousand women lined up outside who would kill for this. You’re going to regret this, Lydia. One day, you’ll be begging for me to touch you.” He let out a sharp, mocking laugh, grabbed his keys, and slammed the door as he left. The moment the roar of his Ferrari faded, I picked up the phone. The “deep-clean” crew was back at the door within twenty minutes. As the scent of industrial-grade disinfectant filled the air, I reached into my robe pocket and touched the folded piece of paper. It was a blank equity transfer agreement. Tomorrow, all I needed was his signature. Three of his core holding companies—the heart of his empire—would be moved into a shell corporation I had spent years building. This was the reason I had endured sixty-eight incidents. This was the light at the end of the tunnel. The next morning, at the Blackwood Tower. As the CFO, I stepped off the elevator and noticed the double doors to the CEO’s office were wide open. Lesleydsay was there, wearing a sundress that left nothing to the imagination. She was perched on the edge of Steven’s mahogany desk, swinging her legs while barking orders at the head of HR. “The budget for the retreat is too low. Steven said I get to pick the venue. I’ve booked the Waldorf, and the per-head cost is four thousand. Fix the numbers.” The HR manager looked at me, eyes pleading for help. Lesleydsay saw me and smirked. It was the look of a cat who had finally caught the mouse. She hopped off the desk and strutted over, waving a stack of receipts in my face. “Hey, Lydia. Be a doll and sign these reimbursements. Last month’s personal expenses—Steven said to run them through the company.” I took the stack and scanned them. Eighty-six thousand dollars. Luxury boutiques, med-spa treatments, and a receipt for a couple’s weekend at a private hot spring. “These exceed the discretionary limit. They aren’t compliant. I can’t sign them,” I said, handing the papers back. Lesleydsay’s smile faltered for a fraction of a second before she whirled around and disappeared into the inner office. Ten seconds later, Steven marched out, his face darkened with rage. Three senior VPs were standing in the hallway, fresh out of a meeting. In front of everyone, he snatched the receipts and slammed them against my chest. They scattered across the floor like confetti. One sharp edge of a paper grazed my cheek, leaving a stinging line. “Lydia, is your brain rotting?” “Lesleydsay is mine. Don’t start playing the ‘proper wife’ card over a few pennies. Sign the damn papers.” The hallway went dead silent, the only sound the low hum of the HVAC system. The VPs looked at their shoes, too afraid to breathe. Seven years ago, I was the one who infused this company with the capital it needed to survive. This building, this office, the very ground he stood on—it was all bought with my dowry. And now, he was humiliating me in front of the team I had built, forcing me to subsidize his mistress. I knelt down, slowly picking up the receipts one by one. “Fine,” I said softly. “I’ll sign.” Go ahead, Steven. Spend it all. Because when you’re dead, I’m taking every cent back. When the crowd dispersed, Lesleydsay lingered. She leaned in close, her voice a honey-coated needle in my ear. “He came to me last night, Lydia. Right after you turned him down.” She smoothed her hand over her flat stomach, her eyes gleaming with malice. “He’s so… vigorous. If I end up pregnant… I wonder how much longer you’ll be holding onto that ‘Mrs.’ title?” Pregnant? A thrill of pure, dark electricity shot through me. I didn’t argue. I didn’t snap. I simply gave her a submissive, almost pathetic smile. “You’re right, Lesleydsay. Steven… he clearly adores you.” I reached into my bag and pulled out the blank equity agreement, sliding it under the reimbursement forms. I held them out to her with both hands, the picture of a broken woman. “Could you have him sign these financial reports as well? It’ll save me the trouble of going back in.” Lesleydsay blinked, surprised by my sudden obedience. She snatched the papers with a triumphant huff. “See? Was that so hard? You might as well get used to it. I’m the future of this company anyway.” A few minutes later, Steven emerged with his arm draped over Lesleydsay’s shoulders. He tossed the folder at me. There it was. His signature—bold, arrogant, and sprawling. Right on the line that transferred thirty-four percent of his empire to me. “Oh, and Lydia…” Steven looked up as if he had just remembered something trivial. “We have the executive physicals tomorrow. I’ve added Lesleydsay to the list as a family dependent.” He looked at her, pinching her chin affectionately. “We might have a little ‘surprise’ on the way, babe. Better to get everything checked out now.” Physicals. Blood work. Full panels. My heart hammered against my ribs. If Steven gave blood tomorrow, the results would be back within forty-eight hours. With his ego, he wouldn’t feel fear first—he’d feel rage. He’d launch an investigation. He’d check the sources, he’d check everyone around him, he’d freeze the company’s assets. The final transfer of funds I was middle of moving would be flagged. Five years of planning. Sixty-eight incidents of hell. All of it would go up in flames. I couldn’t let him go to that appointment. At six a.m. the next morning, I stood in the kitchen, my fingers trembling as I held a small packet of brown powder. Senna extract. Concentrated, tasteless, and odorless. Mixed into warm milk, it would cause hours of violent, uncontrollable cramping and diarrhea—nothing a doctor could trace back to anything but a bad oyster. I set the milk on Steven’s usual black coaster. I knew his routine better than he knew himself. At seven sharp, Steven came downstairs, dressed in a bespoke navy suit. He sat down, reaching for the glass. But before his hand touched the rim— “Steven!” Lesleydsay ran into the room, still in her silk pajamas. She plopped herself onto his lap and playfully snatched the glass from his hand. “I want some! I’m the lady of the house now, I should get the first sip of everything.” She shot me a look of pure spite before tilting her head back and draining the entire glass. I stood frozen, holding a tray of fruit, my heart stopping in my chest. Sure enough, by the time we were supposed to leave, Lesleydsay’s face had turned a sickly shade of grey. As the car pulled onto the expressway, she clutched her stomach, breaking out into a cold sweat. “Steven… I think I’m going to be sick…” Steven’s expression shifted instantly to one of intense panic. “Turn around!” he barked at the driver. “Get us to the nearest ER!” Lesleydsay threw up three times before we reached the hospital. By the time they wheeled her in, she was semi-conscious and limp in Steven’s arms. He stayed with her, his eyes red with worry. I was the one who got the call ten minutes later. “Lydia, you useless bitch! You can’t even make a simple breakfast? Did you do this on purpose? Did you poison her?” His roar was so loud the taxi driver flinched. When I arrived at the VIP wing, Steven was kneeling by Lesleydsay’s bed, tucking the blanket around her with a tenderness I hadn’t seen in years. He heard my footsteps and bolted upright. A cup of ice water flew through the air, drenching me. The force of it knocked me back against the wall. Cold water dripped from my hair, soaking into my blouse. My forehead stung where the rim of the glass had clipped me. In front of three nurses and the attending physician, he shoved his finger into my face. “If it weren’t for the fact that your father is dead, I would have thrown you out on the street years ago!” My father. He had the nerve to mention him? The man who needed three million dollars to save his legacy, a pittance Steven could have provided, but instead watched as my father jumped from his office balcony. I looked down, water dripping from my eyelashes like tears. They weren’t. “If anything happens to her…” Steven grabbed my jaw, his grip so tight I thought my teeth would shatter. “I will make you pay with your life.” “I’m sorry,” I whispered, my voice trembling with a fake, submissive fear. “It was my fault. Should we… should we reschedule the physicals at the center?” “Are you kidding?” he spat, waving his hand dismissively. “We’re staying here until Lesleydsay is cleared. Push the physicals to next week.” He turned back to her, lacing his fingers with hers. It was a beautiful, tender scene. It reminded me of three years ago, when I was hemorrhaging in an ER after a miscarriage. I had called him seventeen times. He never picked up. I found out later he was celebrating the birthday of mistress number thirty-four. Buzz. Steven’s phone erupted. He frowned, answering it with a snap. Within five seconds, the color drained from his face, turning from a furious red to a ghostly white. “What do you mean?” Even from where I stood, I could hear the voice of the head of accounting, trembling over the line. “Mr. Blackwood… there’s a three-hundred-million-dollar discrepancy in the accounts. The system shows the approval came from… the CFO. Your wife.” The air in the room curdled. Steven slowly turned his head, his bloodshot eyes locking onto mine like heat-seeking missiles. “Lydia. Explain. Now.” The only sound in the room was the rhythmic beep… beep… beep of Lesleydsay’s heart monitor. I let my face crumple. I let my hands shake. Panic. That was the only acceptable response. I fumbled with my bag, pulling out a folder and handing it to him with trembling fingers. “I… I found this last week,” I stammered, my voice perfectly pitched with cowardice. “I’ve been investigating it. Someone stole my credentials for the approval system. The funds… they were routed to an account linked to the Greenwich estate.” Steven’s pupils contracted. Greenwich. That was the residence of Jade, mistress number sixty-seven—the one he had dumped in a spectacular, ugly fashion a month ago. She had threatened to ruin him, and he had buried her under a mountain of legal threats. Steven snatched the report, his eyes flying over the data. “That goddamn snake!” he roared, throwing the papers across the room. He didn’t look at me again. Because in Steven’s world, Lydia was a dog. And dogs didn’t plot. Dogs didn’t steal. That night, I sat in the darkness of the study, the blue light of the laptop reflecting in my eyes. When I hit the ‘Enter’ key for the final time, my hands were as steady as a surgeon’s. Over the last thirty days, my father’s old loyalists had helped me complete the final phase of the asset swap. The core of the Blackwood empire had been hollowed out, thread by thread, over five long years. From the outside, the company looked magnificent. But the bones were gone. I walked to the window, looking out over the city lights. Everything was ready. I just needed the wind to blow in the right direction. One month later. The Blackwood Group’s Year-End Gala. Under the crystal chandeliers, Steven walked the red carpet with Lesleydsay on his arm. The flashbulbs were a constant, blinding strobe. I was tucked away at a table in the far corner, reserved for “unassigned guests.” No nameplate. I was seated with three drivers from the logistics department. On stage, Steven raised a glass of vintage Cristal, glowing with the arrogance of a man who thought he owned the world. He looked terrible, though. His eyes were sunken, his skin sallow. He had been suffering from night sweats and a persistent fever. He had even developed small, swollen nodes on his neck. He told himself it was just stress. He had finally gone for that physical a few days ago, then spent the afternoon on a private IV drip, popping fever reducers like candy. I hadn’t stopped the physical this time. I didn’t need to. At the height of the party, Steven suddenly called my name. The ballroom went silent. He tossed a document onto the table in front of me, his tone like he was ordering a maid to refill his water. “Sign this. It’s just a formality. Lesleydsay loves the garden at your family’s old estate. I’ve transferred the deed to her name. You’re the ‘big sister’ here, Lydia. You don’t mind, right?” I looked down. The Transfer of Title for the Lesley Ancestral Home. The last thing my father had left before he jumped. The garden where my mother had spent twenty years planting magnolias. The only place in this seven-year hell that I could still call home. My composure slipped. My hands began to shake—for real this time. I looked up at him, my eyes burning. “Steven… do you have to be this cruel?” He looked down at me like I was an ant in his path. “Lydia, don’t be ungrateful. Without me, you wouldn’t even be allowed in this room. Sign it, and you’re still Mrs. Blackwood.” “And if I don’t?” He didn’t answer. He didn’t have to. Lesleydsay sauntered over, clinking her glass against his. She smoothed the silk of her dress over her waist, grinning. “Lydia, Steven adores me now. If you want to keep your title, be a good girl and sign.” I bit my lip, the pen hovering over the paper. Three hundred pairs of eyes were on me. Some were pitying, some were cold, most were just hungry for the drama. Just as my nib touched the paper— SLAM! The side doors of the ballroom burst open. The private physician I had “consulted” rushed in, his face ghostly white, clutching a red-stamped folder. He was trembling so hard he nearly tripped over the carpet. His voice tore through the music and the chatter, a frantic, jagged edge: “Mr. Blackwood! Stop! There’s… there’s an emergency. Your lab results…” I froze, the pen still poised. The wind had finally arrived.

🌟 Continue the story here 👉🏻 📲 Download the “MotoNovel” app 🔍 search for “424262”, and watch the full series ✨! #MotoNovel

It was past midnight. I was lying in bed, mindlessly scrolling through my phone, when I accidentally tapped into a late-night advice livestream on TikTok. The caller—a man with a digitally altered voice—was mid-confession. He was telling the host, and thousands of listeners, that he was having an affair. And not just with anyone. He was sleeping with the drunk driver who had struck and crippled his wife years ago. At the words car crash and crippled, my left hand instinctively reached across my chest, my fingers brushing against the flat, empty fabric of my right sleeve. The phantom ache of the amputated limb flared up, a dull throb echoing a nightmare I lived every single day. The man on the screen kept talking, his words a stream of casual cruelty. He confessed that he could only make love to his wife in pitch darkness. He said that whenever his hand brushed against the stump of her arm, he felt a wave of visceral disgust. He complained that ever since the accident, his wife had become a lifeless, suffocating presence. Nothing like the bright, vibrant girl he was seeing on the side. A cold prickle of unease washed over me. I reached out to swipe past the video, but his next sentence stopped my heart entirely. It felt like an ice pick driving straight through my ribs. “I mean, she lost her arm saving my mom’s life. But I can’t just sacrifice my own happiness forever out of gratitude, can I?” He sighed, the sound heavy with self-pity. “I admit I still love her. But I just can’t stand looking at her anymore. She’s half a ghost.” The words hit me like a physical blow. I froze. The pregnancy test I had been clutching in my hand slipped from my fingers, clattering loudly against the hardwood floor. Because five years ago, I threw myself in front of a speeding car to save my mother-in-law, and lost my right arm in the process. And the man in this livestream, the man complaining to the internet that my sacrifice had “ruined his life”—was Simon. My husband. The boy I had loved for twenty years. … 1 He was using a voice modifier, but the cadence of his speech, the slight pause he took before defending himself—it was unmistakably Simon. The live chat was scrolling so fast it was a blur. [Are you insane? You’re disgusted by the woman who saved your family?] [Sleeping with the driver who crippled her?! I don’t even have words for how evil that is.] [I hope karma destroys you, you absolute monster.] A violent chill seized my entire body. I couldn’t wrap my mind around it. The man who had always treated me like fragile glass, who swore he would protect me with his life, was currently venting his revulsion for me to fifty thousand strangers. When he talked about the young girl’s bubbly, energetic nature, his voice dripped with an unmistakable, sickening fondness. My stomach violently heaved. I scrambled out of bed, sprinting to the master bathroom, and threw up until there was nothing left but bitter bile. The bathroom door swung open. Simon—who was supposed to be at an academic conference two states away—rushed in. “Catherine? Honey, what’s wrong? Are you sick?” He gathered me into his arms. His hands, large and warm, instinctively reached for the stump of my right arm, massaging the scarred tissue with practiced ease. “I’m sorry I was away these past few days. No one was here to massage it for you. Has it been aching terribly?” His eyes were pooling with gentle, agonizing concern. But all I could hear, looping endlessly in my mind, was his voice from the livestream: Whenever I touch it, I feel disgusted. Five years ago, his mother and I were struck by a drunk driver. I pushed her out of the way and lost my arm. In the dark, suffocating months that followed, I tried to end my life more times than I could count. I swallowed pills. I took a razor to my remaining wrist. Every single time, Simon pulled me back from the ledge. He would hold me, his eyes bloodshot from crying, begging me to stay, swearing that if I died, he would follow me. Since then, unless he was traveling for work, he massaged my shoulder every morning and every night to ease the nerve pain. I had thought those moments were the purest expression of his love. Now I knew that every time he touched me, he was swallowing down bile. He leaned in to kiss my forehead. I flinched, pulling away. “What is it, Catherine?” he asked, his hands hovering awkwardly in the air. He rubbed his cheek against the curve of my neck. “Did I do something wrong? Are you upset with me?” I looked at him, forcing my voice to stay level. “You’re a tenured professor now. A public figure. Doesn’t it embarrass you to have a crippled wife?” “How could you even say that?” he murmured, pulling me tighter. “You gave up everything for my family. And we’ve been together since we were kids. Don’t you know how much I love you?” Staring into his eyes, a terrifying vertigo washed over me. Which Simon was real? The devoted husband rubbing my shoulder in the dead of night, or the man on the internet who wished I was dead? The urge to scream, to confront him about the affair, tasted like pennies on my tongue. But for a fleeting, tragic second, I actually wondered if I was the villain. Maybe I really was just a dead weight dragging down a brilliant, shining man. He ruffled my hair affectionately and pulled a velvet box and a small designer shopping bag from his coat pocket. “I passed by the boutique at the airport. Thought of you.” It was a bottle of high-end perfume and a delicate silver bracelet. It took me one glance to realize the fragrance was a sickly-sweet floral, the kind of scent a twenty-year-old girl would wear to a college party. It wasn’t me at all. When he stepped into the shower, I went through his coat pockets and found the receipt. He had spent ten thousand dollars on a custom, limited-edition jewelry set. The bracelet he gave me was listed at the bottom. It was the complimentary freebie given with the purchase. I stared at the crumpled slip of paper, and a hollow, broken laugh escaped my throat. When we were in college, I had casually pointed out a necklace in a shop window. Simon worked five part-time jobs, running himself into the ground just to buy it for me, telling me that Catherine deserves the absolute best. But now, the absolute best was for someone else. For Brianna. And I, his crippled wife, was only worthy of the scraps she didn’t want. From the bathroom, I heard him humming a soft lullaby over the sound of the running water. It was the song he had written for me years ago. He wasn’t singing it for me anymore. I sat in the dark living room until the sun came up. At dawn, my phone buzzed. The private investigator I had hired on a whim months ago—when Simon’s late nights first started—finally sent over the file. When I saw the name of the driver who hit me, the bottom fell out of my world. I first heard Brianna’s name two years ago. Simon used to come home rubbing his temples, complaining endlessly about his new grad student. “I’ve never met anyone so clumsy, Catherine. If she isn’t knocking over expensive lab equipment, she’s botching the data entry.” He had been on the verge of kicking her out of his research program. I was the one who felt bad for her. I was the one who told him to give her a little grace, to be patient. I never, in my wildest nightmares, imagined that my husband would fall in love with her. That he would love the girl who tore off my arm so much, he would cover up her crimes. 2 The next morning, Simon took a phone call, hastily threw on his coat, and rushed toward the door. “I made reservations for tonight,” he called out. “Don’t forget, it’s our anniversary.” He didn’t go to the university. He drove straight to a boutique pottery studio across town. Through the glass window, I saw Brianna. She was wearing heavy, youthful makeup and an over-the-top, frilly cottagecore dress—the exact aesthetic Simon used to mercilessly mock as childish and ridiculous. Yet now, looking at her, there wasn’t a trace of judgment in his eyes. When they walked up the steps, he actually bent down to lift the hem of her ridiculous dress so she wouldn’t trip. Inside, Brianna was clumsily smearing clay all over the worktable, her hands a mess. Simon, a man who demanded absolute perfection in his lab, wasn’t annoyed in the slightest. He stood behind her, enveloping her hands with his own, patiently guiding her fingers. He leaned down and pressed a tender kiss to her temple. He was a man in his late thirties, grinning like a love-struck teenager. I stood rooted to the pavement outside, the cold seeping into my bones. It wasn’t that he had forgotten how to love. He just didn’t love me that way anymore. Driven by a morbid, masochistic curiosity, I pulled my baseball cap low, slipped on a medical mask, and walked into the shop, taking a seat in the far corner. Memories of our past flickered behind my eyes like a dying film reel. The shop owner noticed me staring at them and ambled over, leaning in with a conspiratorial smile. “Cute, right? I practically watched that girl wear him down. He used to be so cold and guarded, but she completely won him over. They come in at least once a week now.” At least once a week. During the most agonizing phase of my physical therapy, I had begged Simon to come to the rehab center with me just once. He told me the faculty board was breathing down his neck and he simply couldn’t spare the time. He had time. It just didn’t belong to me. The owner pulled out her phone and tilted the screen toward me. “Look at this. He stayed up for three nights straight rendering this AI animation for her birthday.” On the screen, a cartoon version of Simon stood in the pouring rain, holding an umbrella over Brianna’s head, waiting in an endless line to buy her favorite boba tea. I had known Simon for twenty years, and I had never seen that version of him. My vision blurred with hot tears. A few feet away, Brianna leaned back against his chest, her voice a sickly-sweet whine. “Can you please stay with me tonight? Don’t go home.” Simon didn’t even hesitate. “Okay.” “But isn’t it your anniversary? Won’t your… one-armed bandit get mad?” She was laughing. She was mocking my mutilation, and Simon just smiled, fondly tapping her nose. “She depends on me to survive,” he said softly. “She’d never dare throw a temper tantrum.” Brianna sighed, burying her face in his neck. “I’m so sorry, Professor. If I hadn’t been drinking that night, I wouldn’t have almost hit your mom. Thank God your wife stepped in…” I clamped my left hand clamped over my mouth, biting down hard on my own fingers to stop the sob from tearing out of my throat. So it was true. She had been driving drunk. Simon, a man who prided himself on absolute moral integrity, had buried the truth to protect her. When I was first trying to re-enter the world after the amputation, I couldn’t find a job anywhere. Desperate, I had swallowed my pride and begged Simon to pull some strings, just to get me a low-level administrative role in the university’s back office. He had frowned, his expression stern and disappointed. “Catherine, there are procedures for these things. You know I play by the rules.” But his sacred rules instantly disintegrated the moment Brianna needed him. “Don’t carry that guilt, Brianna,” Simon murmured, kissing her hair. “Maybe it was just Catherine’s fate. It has nothing to do with you.” He said it so casually. As if he were comforting her over a failed pop quiz, not the destruction of my entire life. Thinking of the nights I had laid on the bathroom tiles, bleeding out from my own wrists, I couldn’t take it anymore. I shot up from my seat. My chair tipped backward, crashing against the floor with a deafening clatter. From behind me, Simon’s voice called out, “Wait a second.” A spike of pure terror shot through me. I wasn’t ready to face him. I didn’t know how to play this. Was I supposed to scream? Cry? Play the martyr and give them my blessing? Footsteps approached. A hand reached out into my peripheral vision, holding a silver chain. “Miss, you dropped your necklace.” He didn’t recognize me behind the mask. He didn’t even recognize the necklace, which held the diamond wedding band I could no longer wear on my right hand. I looked down. On the hand extending my wedding ring to me, Simon was wearing a misshapen, brightly painted clay ring made by Brianna. My phone vibrated in my pocket. A text from him. [Catherine, emergency faculty meeting came up. Going to have to cancel dinner tonight. I’m sorry.] In that split second, the shattered remains of my heart calcified into pure, unadulterated rage. I walked out of the shop, pulled out my phone, and dialed the university’s ethics hotline. “I need to report an inappropriate relationship between Professor Simon Hayes and his graduate student, Brianna Davis.” 3 To my surprise, he didn’t call me to scream or interrogate me. Instead, that evening, he simply unlocked the front door and walked Brianna straight into our living room. The moment she saw me, Brianna dropped to her knees, tears spilling down her heavily rouged cheeks. “Please, Mrs. Hayes, I’m begging you, don’t ruin my academic career! The accident was all my fault, I know that. I’ll do anything to make it up to you, I’ll be your servant—” Simon scowled, gripping her arms and pulling her forcefully to her feet. He poured her a glass of warm water, handing it to her before turning a cold glare on me. “Catherine, Brianna has no one else in this city. Your little phone call nearly destroyed my career, and you’re trying to destroy her future over a misunderstanding.” He spoke as if he had entirely forgotten how that car crash had destroyed my future. He leaned down, reaching out to hug me. As his arm extended, his sleeve rode up, revealing a cheap, bright pink hair tie around his wrist. He noticed my eyes track the movement and awkwardly tugged his cuff down to hide it. I stared him dead in the eyes, my voice dripping with venom. “I’m ruining her? Didn’t she ruin me? She drove drunk, crippled me, destroyed my career, and now she wants to steal my husband?” I swung my left arm with everything I had and slapped him directly across the face. The sharp crack echoed loudly through the silent living room. Simon froze, his head turned from the impact, the righteous indignation in his eyes fracturing. “You… you know?” he stammered. “About me and her…?” Brianna clutched at my shirt, sobbing violently. “I’m so sorry! I know it’s wrong, but fate is just so cruel. Two loving hearts just can’t stop themselves from being drawn together!” The words made me nauseous. Years ago, when Simon had knelt in front of my parents, begging for their blessing to marry me, he had used that exact phrase. Now, he had packaged it up and handed it to his shiny new toy. I started laughing. I laughed so hard that the tears began to stream down my face uncontrollably. “Simon, my God… my biggest regret in this life is fighting so hard to marry you.” He panicked. He lunged forward, wrapping his arms around me in a crushing grip. “Catherine, listen to me, Brianna has nothing to do with us! We’re just soulmates, it’s a spiritual connection—” “Get your hands off me!” “I swear to God, Catherine, I have never slept with her! It’s purely platonic! My body has never betrayed you!” I thrashed violently against him, sinking my teeth into his shoulder until I tasted blood, but he refused to let go. His body might not have betrayed me, but his heart had packed its bags and left a long, long time ago. “I want a divorce, Simon.” I looked at him with absolute, dead calm. The frantic desperation on his face vanished, replaced instantly by a dark, surging anger. “Why do you always use divorce to threaten me?” he yelled, his voice echoing off the walls. “I told you, the title of my wife belongs to you and only you! Isn’t that enough?!” A blinding rage took over. I raised my left hand, aiming a vicious slap right at Brianna’s tear-stained face. I wanted to hurt the people who had dismantled my life. The slap never landed. Simon moved entirely on instinct. He shoved me backward, throwing himself in front of Brianna to protect her. I lost my balance. Having no right arm to catch myself, I went down hard, my side slamming violently into the sharp corner of the glass coffee table. For a fraction of a second, a flash of guilt crossed his face. “Catherine, stop being so hysterical.” I tried to push myself up, but my single arm was shaking too hard to support my weight. A deep, tearing pain bloomed low in my abdomen. It came in waves, sharp and agonizing. “Simon…” I gasped, clutching my stomach. “Help me up… I’m pregnant…” His pupils contracted. To my horror, beneath the shock, a flicker of genuine relief—even joy—flashed in his eyes. From behind his shoulder, Brianna spoke up, her voice small and delicate. “You don’t know, do you? The doctors said the trauma from the crash made you completely infertile.” The air left my lungs. For the past year, I had been religiously tracking my ovulation. I had choked down bowls of bitter, foul-tasting fertility teas every single morning, desperate to give Simon the family he said he wanted. And he had known. He had watched me torture myself, watching me act like an idiot, and said absolutely nothing. Before I could even find the breath to ask him why, Simon looked down at me, his expression hardening. “There’s no need to lie about a baby just to manipulate me into staying, Catherine.” He adjusted his collar, looking down at me as if I were a stranger. “Look, if you really want a child that badly, Brianna and I can have one for you. You can still be a mother.” The boy I had loved was gone. The creature standing in front of me wore his face, but he was a monster, delivering the most depraved insults with a calm, academic detachment. Using the last ounce of my strength, I pulled the divorce papers from my bag and hurled them at him. The pages fluttered, scattering across the floor. Simon just laughed. It was a cold, arrogant, dismissive sound. “We’ve known each other for twenty years, Catherine. You think I don’t know who you are? You are entirely dependent on me. You’ll never leave.” I stared up at him from the floor, the pain in my stomach intensifying, and realized I didn’t even have the energy to cry anymore. The boy I had spent twenty years loving finally, definitively, died right in front of me. 4 By the time the ambulance got me to the hospital, my dress was soaked through with blood. My phone buzzed on the bedside table. Brianna had sent me a video. It was Simon—the aloof, intellectual professor who claimed he couldn’t boil water—wearing an apron, carefully chopping vegetables to cook a meal for his precious girl. I miscarried that night. The morning I woke up, a notification popped onto my screen. Simon had transferred ten thousand dollars into my account. [Catherine, don’t worry, I won’t abandon you. But Brianna’s future is on the line. I need you to go to the dean’s office today and tell them your phone call was a misunderstanding. Tell them you had a mental breakdown and imagined it.] I didn’t reply. I hit block. Early the next morning, I hired a professional printing company and a few men. We marched right up to the main gates of the university and unfurled a massive red banner. “Brianna Davis: Innocent Grad Student by Day, Home-Wrecking Mistress by Night.” It was right in the middle of the morning rush. Within minutes, hundreds of students had gathered, pointing, whispering, and snapping photos. Brianna saw the banner and immediately burst into perfectly choreographed tears. As campus journalists rushed forward with recorders, Simon came sprinting out of the administration building, pushing through the crowd to shield her with his body. “I apologize to everyone for this disruption,” Simon announced, his voice projecting over the murmurs. “Ever since the car accident that took her arm, my wife has suffered from severe, untreated paranoia and mental illness.” He held up a stamped psychiatric evaluation for the cameras to see. It felt like someone had driven a stake through my chest, leaving a gaping hole for the winter wind to howl through. He had planned this. He had fabricated a psychiatric hold to discredit me, just in case I ever became a threat to Brianna. “To prove my absolute innocence, and to protect Ms. Davis from these baseless accusations,” Simon declared solemnly, “I am officially resigning from my tenure at this university, effective immediately.” He paused, looking deeply aggrieved. “I need to focus on getting my wife the psychiatric help she so desperately needs.” His eyes were sincere, his tone heavy with sacrifice. He looked exactly like the earnest young man who had promised my parents he would cherish me forever. But out of the corner of his eye, he was watching Brianna, making sure she was safe. The moment the crowd dispersed, he grabbed my left arm, dragging me ruthlessly into a secluded alleyway between two buildings. “What the hell is wrong with you, Catherine?” he hissed, pinning me against the brick wall. “I told you I wasn’t going to divorce you! Why can’t you just let her go?!” I laughed, a sharp, bitter sound. “So refusing to divorce me is supposed to be a reward? Simon, you’re the one sleeping with another woman. Where do you get this absolute audacity?” The last shred of his patience snapped. “Because I’m sick of it!” he roared. “I’m sick of coming home every single day to look at your depressing, dead-eyed face! You used to be fun! You used to smile and laugh! Now look at you! All you do is wallow in self-pity!” Brianna came jogging into the alley, gasping for air between her dramatic sobs. “Professor! My parents saw the photos on Twitter… my dad almost had a heart attack!” Simon’s fury instantly melted into frantic, desperate panic. “Look at what you’ve done,” he snarled at me. “Apologize to her right now!” “Are you insane?” I spat. “She’s a homewrecker and a drunk driver. Why would I apologize for telling the truth?” Simon’s hand suddenly shot out. He gripped my right shoulder, his fingers digging viciously into the sensitive, scarred flesh right where my arm had been amputated. That spot was a web of damaged nerves. The slightest pressure sent blinding, white-hot agony shooting through my body. He used to massage it so gently, terrified of causing me pain. Now, he was intentionally crushing it, using my trauma as a weapon to force me to bow to the woman who crippled me. “Apologize!” he ordered. Cold sweat broke out across my forehead. The pain was unbearable, but I clamped my jaw shut, refusing to give him the satisfaction of hearing me scream. “Don’t push me, Catherine,” he whispered dangerously. “You can’t even dress yourself without help. Where exactly do you think you’re going to go if we divorce?” He leaned in close. “I’m going to say this one last time. I am not divorcing you. And I am not leaving Brianna.” The absolute certainty in his eyes was nauseating. He genuinely believed I was a pathetic, broken creature who would endure any humiliation just to keep him. The pain in my nerves was causing black spots to dance in my vision. I couldn’t breathe. Just to get his hand off me, I squeezed my eyes shut and choked out, “I’m sorry.” Satisfied, Simon released his grip. “Good girl. Go home and wait for me.” He adjusted his jacket. “I need to go do damage control with Brianna’s parents.” I nodded slowly. The moment they walked away, I hailed a cab and told the driver to take me straight to the airport. As I sat in the backseat, I opened my phone and set the emails I had drafted to send on an automated timer. Simon. I hope to God I never see your face again.

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On the night of our seventh anniversary, I didn’t get a candlelit dinner. I got a call from the precinct. A couple had filed a criminal complaint against my company, claiming our flagship organic line had hospitalized their child with severe food poisoning. When I walked into the station, the world tilted on its axis. Standing there was Dorian—Lydia’s “one who got away,” the man who had haunted the periphery of our marriage for years. And standing right beside him, her hand resting protectively on his arm, was my wife, Lydia. She didn’t flinch. She didn’t even have the grace to look guilty. She looked at me with a terrifying, flat calm and said, “We have a three-year-old son together. That’s the reality of the situation.” A jagged, hysterical laugh escaped my throat. We had reconciled four years ago, and for every second of those four years, she had kept this life—this child—a secret. The math was the cruelest part. The boy was three. She had betrayed me the moment she stepped back into our home. Lydia’s best friend actually had the audacity to pull me aside later to “soften the blow.” She told me I should be grateful that Lydia at least had the “decency” to hide the affair from me for so long. I reached into my bag and pulled out a tattered folder. Inside was the divorce agreement from four years ago—the one I had ripped up in a moment of weakness. Looking at it now, I felt like a fool who had mistaken a predator’s blink for a lover’s wink. “If that’s how it is,” I whispered, the words tasting like ash, “then she’s free to go live the life she’s already built with him.” Four years ago, I thought we had found our turning point. We’d been married for three years then, a volatile cycle of pain. She had sent me to the police station ten times because I’d gotten into fights with Dorian—her “soulmate.” And every time I came home, our arguments were so explosive she ended up in the ER eleven times from the sheer stress and physical toll of our mutual destruction. Then came the business trip to Dubai. The explosion happened at noon. I remember the roar, the heat, and the ceiling coming down. She threw herself over me, shielding me from the shrapnel that shredded her back. I used every ounce of my strength to hold up a collapsing support beam so she wouldn’t be crushed. We ended up in adjacent hospital beds, our hands stretched across the narrow aisle, gripping each other like lifelines. “No more fighting,” she had sobbed, her face pale against the white pillows. “I’ll send him away, Cade. I promise. Let’s just be us. Let’s have a real life, okay?” Looking at our shared scars, my heart broke for her. With trembling hands, I tore up the divorce papers I’d prepared. “One last try,” I had whispered. That day, Dorian was erased. He was fired, blocked, and scrubbed from her life. To prove her devotion, she even had my name tattooed over her heart, swearing she would never make me regret staying. Now, I realized those vows were just lines in a script she had long since stopped following. … Dorian eventually stormed out of the station, clutching his son and fuming. My legal team had dismantled his “evidence” within minutes. Facing my knowledge of food safety regulations and liability law, he looked like a panicked amateur. He was livid because he couldn’t play the victim. As we entered our house, I strode ahead. Lydia followed, her heels clicking sharply on the marble. “Could you not have been a little more empathetic?” she snapped, her brow furrowed. “Bullying a father and his sick child—is that who you are now?” “Bullying?” I spun around so fast she stumbled back. “My company’s formulas are pristine, Lydia. He clearly fed that kid something he shouldn’t have and tried to frame me for a payout. You’re telling me you couldn’t see through that? Who is bullying whom?” Lydia sighed, a sound of weary disappointment. “You know exactly how clean my manufacturing process is,” I stepped closer, my voice dropping to a dangerous hiss. “And yet, you helped them file the report. You’re exactly who you’ve always been, aren’t you?” “Cade,” she said softly, shaking her head. “Sometimes you truly lack basic human empathy.” I froze. “The boy is three,” she continued. “Dorian is a first-time father. When a child is that sick, you don’t think straight. Instead of being understanding, you attacked a single father for a minor mistake. You…” She looked me up and down, a mocking curl hitting her lip. “Oh, right. I forgot. You’re a man who will never be a father. I guess I shouldn’t expect you to understand what it feels like to care about a child.” The world went white. The next thing I knew, the sound of a sharp crack echoed through the foyer. My hand was stinging. I had slapped her. “Lydia! Don’t you dare act like you don’t know why I’ll never be a father!” She flinched, her eyes dropping to the floor. The guilt finally flickered in her expression, but I wouldn’t let her hide. “College,” I barked. “You got drunk and picked a fight with the wrong people. They came at you with a broken bottle. I stepped in front of it. That bottle severed my vas deferens. I had to get a vasectomy because the damage was irreparable! I gave up my future for yours!” A bitter laugh choked me. “If I had known back then that you were fighting over Dorian that night, I would have let them move me out of the way. I would have never saved you.” “I… I’m sorry,” she stammered, looking small. “I shouldn’t have said that.” “You’ve said a lot of the wrong things over the last seven years.” I stared at her, feeling a coldness settle in my bones. “The truth is, you never cared. Not about me, and certainly not about this marriage. If you did, those words wouldn’t have been so easy to spit out. Tell me, do you ever say ‘the wrong thing’ to Dorian?” Silence. “That’s what I thought,” I whispered. “Cade—” “Stop lying, Lydia. You didn’t value our ‘last chance.’ You just got better at hiding the truth.” I looked at her chest, at the spot where my name was tattooed. I sneered. “You just said what you needed to say to keep your safety net while you kept him in the basement of your life.” “I moved him underground for us!” she suddenly shouted, her frustration boiling over. “In the last four years, did you ever see a shadow of them? No! I kept my lives separate so you wouldn’t be hurt!” I stared at her, horrified. “Lydia… listen to yourself.” “Enough, Cade.” She crossed her arms. “If you hadn’t been so petty and litigious today, you would never have found out. We could have gone on like this forever. We were happy. You’re the one destroying our peace.” When you reach the peak of fury, you don’t scream. You laugh. The report against my company should have been handled by the legal department. I only stepped in because the complainant’s number looked familiar. I had checked it. I had followed the trail. And it led straight back to her. Lydia sighed again, reaching out as if to touch my arm. “Let’s just pretend this didn’t happen. Don’t throw away everything we’ve rebuilt over a misunderstanding.” I laughed again, louder this time, and slammed a new set of divorce papers onto the console table. “If you actually valued ‘us,’ he wouldn’t exist in your world.” “What is this?” Her breath hitched as she saw the header. Petition for Dissolution of Marriage. “Take it back.” She reached for the papers to tear them, but I pinned them down with my palm. “Four years ago was the last chance, Lydia. I meant it.” “Cade…” “Three days,” I said, my voice dead. “Give me your answer in three days.” I walked out without looking back. I left her standing there, her fingers trembling as they brushed the edge of the document. I waited two days. She didn’t call. She didn’t text. On the third day, I went back to the house to end it. But as I reached the door, I heard the sound of clinking glasses and laughter from inside. “Lydia, today’s the deadline for the papers,” a woman’s voice—one of her friends—said. “What’s the plan?” “The plan?” Lydia’s voice was cold, sharp. “He’s being dramatic. He’s the one who owes me an apology for this little stunt.” I froze, my hand tightening on the doorknob. “We’ve been married for seven years,” Lydia continued. “I know I overstepped by bringing Dorian around, but Cade is obsessed with me. We’ve been more ‘in love’ these last four years than most couples are in a lifetime. He’s used to me; he’s never actually threatened divorce before. He’s just trying to scare me.” She must have waved the papers in the air. “He hasn’t even considered how much this ‘performance’ is damaging our relationship.” I felt my heart hammering against my ribs, fueled by pure, unadulterated rage. One of her friends glanced toward the door. She saw the shadow but chose not to say anything. Instead, she asked, “But what if he’s serious this time?” Lydia laughed. “We’ve literally bled for each other, Sarah. People who save each other’s lives don’t just walk away. We’re bonded in a way you couldn’t understand.” “Then why did you have a baby with Dorian? I thought you were actually going straight this time.” I heard the clink of a toast. “A bond that deep doesn’t need to be fragile,” Lydia said. “We saved each other’s lives. He belongs to me, and I belong to him. He isn’t going anywhere.” I took a deep breath, my chest aching. I didn’t open the door. I turned around and walked away. It was time to stop playing games and start the litigation. As my team prepared the filings, a message from Lydia finally came through on the third day: [Instead of wasting time throwing a tantrum, you should focus on paying Dorian for the damages to his reputation.] Attached was a court summons. Dorian was suing my company for food safety violations. He wasn’t giving up. But I knew he didn’t have the brains to do this alone. I called Lydia immediately. “You’re the one who filed this for him, aren’t you?” Lydia let out a soft, melodic hum. She didn’t need to say yes. “And if I refuse to settle?” “Honey,” she said, her voice dropping into a patronizing purr, “you should think carefully. My firm’s top litigation team is handling this. Don’t be stubborn. Just sign the check and let it go.” I gripped the phone until my knuckles turned white. “This company was founded by my grandfather. It’s been a household name for a century. You want me to admit to a lie and destroy the Thorne family legacy just to give your lover a payday?” Lydia sighed. “Why must you make things so difficult for them?” “They are the ones making things difficult for me!” I shouted. “Dorian poisoned his own kid with something else just to get to me!” Silence. When she spoke again, her voice was ice. “Fine. Have it your way. Good luck, Cade.” The line went dead. My lead counsel, Parker, looked at me with worry. “Sir, Lydia’s firm just sent over the formal notice. Her team has never lost a case of this scale. We’re in trouble.” I straightened my tie. “Prepare the files. I’m handling the defense myself.” Parker’s eyes widened. On the day of the hearing, when I stepped up as both the defendant and the lead counsel, Lydia’s jaw practically hit the floor. She had forgotten—or perhaps never cared enough to know—that I held a law degree from the best school in the country. I had just chosen to run the business instead of practicing. My phone buzzed. A text from her. I ignored it. I tore her legal team apart. By the time I was finished, Lydia’s “invincible” lawyers looked like first-year interns. The judge dismissed Dorian’s claim with prejudice. As the courtroom cleared, Dorian was red-faced with fury. I glanced at Lydia. Her expression was unreadable, but as I walked toward the exit, she caught me at the door. She smiled, a strange, lingering look. “Mr. Thorne. You’re much more formidable than I remembered.” “What’s the matter, Lydia? Going to file an appeal for your boy toy?” “No,” she laughed. “If my husband is this brilliant, why would I fight him?” She turned to leave, tossing a final remark over her shoulder. “Good luck with the business, Cade. I hope it keeps growing.” I frowned. What is she playing at? That night, I stayed at the office. I personally audited the warehouse, checked the security feeds, and verified the fire safety protocols. I wanted to make sure there wasn’t a single crack in the foundation. Parker stayed late with me. “Thank god for you, sir. If they’d won, they would have drained our entire quarterly profit to pay that loser. Lydia actually tried to argue for a total asset seizure as compensation! Talk about biased. Whose wife is she, anyway?” One of the junior associates whispered, “Yeah, she’s clearly picked her side.” I stiffened, then forced a smile. “It’s fine. Let’s go home.” But as we walked out toward the parking lot, a deafening BOOM shook the ground. A wall of hot air slammed into my back. I spun around. The warehouse—my family’s legacy—was a pillar of fire reaching for the night sky. “My parents! Their things!” I screamed, lunging toward the flames. Parker and the others tackled me, pinning me to the pavement. “Sir! It’s too dangerous! You can’t go in!” “Everything is in there! The original records, the family archives—everything!” “Cade, stop! It’s gone!” The sirens drowned out my screams. Fire trucks and police cruisers swarmed the area. I watched the orange glow consume the only things I had left of my mother and father. My strength vanished. I stopped fighting. Then, I saw it. A black Rolls Royce parked just outside the police line. A familiar face appeared behind the tinted glass. Lydia was there, a slim cigarette between her fingers, watching the carnage with terrifying detachment. When she saw me look, she picked up the child in the backseat and blew me a playful kiss. In the driver’s seat, Dorian was finally grinning. Lydia stepped out of the car. “You embarrassed Dorian in court,” she said, her voice carrying over the crackle of the fire. “He needed a little compensation for his hurt feelings.” I couldn’t breathe. “The inventory is gone, but don’t worry—I’ll give you the money to rebuild later. Don’t blame him, Cade. This was my idea.” My throat tightened. That building wasn’t just inventory. It was my history. I remembered being five years old, my father holding my hand as he walked me through those aisles, telling me the story of how our family built something from nothing. Take care of it, Cade, they had told me. “Mom… Dad… I’m sorry,” I whispered. The world began to spin. The blackness crept into the edges of my vision. Lydia’s smug expression was the last thing I saw before it shattered. “Cade!” I heard her voice, suddenly sharp with panic, right before I hit the ground. When I woke up, I coughed up a spray of blood. I stared blankly at the doctor, then at Lydia, who was sitting by my bed. The doctor sighed. “Acute cardiac and pulmonary distress, triggered by extreme emotional shock. You have old scarring on your heart, Mr. Thorne. Why weren’t you taking care of yourself? One more night of stress like this and you could lose everything. Do you understand?” I closed my eyes. The old scarring. Another gift from Lydia. Back in college, when she was constantly getting into trouble with local thugs, I was always the one who stepped in. I’d been stabbed and beaten more times than I could count. The scar on my heart was from a fruit knife meant for her. I hadn’t known then that she was only in those fights to protect Dorian’s interests. Once the doctor left, Lydia grabbed my hand, her grip frantic. “Cade, I’m so sorry. I didn’t know… I…” Her voice broke. “It’s my fault. I shouldn’t have pushed you. I shouldn’t have let them burn the warehouse…” “Does it matter now?” I asked, staring at the ceiling. Twelve years of my life, gone in an instant because she wanted to soothe her lover’s ego. She looked frantic. “Cade, I’ll send him away. This time, I mean it. He’s gone.” Her phone buzzed. She glanced at it, and her face went pale. “I have to go. I’ll be right back.” “Where?” I asked, my eyes burning. “To Dorian?” She hesitated. “It’s not him. The baby has a fever.” “And what about me?” I grabbed her wrist, my fingers digging into her skin. “You burn down my life and you’re just going to walk out?” She paused, then slowly, one by one, she pried my fingers off her. “I’ll be back. I promise.” I watched her walk out. She had a home to go to. Dorian had a home. I had nothing. When Parker came to check on me, I was already dragging myself out of bed. “Sir! I’ll call the doctor!” “No.” I looked him dead in the eye. “We’re leaving. Now.” I stood in front of the house—the “reconciliation” home I had bought for Lydia. I was wrapped in a heavy coat, holding a torch. “Sir,” Parker whispered. “Are you sure?” I tossed the torch into the dry brush near the porch. “Positive.” I had carried her across this threshold once. I had thought we were building a sanctuary. Now, the memories were just poison. If I was leaving, I was leaving nothing behind. “Do you want to say goodbye to her?” “No.” A private jet was waiting at the local airfield. I handed him a signed set of papers. “Just give her these.” As the plane climbed into the night sky, the fire below was still raging. I didn’t look back. I was never coming back.

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