Eight years after my family went bankrupt, the poorest, most invisible boy in my high school class suddenly became my VIP client. Later, when my career and life faced setback after setback, he was the one who stayed by my side, walking me through it step by step. At my most helpless moment, he finally confessed the deep, insecure love he had hidden for so long. Yet, in the very last second, just as my heart was truly moved, I overheard a conversation between him and the CEO of the company I was interviewing for. He sat on the sofa, dressed in a sharp custom suit, exuding a cold, careless aura. Beneath that immaculate exterior was the ruthless, sinister stranger he truly was. “Don’t hire her, and this contract is still yours.” 1 The first time we locked eyes after eight years, my VIP client smiled and called out my name. I didn’t even recognize him at first. He didn’t mind my poor memory. Instead, he patiently guided me through the past. It wasn’t until he mentioned our high school and homeroom that it finally clicked. “I remember now! You’re Rowan Sterling!” The corners of his lips curled up. His handsome, mature face, which normally carried an intimidating authority, was softened by that smile, giving off a deceptive illusion of approachability. I couldn’t be blamed for not recognizing him. His transformation was staggering; he was a completely different person. “It’s me.” I truly never expected this. The most invisible, destitute boy in our class had become our firm’s most valued client. Rowan Sterling was my high school classmate back when my family was still ridiculously wealthy, before our bankruptcy and my sudden transfer. I still had some memories of him, though distant and blurry. I remembered he always wore a pair of sneakers that were peeling and coming apart at the soles, yet meticulously clean. His family had been struggling. His mother died when he was born, and by middle school, his father was bedridden with a severe illness. They survived on meager government welfare checks. When the delinquent boys in class bullied him, he never fought back, always trying to avoid causing any trouble. I witnessed it by chance once. Back then, I was young, arrogant, and spoiled rotten by my wealthy parents. Fearless and reckless, I walked right up and splashed scalding hot coffee directly onto the bully’s face, burning him so badly he couldn’t even scream. Rowan just stared at me. The malnourished teenager was incredibly frail, his oversized school uniform hanging off his bony frame like a ghost. Meeting his gaze, I grinned, patted his shoulder, and told him, “Next time they mess with you, just grab one of them and beat the hell out of him.” My words were naive and irresponsible. I never stopped to think about how he would afford the medical bills if he actually hurt someone. Aside from that, we had zero interaction. That is, until my senior year, when my family’s empire collapsed. To dodge the debt collectors, my parents pulled me out of school and we moved away in the dead of night, cutting ties with all my former friends and classmates, vanishing without a trace. 2 Life really is unpredictable. Who could have guessed that my family, once the wealthiest real estate tycoons in the state, would one day lose everything? And who could have imagined that the boy who was once as small and insignificant as an ant would become a billionaire tech mogul everyone tried to impress? I let out a sigh. Realizing he was just an old classmate slowly eased the nervous tension I had about meeting an important client. “After all these years, I never expected to see you again.” Truth be told, Rowan was the only classmate I had seen in a decade. After the bankruptcy, I transferred to a rundown public high school in a bleak rust-belt town. Despite the terrible facilities and environment, I managed to claw my way into a top-tier university. At the very least, holding a Finance degree from an elite school got me through the doors of a Fortune 500 company. I worked myself to the bone every day to earn a decent salary, keeping my paralyzed parents afloat in their long-term care facility. “How have you been these past few years, Mr. Sterling?” The moment it left my mouth, I realized it was a stupid question. Building an empire from scratch is always agonizing. But wasn’t this just the standard corporate small talk? Rowan took a sip of his water, his eyelids lowered, his dark eyes deep and unreadable. After a moment, he replied in a flat, emotionless tone, “Not very well.” I froze for a second, then nodded in agreement. “True. It couldn’t have been easy getting to where you are today. But the hard part is over, right? The future is bright.” Even if we were classmates, he was still the client. My tone carried an involuntary hint of flattery, but he didn’t seem to mind. “What about you? How have you been?” He looked at me, his gaze so intense and earnest that it gave me a strange feeling. Ignoring the anomaly, I shook my head and offered a bitter smile. “Barely surviving, honestly. You saw it yourself—my family went bankrupt, my parents are sick in a facility, and the former heiress is now just another corporate wage slave.” The crushing monthly medical bills bled me dry, swallowing nearly my entire paycheck. Why else would I be working this desperately? I flashed him my most eager, people-pleasing smile. “Whether I eat steak or instant ramen this month all depends on Mr. Sterling signing this deal.” My attempt at self-deprecating humor didn’t make him laugh. He maintained the same faint, unreadable smile that seemed to carry a trace of bitterness. He glanced at me, then looked down, pinching the bridge of his nose as he sighed softly. “Where’s the contract? Let me see it.” I quickly presented it with both hands, slyly uncapping my fancy pen and placing it right next to his hand. Perhaps my desperation was too obvious. Rowan’s expression grew considerably colder, but he didn’t stop me. He called me an old classmate; I politely called him Mr. Sterling. Times had changed. The dynamic between us was now like a lord and a peasant, tainted by the suffocating, vulgar respect of class difference. I wasn’t afraid of him looking down on me. I was only afraid he wouldn’t sign. Thankfully, he showed mercy and generously signed his name on the dotted line. I breathed a massive sigh of relief. “Thank you, Mr. Sterling. Please rest assured, we will deliver the absolute best results for this project.” Rowan showed no reaction. It was as if he didn’t care how the project turned out; to him, this amount of money was just pocket change. “Valerie.” “Yes, Mr. Sterling?” He looked at me seriously and said something I completely failed to understand. “I only signed this contract because of you.” I was dumbfounded. Since when did my status as an “old classmate” carry that much weight? Meeting my blank stare, he added, “Back when I was at my absolute lowest, you were the only one willing to help me.” That tiny, insignificant intervention I had nearly forgotten actually earned me a decade-long debt of gratitude? Honestly, I would have done the exact same thing for anyone else. But Rowan just happened to become an untouchable billionaire. See, it always pays to do good deeds, I thought. “You’re giving me too much credit, Mr. Sterling. I was just young and impulsive. But even if I could do it all over again, I’d make the exact same choice.” He nodded. “True. You have always been so good.” Rowan pulled out his phone. “Let’s exchange numbers. We should keep in touch.” He pulled up his personal contact QR code. 3 “Keep in touch” usually just meant polite corporate lip service. Having navigated the business world for years, I knew the rules inside and out. When I returned to the office with the signed contract, my boss smiled so widely his wrinkles folded over each other, immediately feeding me corporate promises. “Valerie, I’ve always seen great potential in you. Keep up the good work.” I nodded and smiled. “It’s all thanks to your guidance, Mr. Davis.” My boss handed me a luxury gift box, mentioning that Thanksgiving was coming up next week and told me to find a reason to deliver it to Rowan. We had just exchanged numbers, and I already had an excuse to use it. I called Rowan, trying to make my tone sound less like a corporate drone and more casual and friendly. Rowan was a busy man. The phone rang until the very last second before he picked up. “Hello?” “Hey, Rowan! It’s Valerie Vance. Thanksgiving is right around the corner, and I wanted to know when you might be free? I have a little holiday gift I’d love to drop off for you.” Rowan gave me his home address, saying he was free tomorrow. He mentioned a partner had gifted him fresh Alaskan King Crab legs and invited me over to share a meal. I never expected Rowan to be so sentimental. After ten years of silence, he casually invited a former acquaintance into his home for lunch. I guess that’s the kind of grace you have when you’re at the top. I sighed in admiration. 4 I arrived at the address Rowan gave me right at 10:00 AM. It was a sprawling, ultra-luxury modern estate. Behind towering wrought-iron gates lay a manicured courtyard. White fences framed exquisite, rare blooming flowers, and a wide stone pathway cut through a lush emerald lawn. The architecture was elegant and romantic, reeking of impossibly expensive taste. I rang the doorbell, and a housekeeper quickly let me in. Rowan hadn’t gone into the office today. At home, his attire was much more relaxed and casual. He smiled at me. “Take a seat. I just finished my workout.” I felt a bit stiff. “Please, don’t mind me. Go ahead and do what you need to do.” “Oh, I left the gift right here for you. You can open it whenever you have time.” Rowan barely glanced at it before turning to me. “Stop calling me Mr. Sterling. It sounds too distant. Just call me Rowan.” The guy holding the purse strings had spoken; who was I to disobey? I nodded eagerly. “Alright, Rowan it is.” The housekeeper was an incredible cook. The King Crab legs were steamed to perfection, bright red and steaming. I was just reaching for a crab leg to crack it open and score some brownie points when Rowan placed a small plate of perfectly extracted crab meat right in front of me. His movements were fluid and natural, as if he had practiced doing this a thousand times. I was incredibly flattered but felt awkward, trying to ease the tension with a joke. “I don’t know about this. If your girlfriend finds out, she’s going to be furious.” Rowan rolled up his sleeves and started cracking another shell. “There is no girlfriend.” He looked up at me. “Valerie, I have never had anyone else.” That sentence carried an oddly ambiguous weight. He didn’t just say he wasn’t dating anyone; he said he had never had anyone else. It sounded almost like he was trying to prove his innocence to me. My brain short-circuited, and my hand jerked. But then I reasoned he was probably just speaking casually. After a brief, loaded silence, I chuckled. “I get it, the empire comes first. You’re young and successful. Your future partner is going to be incredibly amazing.” Rowan slowly lowered his head. His interest seemed to fade, his tone flat. “Yes. She is incredibly amazing.” I didn’t quite catch that last part, and I deliberately didn’t ask him to repeat it, terrified I might uncover something I shouldn’t. After lunch and some casual chatting, Rowan mentioned that our old class president was hosting a high school reunion next weekend. He asked me to go with him. I couldn’t really refuse. I had just eaten his food and secured a massive contract from his hands. I had to give the client face. I agreed immediately, though I went home dreading how I was going to interact with classmates I hadn’t seen in ten years. 5 On Saturday, Rowan picked me up himself. I had the honor of sitting in the passenger seat of his ridiculously expensive sports car. I teased, “Thanks to you, I finally get to ride in a car that costs more than my life.” Rowan’s expression didn’t change. “If you like it, I’ll give it to you.” “?” My eyes went wide, assuming he was joking. “I don’t love this specific one. I’ll let you know when I find one I like more.” I burst out laughing. Rowan’s lips curled into a smile, carrying an inexplicable sense of indulgence. “Okay.” When we arrived at the hotel banquet hall, everyone was already there. Now that Rowan was the most successful person to ever graduate from our class, everyone wanted to kiss his ring. Since I walked in with him, I ironically became the most invisible person in the room, quickly squeezed into a corner. Ten years had changed everyone drastically. Some were married, some divorced with kids, some ran small businesses, and some were corporate drones like me. The seat of honor was left empty for Rowan. Everyone here had stayed in touch to some degree over the years, clustering with their friend groups. I, the girl who vanished senior year, was left standing awkwardly, not knowing where to sit. Rowan patted the empty chair right next to his. “Valerie, sit here.” The moment the words left his mouth, every pair of eyes in the room snapped toward me. Someone gasped, “Wait, is that Valerie Vance?!” Once he said it, they finally remembered I existed. I flashed a wide, generous smile. “Wow, someone actually remembers me.” The atmosphere livened up, and the topic of conversation suddenly shifted to me. I had no idea who told them about my family’s bankruptcy. “I heard you transferred senior year because your family went under, Valerie. Is that true?” “So what are you doing for work now?” “Oh, I’m sure Valerie’s parents bounced back years ago. A starving camel is still bigger than a horse! She’s probably doing way better than us working-class folks.” They got more and more animated. No matter what they said, I kept my expression perfectly neutral. Everyone here was an adult. We weren’t innocent kids anymore. Every word they spoke carried a thinly veiled layer of schadenfreude or hungry gossip. The class president interrupted the interrogation, standing up to raise his glass. “Let’s make our first toast to our most successful classmate, Mr. Sterling!” There was no shortage of people desperate to latch onto Rowan. Terrified of falling behind, they all rushed forward with their glasses raised. Rowan was no longer the timid, shivering boy from high school. He handled this highly-orchestrated corporate pageantry flawlessly. Having sat at the top for so long, he had experienced this countless times. It didn’t faze him at all. Normally, these people would never have the chance to breathe the same air as someone of Rowan’s caliber. Now that they had the opportunity, they were going to squeeze it dry. In a society ruled by profit, the cheap pride of adults meant absolutely nothing. One man groveled with both hands on his glass, speaking with pathetic humility. “I was an idiot back in school. I hope Mr. Sterling can forgive the ignorance of a fool, and we can still be old buddies.” I recognized him. It was the same punk who used to torment Rowan. We had bad blood. After all, getting a cup of scalding coffee thrown in your face hurts. If he hadn’t been terrified of my father’s money back then, he probably would have jumped me in an alley. Now that I had lost my status, he naturally couldn’t resist kicking me while I was down. He furrowed his brow, glaring at me with arrogant hostility. “Valerie, what the hell is wrong with your manners? Mr. Sterling is sitting right next to you, and everyone is toasting him. Why aren’t you raising your glass?” “Do you still think you’re some untouchable heiress? If you piss Mr. Sterling off, he could crush you like a bug!” The table fell into a dead, awkward silence. No one spoke. If I were seventeen-year-old Valerie Vance, I would have smashed a dinner plate into his smug face. But I was twenty-five-year-old Valerie Vance. I needed to be mature and stable… Screw mature and stable! I gave a fake, plastic smile and asked, “So if you decided to drop dead, does that mean I have to drop dead too?” “I remember you used to love bullying Rowan. You looked down on him for being poor and made his life a living hell.” I covered my mouth, chuckling lightly. “But I know you were just young and ignorant back then. I’m just joking around, don’t take it to heart.” His face turned a sickly shade of green. No one expected me to strip away his dignity so publicly. Just as the man was about to explode in anger, Rowan, who had been completely silent, picked up the glass pitcher and poured water into my cup. “Don’t drink the wine. It’s bad for your stomach.” It wasn’t just the others who were shocked. I was stunned too. The billionaire CEO was personally pouring my water. My aggressive fire was instantly extinguished. “Thank you, thank you, please don’t trouble yourself, I can do it.” Seeing Rowan’s attitude, the man’s fury instantly deflated like a popped balloon. By pouring my drink in front of everyone, Rowan was making a crystal-clear statement: She is under my protection. Watching that cowardly bully tuck his tail between his legs and scurry back to his seat, I almost burst out laughing. Rowan lowered his voice and asked, “Are you upset?” I kept my voice low too. “Not at all. Guys like him are just petty and jealous, which is why he holds a grudge. I’d never waste my time on trash like that.” Rowan didn’t say a word. For a fraction of a second, his body went entirely rigid—a tension I didn’t notice—before he tipped his head back and downed his glass of liquor in one gulp.

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After the party ended, Tristan kissed me, riding the high of his buzz. I thought my years of secret, unrequited love had finally seen the light of day. But just two days later, he went Instagram official with his new girlfriend. It was a backlit photo of them kissing, captioned: “Plotted for a long time, finally got what I wished for.” 1 I gathered my courage and called him. “Did it have to be Chloe?” “Do I need to report to you who I’m dating?” His lazy drawl came through the receiver, so familiar yet suddenly acting like a total stranger. I swallowed the bitter lump in my throat, let out a long breath, and asked, “If it’s her, then what am I?” And what was that kiss? There was a long silence on the other end. After a pause, he let out a cold scoff. “Think whatever you want.” The dead dial tone pierced my eardrums, and a wave of absolute exhaustion swept through my bones. It was a very strange feeling. It was like the little boat you relied on to survive suddenly sprang a leak. You watch the hole slowly widen, the water seeping in inch by inch, yet you stubbornly fantasize that you can still patch it up. It isn’t until the water entirely swallows the hull that you suddenly realize: some things don’t yield good results just because you try hard enough. I took a deep breath and went to the bathroom to wash my face. When I came back, Tristan was calling me again. “Clara, bring a box of pads over. It’s not really convenient for me to go buy them right now.” My heart violently sank. Did he really… think I would never leave him? 2 My family runs a convenience store, located right next door to his house. For certain things, it really was convenient. But it was exactly this convenience that gave him the opportunity to stab me in the heart, over and over again. “Here.” My face was flushed red as I angrily threw the box of pads into his chest. But the moment I turned around, he grabbed the hood of my sweatshirt. “What, you’re mad?” He knew exactly why I was mad. I swatted his hand away, gritting my teeth. “Next time you bring someone home, you don’t need to notify me.” He didn’t take it seriously at all. In fact, he looked incredibly satisfied with my visible discomfort, as if seeing me suffer brought him immense joy. I was so furious I turned to leave. But Tristan was tall with a long reach. With a casual stretch of his arm, he grabbed my hood again and pulled me right back. “You’re a grown adult, how can you be this bad at basic things?” He tossed the box onto the entryway console and slowly, meticulously helped fix my flipped-out hood. He was standing entirely too close. His hot breath brushed against my face, instantly making my heart pound like a drum. He was always like this. A slap in the face, followed by a piece of candy. “Tristan, did you see my earrings?” Right as he was fixing my hood, a girl’s whiny voice echoed from behind him. The moment I saw her, I involuntarily took a step back. It was Chloe. This was the girl who had thrown dirty water on me, called me an ugly freak, and framed me for stealing money. The two of them whispered something to each other, making me, the girl standing in the doorway, look like an absolute pathetic third wheel. My fingernails dug crescent moons into my palms. Watching them link arms, preparing to shut the door in my face, I suddenly found a surge of reckless courage and yelled at Tristan’s back. “I don’t want to like you anymore.” His footsteps halted, and the hand resting on Chloe’s waist visibly twitched. He froze for a few seconds before softly telling her, “Go back inside first.” Chloe shot me a look of pure disdain, didn’t say a word, and obediently went back in. That look was so triumphant, written with absolute mockery and contempt for me. But I didn’t actually care about her. Because for all these years, the only person who could truly hurt me was Tristan. He slowly turned around, his brow furrowed, pulled a cigarette from his pocket, and lit it. “You’re cutting me off again?” He said it so casually, entirely convinced that my bark was worse than my bite. I bit my lip hard, wanting to say something vicious, but realized I was exactly as pathetic as he thought I was. I couldn’t force those words out of my mouth a second time. Eventually, Tristan grew impatient. He tossed the cigarette butt on the ground and scoffed, arrogantly delivering his final verdict. “Fine, Clara. You better keep your word. Whoever reaches out first is a pathetic loser.” Psycho. Throwing out ultimatums like a middle schooler. But I have to admit, I was just as stubborn as he was. I stood there for a long time, my hand hovering over his doorbell, hesitating again and again, but ultimately, I never pressed it. “Fine. This time, I’ll keep my word.” 3 In my memory, this wasn’t our first fight. But compared to the countless frictions of our past, the ending this time was eerily quiet. If this were the past, I would have tossed and turned in the dead of night, listened to his favorite Spotify playlist, analyzed his Instagram stories, and meticulously drafted a massive apology paragraph, waiting for him to mercifully forgive my impulsiveness. But this time, I blocked Tristan’s number and went a full month without contacting him. It felt just like the time he got into that car crash; I felt like a layer of my skin had been peeled off. Back then, the doctors made it sound incredibly serious. I thought Tristan was never going to wake up. I was a walking zombie—I even almost burned down the kitchen trying to make fried rice. When my mom came home and saw me curled up in the corner of the kitchen, she smacked my arm in frustration, then pulled me into a heartbroken hug. “If you lose him, are you just going to stop living?” I buried my face in my mom’s chest and didn’t say a word. My mom started crying too. “Our family owes him, but your dad and I can pay it back. My daughter is not allowed to throw her life away on someone who doesn’t love her back.” I nodded at the time, but the second she turned her back, I secretly ran straight to the hospital. Because I owed Tristan. Years ago, during the devastating earthquake that hit our hometown, I was over at his house playing. His mom and I ended up trapped under a collapsed concrete slab. When the rescue teams arrived, Mrs. Sterling insisted they pull me out first. But by the time I woke up in the hospital, she had passed away in the emergency room. I watched Tristan cry until he passed out in front of her grave, and I silently swore to myself that I would live the rest of my life for him. Originally, Tristan used to follow me around everywhere, but after that day, our dynamic completely flipped. I chased after him every single day, happily swallowing whatever bullying or teasing he threw my way. Later, when we got to high school, because of the prominent scar on the center of my forehead and the fact that I only ever hung around Tristan, I became the target of isolation for the entire class. And Chloe was the one who hated me the most. But she was undeniably gorgeous—so gorgeous that Tristan fell for her at first sight. Back then, Tristan was in the AP sciences and I was in the humanities. Our classrooms were on opposite sides of the building, so he made me deliver breakfast to Chloe for him. Every single morning, aside from enduring the bitter heartbreak of playing his wingman, I also had to endure Chloe’s public humiliation. Even though they broke up shortly after, from that point on, Tristan figured out the exact right way to torture me. I watched him cycle through new girlfriends one after another, resigning myself to the fact that this was all we would ever be. Until the beginning of this year, when he got into that car accident. I stayed by his hospital bed day and night for over a month. I thought our relationship was finally shifting into something real, but then Chloe reappeared. She snatched Tristan away again, delivering a brutal blow right to my head. 4 Probably because I had been a depressed zombie for too long, my best friend Maya couldn’t stand it anymore. One morning, she kicked my door in, dragged me into the bathroom to shower and do my makeup, and announced she was taking me out to find a man. “Clara, did Tristan put a hex on you?! I just don’t get it. Finding a three-legged toad is hard, but finding a two-legged man is the easiest thing in the world!” I forced a painfully awkward smile, having absolutely no intention of explaining my long, agonizing history with him. “Clara, are you even listening to me?” “I’m listening,” I mumbled vaguely, though I hadn’t absorbed a single word. Maya saw right through my fake enthusiasm, rolled her eyes, and shoved me out the door. Like a puppet on strings, I let her drag me through the mall for hours. Three hours later, as I was using the ultra-spicy Korean BBQ as an excuse to let my tears and snot flow freely, Maya suddenly clutched her stomach, claiming she had cramps. I literally couldn’t spare my mouth to speak, so I just waved her away, gesturing for her to hurry back. But just as I refocused my attention on the grilling meat, a massive shadow fell over the table. I looked up. A breathtakingly handsome guy, easily 6’2″, slid into the booth right across from me. “This seat is taken,” I warned him. The handsome guy cleared his throat, showing absolutely zero self-awareness to leave. “Hi, Clara. I’m the… uh…” He didn’t seem very familiar with his own script. He glanced down at a cheat sheet in his hand before remembering. “The boyfriend-for-hire your best friend booked. I’m Ethan.” My eyes practically bulged out of my head. I hastily swallowed my food, grabbed Ethan’s phone, and stared at the booking page with tears streaming down my face from the spicy food. “So your username is… Thunderous Invincible Underpants?” Could he actually survive in the companion-for-hire industry with a name like that? His mouth twitched. He clearly wasn’t thrilled about the name either, but he gritted his teeth and nodded. My phone dinged twice. I lit up the screen, and a custom meme from Maya popped up. “Enjoy the boy toy, stay safe. Ps: You’re welcome.” Stay safe?! Is that something you actually say out loud?! Sitting right in front of this incredibly handsome guy, a literal snot bubble blew out of my nose in sheer frustration. Ethan considerately slid a napkin across the table. But before I could even try to explain that this was a massive misunderstanding, he accurately guessed what I was about to say. He leaned his forearms on the table, a smirk tugging at his lips, and stared at me with wide, innocent puppy-dog eyes. “I’m just a small business owner, Clara. No refunds.” As he spoke, he tapped the screen, pointing to the massive non-refundable deposit Maya had paid. Holy crap, two thousand dollars? Did Maya sell a kidney?! “Fine.” After staring at it forever, I helplessly pulled out my phone. “What’s your server rank?” I assumed “boyfriend-for-hire” just meant a gaming buddy to carry me in matches. Since the money was already gone, I figured I might as well get some gaming out of it. Instead, Ethan pulled out a set of car keys. “Come on, we don’t play cheap games like that.” Two minutes later, a sleek black Maybach pulled up to the restaurant doors. He opened the passenger door, resting one hand on the roof, and tilted his head at me. “Get in.” Before I could even formulate a rejection, I was smoothly bundled into the passenger seat. By the time I regained my senses, Ethan was already in the driver’s seat, leaning halfway across my body to buckle my seatbelt for me. He was so close. The warm glow of the streetlights washed over his face, and I could even see the slight flutter of his eyelashes. I instinctively shrank back. “I can do it myself…” He didn’t even look up. He slowly and deliberately clicked the belt into place, as if what he was doing was the most natural thing in the world. “If you can do everything yourself, what do you need me for?” My heart involuntarily seized with pain. A long time ago, Tristan had said those exact same words to me. One second he had been flirting with Chloe, but the moment he saw me twist my ankle, he aggressively insisted on taking me home. I tactfully told him I could walk myself. Annoyed by my rejection, he forcefully shoved me onto the back of his bicycle. “Clara, if you can do everything yourself, what do you need me for?” When those words left his mouth back then, both of us froze. We didn’t speak another word the entire way home. His erratic hot-and-cold behavior constantly made it impossible for me to tell the difference between his genuine care and his toxic games. To the point where, for fifteen years, stepping forward led to heartbreak, and stepping back left me suffocating with regret. 5 Boom. A brilliant firework exploded against the horizon. Without me even noticing, Ethan had driven us all the way to the Santa Monica Pier. Massive blooms of fireworks lit up the night sky, absolutely breathtaking. But when the sky faded back to dark, an inevitable wave of emptiness washed over me. Ethan must have noticed. Leaning against the pier railing, he broke my train of thought. “Clara, want to hold onto a firework?” I was surprised, not even realizing he had dropped the formalities and just called me by my name. “Hold onto a firework?” He nodded, his sharp jawline dipping in and out of the shadows as the next round of fireworks illuminated the sky. “How do I do that?” I asked. He gave a mysterious smile, took a step closer, and a clean, crisp cologne washed over me. It was subtle, and surprisingly, I didn’t hate it. Then I watched as he pulled a sparkler right from behind my ear like a magic trick. I burst out laughing. “Your agency… I mean, your company trains you guys pretty well.” He scratched his nose, grinning with a touch of smug arrogance. “I’ll just take that as a compliment.” I took the sparkler and looked up at him. “Thank you. Honestly, I was having a really miserable day today…” Before I could finish my sentence, the two exact culprits responsible for my miserable day suddenly walked into my line of sight. They spotted me almost instantly. Chloe waved enthusiastically. “Clara! Is that your boyfriend?” Chloe dragged Tristan over by the hand. But in sharp contrast to her glowing smile, Tristan’s face looked absolutely murderous. He shot Ethan a cold, piercing glare, then snapped his head toward me. “What are you doing wandering around so late with some sketchy guy?” The unlit sparkler froze stiffly in my hand. I had actually told Tristan countless times that I wanted to come to the pier to watch the fireworks. But year after year, I came alone, and I went home alone. He was truly a master at dealing out disappointment. Faced with his hostile interrogation, my expression went ice cold. “The sketchiest guy I’ve ever known is you.” He choked on his words, his brows knitting together, ready to lecture me. Even though he was technically two months younger than me, around him, I always felt like a subservient child. “Come back with me.” He reached out, trying to grab my arm. I instinctively recoiled from his touch. But the very next second, a heavy warmth draped over my shoulders. Ethan had wrapped his jacket around me and pulled me directly into his chest. The ocean breeze whipped his jacket around us. In the freezing tension, Ethan gave a rogue, insolent smirk. “A guy’s girlfriend should be taken home by her own guy, right, senior?” And then I watched as Tristan’s face turned completely black. 6 Ethan kept his arm around me and walked me straight toward that aggressively flashy Maybach. Just as I buckled my seatbelt, Chloe came jogging up to the car. Wearing a polite, flawlessly sweet smile, she leaned down against the passenger window. Her low-cut top offered a very deliberate, peek-a-boo view of her cleavage. “Hey handsome, I saw you bought sparklers. Could I get one?” I don’t know exactly when it started, but Chloe developed a sick obsession with stealing things from me—and she succeeded nine times out of ten. I instinctively clenched my fists, terrified that Ethan was about to become her newest trophy. But this time, I was dead wrong. “No.” “Excuse me?” She clearly had never experienced the concept of being rejected by a man before, her mouth falling open in exaggerated, soap-opera shock. I looked up just in time to see Ethan slam the car door shut, brutally mocking her. “What, you don’t have a man to buy them for you?” Without another word, he slammed on the gas, peeling out and splashing mud all over Chloe’s designer shoes. It was petty, but God, was it satisfying. On the drive back, I tried to fill the silence. “You called him senior back there. You know Tristan?” He glanced at me through the rearview mirror. His face didn’t show much emotion, but there was a distinct, simmering hostility underneath. “Yeah. He tore up a love letter of mine once.” That was when I learned that the three of us all went to the same high school. Except Ethan was two years below me. He was currently a junior in college. Thinking back to what an absolute, arrogant terror Tristan was in high school… Yeah, it made sense that he made enemies. I tried to offer a few comforting words, and before I knew it, we were parked outside my apartment. “Don’t worry, I’ll definitely make sure Maya leaves you a five-star review.” He looked a little speechless but smiled, thanked me, and walked me up to my door. But the moment I walked inside, my phone buzzed. It was a friend request from Tristan. “Who is that guy?” I didn’t reply. A few minutes later, he sent another text. “Are you done throwing this tantrum?” Ah. So a month of agonizing heartbreak was, in his eyes, just me throwing a little tantrum. My chest ached. I typed back: “You said it yourself. Whoever reaches out first is a pathetic loser.” There was no reply after that. I waited a few minutes, then set my phone down with a massive sigh of relief. It felt like… rejecting him wasn’t actually that hard after all. 7 After graduating college, I got a job as an editor for a web novel publisher. The office was pretty far from my house, and I didn’t want to waste my life commuting, so I told my parents I wanted to rent an apartment near work. They assumed I just wanted to avoid bumping into Tristan every day, so they enthusiastically agreed. My dad even slipped me an extra five hundred dollars, telling me he’d rather I rent a slightly more expensive place in a safer neighborhood. So after the holidays, I moved to a complex on the south side of the city. Maya originally promised to help me move, but she got stuck working mandatory overtime, so she sent Ethan instead. “I saw you had a ton of boxes, and I still have two hours left on that boyfriend-for-hire voucher. Might as well use it, right?” I laughed, thinking about how unbelievably unlucky the guy was to get booked for manual labor. But Ethan didn’t show a single ounce of impatience. Weekend traffic was terrible. He told me to wait inside and that he’d be there soon. I felt bad making him do all the work, so I decided to start hauling boxes down to the sidewalk myself. Just as I carried the third box out, Tristan walked up the street. “Where are you going?” I can’t perfectly describe the feeling. I admit that seeing him again still caused a tiny ripple in my deadened heart, but that fearless courage to walk through fire for him? It was completely, permanently gone. Honestly… he was just kind of annoying now. “Moving,” I answered dismissively. “Why didn’t you tell me?” he asked, his brow furrowing. I didn’t want to engage, so I just kept my head down and adjusted the box. Seeing me ignore him, Tristan’s garbage temper flared up again. He slammed his hand down on the box I was trying to lift, striking a pose that clearly said he wasn’t moving until I answered him. My anger instantly flared. “Tristan, do you need something?” His voice rose to match mine. “I can’t talk to you unless I need something?!” “Right!” He froze. I froze too. I let out a long breath, smoothing out my tangled emotions. “If you don’t need anything, stop coming to find me. If you do need something… go find Chloe. You only ever believe her anyway, right?” I screamed at him, and he looked genuinely stunned. His voice actually sounded a little wounded. “When have I ever not believed you?” When did you ever? During our senior year of high school, the class funds went missing. While the teacher was rushing to check the security cameras, Chloe publicly started a rumor that I stole the money. Her reasoning? I was the poorest kid in class, and two days prior, my mom had knitted me a brand-new scarf. She insisted the scarf was bought with stolen money. Even though the teacher told everyone not to accuse anyone before the footage was reviewed, Chloe and her little minions locked me in a storage closet, demanding I hand over the $78 class fund. I still remember the exact moment Tristan kicked the storage room door open and hurled a basketball at one of the girls. My heart swelled with desperate hope, waiting for him to defend me. But the words that actually left his mouth were: “How much did she take? I’ll pay it back for her.” See? It only took $78 to completely shatter a girl’s dignity. Tristan had never, not for a single second, truly believed in me. In that exact moment, I dropped all my expectations of him and learned that the only person you can ever rely on is yourself. That was also the very first time I told Tristan I didn’t want to like him anymore. I yanked the final cardboard box out from under his hand. “Go home. I can move my own things.” My icy attitude made Tristan’s face sink further and further. He opened his mouth, about to say something, but was interrupted by a sudden voice. “Looks lively over here. Need a hand, beautiful?” 8 Honestly, when the car pulled up to my new apartment complex, I was still a little dazed. When Ethan arrived earlier, he instantly stepped right between me and Tristan, looking less like a guy hired to help me move and more like a guy ready to throw a punch for me. But before I could dwell on it, a more pressing question popped into my head. “Does moving furniture cost extra?” I remembered that physical labor wasn’t listed on their company’s service menu. Maya was loaded, but as a junior editor, two thousand dollars was my entire month’s rent. Ethan laughed, unbuckled his seatbelt, crossed his arms playfully, and sized me up. “Of course it does. You weren’t planning on getting my services for free, were you?” My heart skipped a beat. “H… how much?” I swear, if it was over five hundred dollars, I was abandoning the car and fleeing on foot. He stared right at me, his eyes practically drowning me in warm, liquid amber. He stared so intensely I actually got scared. He leaned closer and closer, and right when I thought he was going to kiss me, he looked down and laughed, flashing two faint dimples. “Look how scared you are. Just buy me lunch, okay? I’ve been starving all morning.” I paused, then eagerly agreed. So after moving the boxes, we went to a trendy Korean BBQ spot. I have to admit, being young is great. Not only did we use his student discount, but we turned heads the entire time. Of course, it was mostly because Ethan was ridiculously handsome, which meant I caught the crossfire of all that attention. Someone inevitably started whispering about my face. “Look at that girl. She has a massive scar on her head. Why doesn’t she just get plastic surgery?” “Who knows, probably can’t afford it. But that guy is so hot, why would he ever go for an ugly freak like her?” The needle-sharp insults made my stomach drop. I reached for my head—crap, I forgot to wear a hat today. After the accident, my dad considered getting me reconstructive surgery. But my mom was running the little store by herself, money was tight, and my dad’s injured leg required expensive physical therapy. I felt too guilty burdening them, so I just kept putting the surgery off. I frantically tried to pull my bangs down to cover it. Right at that moment, Ethan suddenly leaned across the table. His long, elegant fingers gently tapped my forehead, stopping my panicked movements. “Please, scars are incredibly cool. You have to be so lucky to grow little wings right on your forehead.” A gruesome, jagged scar, yet he described it with such beautiful, romantic poetry. He tucked the loose strands of hair behind my ear, handling me as gently as if I were a priceless, fragile treasure. This was the very first time in my life someone told me I didn’t need to hide my ugly scar. The girls at the next table were still whispering and giggling. Ethan stood up straight, his brows instantly knitting together in fury. He walked over, leaned both hands heavily on their table, and stared dead into the eyes of the loudest girl. Her face instantly flushed bright red. “Are… are you looking for me?” He flashed a vicious grin, and under her awestruck gaze, he slowly spoke: “Yeah. Just coming over to hear the garbage you’re talking.” The girl froze. I froze too. Her friend panicked, glaring at Ethan and snapping, “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything! You might be handsome, but your mouth is absolutely toxic!” Ethan laughed, raising an eyebrow. “Oh, so you do understand that you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover.” “Why is it okay for you to talk trash behind someone’s back, but it’s not okay for me to insult you to your face?” The girl choked, but immediately shot back: “Even if we were wrong, you’re a guy! How can you be so classless and verbally attack women like that?” Ethan let out a cold scoff. “Sorry, I only reserve my manners for people I actually like.” As he said it, he turned his head and looked right at me, before turning back to the girl: “As for you, take a good look in the mirror and ask yourself if you even deserve basic respect.” By this point, several waiters had rushed over. I didn’t want to make a huge scene, so I tugged gently on Ethan’s sleeve. “Let it go. I’m used to it.” Ethan wanted to say more, but sensing my plea, he swept a final, glacial glare over the two women, then tenderly ruffled my hair. “No one has the right to define a person by their appearance, and no one has the right to use appearance as a weapon to hurt others. Clara, I know exactly how incredible you are. Do not waste a single second feeling sad over trash like them.” I listened in a daze. A rush of heat flooded my chest, followed by an inexplicable wave of sorrow. Because I suddenly realized that Tristan had never, ever said anything like that to me. Even though every time he saw someone mocking my scar, he would aggressively chase them away, afterward, he would only ever look at me coldly and say: “Clara, pull your hat down.” He and Tristan were so completely, fundamentally different. A few minutes later, the manager’s apologies pulled me back to reality. They moved us to a private booth and gave us a free plate of prime rib as an apology, so I didn’t push the issue. After we ate, he walked me home. We strolled side-by-side down the sidewalk. He linked his hands behind his head and gave a massive stretch. As he moved, his black hoodie rode up, revealing a flash of toned abs. I happened to catch a glimpse, and my face instantly caught fire. Ethan noticed my sudden awkwardness, took a quick step forward, and blocked my path. “What’s wrong, beautiful?” A teasing half-smile played on his lips. He absolutely knew I saw. I cleared my throat, quickly changing the subject to thank him for lunch. But I forgot that if you give this guy an inch, he takes a mile. “If you really want to thank me, go on a date with me next time.” “A date?” “There’s a new amusement park opening up. My little brother won three VIP tickets and is forcing me to go. I refuse to be the third wheel to him and his girlfriend, so I need to find someone to come with me.” He leaned down, biting his lip, putting on his best pathetic, abused-puppy act. “Clara, being a single dog abandoned by a gross, overly-affectionate couple is incredibly depressing. Have mercy on me.” I wanted to point out that he could just not go, but staring into his dazzling, star-filled eyes, I couldn’t find a single reason to say no.

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The new transfer student clung to me the second he arrived. He was proud, cheerful, and full of youthful spirit. I tutored him, helping him climb from the absolute bottom of the class to the top tier. He would rescue me from awkward situations, pinching my cheek and saying: “Little coward, let me take you to ditch class and get ice cream, okay?” Until I overheard him confessing to someone else at the corner of the stairwell. His eyes were obedient, his voice pleading. “I came here for you.” “You really hate her, right? I’ll drag her down.” During evening study hall that night, I finished seven practice exams, working so relentlessly that it made everyone else in the room panic. 1 During our senior year of high school, all my AP science notes were thrown into the muddy school pond. Carter Hayes jumped into the filthy water without a second of hesitation. Soon, he held the soaking wet notebook high in the air. He flashed a bright, blinding smile at me. “Chloe, I found your notebook.” Looking at the ink-smeared, mud-caked notebook… “Th… thank you.” I thanked him softly. I was a natural stutterer; my speech was never fluid. “Keep me company after school to buy ice cream as a thank you, okay?” He grinned, revealing his slightly pointed canine teeth. The students crowding around us immediately started cheering and teasing. “No.” After school, the physics teacher was going to explain some problems to me; I didn’t want to waste my study time. As soon as I refused, Carter’s face fell, looking exactly like a kicked puppy. “Oh, I see… then I won’t bother you.” His amber eyes were filled with visible disappointment. Carter’s buddies immediately jumped in. “Carter dug your notebook out of dirty water, and you won’t even buy him an ice cream?” I looked at Carter standing tall in front of me, laughing and roughhousing with his friends. “Nobody is allowed to tease Chloe, she’s busy.” If I hadn’t eventually learned Carter’s true colors. I really would have believed he was my salvation, my protective knight in shining armor. I still vividly remembered yesterday at the corner of the stairs. He was half-kneeling on the ground, tying a girl’s shoelaces. The sunlight gilded his profile; the usually arrogant boy looked incredibly gentle and careful. I leaned against the wall, clamping a hand over my mouth. I clearly heard him say: “You really hate Chloe Vance, right? Just wait a bit longer, I’ll drag her grades down.” “Don’t worry, I won’t fall for her.” “I came here for you, Audrey Miller.” 2 Before I met Carter, I seemed to have never been noticed by anyone. Ever since my mom remarried, she seemed to have completely changed. She went from being my mom— To being the mom of the daughter my stepdad brought with him. At the dinner table, she would endlessly praise Audrey. “Audrey, eat some more, these are your favorite chicken wings.” Mom piled all the chicken wings from the serving bowl onto my nominal step-sister’s plate. Audrey glanced at me coldly, a bit disgusted. “No thanks, I’m on a diet.” I looked up at my mom. The smile on her face was a little awkward. “Right, right, after all, you’re so pretty, Audrey.” When Mom noticed me looking at her, her face suddenly flushed red, and she angrily scolded me. “Audrey isn’t like you. All you know is how to eat, eat, eat. You’ve gotten as fat as a pig.” I lowered my head and said nothing. I was born with a stutter; it was even more obvious when I spoke in long sentences, so I couldn’t be bothered to defend myself. I just buried my head and ate my rice. It was just that today’s rice tasted a bit salty. I didn’t know why. I clearly didn’t eat that much. Why did my body inflate like a balloon, gaining weight and breaking out in severe acne? I tried suggesting that I wanted to go to the doctor for a check-up, but Mom shot me down, even twisting my ear as she scolded: “It’s just puberty acne, you’re making a fuss over nothing. We don’t have money to take you for medical tests. You have zero sympathy for your mother and only know how to waste money.” But my step-sister’s dance classes were a hundred dollars a session, and she never missed a single one. My stepdad didn’t like me either, but he maintained a facade of surface-level kindness. My bloated figure only further highlighted Audrey’s beautiful, slender frame. I held a breath of fierce resentment in my chest. I refused to believe I was inferior to Audrey in every single way. So I studied desperately, and finally, my grades squeezed into the top fifty in the entire school, much better than Audrey, who hovered right in the middle. But when I walked home carrying a ten-pound backpack… Passing by the glass windows of a high-end, beautiful boutique… I clearly saw my mom and stepdad together, picking out a pearl hair clip for Audrey. Audrey was holding a cup of ice cream, eating it lazily. Letting my mom stand behind her on her tiptoes, brushing her hair and trying on the hair clip. I gripped my backpack straps tightly. I stood in the tidal wave of the crowd, watching them. My backpack felt so incredibly heavy in that moment, almost pressing me down so hard I couldn’t take a single step. I saw the “Dairy Queen” logo on the ice cream cup Audrey was holding. I remembered a few days ago when I asked my mom for money to buy school supplies, and she viciously threw a crumpled five-dollar bill at me. I bought a scantron pencil, an eraser, and a black pen. The money was gone. The teacher’s words from class echoed in my ears. “Correct your mistakes in red pen, correct them in red pen! Chloe, tell your mom to go buy you a red pen.” 3 Carter was the new transfer student. As soon as he transferred to our school, he clung to me. Before the teacher even assigned him a seat, he sat down right in front of me. “Teacher, I’ll just sit here.” Then he turned his head and said to me. “Hi, I’m Carter. Can I borrow a pen?” As the unremarkable, chubby girl in class, this was the very first time a boy had actively struck up a conversation with me. My heart instantly felt nervous, and I even subconsciously felt a deep wave of shame. Please don’t be sarcastic, and please don’t laugh at me. This was the subconscious reaction of a historically ignored, self-esteem-lacking, cowardly person facing friendliness. I frantically dug through my backpack, but could only find some chipped, imperfect pens. These were all picked up from the floor while doing classroom cleaning duties. I had no allowance; my school supplies were mostly school rewards or things I found on the ground. I finally managed to dig out a black click-pen and handed it to Carter. This pen flowed with a lot of ink, and I only ever dared to use it when writing English essays. He took the pen and casually handed me a Ferrero Rocher. “Thanks. This is for you.” That chocolate, wrapped in gold foil, made me panic. Back in 2015, a Ferrero Rocher was a very expensive candy to me; I had never tasted one before. I carefully tucked it into my desk cubby, planning to return it to him after class. The moment the bell rang and he stood up, I gathered my courage and called his name. Thankfully, I didn’t stutter. “Carter.” “Hmm? What’s up?” Carter turned his head to look at me. He was tall, and stepping on the leg of his chair, I had to look up at him. The corners of his mouth carried a smile, and his eyes reflected a chubby me, a shy me. “You don’t… need to… give me…” I was so pathetic, I stuttered again. He burst out laughing. Winds from all directions suddenly rushed in through the open window. The wind lifted the blue curtains, blowing them up like sails on a ship. The test papers of the students in the class fluttered up like pigeons taking flight. A piece of paper flew up and perfectly covered half of his brow and eye. He smiled at me and said. “How did you become a little stutterer?” “It’s actually kind of cute…” 4 Honestly, high school students are usually very sensitive to transfer students, often rejecting them. But Carter mixed perfectly with everyone as soon as he arrived. He had an outgoing personality, a tall, handsome build, and the teachers treated him with noticeable politeness. High schoolers have a natural awe for students who come from wealthy, powerful families. Carter flawlessly integrated into the class. Between classes, boys actively invited him to play basketball, and girls would tell him what the next class was. Many people tried to get on his good side. I was sitting so close to him, yet I didn’t dare say a single word to him. But Carter actively sought me out. During class, if he forgot his textbook, he would pull his chair right next to mine to share. He would naturally turn around to ask me for the homework. Somehow, we slowly became familiar with each other through this. But most of the time, Carter only talked to me during class. The second class ended, he disappeared. I didn’t have any close friends, so during breaks, I mostly sat in my seat studying physics problems by myself. That was when Ethan Wright came over with a physics test paper. Ethan was our class’s Academic Rep. He was tall and had clean features. But he always wore round glasses, and combined with his middle-part haircut, the other boys gave him the nickname “Teacher’s Pet.” He had a softer personality, so the boys didn’t really like hanging out with him either. Like me, Ethan was somewhat of a social outcast in the class. Ethan brought his test paper and plopped right down in Carter’s seat, then leaned in so our heads were close together to discuss the problem. The more we calculated, the closer we felt to the answer. We looked up and smiled at each other, actually feeling a bit of mutual appreciation. But right at that moment, laughter rang out in my ears. A few bored boys had wandered over to tease us. “What are you two doing?” “Dating, obviously.” The moment those words left the boy’s mouth… Ethan reacted like a cat whose tail had just been stepped on. He instantly shoved the test paper away from us. The thin paper was pinched by a textbook and ripped cleanly in half with a loud shhhk. Ethan’s face turned beet red. I knew it wasn’t the blush of shyness; it was pure embarrassment and shame. He felt ashamed of being paired up with a fat girl. The physics problem wasn’t even fully solved yet, but Ethan stood up and yelled. “What kind of garbage are you talking about? I would never like Chloe.” The boy next to him grinned. “Yeah, exactly, Chloe’s like Porky Pig.” My ears were filled with the boys’ mocking laughter and Ethan’s raised, defensive voice explaining himself. I gripped the pen in my hand, remaining completely silent from start to finish. My face looked calm, but I knew that the internal fortress I called self-esteem was collapsing, falling apart piece by piece. Dust and smoke rose from the ruins of my heart. I wouldn’t cry. A fat person’s tears wouldn’t earn anyone’s sympathy; it would only put me in an even more awkward, humiliating position. I just buried my head lower and lower. 5 “So what if she’s chubby? That just means she eats well.” Carter’s magnetic, slightly raspy voice suddenly rang out. I had no idea when Carter had returned to the classroom, but he was standing right next to us. He was tall and carried an intimidating presence. Because he had just transferred, he didn’t have a school uniform yet. He was wearing his own black crewneck t-shirt. A silver chain hung around his neck. It only amplified his arrogant, untamed aura. Carter was lazily spinning a small keychain on his finger, from which dangled a little white bunny. He tossed the little bunny onto my desk, as if to comfort my broken heart. Then, he lazily reached out and grabbed Ethan by the back of his collar. Sounding like he was just joking around: “Move aside, stop wasting Chloe’s time. I still need her to tutor me.” The boys who were teasing earlier kept pushing it: “What’s up, Carter, is Chloe yours or something?” Carter shot him a lazy, sidelong glance, a careless smirk hanging on his lips. But his tone was incredibly firm and serious. “Yeah, she’s mine. Got a problem?” The boy’s brutal honesty choked the others into silence. “Chloe, explain this problem to me.” Carter squeezed past a flushed, embarrassed Ethan. He held up his physics textbook, flipped to the chapter on reference frames, and badgered me to teach him. Ethan’s face went white, then red. But intimidated by Carter, he didn’t say anything. He just gripped his physics book so tightly his knuckles turned white and his veins popped. Even though the lesson on reference frames was relatively simple, I still earnestly explained the concepts to Carter. It was only halfway through my explanation that I realized something was off. I casually looked up, locking eyes with him. He wasn’t looking at the problem at all. He was just resting his chin on his hand, watching me with deep interest. He had slightly downturned, world-weary eyes with dark irises that looked like polished obsidian. It made my heart race in panic. Carter was different from the other boys in class. I had been given cruel nicknames and called Miss Piggy. I had been blamed by the boys behind me for blocking their view when I was punished and made to stand in the back of the class. When it came to taking out the trash or scrubbing the sinks, the others subconsciously assigned those dirty, tiring chores to me. Because I was fat and plain, I didn’t have the right to resist. When carrying heavy boxes, I had tried to say: “I don’t think I can carry two classrooms’ worth of textbooks by myself.” The only response I got was an impatient: “Fat people are strong, stop whining.” But Carter was the only one. He was the only one— Who treated me like a normal girl. An ordinary high school girl’s fragile, crumbling self-esteem… In that exact moment, had finally been seen and defended.

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1 I never, in a million years, thought the three titans of my lab would get so bored they’d make a bet about me. The prize was a batch of top-tier, imported lab reagents. The wager? To see which of them this dirt-poor grad student, who barely scraped her way in, would try to seduce within a month to scrounge for equipment access and funding. So that’s how we’re playing it? Hard mode? Fine. I’ll see their bet and raise them a full-blown psychological drama, turning their little competition into an all-out war. Now, they’re practically tripping over each other to give me access, approve my funding, and invite me to their projects, the original bet long forgotten. And me? The former “target” of their wager? I’m just sipping the coffee they brought me, watching them fight for my affection. Honestly, fellas. If you’d just been this helpful from the start, we could have avoided all this drama. … My name is Aria, and I’m the lab’s resident stray. My advisor, Professor Freeman, is a legend who exists only in the signature of his emails. The most valuable things he ever gave me were my “last-chance admission” status and the sage advice to “be self-reliant.” To graduate, I’ve honed the art of resource-scrounging to a razor’s edge. My skin has thickened accordingly. The lab’s three big shots are my primary targets. Caden, the cold, brilliant academic, is the gatekeeper of all lab equipment. Want to use a machine? You have to get through an approval process stricter than airport security. Blake, the walking ATM, controls the lab’s finances. A single vial of reagent from his private fridge is worth more than everything I own. And Noah, the tech wizard, is a professional award-winner. I can’t even find the power button on the advanced equipment he builds. Today, my graduation data hit yet another wall. I mustered the courage to ask Caden to borrow an instrument, only to be shut down with a curt “I’m using it” and “It needs maintenance.” Then I tried asking Blake for some reagents. He pushed up his glasses, a sly, fox-like grin on his face. “Ah, this one is for core team members only.” The final blow came during the group meeting. Noah, with his typical bluntness, tore my data to shreds in front of everyone, even criticizing the color scheme of my charts. Once is a coincidence. Twice is an accident. Three times… this was a coordinated attack. It wasn’t until I saw an open chat window on a public computer that it all clicked. [Betting she’ll come after one of us for resources within a month.] [I’ll put up that batch of imported reagents as the prize.] [Deal.] The timestamp was from a week ago. Well, damn. And here I thought I was just trying to graduate. Turns out I’m the star of a reality show: Love & Lab Coats. Before discovering this earth-shattering wager, my life in the lab was simple, tedious, and soul-crushing. My days were more tangled than a kitten’s ball of yarn. In the morning, I’d get up before dawn to help pack meals in the cafeteria for a free breakfast. Then I’d rush to the lab’s common area to fight for a computer older than I am, constantly oscillating between “It’s almost done!” and “It crashed again.” At noon, I’d choke down a stale, discounted bread roll while sprinting to another campus to work as a teaching assistant, grading an endless mountain of papers. In the afternoon, I’d squeeze in experiments back at the lab, my most fervent prayer being, “Please, dear God of machinery, don’t break down. I can’t afford to fix you.” Evenings were spent either bussing tables at a local diner or tutoring kids who would ask, “Teacher, why are you always so sleepy?” I’d usually stumble back to my dorm late at night, forcing my eyes open to read papers and write reports, often waking up with a jolt after falling asleep at my desk, a page of my draft soaked through. I was a perpetual motion machine, the broke edition, fueled by sheer desperation to graduate and eat. Chasing a guy? Romance? That was a luxury for people with time, money, and a full head of hair. We were from different worlds. They floated on clouds, discussing top-tier journals, competitions, and their bright academic futures. I was down in the mud, clawing my way toward a diploma and a job that could ease the burden on my family. My daily worries were whether my data would run, if I’d be late for my part-time job, and if the cafeteria lady would be generous with her serving spoon. I never imagined that a low-level lab rat like me would become the subject of a bet between the three top dogs. Does this count as my big break? After discovering the bet, I spent a solid half-hour doing angry sit-ups on my dorm bed. But anger wasn’t going to get me anywhere. I had to get smart. They wanted to see me chase one of them? Fine. I’ll show them a “targeted strike” of affection so precise and devastating it’ll make their experimental data look sloppy. 2 Three o’clock in the afternoon. The lab’s common area was at its busiest. The three big shots were huddled around Noah’s computer, staring at a screen of what looked like pure chaos—some advanced algorithm, apparently. I chose my moment and made my grand entrance, carrying a tray of coffees I’d spent a small fortune on. “Hey guys, you’re all working so hard! I brought coffee for everyone!” My smile was radiant, projecting the warmth of a loving, supportive colleague. The background noise of the lab screeched to a halt. You could feel the unspoken question hanging in the air: Aria is treating? Aria, the girl who could split a penny eight ways and had mastered eighteen different methods of mooching Wi-Fi, was actually buying coffee? I could read the shock in their eyes. My reputation as the lab’s number-one cheapskate was legendary. The last time the senior students went out for a group dinner, I’d successfully escaped paying my share by claiming I had to rush back to “take in my laundry.” The time before that, when everyone chipped in for the professor’s birthday, my contribution was a handmade card on paper I’d salvaged from the recycling bin. But I ignored their stunned faces, my gaze locking onto Caden. In front of everyone, I presented him with the “special order”—a hot, black Americano, no sugar, no milk. “Caden, this one’s for you. I remembered you’re lactose intolerant, so this should be perfect.” My tone was the epitome of casual thoughtfulness. The air grew thick. Caden’s expression was a complex mix of suspicion and confusion. “You… you bought this?” I almost broke character. My inner self was screaming. No, I used the power of my sincere gaze to convince the coffee machine to give it to me for free! This cost me two lunches, you fool! The pain was real. But on the outside, I lowered my head slightly, my voice soft but with a hint of defiance. “Yeah, I did. You guys are always helping me out. It’s the least I could do.” Helping me out by blocking all my resources, you mean! I seethed internally. Blake pushed his gold-rimmed glasses up his nose, a faint, knowing smile playing on his lips. “Well, isn’t our Aria being unusually… generous. And so thoughtful, too. I guess you’re desperate to get your data from that HPLC Caden is guarding?” Caden’s hand, which had been reaching for the coffee, froze. His eyes narrowed, studying my face. Here we go. The show was on. In the next second, my eyes welled up. I looked at Blake with wide, “innocent” eyes, my expression a perfect picture of disbelief and hurt. “You’ve got it all wrong, Blake.” My voice was soft, my gaze pure as the driven snow. “I’ll figure out my own data. I can’t just expect everyone to take care of me all the time.” I bit my lower lip, then turned to Caden. My eyes now held a perfect blend of sympathy, admiration, and a shy “I understand you” look. “I saw Caden in the instrument room late last night, calibrating the equipment. He works so hard… I just thought he deserved a little extra care. That’s all.” My voice grew quieter, and a faint blush crept up my cheeks for added effect. I had perfectly embodied the image of a secret admirer, too shy to express her feelings but deeply concerned for her senior. I was so convincing, I almost believed it myself. Caden was clearly thrown by my direct approach. He looked at the coffee in my hand like it was a hot potato, unsure whether to take it. Was that… a blush creeping up his neck? He cleared his throat and, under the complicated stares of his two friends, took the coffee. His voice was a little strained. “Thanks for the thought.” Exactly the reaction I wanted. “You’re welcome!” I beamed at him. Then, as if just remembering the other two, I let out a little “Oh!” and offered them the remaining cups. “Blake, Noah, these are for you.” Blake’s smile was a bit forced. “How very kind of you, Aria.” Noah just grunted, took a cup, and said nothing. I pretended not to notice their expressions, but inside, I was cackling. Men! They all need the validation of female attention to feel secure in their own charm. They might not be interested in me personally, but with a bet on the line, whoever I “chased” would be the implicit winner. Oh, the beautifully childish male ego. 3 Just as I predicted, Blake and Noah exchanged a look that clearly said, So she’s going for Caden. I was screaming internally: You sweet summer children. You have no idea. Just when they thought I was about to launch a full-scale offensive on Caden, I calmly sat down. From my worn canvas tote bag, I dug around, and dug around, and dug some more, finally pulling out a wrinkled, 30-cent Snickers bar. “Here.” I shyly offered the candy bar to Noah. “Noah, you looked a little pale at the last meeting. Maybe low blood sugar. You should keep this handy.” Noah stared at the pathetic-looking Snickers bar as if it had personally offended him. His face was a perfect picture of bewilderment. Blake and Caden stared at each other, their expressions screaming, “WTF???” I had to bite the inside of my cheek to keep from laughing at their collective confusion. But as amusing as the drama was, I had bills to pay. To scrape together next semester’s housing fees, I had opened up a new front on the battlefield of part-time jobs. “Mr. Rossi’s Diner,” a greasy spoon on the street behind campus. Today was my first day on the job. Dressed in an oversized uniform left by the previous employee, I was wiping down a table when the bell over the door jingled. I reflexively pasted on my professional smile. “Welcome t—” The “o” got stuck in my throat. Oh, crap. Why in the world were Caden and Blake in a place where the average meal cost less than ten dollars? Weren’t they supposed to be at some fancy restaurant discussing molecular gastronomy? My brain went into red alert. My body reacted faster than my thoughts, and I made a move to dive into the kitchen. But Blake’s radar-like eyes had already locked onto me. He blinked, and then a smug, “Gotcha!” grin spread across his face. He nudged Caden. Caden turned. The “mere mortals, do not approach” expression on his face cracked when he saw me, clad in a grease-stained apron, precariously balancing a tray. What are you looking at? Never seen a beautiful woman bussing tables before? I managed a smile that was uglier than a grimace. “Right this way, gentlemen.” As I led them to a booth, Blake drawled, his voice dripping with mock surprise. “Well, well, Aria? Small world, isn’t it? You’ve certainly got a wide range of talents.” I was mentally rolling my eyes so hard I was afraid they’d get stuck. It’s my first day, you jerk! But I kept the smile plastered on my face. “You’re too kind. Life’s tough, got to be versatile.” I continued my performance, sneaking a shy, embarrassed glance at Caden. He, in turn, had sunk into a strange silence. After taking their order, I waited for Caden to head to the restroom, then scurried over to the cash register. “Mr. Rossi,” I whispered to the owner, “that table over there… when they’re done, if there are any untouched dishes, could you maybe… pack them up for me?” The owner looked at me, confused. “You haven’t eaten dinner?” I lowered my head, my voice even quieter, laced with embarrassment. “I spent my meal money on coffee today…” Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Caden stop dead in his tracks on his way back from the restroom. Just as I’d planned. When he returned to his seat, his gaze was even more complicated. Later, as I was serving their food, my hand “trembled,” and a dish of chili oil nearly spilled all over me. Just as I was about to star in a tragic B-movie titled Waitress Down, a long, clean hand shot out and steadied the teetering plate. It was Caden. His brow was furrowed, and his eyes darted from my face to the counter where I’d been begging for leftovers. His voice was low. “You haven’t eaten dinner?” Hook, line, and sinker. I set the dish down, my head bowed as I twisted the corner of my apron. My voice was barely a whisper, filled with the panic of being caught. “Oh! N-no, it’s fine. I’m used to it. I… I went a little over budget with the coffee this afternoon.” 4 It was true, I hadn’t eaten. Those coffees were a major expense. My heart was still bleeding over it. He watched me in silence, the cool indifference in his eyes slowly replaced by sheer disbelief. He probably couldn’t comprehend how someone could be so broke that buying a few coffees meant skipping a meal. Caden barely touched his food. He poked at his rice for ages, his gaze constantly drifting in my direction. When Blake tried to talk to him, he just mumbled noncommittal responses. As I weaved between tables, my mind was racing with calculations: the “pity + coffee” combo was working beautifully. Finally, they finished their meal. Blake took a call and left, and I was about to breathe a sigh of relief when I realized Caden hadn’t moved. He had shifted to a less conspicuous table near the door. I snuck a glance during a lull. The guy had his phone out and was pretending to read emails. Seriously? His acting was worse than mine. Who reads academic emails in a noisy, greasy diner? I pretended not to notice and went about my work—clearing tables, wiping them down, greeting new customers. But even while busy, I kept the performance going. I made sure to “accidentally” pass by his table several times, “casually” wiping sweat from my brow, and letting out a soft, pitiable grunt while lifting a heavy stack of bowls. From the corner of my eye, I could see “Mr. CEO” wasn’t reading a single word. His frown deepened, and his fingers swiped aimlessly at the screen. At 9:30, the diner closed. I rubbed my aching back, said goodbye to Mr. Rossi, and dragged my exhausted body out the door. A figure immediately blocked my path. It was Caden. He had actually waited all this time. Under the dim streetlight, he looked a little flustered. He was clutching a takeout bag, and the tips of his ears were distinctly red. “Here,” he said, holding out the bag. His tone was clipped, but his eyes avoided mine. “I was… waiting for you. It was on my way.” I almost burst out laughing. On your way? Dude, you live in the fancy apartments on the east side of campus, and I live in the crumbling dorms on the west. Your “way” is a bit of a detour. But I instantly switched into “surprised and flattered” mode, my eyes lighting up. “Caden, you waited for me?” He cleared his throat and shoved the bag into my hands, his gaze fixed on a distant lamppost. “Just eat it.” I took the warm, fragrant bag, and a genuine flicker of gratitude went through me—I was starving. But the show must go on. I looked up at him with wide, watery eyes, my voice soft. “Caden, you’re such a good person. You’re so smart and so considerate.” I blushed on cue, lowered my head, and mumbled, “I wish… I wish I could always meet people as nice as you.” Then, I “panicked,” looking up as if I’d said something scandalous, and quickly tried to backtrack. “Oh! I mean, thank you! I-I should go.” Clutching the food like a lifeline, I turned and practically ran toward my dorm. After a safe distance, I snuck a peek back. Caden was still standing there, a long, lonely figure under the streetlight. He ran a hand through his hair in frustration, touched his ear again, and then, almost comically out of sync, turned and walked in the opposite direction. Seeing him looking like a flustered, love-struck teenager, a smirk played on my lips. I hugged the warm takeout container and hummed a little tune all the way back to my dorm.

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After a smooth-talking grifter wiped out her savings, my tearful younger sister came to me. I took her in, fought her battles, hired a lawyer, and even gave her my year-end bonus—anything to help her recover. But my boyfriend, Arthur, grew increasingly annoyed. “You handle everything for her, and she doesn’t even thank you. Leighton, are you her mother? If she’s so clueless, she deserved to be scammed!” That’s when I threw a glass at him. I stared him down and said, “She’s my flesh and blood. Our mom died when she was eight—I raised her. So treat her with grace, if not for her, then for me.” Later, I was sent out of state for work. I called daily, watching her rebuild her life through the screen. Everything seemed to be returning to normal. Until two months later, when I came home a day early. I pushed open my bedroom door to find my sister in my favorite silk nightgown, leaning against Arthur’s chest. He was feeding her the sweetest part of a watermelon, his face full of sickening tenderness. 1 The silence in the bedroom was instantly suffocating. Amanda was the first to react. She bolted upright, springing away from Arthur’s chest like she had been burned. Her lips were visibly trembling. “Leighton? What… what are you doing home? Your flight wasn’t supposed to land until Friday…” The spoon in Arthur’s hand froze in mid-air. A drop of red watermelon juice fell, staining my pristine silk bedsheets. The color drained from his face. He didn’t say a single word. I stood frozen in the doorway. My fingers were wrapped so tightly around the handle of my suitcase that my nails were biting into my palms. The air conditioning was humming quietly, yet a cold sweat had broken out across my spine. Amanda forced a smile that looked infinitely worse than a crying fit. “You must be exhausted, Leighton. Here, let me take your bags.” She stumbled toward me barefoot in a frantic rush. Her knee clipped the sharp edge of the bedframe. She hissed in pain, and her eyes instantly welled up with fresh, pathetic tears. Arthur’s brow furrowed immediately. He reached out and caught her by the waist to steady her. “Careful. You’re always rushing into things.” His tone carried a hint of reprimand, but the way his hands lingered on her was so incredibly, disgustingly tender. I stared at his hand resting on her arm. My stomach completely dropped out. “How long has this been going on?” My voice came out much calmer than I expected. Amanda went rigid. She instinctively looked up at Arthur, seeking permission or protection. He gently pulled her behind him, finally locking eyes with me. “Leave her out of this. This is on me.” Arthur was a man of very few words. He was always stoic, never one to wear his heart on his sleeve. When I agreed to date him three years ago, it was exactly because of that steady, grounded nature. He wasn’t like the slick-talking players who left you constantly second-guessing your worth. When our mom passed away, I was twelve, and Amanda was eight. Our dad couldn’t handle the grief. He drowned himself in cheap liquor, skipped shifts, and eventually got fired. Two years later, his liver gave out, and he left us too. From that moment on, I never leaned on another living soul. Arthur was the first person who ever made me feel like being taken care of didn’t have to be a debt. He made me feel like it was okay to take off my armor and just be soft. Yet here he was, standing right in front of me, shielding my little sister with his body and looking at me with eyes colder than winter ice. He was looking at me like I was the enemy. Amanda peeked out from behind his broad shoulders. Her eyes were red and swollen. “Leighton, it’s really not what you think. We just…” “Got your story straight yet?” I cut her off, my voice dripping with ice. “Go ahead. If you’re going to explain, then spell it out. What exactly is your relationship? When did it start? And just how far have you gone?” Amanda flinched. The tears spilled over immediately. She rubbed her eyes like a toddler, letting out these soft, pitiful sobs. I let out a dry, hollow laugh. I didn’t even know if I was laughing at her audacity or my own utter stupidity. Arthur tightened his grip on her hand. His voice was incredibly soft when he spoke to her. “It’s okay. Let me handle this. Put some slippers on, the hardwood is cold.” Then he looked up at me. “Leighton, let’s take this outside.” “Arthur, this is my house.” My voice finally started to shake. “You’re telling me to leave?” He fell silent for a few heavy seconds. He glanced back at Amanda. She was shrinking into herself, her toes curling against the floorboards like a frightened rabbit. When Arthur spoke again, his tone was placating, laced with a pleading edge. “She had a panic attack last night and didn’t fall asleep until four in the morning. Just let her get some rest. Please?” A dull, agonizing ache bloomed in my chest. It felt like someone had shoved a fistful of cotton down my throat. I couldn’t swallow. I couldn’t breathe. In the three years we had been together, I had never seen Arthur beg anyone for anything. He was a proud man. He never backed down in corporate negotiations, and he never apologized when he knew he was right. But right now, he was throwing away all his pride to beg me on behalf of the sister who stole him. Arthur picked up his jacket from the back of the chair. He turned to Amanda and gave her one last gentle instruction. “Go to sleep. Don’t wait up for me. There’s milk in the fridge, make sure you heat it up before you drink it.” I turned on my heel and walked out the front door. If I stayed in that room for one more second, I was going to throw up, or worse, I was going to let them see me cry. 2 Arthur followed me out, keeping exactly half a step behind me the entire way down. His face was buried in the shadows, his expression unreadable. When we reached the underground parking garage, he opened the passenger door of his car for me. I didn’t move an inch. “Right here is fine.” His hand paused on the door handle. He closed it quietly, fished a pack of Marlboros from his pocket, and lit one. The fluorescent lights overhead were flickering, casting a sickly yellow glow over the concrete. The cherry of his cigarette flared bright red in the dimness. “I made the first move.” He took a long drag. His voice was incredibly raspy. “Don’t blame her for this.” “Amanda is your little sister. You practically raised her, so you know exactly how she is. She’s terrified of her own shadow. She doesn’t know how to survive without someone holding her hand. After she got completely wiped out by that last loser, I watched her fall apart… I just couldn’t turn a blind eye.” He flicked his ashes onto the concrete. He still wouldn’t look at me. “But you’re different. Leighton, you are the most capable, fiercely independent woman I have ever met. Even without me, you are going to be completely fine.” I stared at him. I pressed my fingernails so hard into my palms that the skin nearly broke. “So that’s it? Because I’m independent, I deserve to be stabbed in the back by the two people I trusted most?” It was the most absurd, twisted logic I had ever heard in my life. When Amanda first moved into my guest room, Arthur couldn’t even stand hearing her name. If he caught her wandering into the kitchen in her pajamas, his face would twist in disgust. He used to drag me into our bedroom and whisper-shout about how she had zero boundaries and how my apartment wasn’t a halfway house for helpless adults. Two months ago, right before my business trip, I literally begged him to keep an eye on her while I was gone. He stood at the airport drop-off, hands stuffed in his pockets, looking absolutely miserable. She’s your sister, Leighton. She is not my responsibility. That’s exactly what he told me. It had only been eight weeks. And now, this man wearing the face of the person I loved was standing in front of me, speaking words that made him sound like a total stranger. Arthur shoved the cigarette box back into his pocket. His voice was heavy with complicated guilt. “I know I screwed you over. All that money you wired to Amanda to bail her out? I’ll pay you back every last cent. And the condo is yours. I won’t ever set foot in it again.” He paused, taking a shallow breath. “I just have one request. Amanda really, truly looks up to you. Don’t let my mistake destroy your relationship with your sister.” I felt entirely hollow. I was so exhausted by the sheer audacity of it all that I didn’t even have the energy to scream. “If you know that sleeping with my sister is a mistake, then why the hell did you do it?” His jaw ticked. A long time passed before he finally answered. “Leighton, there are some things you just can’t control. It happened. I will do everything in my power to make it up to you.” “But if you blow this up and make a scene, the person who gets hurt the most is Amanda. You don’t want to see your little sister dragged through the mud by the rumor mill. Right?” “I’ll pack her things and take her to my place tomorrow morning. I booked you a suite at the Marriott for tonight. Just give them your name at the front desk.” He turned and walked toward the elevators, leaving me completely alone in the freezing garage. My phone buzzed in my pocket. It was a text from him with the hotel address. At the very end of the message, he had typed, I’m sorry. I stared at those two words until my vision blurred. Upstairs, a single warm light was glowing from the window of my condo. I had changed that exact lightbulb with Arthur the day before I left for my trip. Now, that light was shining on someone else. There were millions of lights in this sprawling city. But not a single one was burning for me anymore. I finally crouched down right there on the concrete, burying my face in my knees as my shoulders shook violently. I never went to the hotel he booked. Instead, I drove my car onto the interstate and just kept driving in circles until the sun came up. 3 The next morning, I drove out to the historic district. Tucked away on a quiet street corner was a quaint floral boutique. It was owned by Harper, my old college roommate. When Amanda’s ex-husband threw her out on the street, I was the one who paid the retainer for her divorce lawyer. While the legal battle dragged on, I begged Harper to give Amanda a low-stress job at the shop just to get her out of the house. I paid Amanda’s salary out of my own pocket, strictly forbidding Harper from ever telling her the truth. I still remember Harper laughing at me over the phone. Leighton, why do you treat this girl better than you treat yourself? Amanda was standing on the porch of the boutique. She was wearing a canvas apron, crouching on the ground as she repotted a fern. When she saw me walking up the steps, the metal trowel slipped from her grip and clattered loudly against the pavement. “Leighton? How did you know I was working today?” I didn’t answer. I just pushed past her and walked inside. Amanda scrambled to her feet and scurried in after me. She frantically grabbed a wooden chair, wiping the seat down with the sleeve of her shirt in a desperate, fawning gesture. “Have a seat, please. Let me get you some water.” She spun around too fast and crashed into a display stand. A watering can tipped over, spilling a puddle across the floorboards and soaking her sneakers. She stared down at her wet shoes, then looked back up at me, wringing her hands like a grade-schooler caught stealing candy. Looking at her, my mind drifted back to when we were kids. She was only eight when we lost mom. She was so terrified of the dark that she had to wrap her arms around my neck just to fall asleep. Even as she grew older, she was always attached to my hip. She was like a little shadow I could never shake off. “Leighton.” Her shaky voice pulled me back to the present. “I know you hate me right now.” “But I swear I didn’t plan this. I don’t even know how things spiraled like this.” She tilted her head to look at me. Her eyes were already completely bloodshot. “You’ve been good to me my whole life. I know that. But you were always so busy. You were always fixing my problems, throwing money at the issue, but you never actually had the time to just sit and listen to me. Arthur is different.” “He actually asks me what I had for lunch. He remembers the tiny, stupid details of stories I tell him. He picks up the phone at 3 AM when I have a nightmare.” “You always told me you wanted someone to treat me right. Now I finally have that someone. Why can’t you just be happy for me?” Listening to her play the victim while demanding my blessing made me want to laugh until I threw up. I had poured sixteen years of my life into raising this girl, and she turned out to be an utterly ungrateful snake. “Amanda, since the day you were born, name one thing you asked for that I didn’t give you.” “Your college tuition, your rent, your groceries, your divorce lawyer, the credit cards you maxed out, the thousands of dollars that grifter stole from you. Have you ever actually sat down and calculated how much money and blood I have bled out for you over the years?” “And after all of that, my reward is the sister I raised stealing the man I was going to marry.” She dropped her gaze. Her lips quivered as heavy tears slipped down her cheeks, splashing against the wooden floor. “I was twelve years old doing homework for rich kids just to buy our groceries. At fifteen, I was bussing tables at a greasy diner. A vat of frying oil splashed on my arm and left scars I still have today. When I was twenty, I worked so many overtime shifts that my stomach started bleeding. When the ambulance took me away, there wasn’t a single person sitting next to me in the back of that truck!” I shoved my sleeve up past my elbow, exposing the faded, jagged white scars running up my forearm. “You don’t know any of this. Because I intentionally hid the ugly parts of survival from you so you could have a normal childhood.” She stared at the scarred tissue. The last bit of color drained out of her face. “For sixteen years, I carved out half my life and fed it to you! And how do you repay me?” “You parade around in my clothes, you sleep in my bed, and you climb into my boyfriend’s lap!” She collapsed onto the floorboards in a pathetic heap, her apron smudging against the dirt as she sobbed uncontrollably. I crouched down so I was eye-level with her. The ice in my chest had completely frozen over. Every warm memory I ever had of her was now rotting in my mind. “Amanda, everything you ever wanted, if it was in my power to give, I gave it to you.” “But the things I do not offer, you do not get to steal. You never had the right.” Arthur came sprinting through the door at that exact moment. He took one look at Amanda crumpled on the floor, shivering and sobbing, and his face morphed into pure rage. He crossed the room in three massive strides, yanked her off the ground, and shoved her firmly behind his back. “I told you, if you have a problem, you come to me!” He glanced back at the trembling girl behind him, then turned his furious gaze back on me. The anger in his eyes was visceral. “You know she has a bad heart! Could you not have just talked this out like an adult? Did you really have to push her to the edge of an attack?!” I looked at him and couldn’t help but let out a cold, sharp laugh. “You are getting awfully good at playing the knight in shining armor, Arthur. I recall a time when she first moved in, and you couldn’t even stand the sound of her breathing! Now you’re her patron saint?” Arthur puffed out his chest, looking completely self-righteous. “You want to keep score? Fine! You practically raised her. Calculate every dime you spent on her, every favor you pulled. Give me a number!” “I will pay you back every single cent, plus interest! Will that satisfy you?!” I stared at the stranger standing in front of me. Unbidden, a memory flashed through my mind from three years ago, back when he was trying to win me over. It was the dead of winter. A blizzard had rolled in. He stood outside my office building for three hours waiting for me to finish a late shift, keeping a bag of roasted chestnuts warm inside his coat so I would have something hot to eat. He hadn’t texted me because he didn’t want to stress me out while I was working. He just waited in the freezing wind until his face was raw. Back then, I remember thinking, This man is so undeniably good. Every horrible thing I have ever endured was just the universe testing me so I could save up enough luck to find him. And now, this same man was standing across from me, trying to boil down our entire history. Three years of devotion. Countless late-night conversations. The safety of his arms. Every promise we made about the future. Everything I thought was permanently etched into my soul. He was trying to reduce all of it into a cold, hard number on a bank transfer. A clean break. Paid in full. “Stop it!” Amanda suddenly shrieked, stepping out from behind his back. Her face was drenched in tears, her chest heaving violently as she struggled to catch her breath. Arthur immediately reached out to support her waist, but she slapped his hand away. She lifted her chin and glared at me. Her eyes were burning with an ugly, defiant resentment. “Leighton, I know I did you dirty. I know I owe you a debt I can never repay. But stop acting like you are some holy martyr!” “You raised me for sixteen years. Every meal, every coat, every dollar—I remember all of it. But do you want to know a secret? Growing up, the person I hated most in this entire world was you!” “You handled everything perfectly. You were so flawlessly capable that every time I looked at you, I felt like a piece of trash. You made me feel like I couldn’t survive twenty-four hours without you holding my hand!” “I could never stand tall in your shadow. That’s why I was so desperate to escape you! The only reason I married that absolute loser was because he promised to take me away to a different city!” “Yeah, he turned out to be a scammer too. But this time is different. I am never listening to you again.” She grabbed Arthur’s hand, weaving her fingers tightly through his. “I have finally found my true love. Even if you curse my name for the rest of your life, I am never letting go!” “You already have everything else in the world. So what if you let me have this one man?!”

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1 To save a few hundred bucks on rent, I moved into a subdivided four-bedroom apartment. The leasing agent told me the other tenants were all young corporate professionals working in the nearby financial district. He said they left early, came back late, and were incredibly quiet. He wasn’t lying about the quiet part. I had lived there for two weeks and hadn’t seen a single shadow. That was until the third night, when I was scrolling through a news article about a shady subleaser who made copies of tenants’ keys to murder them. The ventilation window above my bed suddenly swung open. A skeletal hand reached down from the darkness and wrapped a coarse nylon cord around my throat. Right before the darkness took me, I finally got a good look at his face. It wasn’t some shady landlord. It was a homeless drifter who had been living in the crawl space above my ceiling the entire time. He was one of my “invisible” roommates. I blinked. And then I was back to the very first night I moved in. A searing, electric pain shot through my neck, violently waking me up. I shot up from the mattress, gasping for air. There was no skeletal, grinning face. There was no pitch-black ventilation window. There was only the pale blue glow of my phone screen resting on the sheets. I checked the time. July 15, 2023. 8:00 PM. I touched my throat. There were no ligature marks, but the phantom burn of a coarse nylon cord scraping against my skin was still there. I took huge, greedy gulps of air, the sound of my own heartbeat hammering against my ribs echoing in the cramped room. I was alive. Or rather, I had come back to life. Half an hour ago, or exactly three days from now in my previous life, I died in this exact room. I was strangled to death by a squatter hiding in the crawl space above my head. I scanned my surroundings. It was a windowless, closet-sized room, barely sixty square feet. It held a twin bed and a cheap canvas wardrobe. The walls were painted a sickening, clinical white, clearly a fresh coat of cheap paint used to cover up the black mold creeping up the baseboards. The air was heavy with a lingering, damp mildew smell mixed with the sour stench of cheap formaldehyde. Just to save fifty bucks a week, I had stuffed myself into this literal coffin. My banking app was still open on my phone, displaying a thoroughly depressing number. Available balance: $342.50. That was my entire net worth. It wasn’t even enough to cover next month’s rent. I remembered exactly what Chuck, the chubby leasing agent, had told me. “Listen, sweetie. You won’t find anything this cheap in this neighborhood. It’s a four-bedroom unit, and the other three rooms are rented by high-end white-collar workers. They have top-tier etiquette. They leave early and come home late. Honestly, you probably won’t even run into them.” He was absolutely right. I never ran into them. In my past life, I lived here for two weeks. Even when I got up to use the bathroom at three in the morning, I never heard a single peep from the other three rooms. But I did hear other noises. Every night, right around midnight, I would hear a faint scratching sound coming from the ceiling, like fingernails scraping against plywood. Sometimes, there was a soft tapping, like marbles rolling across the floorboards above me. I thought it was just rats. I even bought sticky traps and put them on top of my canvas wardrobe. Right up until the moment I died, those glue traps sat perfectly clean and empty. Because the real “rat” wasn’t crawling on my wardrobe. He was crawling right above my head. I slowly tilted my head up, fixing my eyes on the small ventilation square cut into the upper corner of the drywall. It was a makeshift vent installed to give these windowless, illegally subdivided rooms some air circulation. It connected directly to the drop ceiling in the hallway. In my previous life, that emaciated hand, caked in black grime, had snaked its way out of that exact hole. The initial wave of paralyzing fear began to recede, quickly replaced by the sharp, razor-edge clarity of a survivor. I knew that monster was up there right now. He was pressed against the thin ceiling tiles like a giant, grotesque cockroach, listening to every single breath I took. He might even be peering through a crack, watching me right this second. I had to get out. Even if I had to sleep on a park bench or in a 24-hour McDonald’s, I could not stay in this apartment. I slid off the bed, moving with agonizing caution. I quietly shoved my ID, my debit card, and a small paring knife I bought for self-defense into my purse. I left the clothes and the bedding. My life was worth a hell of a lot more than some cheap polyester. I reached out, wrapped my hand around the doorknob, and gave it a gentle twist. Click. The lock gave way. I pulled the door open just a crack. The living room outside was pitch black. It wasn’t just dark. It was a suffocating, ink-like blackness. The windows had been completely sealed off with heavy blackout curtains. It was quiet. Dead quiet. The doors to the other three bedrooms were shut tight. Not a single sliver of light leaked from underneath them. I held my breath and tiptoed into the hallway. With every step I took, the cheap laminate flooring let out a faint groan. In the dead silence of the apartment, it sounded like a gunshot. I didn’t dare look back. A cold chill crept up my spine, screaming that something was lurking in the dark, watching my every move. I finally reached the front door handle. It was an old-school deadbolt that required two full turns to unlock. My palms were sweating profusely. I gripped the latch and twisted hard. It didn’t budge. I tried again. Still locked. My stomach plummeted. The door had been deadbolted from the outside. With these old security doors, if someone locks it from the outside with a key, you can’t open it from the inside without your own key. And Chuck had only given me the key to the lower handle lock. He never gave me the deadbolt key. Who locked it? Chuck? The sub-landlord? Regardless of who did it, I was now officially trapped inside this giant wooden coffin. Right at that moment, I heard a noise. It was incredibly faint. Very subtle. It sounded like someone slowly rubbing the pads of their fingers against wallpaper. The sound was coming from right behind me. Specifically, from the ceiling directly above the hallway leading back to my bedroom. I stiffly turned around. In the darkness, I could just barely make out the square outline of the ceiling access panel at the end of the hall. It shifted upward, just a fraction of an inch. 2 The access panel had definitely moved. Something had pushed it up from the inside, exposing a pitch-black crack. A sickening, putrid stench immediately wafted out from the gap. It smelled like sour rot, stale urine, and the heavy, greasy musk of someone who hadn’t bathed in years. It was the drifter. He was watching me. He knew I had just realized the front door was locked. He was waiting for me to panic. He was waiting for me to scream, perfectly content to toy with me like a cat cornering a mouse, soaking in my absolute terror. The hairs on my arms stood on end. I dug my fingernails so hard into my palms that they nearly broke the skin. I had to force myself to stay calm. I couldn’t scream. In a hellhole like this, screaming would only get me killed faster. I took a deep, shaky breath and pretended I was just heading to the bathroom. I turned around and walked toward the bathroom door, intentionally making my footsteps a little heavier. “Stupid door. Gotta tell the agent to fix that deadbolt tomorrow,” I muttered to myself. I kept my voice low, but loud enough for the thing in the ceiling to hear. I stepped into the bathroom and immediately locked the door behind me. There was a window in here that looked out into the building’s stairwell, but it was completely covered by heavy security bars. I could never squeeze through. My only way out was the front door. Since I couldn’t open it from the inside, I had to wait for someone to open it from the outside. Or I had to lure someone here. I pulled out my phone, my fingers trembling as I opened my texts with Chuck, the sleazy leasing agent. The guy was a total creep who always stared at my chest when he talked to me, but he worked for a legitimate real estate agency. Surely he wouldn’t boldly assist in a murder. “Hey Chuck, the front door is stuck. I have an emergency and really need to run out for a bit.” I hit send. No reply. I tried calling him through the app. It rang twice, then the call was manually declined. A second later, a text popped up on my screen. “It’s late, sweetie. Where are you rushing off to? The door is just jammed, I’ll bring a guy to fix it tomorrow. Just go to sleep. Building security is top-notch, you’re perfectly safe.” Building security? This rundown slum didn’t even have working streetlights. What security? And how did he know I was trying to leave right this second? How did he reply so fast? Unless he was standing right outside the building. A fresh, biting chill shot down my spine. I remembered a tiny detail from my past life. Right as the squatter was strangling the life out of me, I swore I heard a noise coming from the front door. It sounded exactly like a key turning in the lock. Was this whole thing a setup from the start? The agent lures in the prey, the landlord collects the cash, and the squatter handles the disposal? No, that didn’t make sense. If it was a highly coordinated murder ring, they would have been busted ages ago. It was far more likely that Chuck knew something shady was going on, but turned a blind eye to pocket the commission. Or worse, he was actively using this squatter to terrify tenants into breaking their leases early so he could pocket their security deposits. I gripped my phone, my knuckles turning white. Since he was perfectly fine throwing me to the wolves, I had zero reason to play nice. I opened my dial pad and typed 911. Before I could even hit the call button, the bathroom lights flickered wildly. Bzzzt. The bulb died. The entire bathroom was plunged into total darkness. Immediately after, that familiar, sickening scraping sound echoed from right above me. It wasn’t in the hallway anymore. It was coming from the aluminum drop ceiling right inside the bathroom. Those flimsy aluminum panels could never support the weight of a grown man. But he didn’t need them to support his weight. He just needed to push them out of the way. Clack. The sound of the first metal panel being popped out of its frame echoed in the dark. In that exact moment, I could literally feel a wave of hot, foul breath ghosting over my scalp. I didn’t dare look up. I yanked the bathroom door open and bolted into the hall. Being trapped in a tiny bathroom with that thing dropping on my head was a death sentence. If I was going to fight, I needed the open space of the living room. I rushed back into my bedroom, slammed the door shut, and threw my entire body weight against the wood. I gripped the paring knife tight, aiming the blade straight at the door. But I knew this flimsy door wouldn’t stop him. The cheap spherical lock could be popped open with a credit card. And more importantly, he didn’t need to use the door. The ventilation window. I whipped my head around. The vent was still just a dark, empty square. But I knew exactly what was happening. He was crawling through the ceiling space right now, skittering like a massive gecko, making a beeline straight for my room. I had to find a way to save myself. Aside from this door, the room had zero exits. The only real window faced an interior air shaft. Jumping out meant a four-story drop into sheer darkness. I would either die or break both my legs. Wait. This apartment was illegally subdivided. To squeeze out maximum profit, they had built all these extra walls using cheap metal studs and thin gypsum drywall. The walls had zero soundproofing, which meant they were incredibly fragile. My room shared a wall with Room B. If I could smash a hole through this drywall and escape into the next room, I might have a chance. As long as someone was in there, I could scream for help. Even if I hadn’t seen anyone in two weeks, Chuck promised me these were young professionals. Having even one person on my side was infinitely better than fighting a monster alone. I looked at my canvas wardrobe. Right behind it was the shared partition wall. I didn’t care if the noise alerted the thing in the ceiling anymore. I shoved the flimsy wardrobe out of the way. Facing the pale, sickly white wall, I raised my leg and kicked it with absolutely everything I had. Thud! A dull, heavy impact. The wall vibrated, but it held. The crawling sounds above me instantly stopped. He was right above my head. He was listening. He was trying to figure out what the hell I was doing. I gritted my teeth, took two steps back, and launched another brutal kick. Crack! This time, the cheap drywall let out a satisfying crunch, caving inward to form a noticeable dent. It was working! I went completely feral, kicking the dent over and over again like a madwoman. Pure adrenaline completely masked the pain in my heel. Only one thought looped in my brain. Break it open! Crash! My foot finally punched completely through the drywall. Ignoring the jagged, chalky edges, I reached in and began violently tearing away the pink fiberglass insulation, widening the hole as fast as I could. A cloud of drywall dust filled the air, making me cough violently. Through the jagged hole, I finally saw the inside of the room next door. Catching the faint ambient light bleeding in from my side, I saw a bed. Someone was sitting on the edge of the mattress. It was a woman with long, dark hair flowing over her shoulders. She was facing away from me, completely motionless. “Help! Please! Someone’s trying to kill me! Call the police!” I screamed at her back, my voice shaking uncontrollably. She didn’t move. She didn’t even twitch. Panic took over. I didn’t care that the hole was barely the size of a dog door. I forced my head and my right shoulder through the jagged gap. “Hey! Wake up! Call 911!” I reached out, grabbed her shoulder, and yanked her backward. Her body was incredibly light. She spun around effortlessly. The moment I saw her face, the blood in my veins turned to ice. It was a rigid, chalk-white plastic face. She had cartoonishly exaggerated red lips, and her eyes were just two solid dots of black paint. It was a retail store mannequin. She was dressed in a neat corporate blazer, her cheap synthetic wig slightly askew, staring blankly back at me. Only then did I realize that aside from the bed and this plastic nightmare, the room was completely empty. A thick layer of dust coated the floor. There were no high-end white-collar professionals. There never were. “Hehehe.” A soft, raspy chuckle echoed from the ceiling right above my room. It didn’t sound human. It sounded like a stray cat with a throat full of phlegm, sharp and entirely deranged. A skeletal hand reached down through the ventilation window on my side of the wall. It was gripping a frayed nylon rope. He dangled the noose right in front of me as I remained hopelessly wedged in the drywall, completely trapped. 3 When fear reaches its absolute peak, it morphs into total numbness. I was stuck in the wall. Half my body was in my room, the other half in the dark with the plastic mannequin. In front of me sat a lifeless plastic doll. Behind me was a serial killer. The nylon rope swayed in the air like a venomous snake preparing to strike. I violently violently jerked my body backward. I didn’t care as the jagged edges of the drywall sliced deep cuts into my waist and ribs. The sharp sting of pain brought a wave of absolute clarity. I scrambled back on all fours, retreating to the farthest corner of my room, my fingers clamped in a death grip around the handle of my paring knife. The hand slowly retreated back into the ceiling. But that didn’t mean he was giving up. He was enjoying this. Just like a cat torturing a wounded bird before finally snapping its neck. He knew I had nowhere left to run. Room B was a fake. What about the rest? Were all of Chuck’s “high-end, quiet professionals” just plastic dolls propped up in empty beds? They faked a full house just to trick naive, broke, and paranoid girls like me into signing a lease. This entire apartment wasn’t a home. It was a carefully constructed hunting ground. I needed to know for sure. Even if knowing wouldn’t save my life, I refused to die ignorant. I charged out of my bedroom. The living room was still engulfed in suffocating silence. I sprinted straight to Room C and violently twisted the knob. Locked. I took a step back and kicked it. These hollow-core wooden doors were basically made of cardboard. Three kicks later, the wood around the strike plate splintered and gave way. I crashed into the room. Using my phone’s flashlight, I saw the exact same setup. An empty room. A bed. A “man” sitting in a desk chair. He was wearing a cheap suit and wire-rimmed glasses, a permanent, lifeless plastic smile plastered across his face. Another mannequin. I moved to Room D. The door was unlocked. I pushed it open and gagged. This one was even more twisted. There were two “people” lying in the bed, a man and a woman, tucked neatly under the covers with only their plastic heads exposed. The “couple” Chuck had told me about. It was all completely fake. In this entire four-bedroom apartment, I was the only living, breathing soul. No, wait. There was one more. Up in the ceiling. I stood in the dead center of the living room, sweeping my flashlight across the doors of this deranged wax museum. In that moment, the fear completely evaporated. I just felt sick. A profound, violent wave of nausea washed over me. They played me for an absolute fool. Just to pocket a few hundred bucks in rent, they built a tomb for the living. Drip. A drop of liquid splattered onto the laminate floor right by my shoe. I looked down. It was a cloudy, yellowish drop. The sharp, foul stench of ammonia immediately hit my nose. I slowly tilted my head up. I aimed the flashlight beam straight at the center of the living room ceiling. The large maintenance hatch had been completely pushed aside. Hanging upside down from the opening was a head so emaciated it looked like a skull wrapped in thin leather. Greasy, matted hair hung down like dead weeds. His cloudy, jaundiced eyes squinted against the harsh glare of my flashlight. He stretched his lips into a wide, grotesque grin, revealing a mouth full of rotting black teeth. He was holding a dirty plastic water bottle, slowly tipping it over the edge, letting drops of urine fall to the floor. He was mocking me. He was pissing on his territory to remind me who was in charge. This was my “roommate.” Every night, when I thought I was hearing rats, I was actually listening to him. A massive, human-sized rat. “Come down here!” I screamed at the top of my lungs. My voice was so raw and feral it even startled me. “If you have the guts, come down here! Hiding up there makes you a coward!” I raised the paring knife and slashed the air aggressively toward him. His sunken face twitched. He clearly hadn’t expected the cornered prey to snap back. He pulled his head back into the darkness. A second later, I heard the frantic, heavy thudding of him crawling rapidly across the aluminum tracks. He was heading straight for my bedroom. I knew exactly what his plan was. The ventilation window. It was his favorite ambush spot. I couldn’t go back into that room. But I desperately needed to use that room. My brain kicked into absolute overdrive. Adrenaline flooded my system. If he wanted to play dirty, I was going to burn his entire world down. I bolted into the kitchen. There was no gas stove, just a cheap electric hot plate. But I vividly remembered seeing a discarded metal gallon of paint thinner sitting in the corner under the sink from when they did the cheap renovations. Highly flammable. I grabbed the metal tin by the handle and shook it. It was half full. More than enough. I sprinted back toward my bedroom, lugging the tin with me. The ventilation window had already been pushed open. That grimy, skeletal hand was just starting to reach down. When he saw me barrel into the room, his hand paused in mid-air. He was probably wondering why the prey was stupid enough to run back into the trap. I let out a cold, venomous laugh. I unscrewed the cap of the metal tin, aimed right for the bed directly beneath the vent, and violently splashed the paint thinner across the mattress and the wall. The sharp, chemical fumes instantly choked the tiny room. “You want to come down?! Then come the hell down!” I pulled a cheap gas station lighter out of my pocket. Click. A small, bright flame sparked to life. The eyes peering out from the darkness of the vent widened in sheer terror. It was the primal, animalistic fear of fire. He tried to yank himself backward into the crawl space. But I wasn’t going to let him escape. I tossed the lit lighter squarely onto the soaked bedsheets. Whoosh! A wall of fire erupted instantly, roaring like a beast as it climbed the drywall, curling viciously toward the ceiling. The ventilation window acted like a chimney, pulling the flames and the blistering heat straight up into the crawl space. “AGHHHHH!!!” A horrific, blood-curdling shriek echoed from the ceiling. It was a sound that made my skin crawl, like a pig being slaughtered alive. I took a step back into the hall, watching the tongues of fire lick the edges of the vent. But I knew this wasn’t going to kill him. A quick flash fire like this would only give him severe burns. And if this entire slum went up in flames, I’d burn to death right along with him. I didn’t want a murder-suicide. I just wanted to smoke the bastard out. I wanted to force him out of his dark little fortress and drag him down to the floor, where I could look him in the eye and fight him to the death. Right on cue, a frantic, violent thrashing echoed from the ceiling panels. The crawl space was filling with thick, toxic smoke and searing heat. He couldn’t take it anymore. Crash! A massive explosion of noise erupted from the hallway. The entire maintenance panel was kicked completely out of its frame. A dark, thrashing mass of burning rags and limbs plummeted from the ceiling, slamming brutally against the hard floor. He had landed. He was a frail, emaciated man, barely five feet tall, wrapped in layers of filthy, shredded cotton coats. His matted hair was literally on fire. He was screaming in agony, rolling wildly across the laminate floor, frantically slapping at the flames eating at his clothes. I gripped my paring knife tight and stepped out into the hall. He was no longer the apex predator lurking in the shadows. He was just a pathetic, burning rat. I didn’t hesitate. I lunged forward, aimed the blade at his exposed thigh, and drove it down with everything I had. Squelch. The blade sank deep into the muscle. He let out another agonizing wail. His cloudy eyes finally registered pure, unadulterated fear. He tried to scramble backward, but I drove my boot squarely into his grotesque, rotting face. “That was for strangling me to death!” I ripped the knife out. Dark blood sprayed across the floor. I raised the knife to finish the job. But right at that second, the sound of metal scraping against metal echoed from the front door. Click. The deadbolt turned. The door swung open, and Chuck’s massive, fleshy frame filled the doorway. He was heavily out of breath, clutching a solid aluminum baseball bat. He had clearly heard the screaming and rushed upstairs. But when he saw the bloodbath in the hallway, he froze. I froze too. I figured he might show up, but I didn’t expect him to be armed to the teeth. And more terrifyingly, when he looked down at the bleeding, burning squatter on the floor, there was absolutely zero surprise in his eyes. Only… pure, unbridled rage. It was the rage of a man watching his expensive property being destroyed. “You useless piece of trash!” Chuck spat, turning around to slam the front door shut, firmly locking the deadbolt behind him once again. He turned back to face me. Those beady little eyes, usually squinting with a sleazy smile, were now blown wide open, radiating absolute malice. “Damn, you’re a vicious little thing, aren’t you?” He slapped the baseball bat against his open palm, taking a slow, heavy step toward me. “This retard might be missing half his brain, but he’s been my loyal guard dog for six months. He’s saved me a ton of headaches. You just crippled him. How the hell am I supposed to run my business now?” His tone was incredibly casual, like he was complaining about a broken vending machine. But the truth hit me like a freight train. This drifter wasn’t some random squatter who broke in. He was Chuck’s attack dog. He was kept on a leash, intentionally used to terrify tenants so they’d break their leases and forfeit their deposits. And sometimes… he was used to dispose of the tenants who didn’t play nice. I gripped my blood-soaked knife, slowly backing away. I was trapped between a wolf and a grizzly bear. And this bear was bigger, stronger, and infinitely more dangerous. “Stay back! I already called the cops!” I screamed, keeping the knife raised. “The cops?” Chuck let out a wet, ugly snort. “I installed a military-grade signal jammer in this shithole. Who did you call? The grim reaper?” No wonder the call failed. “I was just gonna let you stay a month, keep your deposit, and kick you to the curb. But you just had to play the hero.” The fat on Chuck’s face jiggled as he curled his lips into a sickening, predatory smile. “Since you figured out the game, you can stay here permanently and keep them company. I was getting bored of looking at those plastic dolls anyway. A real corpse will really spice up the room.” He raised the aluminum bat high over his head, aiming a lethal swing straight at my skull.

🌟 Continue the story here 👉🏻 📲 Download the “MotoNovel” app 🔍 search for “446001”, and watch the full series ✨! #MotoNovel

1 For the third time this week, the new intern wrote me up for slacking off. She stood by my desk with her chin tilted up in that sickeningly arrogant way of hers. “Mr. Lively made it crystal clear. No one is allowed to eat snacks, drink beverages, or play on their phones at their desks.” “You broke all three rules. That’s a three-thousand-dollar fine. We’re docking a full month’s pay.” Looking at her perfectly manicured, youthful face, I couldn’t help but smile. The girl had only been working here for fifteen days. Riding on the coattails of Oliver Lively’s favoritism, she strutted around the office like she owned the place, treating everyone else like dirt on her shoe. But there was one tiny detail she didn’t know. I was the majority shareholder of this firm. Where did she get the audacity to fine the very boss who signed her paychecks? My name is Victoria. I am thirty-eight years old. Ten years ago, at twenty-eight, I founded an interior design firm from the ground up. Over a decade of blood, sweat, and sleepless nights, I grew it into a highly reputable brand in the city. Once the company stabilized, I stepped back from the front lines. I handed the day-to-day management over to the CEO I had personally mentored and promoted: Oliver Lively. Oliver was five years younger than me. He was sharp, ambitious, and my absolute top choice for a successor. I delegated my power completely. Unless there was a massive, company-altering project, I stayed entirely out of the daily operations. I just kept a single, modest desk for myself tucked away in the farthest corner of the design department. I set my own hours. I came and went as I pleased. To the rest of the staff, I was just a veteran employee with no real authority. They politely called me “Victoria” and left me alone. I loved the peace and quiet. I also never interfered with HR decisions or new hires. That was, until Blair showed up half a month ago. Oliver personally escorted her onto the design floor. “Everyone, this is Blair. She’s a fresh Ivy League graduate and the newest addition to our design team. Please show her the ropes,” Oliver announced, his tone practically dripping with admiration. Blair smiled and waved, her eyes sweeping across the open-plan office. When her gaze finally landed on me, it was loaded with scrutiny and thinly veiled contempt. From her very first day, she refused to act like an intern. She complained that the standard-issue company laptop was too slow, demanding the admin team order her the latest, fully loaded iMac. She complained that the coffee in the breakroom was cheap instant trash. By her second day, she had an assistant running out to buy artisanal pour-over coffee, charging it directly to the corporate account. When people started whispering about her diva behavior, she just offered a condescending smirk. “Mr. Lively authorized it. He said brilliant creative minds require a premium environment, and the company shouldn’t pinch pennies on the little things.” The name “Mr. Lively” was her royal decree. To give credit where it’s due, she was undeniably clever. She quickly gathered a clique of young, equally arrogant junior designers who thought they were God’s gift to architecture. To the older, seasoned staff, she showed nothing but disrespect. Right in front of the entire floor, she announced that my design philosophy was “ancient history and completely out of touch.” During a pitch review with the Design Director, she didn’t hesitate to interrupt, loudly criticizing a color palette as “tacky and entirely unfit for modern aesthetics.” At first, I brushed it off. I figured she was just young, overly ambitious, and desperate to prove herself. I even saved her skin once. We had an urgent, high-stakes project, and Blair volunteered to take the lead, bragging that she could handle it in her sleep. She severely overestimated her abilities. With barely an hour left before the client deadline, her entire 3D rendering file corrupted. The poor girl was on the verge of a full-blown panic attack, tears welling in her eyes. I stepped in, rebuilt the core models from my own archives, and sent the final draft to the client with minutes to spare. She looked at me that day with a mix of genuine shock and gratitude. I assumed that after bailing her out, her attitude toward me would finally change. I was dead wrong. The very next afternoon, I overheard her chatting in the breakroom. “That Victoria woman just has a few more years of repetitive experience. It’s really no big deal. If I had the luxury of sitting around doing nothing but studying software all day like her, I’d be ten times faster.” One of her little followers chimed in. “Seriously. I heard she’s just coasting until retirement. She abuses her seniority to slack off all day.” Blair let out a light, arrogant laugh. “Don’t worry, the company isn’t going to sponsor a charity case forever. Mr. Lively told me the future belongs to the young blood. Dinosaurs who can’t keep up with the new pace will be phased out sooner rather than later.” I stood completely still behind the breakroom door, a ceramic mug in my hand. I didn’t walk in. “I’m telling you, people like her are just dead weight taking up oxygen,” Blair continued. “Just wait and see. I’m going to clean up this toxic, lazy culture myself.” I completely lost my appetite that day. I suddenly realized that the company I had built with my bare hands had quietly bred a culture I absolutely despised. 2 Blair’s grand “clean-up” operation started almost immediately. First, the HR Admin approached me with an incredibly awkward expression. “Victoria, Mr. Lively is rolling out a strict new attendance policy. Everyone has to clock in and out using the app. So, regarding your schedule…” I had been at this company for ten years and had never once clocked in. It was one of my unspoken privileges as the founder. I looked at the stressed admin manager and nodded gently. “Alright. I understand.” The next day, HR called me into a private meeting. “Victoria, a colleague reported that you spend company hours browsing websites unrelated to your current projects. It sets a bad precedent for the floor.” I glanced at the screenshot the HR rep slid across the desk. It was a photo of my monitor showing a high-end European architectural forum. Browsing global design trends was a daily habit I had maintained for a decade to keep my inspiration fresh. “Who reported this?” I asked flatly. The HR rep stammered, avoiding my eyes. “We have a strict obligation to protect the anonymity of whistleblowers.” “Fine. I’ll keep that in mind.” I didn’t take it to heart. I assumed it was just petty, childish office politics. But I vastly underestimated just how much Oliver was willing to indulge her. A week later, a brand new “Employee Code of Conduct” was blasted to every inbox in the company. It was a massive, hundred-page document detailing exactly how folders should be arranged on desks, what kind of mugs were acceptable, and explicitly banning employees from resting their heads on their desks during lunch breaks. At the very bottom of the document was Oliver Lively’s digital signature. The author of this ridiculous manifesto? Blair. Oliver had shattered corporate protocol, promoting her straight from intern to Executive Assistant to the CEO. Her workspace was moved from the crowded design floor into a sleek, private glass cubicle right outside Oliver’s office. From that day on, she patrolled the office like a prison warden, clutching a leather-bound notebook, documenting any “infractions” she spotted. Brenda, a senior designer, took a brief phone call because her toddler had a fever. Blair wrote her up. Arthur, our Design Director, ate a sandwich at his keyboard because he was rushing a deadline. Blair issued a company-wide reprimand. The entire office was suffocating under a thick blanket of resentment and fear. And I was her favorite target. The first write-up was for a tiny potted succulent sitting next to my monitor. “Victoria, the handbook explicitly states that personal items are forbidden in the workspace. It damages the sleek, professional image of the firm.” The second write-up was for using my personal Macbook to answer private emails. “Victoria, company property is for company use only. If you need to handle personal business, please do so off the clock.” The third write-up was today. My crimes were a glass of water, a small plate of saltine crackers, and the fact that I was holding my phone, reading a client’s feedback on a recently completed project. She stood over me, looking down like a judge preparing to deliver a death sentence. “A three-thousand-dollar fine. Deducted straight from your paycheck this month. Do you have a problem with that?” I looked up at her calmly. Slowly, I rotated my phone screen so she could see it. It was a glowing letter of gratitude from a major client, explicitly praising the entire project team, including her, the intern. “I am working,” I said. She glanced at the screen and scoffed. “Save the excuses. Everyone in this building knows you coast through the day and slack off on company time. Now you’re openly insubordinate to your superiors. How exactly do you expect management to deal with you?” I let out a dry, incredulous laugh. The sheer absurdity of it was almost entertaining. I took my time standing up from my chair. The air in the design department seemed to freeze solid. Every single person stopped typing, holding their breath, their ears straining to catch every word of our confrontation. “Insubordinate to my superiors?” I repeated the phrase slowly, letting it hang in the air. My gaze drifted past her, sweeping across the entire crowded floor. “I have a quick question for everyone sitting here today. Which one of you is my superior?” 3 Dead silence. A few of the veteran designers, the ones I had personally interviewed and hired years ago, kept their eyes glued to their monitors, pretending to be invisible statues. Blair’s face flushed an ugly shade of red. She clearly hadn’t expected the entire floor to leave her hanging. Not a single person stepped up to back her. She gritted her teeth and jutted her chin out defensively. “My official title is Executive Assistant to the CEO. I am tasked with monitoring all personnel. That absolutely makes me your superior!” “If you have a problem with my authority, take it up with Mr. Lively!” “Sure,” I nodded agreeably, picking up my phone. “I’ll ask him to come down here right now.” A collective, quiet gasp rippled through the cubicles. Everyone thought I had lost my mind. A “lazy” senior employee actively provoking the CEO’s wrath was career suicide. Blair’s lips curled into a victorious, predatory smirk. I ignored her completely. I found Oliver’s name in my contacts and pressed call. He picked up on the second ring. “Hello?” Oliver’s voice was deep, steady, and thoroughly professional. “Oliver. Come down to the design floor. Now.” My tone was perfectly flat. I didn’t use his formal title. I didn’t offer any explanations. I spoke to him the exact same way a boss speaks to a subordinate. There was a fraction of a second of dead air on the line before he replied, “Understood. I’ll be right there.” I ended the call and tossed my phone casually onto my desk. Blair crossed her arms over her chest and sneered. “Putting on a brave face. Let’s see how fast that attitude disappears when Mr. Lively gets here.” I didn’t say a word. I just pulled my chair back out, sat down comfortably, and watched her with quiet amusement. Less than three minutes later, Oliver’s tall, imposing figure strode through the glass doors of the design department. After three years of holding the reins, the man I had mentored had cultivated a genuinely intimidating corporate aura. The moment he walked in, the oxygen in the room seemed to vanish. Blair immediately rushed over to his side, her voice dripping with manufactured grievance and venom. “Mr. Lively, thank god you’re here!” “Victoria is blatantly violating company policy. She’s eating, drinking, and playing on her phone at her desk. I issued a standard three-thousand-dollar fine according to your new regulations, and not only did she refuse to accept it, she openly disrespected me and demanded you come down here!” “She has absolutely zero respect for you or the rules you established for this firm!” As she ranted, she shot me a smug, vindictive glare out of the corner of her eye. Oliver’s sharp gaze locked onto me. His brow furrowed just a fraction of an inch. His eyes were a storm of complicated emotions. There was impatience, calculation, and a flicker of something much darker that I couldn’t quite read. Over the last three years, he had truly transformed into a ruthless businessman. Cold, decisive, and entirely detached. “Victoria, what exactly is going on here?” he demanded, his voice entirely devoid of warmth. I met his icy stare without flinching. “Exactly what your assistant just said. I drank half a glass of water, ate a single saltine cracker, and looked at my phone for three minutes.” I paused, picking up the small saucer of crackers and sliding it across my desk toward him. “I’m sure the CEO is unaware, but I suffer from chronic hypoglycemia. I specifically asked the admin team to keep these stocked in the pantry for me.” “As for the phone,” I picked up the device and tapped the screen to keep it awake. It was still displaying the client group chat. “Mr. Harrison from Vanguard just sent a lengthy appreciation text to the group, promising to refer a massive new client to our firm. I thought it was a phenomenal win, and I wanted to make sure the project team saw it immediately to boost morale.” “I wasn’t aware that keeping tabs on our biggest client constituted ‘playing on my phone’.” Oliver’s face darkened significantly. Seeing his hesitation, Blair immediately threw more fuel on the fire. “Mr. Lively, do not listen to her pathetic excuses! A rule is a rule. We cannot grant special privileges just because she’s been here a long time!” “She is weaponizing her seniority to challenge your absolute authority! If you do not punish her severely today, how will anyone ever respect your policies in the future?” 4 Every single word Blair said was precision-engineered to hit a power-hungry executive’s deepest insecurities. I knew exactly what Oliver had been trying to do since he took over three years ago. He was desperate to prove himself, desperate to scrub away my legacy and establish his own absolute, unquestionable dominance over the firm. Blair was nothing more than a convenient weapon he was using to purge the old guard and eradicate anyone loyal to me. And as the ultimate symbol of the old regime, I was naturally the first head that needed to roll. Right on cue, the temperature in Oliver’s eyes dropped below freezing. He looked down at me, pronouncing his verdict word by agonizing word. “Rules are rules. Once a policy is set, everyone must comply. Victoria, as a senior member of this firm, you should be setting the standard, not breaking it. Blair was simply doing her job. She did nothing wrong.” “And your point is?” I asked quietly. “My point is the three-thousand-dollar fine stands. Furthermore, for blatant insubordination and refusing to comply with management, your quarterly bonus is completely revoked. I expect a one-thousand-word written apology on my desk by tomorrow morning.” Oliver delivered the sentence with absolute finality, leaving zero room for negotiation. The office was so quiet you could hear a pin drop. Everyone was entirely paralyzed by the sheer brutality of his decision. This wasn’t corporate discipline. This was a public humiliation. A sickeningly triumphant grin spread across Blair’s face. She looked at me like I was a peasant who had just been thrown into the mud. I looked at Oliver. I looked at the man I had trusted with my life’s work, the man I had practically treated like a younger brother. Any lingering trace of affection I had for him evaporated completely in the freezing air of his betrayal. I smiled. A slow, chilling smile. “Oliver. And if I refuse to write it?” His eyes narrowed dangerously. “Then you will submit your immediate resignation. Visionary Interiors does not employ staff who refuse to fall in line.” “Fire me?” I let out a dry, incredulous laugh, slowly rising to my feet to look him dead in the eye. “Oliver, are you absolutely certain you have the authority to do that?” “I am the CEO of this company! Do I have the authority to fire a regular employee?!” he snapped, his voice rising in anger. “A regular employee?” I shook my head, my smile widening into something lethal. “It seems that playing the role of CEO for three years has made you completely forget who actually owns this company.” My voice wasn’t loud, but in the dead silence of the office, it hit like a shockwave. Oliver’s pupils contracted violently. The triumphant smirk on Blair’s face froze solid. I didn’t give them a single second to recover. My eyes swept over their pale, panic-stricken faces, and I delivered the final blow with crystal-clear precision. “I am officially notifying you, in my capacity as the Founder and Chairman of the Board—” “Oliver, you and your little assistant are both fired.” 5 As the words left my mouth, a suffocating, graveyard silence descended upon the design department. The air was so tense it felt solid. You could hear the faint hum of the air conditioning kicking in. Every single pair of eyes in the room was locked onto the three of us like spotlights. Shock. Horror. Absolute disbelief. The arrogant smirk on Blair’s face had completely collapsed, her features twisting into an ugly, glitching mask of confusion. She opened her mouth to speak, but no sound came out. She just stared at me with wide, manic eyes, looking at me like I belonged in an asylum. Oliver’s reaction, however, was much faster. After a microsecond of genuine terror, his face darkened into a thunderous scowl. His eyes were sharp as daggers, practically boring a hole into my skull. “Victoria.” He ground my name out through clenched teeth, his tone dripping with the fury of a man whose ego had just been publicly shattered. “Do you have any idea what the hell is coming out of your mouth? Who do you think you are?” “Who do I think I am?” I repeated calmly, stepping closer to him. “I am the Founder of Visionary Interiors. I am the Chairman of the Board. And I am the absolute majority shareholder, possessing seventy percent of this company’s equity.” “Does that answer your question?” With every title I listed, the color drained further from Oliver’s face. When I said “seventy percent,” his pupils shrank to pinpricks, and a flash of genuine, visceral panic finally bled through his stoic facade. But he forced himself to stabilize. He was desperately trying to hold the line. “Heh.” He let out a harsh, mocking laugh, dripping with fabricated disdain. “Victoria, you’ve been sitting in the corner doing nothing for so long that your brain has finally rotted. Chairman? You handed the CEO position to me three years ago. You are no longer in control of this company’s operations.” “As for your so-called shares… who knows if that’s even true anymore? And even if you do hold equity, terminating a CEO requires a formal vote from the Board of Directors! Standing here having a psychotic break in front of the staff just makes you look pathetic.” His desperate counterattack fed Blair a massive dose of liquid courage. She immediately chimed in, her voice shrill and grating. “Exactly! Mr. Lively is the CEO! Who the hell are you?! You’re just a washed-up, obsolete employee on a power trip! You’re just throwing a tantrum because you got caught breaking the rules!” She turned to the surrounding staff, aggressively trying to rally the crowd. “Everyone sees this, right?! This is what toxic entitlement looks like! She thinks just because she’s old, she can publicly disrespect the CEO and destroy the corporate structure! People like her need to be thrown out immediately!” Not a single person agreed with her. The young designers who used to follow her around like lapdogs suddenly found their shoes incredibly fascinating, shrinking down into their office chairs to hide behind their monitors. The veteran employees just stared at her with expressions of profound pity, like they were watching a toddler play with a loaded gun. Oliver clearly sensed the dangerous shift in the room’s atmosphere. His face hardened. He pulled himself up to his full height, projecting maximum CEO authority, and shouted toward the glass doors. “Security! Get security up here right now! Remove this disruptive individual from the premises immediately!” He was crossing the Rubicon. He was burning the bridge completely. He was absolutely certain that in the eyes of the staff, I was just a figurehead with no actual fangs. He believed that if he threw me out into the street like garbage today, his absolute reign over the company would be cemented forever. Two uniformed security guards jogged onto the floor, looking incredibly stressed. “Mr. Lively, what seems to be the problem?” Oliver pointed a rigid finger at me, his voice a block of solid ice. “Escort her out of the building. Effective immediately, she is no longer an employee of Visionary Interiors.” Blair crossed her arms, looking down her nose at me, practically vibrating with glee. “Did you hear the man? Look at you now, getting thrown out on the street! You brought this entirely on yourself!” The two guards exchanged a miserable look, but they slowly stepped toward me. “Ma’am, please don’t make this difficult…” The entire office stopped breathing. I looked at Oliver’s twisted, power-hungry face. The very last thread of mercy I had for him snapped. I slowly reached into my pocket and pulled out my phone. Without breaking eye contact, I dialed three simple digits and put it on speaker. “Hello, 911? I need to report a major corporate crime.” The smug expressions on Oliver and Blair’s faces instantly froze over.

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1 I was born a human lie detector. When people lie to me, they hiccup—a telltale glitch that makes even the smoothest deceptions clear as glass. But knowing too much truth leaves you utterly alone. Then Eleanor Kensington, matriarch of the Kensington Group, appeared. She took my hands, her diamond rings digging into my skin. “Someone inside is cooking the books. After two years of failed audits, you’re the only one who can look them in the eye and tell me who it is.” She offered a hundred grand a month and promised if her son, Declan, ever wronged me, I could leave with a fortune. Having no real friends anyway, I accepted. For three years of marriage, I uncovered five executives stealing from the company, recovering over a hundred and fifty million dollars. The Kensingtons became an untouchable fortress, and I moved from a tiny apartment to a Hampton estate so large I could bike down its halls. One Tuesday, pedaling past Declan’s study, I heard him and his partner Carter talking. “The books are clean. Isn’t it time you got rid of your freakshow wife?” Carter said. “Give her severance, say we’re restructuring.” “And if she refuses?” “Who’ll take her side? She has no friends.” I stopped my bike, knocked, and pushed the door open. “Let’s draw up the divorce papers now,” I said, looking at Declan. “Sinclair Enterprises is desperate—their board is throwing blank checks at anyone who can find their missing funds. I’m sure they’d love a human lie detector at their door. Beats hiring the Big Four.” Catherine. How long have you been standing there? Declan’s voice held no surprise. Just the cold irritation of a man whose neatly arranged schedule had been disrupted. Carter recovered quickly. He leaned back into the leather sofa and crossed one leg over the other. Perfect timing, actually. Saves Declan the trouble of breaking the news to you. He doesn’t need to break anything. I leaned the bicycle against the doorframe. Do we have the papers ready? If not, I can wait by the printer. Declan had not anticipated this. He probably thought I would cry. Beg. Demand answers. Or refuse to leave the gold-plated cage. After all, like he just said, where else would a friendless woman go? He walked around the mahogany desk and shoved his hands into his tailored pockets. Are you absolutely sure you have thought this through? After three years, I knew that body language. Hands in the pockets meant the verdict was already sealed. Now it was just administrative work. Crystal clear. But one quick question. Is that hundred grand before or after taxes? Carter let out a sharp laugh. Declan did not even smile. His eyes swept over my face like he was taking inventory of a broken piece of office equipment ready for the scrapyard. My lawyers will email you the paperwork, Catherine. But let me make one thing abundantly clear. You signed an NDA. Every piece of corporate data, every scandal, every name you caught. Not a single word leaves your mouth. Including the names of the embezzlers? Including everything. They were gagging me. Before I could reply, Carter stood up. He reached down and adjusted his silver cufflink. I had watched him do that for three years. It was his physical starting pistol right before he said something incredibly cruel. Catherine, do not take it personally. The board just hired Dr. Mia. She has a Ph.D. in criminal psychology from an Ivy League. She uses micro-expression analysis. Actual science. He put a heavy, crushing weight on the word science. The Kensington Group no longer needs to rely on… He paused, tasting the insult before letting it drop. Voodoo. Voodoo. Three years ago, Declan’s mother sat in my dingy apartment and called me their last hope. Now, I was voodoo. A parlor trick. But right as he said the word voodoo, he hiccuped. It was a soft, muffled sound, rolling up from the back of his throat. He did not even notice it. But I did. That hiccup meant he did not believe I was a parlor trick. He knew exactly how terrifying my gift was. He just wanted to grind me into the dirt anyway. Fine. I grabbed a custom pen off the desk, skimmed the nondisclosure agreement for two minutes, and signed my name on the bottom line. As Declan took the folder back, his phone buzzed. He had just wired me the hundred grand. The memo line read: For three years of service. No thank you. No apologies. Not even the fake excuse about European restructuring. Walking back out into the hallway, it felt longer than before. Halfway down, I saw two maids carrying cardboard boxes out the side door. Fast and efficient. My things. They had already packed my life away. This was not a spur-of-the-moment decision. It was choreographed. They had probably practiced their facial expressions in the mirror. I just happened to ruin their opening night. Mrs. Kensington. Your items are all here. Two boxes. I brought two boxes when I moved in. I was leaving with two. I carried them out through the wrought-iron gates. The June evening wind rustled through the sycamore trees, smelling of fresh-cut grass and gasoline. The gates clicked shut behind me. The heavy metallic thud sounded like a goodbye no one wanted to say out loud. Sitting on the curb, I pulled out my phone and scrolled through my contacts. Three people. Eleanor Kensington. The estate butler. And a delivery guy who brought me Thai food on Tuesdays. Declan was right. A woman without a single friend. That line didn’t make him hiccup. It was the brutal truth, and that was why it cut right down to the bone. I took a deep breath, opened my hidden folder, and tapped a number I had saved a month ago. The private line to the CEO of Sinclair Enterprises. I had seen a top-secret competitor analysis file in Declan’s study. The Sinclair board was getting absolutely cannibalized by internal fraud. It rang four times. Executive office of Sinclair Enterprises. Put me through to Nate Sinclair. Tell him Declan Kensington’s ex-wife is calling. Five seconds later, the line clicked. A deep, gravelly voice bled through the speaker. It sounded like sandpaper dragging across cello strings. The voice of a man who had not slept in days. Catherine? He knew who I was. Mr. Sinclair. I hear you are looking for someone to audit your ghosts. You signed a non-compete and an NDA. I am not auditing Kensington. I tightened my grip on the cardboard box resting on my knees. I am auditing you. Dead silence on the line. When Nate finally spoke, the texture of his voice had changed. It sounded like a match striking in a pitch-black room. Tomorrow. Nine sharp. Floor thirty-two. Do not be late. 2 So you are the walking polygraph. Nate Sinclair leaned against the edge of his massive mahogany desk, his arms crossed over his chest. He was younger than I pictured. Late twenties, maybe thirty. Sharp jawline, heavy brow, but the dark circles under his eyes were so deep no concealer could ever hide them. His office was cavernous, but three of the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves were completely empty. The dust outlines of where the books used to be were still visible. Sold them. Sinclair Enterprises was bleeding out faster than I thought. Take a seat. He gestured to the leather chair opposite him. I stayed standing. Test me first. He raised an eyebrow. You brought me in, but you don’t believe it. That is normal. Nobody ever believes it at first. Say a few true things, then say a lie. Feel it for yourself. Nate stared at me for three long seconds before dropping his arms. Alright. I had a ribeye steak for dinner last night. Silence. No hiccup. Truth. I said. He kept going. The current financial health of Sinclair Enterprises is robust, and there is no internal fraud. Hiccup. It popped out of his chest, a dull thud against his ribs. The cool facade on his face cracked right down the middle. His hand instinctively shot up to touch his throat. That is impossible. I do not hiccup. You do when you look at me. He tried one more. I decided to meet you today on a whim. No hiccup. Truth. I finally sank into the leather chair. Mr. Sinclair, we can do this a hundred times. But in front of me, there are only two options. Fact, or fiction. A heavy, suffocating silence filled the room. He tapped his fingers against the edge of the desk, the rhythm slow, like a metronome calculating a risk. Assume I believe you. How exactly do you help me? How many partners do you have on the board? Seven. Put them all in one room. I will ask them questions down the line. Whoever lies, hiccups. We catch them in broad daylight. It is that simple? It is that simple. He picked up his desk phone. Toby. Get the seven partners into the main conference room at ten o’clock. Tell them it is an emergency financial review. He hung up, looking at me with a lingering shadow of doubt. What is your rate? See the results first. If you like the show, you write the check. At ten o’clock on the dot, seven executives filed into the glass-walled conference room. As they took their seats, the stares began. Curious, disdainful, defensive. A bald man on the far left stared at me for two seconds before turning to Nate. Nate, who is the guest? Our external risk management consultant. Catherine. The bald man scoffed loudly. I opened the financial summary folder Nate gave me and turned to the first page. Good morning. I am going to ask a few simple questions. I expect honest answers. Number one. In the past twelve months, has anyone at this table authorized an off-the-books expenditure? A beat of absolute silence. A tall man in a tailored suit answered first. No. No hiccup. A woman in wire-rimmed glasses. No. No hiccup. It was the bald man’s turn. No. Hiccup. It was loud. A wet, hollow sound like a fist hitting a snare drum. The entire room froze. The bald man rubbed his throat violently. Swallowed wrong. Choked on my own spit. I completely ignored him. Question number two. Have you ever shared internal Sinclair financial data with an external party? Of course not. Hiccup. Louder this time. The other six partners started exchanging frantic looks. I leaned forward. Have you ever heard of an offshore entity called Avalon Holdings? The bald man, Gage, jerked backward in his chair. His lips parted, but no sound came out. He didn’t dare speak. Because he knew the second he said no, his own throat would betray him. Nate took over, his voice cold enough to snap steel. Gage. You have the right to remain silent, but the legal department is seizing your hard drives at noon. Gage shoved his chair back. It screeched horribly against the hardwood. He bolted out of the conference room, slamming the heavy glass door so hard the floor vibrated. The remaining six partners slowly turned their heads to look at me. The weight in their eyes had changed. They were not looking at a consultant anymore. They were looking at a terrifying, hyper-precise weapon. I recognized that look. I lived with it at the Kensington estate for three years. Freak. They weren’t saying it, but it was echoing in their skulls. After the room cleared out, Nate asked me to stay behind. Two minutes. One parasite gutted. The way he looked at me had shifted too. Earlier, it was a test. Now, it was an evaluation. He was calculating my blast radius. Catherine. Declan used you for three years and only caught five people. Why? Because some people are smart. I kept my eyes on the polished table. They never speak a single lie in my presence. They only state verifiable, unarguable facts. They hide behind the truth. And when they do that, I cannot touch them. He frowned. I caught five of Declan’s ghosts. But the sixth… in three years, the sixth person never spoke a single word about money when I was in the room. Who is it? I didn’t answer. The ink on my NDA was still wet. He didn’t push it. A frantic knock shattered the quiet. Toby, Nate’s assistant, burst in. He looked completely rattled. Mr. Sinclair. The Kensington people are downstairs. Carter Brooks is here personally, and he brought… A behavioral analyst. I finished his sentence. Toby shot me a wildly confused look. I stood up and smoothed out the collar of my blouse. Her name is Dr. Mia. She is the weapon the Kensington board bought to replace me. Nate leaned forward, his hands flat on the desk. How did you know she would come here? Because the Kensingtons want to burn every bridge I could possibly walk across. I stared at the door, my voice dead flat. She is not here to collaborate. She is here to steal my job. The door pushed open. Carter strolled in first, exuding the effortless arrogance of a man playing with house money. Right behind him was a woman in a razor-sharp black skirt suit. Low ponytail, pale skin, a perfectly measured smile. She saw me and widened her eyes in flawless, manufactured surprise. Catherine? Oh my god, what a coincidence. You are here too! 3 What a crazy coincidence finding you here, Catherine. Mia’s voice was sweet enough to pour over pancakes. As she walked in, her eyes swept the room. A rapid, microscopic scan that missed absolutely nothing. She was a professional. Carter adjusted his silver cufflink, his tone as casual as a man discussing the weather. Mr. Sinclair, let me introduce Dr. Mia. Top-tier expert in micro-expression analysis. Sinclair and Kensington might be rivals, but when it comes to risk management, we can share resources, right? Nate did not take the bait. He just glanced at me. I stayed completely silent. Mia did not miss a beat. She extended a hand to Nate, then turned to me, dialing up the wattage on her smile. Catherine, I heard you just caught a mole for Mr. Sinclair? That is so impressive. Right as she said impressive, she hiccuped. It was tiny. Just a little bubble popping in her chest. She obviously didn’t notice. But I heard it loud and clear. She did not find me impressive at all. Carter. Nate finally spoke, his voice dry. You didn’t drive all the way across town just to play door-to-door salesman. Carter chuckled. Not selling anything. Dr. Mia has quite the reputation. Half of Wall Street uses her software. I brought her today to give you a complimentary demonstration. He paused and let his eyes slide over to me. And, you know, a little A/B testing never hurt anyone. Let’s see whose method is more effective. You can judge for yourself, Nate. A side-by-side comparison. He wanted to put me and Mia on a scale in front of my new boss and watch me tip into the mud. Nate frowned. I don’t think that is necessary. Mr. Sinclair, Mia cut in, her voice soft but coated in iron. I have been in this field for six years. I use a peer-reviewed Facial Action Coding System. It is not… She pretended to search for the right words. It is not an unverified gut feeling. That sentence triggered no hiccup. She genuinely believed that. She thought I was a total hack. Nate looked at me. Do you mind? he asked. I held out a hand. Be my guest. Mia set up the test with terrifying speed. She had Toby pull three random Sinclair employees into an interrogation room next door. The room was divided by a one-way mirrored glass. Mia and I sat on the dark side of the glass, a microphone console resting between us. The rules are simple, Mia explained, tapping her manicured nail against the desk. All three employees will state a claim. One of them is lying about a fake expense report. Catherine and I will individually spot the liar. Reasonable. Except for one massive detail. The glass. They were in another room. My gift… my curse… only works when the person is lying to my face. To me. Not through a speaker. Not through a reinforced mirrored wall. My spine locked up. Mia had already pressed the intercom button. Subject One, begin. The voice fed through the speaker. A guy reading a monotonous excuse about a business dinner receipt. I strained my ears. No hiccup. But I couldn’t tell if he was telling the truth, or if the glass was acting as a shield. Subject Two. No hiccup. Subject Three. No hiccup. My fingers dug into the plastic barrel of my pen until it cracked. No one had ever tested me with a wall between us. Because at the Kensington estate, the golden rule was that all interrogations had to be face-to-face. Did Mia not know the rule? No. I saw the tiny, razor-thin smirk at the corner of her mouth. She knew exactly what she was doing. I have my verdict. Mia spoke first. Subject Two is lying. When he described the dollar amount, there was a zero-point-three-second micro-contraction in his right brow ridge. His lip corner pulled down forty percent past the baseline. It sounded clinical. Flawless. Bulletproof. Everyone turned to look at me. Catherine? Your turn. I stared through the glass at the three people sitting completely still in the sterile room. I need them in this room. Face to face. Mia tilted her head, performing perfect, innocent confusion. Catherine, what does face to face have to do with it? I thought you said you could just tell when people lie? My ability requires proximity. So the second you aren’t close enough, the magic turns off? Carter’s voice dripped with mocking delight from the back of the room. See, Nate? This is exactly what I was talking about. Unverified gut feelings. Nate remained silent. But I saw his index finger tap against the table once. He was hesitating. Mia’s verdict was locked in. Subject Two. Toby went next door to confirm with the script. The answer came back. Subject Two was the liar. He was given a fake number to read on purpose. Mia smiled. It was warm and entirely devoid of aggression, which somehow made it slice twice as deep. Catherine, I mean absolutely no offense. But some lines of work require actual science. Don’t you agree? When she said those words… Hiccup. Just one. Faint and fast. She hiccuped on I mean no offense. She meant every ounce of offense. This entire spectacle was a targeted assassination of my credibility. But in that room, nobody cared about the hiccup. They only cared about the scoreboard. Mia got it right. I choked. Carter stood up, slowly adjusting his cuffs. Mr. Sinclair, take your time deciding. The Kensington Group is happy to lease Dr. Mia’s services to you whenever you are ready to upgrade. As he walked past my chair, he dropped his voice to a whisper only I could hear. Your little parlor trick is dead, Catherine. When he said dead, he did not hiccup. He firmly believed my career was over. I stood in the empty conference room watching them leave. Nate didn’t follow them out. He lingered near the heavy oak doors. Catherine. Yeah. Why did you need to be in the same room for that test? Because my gift is real. I looked down at the carpet. My voice felt hollow, thinner than I wanted it to be. But it has rules. The person has to be in front of me. Glass, walls, phone calls… they block it out. Nate let that sit in the air for a few seconds. Then why didn’t you say that from the beginning? Because nobody believes it anyway. I looked up and met his eyes. Nate. You spent three years hunting your ghosts and found nothing. I spent two minutes and handed you Gage. Is that not enough? His expression was impossible to read. It was a tangled mess of calculation, but at the very least, there was no disgust. Right as he opened his mouth to reply, Toby rushed back into the room. He was clutching a tablet, his face pale. Mr. Sinclair. Dr. Mia’s PR team just posted something on Twitter. Toby handed the tablet over. It was Mia’s verified professional account. The bio read: Behavioral Analyst / Criminal Psychologist. The newest tweet had a glossy photo of her smiling in a boardroom. Just did a risk management demo for a major firm. Ran into a woman claiming to be a “human polygraph.” But she demanded to be face-to-face, claiming her magic powers vanish through a glass window. Science respec ts hypotheses, but repeatability and verification are the bare minimum. Stay rational out there, corporate America. Don’t fall for superpowers. The comment section was already exploding with thousands of replies. LMAO human polygraph? So she’s basically a tarot card reader for corporate. How does a fraud like that even get into a boardroom? Ivy League micro-expressions vs. magical hiccups. If you believe the hiccups, you need a psych eval. I stared at the glowing screen. I tapped my thumb against the plastic edge of the tablet twice. Nate shifted his gaze from the screen to my face. Catherine. What is your play here? I am not playing anything. I handed the tablet back to Toby. I am just wondering whose orders Mia was following when she hit post. You think Carter put her up to it? She hiccuped when she said ‘I mean no offense’. I looked dead into Nate’s tired eyes. Aren’t you curious, Nate? Why is the Kensington Group so utterly desperate to erase me from this industry?

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1 I went for a walk and ended up being stalked by a kid. He followed me for ten blocks, through every turn and alley, all the way to my front door. I definitely didn’t expect the little guy to breathe fire. While I was getting him water in the kitchen, he burned my entire front lawn. Panicked, he covered his mouth, then dug into his pocket, pulled out a glittering silver band, and shoved it onto my wrist. “I’m a hatchling,” he squeaked. “I can’t control my powers yet. I had a huge fight with my family. Can I stay here a few days? I’ll give you my big brother as payment for the grass.” I was speechless. Before I could process the burned lawn, glowing text suddenly appeared in the air before me: [Holy crap, that’s the Dragon King’s mating bracelet! Once worn, it’s for life. The male lead is now tied to this random extra!] [The male lead’s little brother is such a liability. He burned her yard and sold his brother to a stranger.] [Who cares? This cannon fodder girl is terminally ill anyway. Our female lead is already on her way—she just has to kill this nobody, take the bracelet, and claim the Alpha.] Right then, the doorbell rang. The little guy’s face instantly darkened. With a soft pop, two tiny, golden dragon horns sprouted from his forehead. A smattering of iridescent scales crawled up his neck and tucked behind his ears, catching the porch light. He threw himself into my legs, burying his face in my jeans. “The mean lady who keeps harassing my brother is here. I hate her so much.” Before I could even reach for the handle, the front door was kicked wide open. A woman in a blood-red designer dress stepped over the threshold. Her cold, reptilian gaze swept the room before locking dead onto me. The floating text hovering in my line of sight started refreshing like crazy. [She is here! The female lead, Penelope, has arrived!] [Our golden koi shifter finally enters the chat. She is the chosen one. All she has to do is mate with the Dragon King, and she will ascend to full dragonkin.] I glanced down at the glowing subtitles, then looked back up at the arrogant woman standing in my entryway. Oh. So she was just a little koi fish trying to sleep her way up the mythical food chain. “You have a lot of nerve, luring Harry all the way out here.” She tilted her head, looking at me like I was something she had scraped off the bottom of her heel. “A dying human dares to touch a member of the dragon clan? You really are begging for a quick death.” I took a step back, hoping the little dragon attached to my leg would explain the situation. But Harry just buried his face deeper into my jeans, trembling. Penelope waved a manicured hand dismissively, gesturing to the two massive bodyguards behind her. “Take her down. Ronan said anyone who harms his baby brother is to be executed on the spot. We do not even need to report this.” The two heavily muscled men grunted in agreement and lunged toward me. My heart did a painful stutter in my chest. My oncologist told me I had exactly one month left to live. Now, somehow dragged into a turf war between mythical wildlife, I would be incredibly lucky to survive the night. The little troublemaker clutching my leg was shaking like a leaf, refusing to say a single word in my defense. I let out a resigned sigh and wrapped a protective arm around the kid’s shoulders. I raised my arm instinctively to block the guards’ incoming fists. But the second I moved, the two men hit the brakes so hard their boots skidded on the hardwood floor. The silver band on my wrist was pulsing with a low, dangerous golden light. The men stared at the jewelry, the color draining entirely from their faces. “Boss… that thing on her wrist… that is the Alpha’s mating band.” “Clan law is absolute. Whoever wears that claim has to be treated as the Dragon Queen.” The guards exchanged panicked looks. The weapons in their hands slowly lowered to their sides. Penelope froze. For a split second, she looked utterly lost, but it was quickly replaced by explosive, blinding rage. “Where did you steal that? Take it off right now! That belongs to me!” She lunged at me, her sharp nails digging fiercely into my forearm. “You think a cheap, dying mortal like you can compete with me?” Harry suddenly snapped his head up. He opened his tiny mouth and unleashed a scorching blast of fire directly at Penelope’s feet. “Back off!” He planted himself firmly in front of me. His golden horns vibrated with fury, and his pupils narrowed into dangerous vertical slits. “Do not ever touch her! She is going to be my brother’s mate!” A shiver ran violently down my spine. Wait. What? Penelope let out a sharp, mocking laugh. “Harry, do you even hear yourself? You do not get to dictate Ronan’s marriage.” The kid stuck his chin out, his voice ringing loud and clear. “My brother spent months incubating my egg! I am his absolute favorite! Of course he is going to listen to me!” 2 The moment Harry finished his sentence, the glowing text in the air went into overdrive. [When their parents died, they left behind a single dragon egg. The male lead stayed awake for weeks straight to hatch his baby brother, and this ungrateful brat is what he gets.] [It is over. Penelope is totally in killer mode now. This sick mortal chick is not making it to morning.] Penelope’s eyes were practically boiling with rage. She was seconds away from tearing my living room apart. I sighed, rubbing my temples. “Look, I really do not care about the drama between you magical creatures.” I glanced down at the kid clinging to me. “If you want to crash here, you can.” Then I looked back up at Penelope. “As for this bracelet, if you want it so badly, you can have it.” I reached over and gripped the silver band, pulling at it. I yanked. I twisted. I pulled until my skin turned red. But it did not budge a single millimeter. The bracelet felt like it was fused directly to my bones. Penelope stared at my wrist, her eyes wide with absolute disbelief. “You…” Harry’s face instantly lit up. He clapped his tiny hands and jumped up and down. “It will not come off! That means your biological compatibility with my big brother is at one hundred percent!” “You are his fated mate! I knew I picked the right one!” Penelope’s face turned the color of storm clouds. I looked at her furious expression and offered what I thought was a very genuine, comforting smile. “Hey, do not stress about it. I have terminal cancer. The doctors gave me a month, tops. Once I drop dead, you can just slide it right off.” Penelope choked on her own breath. She stared at me in horrified silence for several long seconds. “Fine. One month. I will be back in thirty days to collect your corpse.” The second the front door slammed shut, the little guy on my floor let out a joyous, echoing howl. He was grinning so hard his cheeks looked like they were going to cramp. “I observed a lot of humans, and I knew you would be the perfect match for my brother! Now the three of us get to live happily ever after!” I looked down into his bright, glowing eyes, completely at a loss for words. Later that night, I sat alone on the edge of my bed. The doctor’s voice echoed in my head. “It is your final month, Riley. Just try to enjoy the time you have left.” Late-stage bone cancer was a nightmare. The cold did not just chill your skin. It seeped directly out from the marrow. I curled up under three layers of blankets. Just as I hovered on the edge of a restless sleep, I felt a solid, radiating heat press gently against my back. It was not invasive. It was just a quiet, heavy presence sharing its warmth with me. A broad chest pressed against my spine. I could feel the deep, steady rhythm of a heartbeat. I figured my brain was finally misfiring. A terminal hallucination. I let the warmth pull me under and closed my eyes. When I woke up the next morning, I stared at my hands. My usually translucent, ghostly pale fingertips actually had a healthy flush of pink to them. Harry, who was currently sprawled across my pillow drooling, rubbed his eyes and rolled over. He caught me staring blankly at my own palms. He stretched his arms high above his head, a tiny scaly tail swishing out from under the duvet. “Oh yeah, I forgot to tell you. That bracelet creates a sympathetic bond between you and my brother.” “A huge chunk of your pain and sickness is getting siphoned off to him.” He said it incredibly casually. “Our clan is super durable. A tiny human sickness like that is basically just a papercut to him.” I sat there, completely paralyzed. That heat in my bed every night. That was him. The month flew by in a blur. But the person who showed up at my front door when the thirty days were up was not Penelope. It was my parents. They stood on my porch, launching right into a screaming match before I could even say hello. “We had to ask around just to find out you were not even staying at the hospice anymore! Why the hell are you still breathing?” “Your brother Finn needs those corneas, Riley. We had a deal. Once you were gone, his eye surgery was supposed to be fully covered.” 3 Harry stopped playing with his Lego set on the floor. He slowly looked up, his little tail completely stiffening. My mother took a hard step into the hallway. “Are you faking this whole terminal illness thing? The doctors said you had a month. It has been five weeks, and you are sitting here looking perfectly fine.” “Are you just scamming us for pity money? That whole dying routine was just an act to ruin us, wasn’t it?” I opened my mouth, but the memories swelled up and choked the words right out of my throat. That was not how it happened. When the diagnosis first came back, the doctors told me if we started aggressive treatment immediately, I had a fifty percent survival rate. I went home and told them. My parents sat on the living room sofa in complete silence for a very long time. I thought they were doing the math, figuring out how to remortgage the house or take out loans. Instead, my father finally looked up and said, “We just cannot afford it right now. Finn needs his treatments. You are just going to have to tough this out on your own.” My father’s eyes suddenly darted past me, locking onto Harry. His face contorted into a nasty sneer, like he had just figured out a magic trick. He shoved past me, marching over and violently kicking over the Lego castle Harry had been building all morning. “Well, well. Look at this. No wonder your health suddenly bounced back. You are scamming your own family to play house with some stray brat! You are a disgrace!” Harry sat on the floor among the shattered plastic bricks. His tiny fists clenched tightly in his lap, and he bit down hard on his lower lip. Before I could intervene, a shadow fell over the open doorway. Penelope. “Not dead yet?” She smirked, leaning against the doorframe. “I guess I will have to do the heavy lifting myself. I cannot have you dragging this pathetic body around, trying to seduce Ronan. I am clearing the path today.” My mother’s eyes instantly lit up. She whipped around to face Penelope. “I knew this ungrateful bitch was out here sleeping around! We have been trying to figure out how to get rid of her for weeks. If you have a way to handle it, we will gladly hold her down for you.” Penelope raised a perfectly plucked eyebrow. With agonizing slowness, she pulled a shimmering silver cord from the sleeve of her coat. Harry launched himself off the floor like a tiny cannonball, throwing his arms out to shield my legs. Penelope did not even bother looking down. She simply flicked her wrist. The silver cord shot out like a viper, wrapping tightly around the little boy and pinning his arms to his sides. “I carry this specifically for disobedient little lizards.” Penelope shifted her gaze back to me, smiling sweetly. “There. All quiet.” The three of them started walking slowly toward me. Harry thrashed violently on the floor, fighting the silver bindings. His voice went hoarse with panic. “Let me go! When my big brother gets here, he is going to rip you all to pieces!” Penelope elegantly adjusted her cuffs. “Ronan is incredibly busy right now. He does not have time to babysit you.” She stopped mere inches from my face, looking down her nose at me. “By the time he finishes his business, your ashes will be cold. His only choice for a mate will be me.” Without warning, she raised her hand and slapped me hard across the cheek. My head snapped to the side. A high-pitched ringing flooded my left ear like rushing water. Before I could recover, she grabbed a fistful of my hair, yanked me forward, and threw me straight to the floor. My forehead slammed against the ceramic tiles. My vision exploded into black spots. I could feel warm blood pooling in the grout lines beneath my cheek. But beneath the dizzying pain and the metallic taste of blood, something strange happened. A terrifying, explosive surge of pure rage bubbled up inside my chest. And it was not my own. The silver band on my wrist flared with a burning heat, pulsing like a second heartbeat beneath my skin. It felt like an invisible, massive hand was wrapping protectively around my pulse. I pushed my hands against the cold tiles and forced myself up. Penelope’s smug, victorious face was right in front of me. I raised my hand, pulled back, and swung. I did not even process the movement myself. My hand connected with her jaw so hard her head violently whipped to the side. She stumbled back, clutching her rapidly swelling face, her eyes wide with absolute horror. “How the hell does a dying mortal have that much spiritual power?” she screeched. 4 The moment she yelled, the floating text that had been missing for a month suddenly flooded my vision again. [Holy shit! That was the Dragon King channeling his power through her to slap the Koi!] [No way, no way! How could the male lead hit our precious Penelope? Is the Koi-Dragon romance sinking before it even starts?] [This random extra is definitely using black magic. Poor Penelope, her face is totally red. I feel so bad for her.] [What is wrong with Ronan? Did he get possessed by this dying human? How could he lay a hand on our girl?] My parents and Penelope scrambled out the door, terrified of the sheer force of the blow. Penelope made sure to yell a classic villain threat over her shoulder, swearing I was using dirty tricks. She promised to go find Ronan, get the truth, and come back to skin me alive. I stood alone in the hallway, staring down at my tingling palm. That terrifying, foreign strength was already slowly bleeding out of my muscles. I let out a shaky breath, crouched down, and helped Harry untangle himself from the silver cord on the floor. He threw tiny punches at the air, his eyes shining. “I knew it! I knew my brother was protecting us the whole time!” I knelt down so we were eye to level. I looked at him very seriously. “Harry, thank your brother for me. Seriously. Tell him I owe him my life.” He tilted his head, his little tail curling into a happy loop. “Just thank him yourself! You guys are literally soul-bonded through the bracelet. He can feel basically everything you feel in your heart!” Then, he suddenly leaned in close, dropping his voice into a dramatic, conspiratorial whisper. “By the way. My brother’s Mating Season is starting in a few days.” I blinked, still trying to process the magic slap. “Okay? And? What does that mean?” His chubby little cheeks instantly flushed bright crimson. Even the tips of his tiny dragon whiskers turned pink. He slapped both hands over his face and spun around, his muffled voice leaking through his fingers. “How am I supposed to know? That is adult stuff! Do not ask a baby!” A few days later, Harry spent the entire afternoon running wild outside. He claimed he made friends with a local pixie kid and they were going to look at lotus ponds. Before he sprinted out the door, he stuck his tongue out at me. “Do not wait up for dinner, Riley! I am eating lotus seeds with the bugs tonight!” When the sun completely set and the streetlights flickered on, he still wasn’t back. I couldn’t sit still anymore. I grabbed my jacket, ready to go scour the neighborhood. I yanked the front door open, and stopped dead. A towering, broad-shouldered silhouette was standing on my porch. I just stared, completely mesmerized. The man’s pupils dilated slightly. A deep flush crept up his neck, tinting his ears red. “Are you Riley?” I snapped out of my trance. “Uh, yeah?” “I had my people drop Harry off at my estate. Thank you for watching him these past few weeks. He will not be bothering you anymore.” He paused, his voice dropping an octave, turning rough and strained. “My Mating Season starts tonight. Can I stay here until it is over?”

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1 My sister Sarah gave up everything for me after our parents died. First, her job. Not long after, her boyfriend of seven years, Mark, broke up with her. Jobless and heartbroken, she grew quiet, withdrawn. The warm smiles she used to give me vanished, replaced by a permanent storm cloud. The third time I had a heart attack and was rushed to the ICU, she finally broke. I could hear her screaming just outside the door. “It’s a fortune a day in there! You’re always clutching your chest, always saying your heart hurts. When is it ever going to be for real?” A nurse stepped out to calm her. “Ma’am, his condition is critical. A heart attack is incredibly painful. Please, this is a hospital. You need to be quiet.” Sarah’s voice cracked, thick with despair. “Easy for you to say! What if you were stuck with a brother like him?” The nurse said nothing more. The hallway fell silent. Inside the ICU, the only sound was the soft beep of my heart monitor, each beep a little weaker than the last. A moment later, I reached up and pulled the oxygen tube from my nose. Don’t worry, Sarah. This time, I’m not waking up. … The familiar, chilling sensation of death washed over me. As I closed my eyes, my soul drifted out of my body. The nurse was gone. Sarah was slumped on a bench in the hallway, her head leaned back against the sterile white wall, her face etched with a weariness that went bone-deep. I knew how tired she was. She had given me everything she had, everything she was. Even the man she’d planned to marry. I floated toward her, wanting to wrap my arms around her, to offer a comfort I never could in life. My hands passed right through her, through the wall behind her. It finally hit me. I was really dead. I couldn’t even say goodbye. Sarah rubbed the bridge of her nose and pulled out her phone. She hesitated, then opened her messages and found Mark’s name. The conversation had ended two weeks ago. Mark’s last texts were a torrent of frustration: [Sarah, how long are you going to keep putting your life on hold for him?] [My mom was already against us. Now you don’t have a job. How am I supposed to explain this to my family?] Her only reply was five words: [Alex is my brother.] [So he gets to drag you down for the rest of your life?! He was your parents’ kid, not yours!] Three exclamation points. Even in text, you could feel his rage. Sarah’s thumb swiped up, revealing the messages before the final blow-up. Sarah: [No one asks for a heart condition. Alex is miserable, too.] Sarah: [Mark, please, just wait a little longer. Once he’s stable, I promise I’ll make it up to you.] Mark: [I can’t wait. You need to tell me right now. Are you cutting ties with Alex or not?] She hadn’t answered. Mark: [You don’t expect to marry me and bring him along, do you? You think my mom would ever agree to us taking care of him?] Mark: [You sold your apartment to pay his medical bills last time. What’s next? What do you even have left to sell?] Mark: [Sarah, we’ve been together for seven years. Is this how you treat me?] Mark: [Answer me!] She never replied. It wasn’t that she was ignoring him. I remember that moment. My body had gone limp, my breath catching in my throat, the world closing in. She had been frantically searching for my medication. But Mark didn’t know that. All he knew was the silence on the other end of the line. His final message was one of defeat: [Let’s break up. I can’t do this anymore.] Sarah’s finger hovered over those words, her eyes turning red. I remember her breakdown that day. I was on the floor, gasping for air, my hand clamped over my chest. Her eyes were blazing as she screamed at me, “Is it not enough? When are you going to stop doing this?” “You’ve tortured me for years, you cost me my job, and now Mark is gone because of you,” she’d sobbed. “Are you happy now?” I wanted to tell her to forget me, to go to him. But the pain was a vise, squeezing the words from my throat. The panic and lack of air finally made me pass out. The color drained from her face. She scooped me up and raced to the hospital. They spent forty minutes bringing me back. But there was no relief on her face, only emptiness. Mark wouldn’t answer her calls or see her. The first thing I did when I came to was grab her hand. “Sarah, stop. No more treatments. Don’t waste any more money on me.” “Go find Mark. Please, just leave me.” She froze, her gaze falling on my pale, gaunt face. Her eyes slowly filled with tears. After a long moment, she squeezed my hand, her voice softening. “I didn’t mean what I said. I was just angry. Don’t take it to heart.” And then came today. Another attack. I had tried to fight it, begged my own body not to betray her again. Don’t do this, not now. She’s already exhausted. Don’t be a burden. But the feeling of my heart seizing, the icy grip of death, ripped a cry from my lips. It hurt so much. She rushed me to the hospital, her face a mask of panic. The doctor’s verdict was the final straw: the ER couldn’t help me anymore. I needed to be in the ICU. It wasn’t the first time she’d heard those words. But it was the first time they made her shatter. Back in the hallway, Sarah’s fingers tapped out a message on her phone, a desperate plea to Mark. But she deleted it before sending. She closed her messages and opened her social media, posting a picture of the sterile hospital corridor. The caption read: [My brother is critically ill. If anyone is able to help, please, I’m begging you. If you can help me save Alex, I’ll spend the rest of my life repaying you, whatever it takes.] The post went up. Silence. Not even a single ‘like.’ Our parents were gone. The relatives who used to be close now treated my illness like a plague, avoiding us at all costs. Sarah didn’t have a wide social circle, and her old work colleagues weren’t the kind you could ask for donations. The only comments came from a few guys from her college days who’d always been jealous of her. [Isn’t that Sarah, our top scholar? Got into university with the highest score in the city. What happened, run out of money?] [Hey Sarah, I thought you landed a sweet gig at that big corporation. Making good money, right? Can’t even afford to take care of your own brother?] [How much do you need for the surgery? Fifty grand? My family is looking for a new maid. Come work for us, and I’ll give you the cash.] Her expression shifted from shock to humiliation to fury. Her knuckles turned white as she gripped the phone. She had always been brilliant. Top of her class, graduated with honors, and beat out two hundred other interns for a single full-time position at a top firm. She was our family’s pride and joy. If things had been different, she and Mark would probably be married by now. But a car crash took our parents. The insurance payout was tied up in legal battles. And my medical bills were a mountain of debt. It was all because of me. Sarah raised her hand, ready to hurl the phone against the wall. But she stopped herself, her hand trembling. She sank back onto the bench, burying her face in her hands as silent tears streamed down her cheeks. She couldn’t afford to break it. A new phone was a luxury she didn’t have. In the dead quiet of the hallway, her tears hit the polished floor with a soft pat, pat, pat. Each sound was like a hammer blow to my heart. I was already dead, but somehow, it still ached. “Sarah.” A familiar voice echoed from the end of the corridor. Her head snapped up. It was Mark. His eyes were a mix of pity and frustration. She quickly turned away, wiping the tears from her face. He walked over and pressed a paper bag into her hands. “I saw your post,” he said, his voice low. “Here’s ten thousand. It’s all I have right now. Use it. For the rest… I’ll try to help you figure something out.” He turned to leave. She shot out a hand and grabbed his arm. “Where did you get this? You’ve already loaned me so much of your savings, you—” “I’m getting married.” The words sliced through the air, stopping her cold. He didn’t turn around, didn’t see the way her world tilted on its axis, the way her pupils contracted in shock. His voice was hoarse. “Don’t worry about paying me back. And… don’t come to the wedding.” He pulled his arm free and walked away. Sarah glanced from his retreating back to the closed door of the ICU. Without another thought, she gritted her teeth and ran after him. She caught up to him just outside the hospital entrance. “Give me one more chance, Mark. Please. Don’t marry someone else, okay?” she begged, her voice choked with tears. “I can’t help what’s happened with Alex. He’s my brother. I can’t just let him die, can I?” “I’ll find a better job, I swear!” He looked down, refusing to meet her eyes. “I know this is hard for you, Sarah. But it’s hard for me, too. We’re just not right for each other anymore. Let’s stop torturing ourselves.” He let out a ragged breath. “My mom gave me an ultimatum. If I get back together with you, she said she’ll kill herself.” Sarah’s face went white. “Let me talk to her. Please. Alex is a good kid, he’s so smart. If it weren’t for his heart, he would have been amazing.” Mark sighed, his voice barely a whisper. “I know.” “I really do know.” His tone… it was the same one he’d used the first time they’d broken up. I’d gone to him, crying, begging him not to leave my sister. I told him I never wanted to be sick, never wanted to be a burden. I promised I would leave, disappear from their lives forever. He had wiped my tears away and said, so gently, “I know you’re a good kid, Alex. I know.” He’d called Sarah to come get me, and they’d gotten back together soon after. But this time, though the words were the same, his eyes were filled with a bottomless despair. He pulled his hand from her grasp again. “It’s too late, Sarah. I’m engaged.” She stared at him, her mouth agape. Just as she was about to speak, her phone rang, a shrill, insistent noise. It was the hospital. They must have found me. Sarah’s jaw tightened. She declined the call. “Mark, I promise this is the last time. Just wait for me. So what if you’re engaged? I don’t care!” “But I do!” he suddenly roared, his composure shattering. “Just leave me alone, Sarah! I don’t love you anymore!” The words hung in the air, and then he practically fled. Sarah started after him, but two men in dark suits stepped out of nowhere and grabbed her. A lavishly dressed, middle-aged woman emerged from a black car parked at the curb. She seized Mark’s arm and dragged him back in front of Sarah. “Sarah,” the woman said, her voice dripping with venom. “That ten thousand dollars was from me. Mark is my son-in-law now. You can’t have him.” Sarah struggled, her eyes wild with fury. “Let him go! You monster!” The only answer she received was a flurry of kicks and punches from the two men. I watched, helpless, spinning in a frantic circle. “Stop!” Mark fell to his knees before the woman. “I’ll go with you, just stop hitting her! Please, let her go. She has nothing left!” The woman sneered, turned, and got back in the car. Mark cast one last, fleeting glance at Sarah before following. The men threw Sarah to the ground. She lay there, bruised and gasping, watching the car disappear down the street. Her phone rang again, a jarring, incessant shriek. She snatched it up and screamed into it, “Stop fucking calling me! Just do whatever you have to do! Use whatever machines, whatever drugs, just stop calling me!” With a final, guttural cry, she flung the phone, and it skittered across the pavement, the screen shattering. … That afternoon, Sarah found a job through a back-alley agency. A human punching bag at an underground fight club. A hundred dollars a session. During the interview, she was practically begging. “I can take a punch, I really can. Please, sir, can you schedule me for a few extra sessions? Thank you, sir.” The recruiter, a burly man with a crooked nose, eyed her delicate frame with a frown. “You sure about this, sweetheart? We ain’t responsible if you get messed up.” Sarah nodded eagerly. “Anything that happens is on me. I’m tougher than I look.” He grunted and slid a form across the desk. “Sign here. We’ll give you a trial run day after tomorrow. If you don’t crap out, you’re hired.” A flicker of hope lit up her eyes as she took the form. But when she reached for a pen, her smile froze. She stared at a name on the registration list, her voice trembling. “Sir… this name, Alex. When did he sign up? Is he… about twenty-five?” The man thought for a moment. “Oh, that kid? He was a liar. Came in here trying to make a quick buck, swore he was in perfect health. Didn’t last two punches before he had a heart attack on the floor. The boss had to shell out a few grand to get rid of the problem.” Sarah’s pupils dilated, her eyes instantly flooding with red. She stared at the man, her voice a raw, broken whisper. “A few… grand?” “Yeah, five thousand, I think. Can’t remember.” The application form slipped from her fingers and fluttered to the dirty floor. Two weeks ago, right after she and Mark broke up, I had given her five thousand dollars. “Three for a new phone,” I’d told her. “The other two to take Mark out for a nice dinner, a movie. Buy him a gift.” “He’ll forgive you, Sarah. I know he will.” Her face had been a cold mask. “Where did you get this money? Did you steal it?” she’d demanded. “Alex, haven’t I told you, no matter how bad things get, we don’t steal?” “I didn’t steal it!” I’d cried. “It’s money I’ve been saving up since I was a kid! From Mom and Dad, back when they were… still here. I never spent it.” She had stared at me for a long time, her expression unreadable. She took four thousand, leaving one on my pillow. In the end, she spent fifteen hundred on a second-hand phone and the other twenty-five hundred on my medication. I was furious. I asked her why she didn’t try to make up with Mark. She’d given me a bitter, self-deprecating smile. “What’s between us can’t be fixed with a few thousand dollars.” She was right. The thing between them was me. Sickly me. I felt so helpless. The only thing I could do was try not to have another attack. I locked myself in my room, didn’t see anyone, didn’t speak. I thought if I just disappeared, I could stop being a burden. I was wrong. A faulty heart doesn’t care about your good intentions. It comes for you when it wants to. Sarah stumbled out of the fight club, her eyes red-rimmed and hollow. She ran home and tore open a drawer, her hands shaking as she pulled out our mother’s gold bracelet. It was the last piece of jewelry she had left. Everything else had been sold off over the years. This one was supposed to be for her, a wedding gift from a mother she’d never see again. It should have been hers. Sarah squeezed her eyes shut, clutching the bracelet as she knelt before our parents’ portraits. “I’m sorry, Mom, Dad,” she whispered, her voice breaking. “I’m not strong enough. I can’t take care of Alex. I have to sell your gift to pay his bills.” “All these years, I’ve felt so trapped. Because of Alex, I lost everything. I even lost Mark.” “But today… today I found out that Alex wasn’t a burden. He was fighting for us, too, in his own way.” The confession, locked away for so long, seemed to strengthen her. Her voice grew firm. “We’re family. I will never give up on him. I’ll never say those horrible things again.” “When he gets better, I’ll find a way to get him a new heart. I’ll beg, I’ll borrow, I’ll grovel before all the people who look down on me. I don’t care anymore.” She pressed her forehead to the floor in a single, solemn gesture, then got up and left the house. The bracelet sold for fifteen thousand dollars. Sarah had haggled, promising the pawnshop owner she’d buy it back someday if no one else did. She rushed to the hospital, clutching the cashier’s check, a desperate, fragile hope on her face. But when she got to the billing department, she was met with a cold stare. “Who are you paying for?” the clerk asked. “Alex,” Sarah said, forcing a smile. “The young man who was admitted to the ICU last night.” She slid the check across the counter. “Here’s ten thousand to start. I’ll pay the rest as soon as I can.” The clerk gave her a long, hard look. “You’re the woman from yesterday, aren’t you? The one who was screaming in the hallway for your brother to just die?” Sarah’s smile froze on her lips. Shame and regret flooded her eyes. “I’m sorry. I was… emotional yesterday. It won’t happen again. Could you please just process the payment for my brother?” Floating above, I sighed. The clerk sneered. “Sorry. Can’t do that.” Sarah was stunned. “Why not? Is it not enough money, or…?” “Your brother is dead.” The words cut her off. The clerk stared into her eyes, watching them widen in horror. “We tried calling you all morning. First, you didn’t answer. Then you told the nurse you didn’t care. And then your phone was off.” “You can take your money back.”

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