She wakes beneath the fluorescent lights, broken but alive. Machines hum beside her, but the real wound isn’t her fractured body—it’s her fiancé’s calm confession.

They broke up weeks ago, he says. He only came out of duty. And he’s already moved on—with his boss’s daughter.

The doctor believes him. The nurses pity her. His best friend nods along, though she catches the hesitation in his eyes—the silent bargain in his glance.

Orphaned and alone, she cannot outshout their voices. So she doesn’t. She smiles. She thanks them. She pretends her mind is fogged.

But at night, when silence sharpens her loneliness into a blade, she begins to plan.

Her revenge will not only cut, but carve: to peel back her fiancé’s lies until his glittering new love sees the truth beneath his ambition, to bend the best friend’s loyalty, and to turn pity into power.

Revenge isn’t always cold. Sometimes it’s seductive. And soon, she’ll be the one holding the knife.

The hotel doors slid shut behind her with a soft hydraulic sigh, a sound so calm and civilized it almost mocked the chaos tearing through Willow's body. She didn't turn around. She didn't want to see the flash-frozen tableau she'd left behind: Miles standing pale and cornered, Christy breaking open in real time, Zane staring at her like she had just ripped the sun out of his sky. She refused to carry any of them with her, not after detonating every secret they had built around her like a cage. The echo of that room clung to her skin, the stale perfume of guilt trailing behind her as if determined to follow her into the night.


Chapter 70 - Chapter Sixty-Eight — Streetlight Collapse