The soft click of his bedroom door echoes like a final punctuation mark, leaving Milia alone in the vast, shadowed kitchen. She stares at the waiver, the white paper a glaring contrast against the dark marble of the counter. The silence that follows isn't the peaceful solitude she's spent a month demanding; it feels heavy, oppressive, like the air before a thunderstorm.
She picks up the document again, her eyes tracing the elegant curves of his signature. It's too neat, too deliberate. He hadn't written this in a moment of drunken honesty or impulsive hurt. He had sat in that guest room, surrounded by her hand-me-down furniture and his meager belongings, and meticulously planned his own erasure from her life.
"I am just trying to earn enough to buy my own invisibility."
The words grate against her mind. In her world, people fought, screamed, and clawed for a moment of her attention. They sold their secrets to be near her, they lied to stay in her orbit. And here was Arlen Adelaide, a man of a lineage older than her own fame, working himself into a state of physical collapse just to afford the luxury of never seeing her again.
"Is that it, then?" she whispers to the empty room, her voice a fragile thread of sound. "You'd rather be a nameless face in a crowd than a Madrigal by marriage?"
She feels a sudden, sharp urge to march into his room, shake him awake, and demand to know why she isn't enough to make him want to stay—or at least, why he doesn't hate her enough to stay and make her miserable. His selflessness feels like the ultimate insult; it denies her the role of the victim and leaves her only with the role of the predator.
She walks over to the sink, the cold water splashing against her hands as she tries to wash away the phantom heat of the interaction. Her reflection in the darkened window looks haunted. The great Milia Madrigal, outmaneuvered by a "ghost" with a money pouch and a waiver.
Her gaze drifts toward the guest wing. She thinks of him in there, likely collapsed on the bed, too tired to even take off his shoes, with that orange cat as his only comfort. She thinks of the bruises on his wrists and the lipstick on his jaw, and for the first time, she doesn't feel disgusted by the "filth" of the club. She feels a cold, sinking realization that while she was busy trying to break him, he was already broken—and he was using the pieces to build her a way out.
"Fine," she says, her jaw setting into a hard, defensive line as she sweeps the waiver off the counter and tucks it into the pocket of her robe. "If you want to be a martyr, Arlen, I'll let you. I'll let you work until you're nothing but a shadow. I'll let you save every cent until the clock runs out."
She turns off the kitchen light, plunging the room into darkness.
"But don't expect me to thank you," she mutters, though the words feel hollow even as she speaks them.
She heads toward her master suite, her heels silent on the plush carpet. The five-month trial was only twenty percent over, but as she lies in her king-sized bed, staring at the ceiling, the freedom she so desperately craved feels less like a prize and more like a void. She had won the war, but Arlen had won the exit, leaving her to rule over an empty penthouse and a conscience that refused to stay silent.
***
Coming back to the penthouse in the middle of the night, Arlen quietly dragged his feet across the hallway and into his room. The exhaustion of being the "most requested host" felt like lead in his limbs.
"I'm back, Dex." Arlen murmurs as he opens the door of the dimly lit guest room.
By now, Dex would have already been waiting by the doorway *meowing* for attention or food. But there's only silence. Noticing the change, Arlen's eyes quickly sweeped the room to find where the feline is.
Dex is curled on the bed unmoving. Arlen slowly and tentatively touched Dex only to feel the searing heat in its skin and fur.
"D...Dex?"
Without a moment's hesitation, Arlen scoops Dex up against his chest. The exhaustion was momentarily forgotten, driven by pure unadulterated adrenaline. Arlen scrambled to the hallway, his steps leaving soft *thuds* in their path. He lunges towards the penthouse exit and into the cold night, desperate to find the nearest open veterinary clinic.
The heavy, curated silence of the penthouse is shattered not by a polite greeting or a ghostly shuffle, but by the frantic, uneven thudding of footsteps.
Milia, who had been sitting in the dark of her bedroom, her mind still circling the waiver like a moth to a flame, snaps her head toward the door. The sound is wrong. It's too loud, too desperate, too 'human' to belong to the Arlen she's known for the past month.
She flings her door open just as Arlen lunges past her toward the foyer. He isn't wearing the "Tragic Prince" suit or the "invisible servant" mask. He's in a thin, oversized sweater, his hair a tangled mess, clutching a limp, orange bundle to his chest. His breath is coming in jagged, wheezing sobs—a sound she's never heard from him.
"Arlen?" she calls out, her voice sharp with a sudden, unbidden alarm. "What are you—"
He doesn't even look at her. He doesn't say "Miss Milia." He doesn't apologize for the noise. He hits the elevator button repeatedly, his fingers trembling so violently they slip off the brass. His hazel eye is wide, glassy with a terror so raw it makes her heart do a strange, uncomfortable jolt.
"He's hot... he's so hot..." Arlen whimpers, his voice cracking. He isn't talking to her; he's talking to the air, to the universe, to the cat that is burning up in his arms.
The elevator doors glide open, and he vanishes inside.
Milia stands in the hallway, the cold air from the air conditioning suddenly feeling like ice on her skin. She should let him go. She should be glad for the quiet. But the sight of him—so utterly stripped of his practiced grace, looking like a boy who had just watched his entire world catch fire again—leaves her feeling physically ill.
She looks at the empty foyer, then at the elevator floor indicator as it rapidly descends.
"Damn it," she hisses, grabbing her designer trench coat from the rack and slipping into her house slippers, not even bothering with heels.
By the time she reaches the lobby, Arlen is already stumbling through the glass revolving doors and out into the humid, midnight heat of Manila. The street is nearly empty, the occasional headlight of a passing car reflecting off the wet pavement.
Arlen is standing on the curb, one hand clutching Dex, the other raised frantically toward a passing cab that doesn't stop. He looks small against the backdrop of the towering skyscrapers—a "Tragic Prince" who has lost his stage and is now just a desperate soul in a city that doesn't care.
"Taxi! Please!" he cries out, his voice a thin, ragged streak in the night.
Milia pushes through the lobby doors, the humid air hitting her like a wall. She sees him start to run down the sidewalk, his gait uneven, his lungs pulling in air with a painful, whistling sound. He's heading toward the nearest main road, but he looks like he's about to collapse before he even reaches the corner.
"Arlen! Stop!" Milia commands, her voice projecting with the authority of someone used to being heard over thousands.
He stops, but he doesn't turn around. He's hunched over the cat, his shoulders shaking with silent, rhythmic sobs.
"He's not breathing right," Arlen whispers as she reaches him, his voice devoid of the polite distance he's maintained for weeks. "Milia... he's all I have. Please. He's all I have."
It's the first time he's used her name without a title, and it feels like a physical blow to her chest. She looks down at the cat, Dex, whose small chest is hitching with shallow, rapid breaths. The heat radiating from the animal is palpable even a foot away.
Milia looks at Arlen—really looks at him. The "ghost" is gone. The "host" is gone. Standing before her is the boy from the archived article, the one with the bandage over his eye, standing in the ruins of a life that had been burning for fifteen years.
Her hand goes to her pocket, where his signed waiver still sits. I am just trying to buy my own invisibility.
"My car is in the basement," Milia says, her voice snapping back into a sharp, decisive tone. She grabs his arm—not to pull him, but to steady him. "The 24-hour vet is six blocks away. Come on."
She doesn't wait for his thank you. She drags him back toward the building's private garage entrance. For the first time in their month-long trial, the power dynamic hasn't shifted because of a contract or a secret; it has shifted because, for the first time, Milia Madrigal has decided that his tragedy is no longer something to mock, but something she can't bear to watch him face alone.
The roar of Milia's luxury SUV engine echoes through the concrete cavern of the basement garage as she peels out of her reserved spot. Arlen is huddled in the passenger seat, a stark contrast to the premium leather interior. He's leaning forward, his head bowed over Dex, whispering frantic, broken fragments of prayers that he thinks Milia can't hear.
"Shh, shh, stay with me, Dex. Just a little longer. Please, please..."
Milia's knuckles are white as she grips the steering wheel, weaving through the sparse late-night traffic with a reckless precision that would have her manager having a heart attack. She glances sideways at him. In the strobing light of the streetlamps passing overhead, Arlen looks translucent. His hazel eye is fixed on the orange fur of the cat, and he's stroking Dex's ears with fingers that won't stop shaking.
She realizes, with a jolt of discomfort, that she's never seen him touch anything with such genuine, unmasked tenderness. Not her furniture, not his belongings—certainly not her.
"The clinic is right around this corner," she says, her voice intentionally hard to keep her own nerves from showing. "And stop that whispering. You're making the air in here feel like a funeral. He's a cat, Arlen. They're resilient. They have nine lives, remember?"
"He's the only one left," Arlen whispers, his voice so thin it nearly disappears into the hum of the air conditioning. "Of everything... he's the only one I have."
The words hit Milia like a physical weight, pinning her to the driver's seat. She remembers the archived article. The fire. The locked wing. The death of his mother. She realizes then that Dex isn't just a pet to him; the cat is a living bridge to a life that ended in ash fifteen years ago.
She pulls the car onto the curb in front of the neon-lit '24/7 Veterinary Emergency' sign, the tires screeching slightly. Before she can even put the car in park, Arlen is out the door.
He fumbles with the clinic's glass entrance, nearly falling over his own feet. Milia follows him, her silk robe billowing under her trench coat, looking utterly out of place in a room that smells of antiseptic and old dog fur.
"Please! Help him!" Arlen cries out, lunging toward the reception desk. A startled vet tech looks up, but seeing the genuine desperation in Arlen's eyes—and the imposing, famous woman standing behind him—she moves immediately.
"Bring him back to the triage table, now," the tech says.
Arlen follows them like a man walking toward his own execution. He has to be told three times to let go of Dex so the vet can begin the examination. When he finally does, he stands in the middle of the clinical, white-tiled hallway, his arms still bent in the shape of the cat he was holding, looking lost and hollow.
Milia stands by the door, watching him. The silence of the clinic is punctuated only by the distant barking of a dog in the back and the soft, urgent murmurs of the medical team. She sees Arlen slide down the wall, his knees hitting the floor, his head dropping into his hands.
He's not a host. He's not a fiancé. He's just a boy who is terrified of losing the last thing that knows his name.
She walks over to him, her shadow falling over his slumped form. She should say something biting to bring him back to his senses, something to remind him that she's only here because she was inconvenienced. But the words die in her throat.
"He's in good hands, Arlen," she says, her voice uncharacteristically soft, almost hesitant. She reaches out, her hand hovering over his shoulder for a long moment before she finally lets it rest there, a firm, grounding weight. "The Madrigals don't pay for mediocre doctors. If he can be saved, he will be."
Arlen looks up, his hazel eye swimming with tears that finally spill over, tracing paths through the faint, lingering dust of the penthouse he'd spent all morning cleaning. A task Milia finally lets him do, initially to see just how far his 'act' is going to take him
"Why are you helping me?" he asks, his voice raw. "You told me you didn't care if he went hungry. You told me you wanted me to disappear."
Milia draws her hand back, her expression hardening back into its defensive, aristocratic mask. She looks away, focusing on a posters of dog breeds on the opposite wall.
"Because if that cat dies on my watch, you'll be even more of a pathetic, moping ghost than you already are," she snaps, though the sting is gone from her tone. "And I have four months left of this trial. I won't have my penthouse turned into a mausoleum for an orange tabby. Now, stand up. You're an Adelaide, for heaven's sake. Stop groveling on a vet's floor."
She reaches into her pocket and feels the crinkle of the waiver. She thinks about his "escape fund," his host shifts, his lace jabots, and the way he 'almost' licked wine off a table just to appease her. She looks at the closed door where Dex is being treated, then back at Arlen, and for the first time, she feels the weight of the five months not as a sentence, but as a countdown she's no longer sure she wants to finish.