Abandoned by My Family, Protected by a Billionaire

The day I died, Mina was upstairs in a wedding dress made for me.

The ballroom music filtered down through two floors of concrete and marble, arriving in the basement as nothing more than a dull, rhythmic pressure—each drumbeat landing directly on my broken legs as though it knew exactly where to find me. The wounds had long since stopped bleeding properly. What remained was rot: blackened crusts of dried pus and blood pressed flat against the damp floor, layer over layer, like something geological.

A full week without food. Three days, at minimum, without water.

The guard outside found the whole situation mildly amusing. His voice came through the iron door without any particular effort on his part. "Nepheia. Do me a favor and don't die today. Bad luck for the wedding."

I opened my mouth. What came out was a sound like a broken bellows.

Today was supposed to be my wedding day. Mine and Koujirius's.

The officiant's voice drifted down from above, chopped into fragments by the floor between us.

"Mr. Koujirius… in sickness and in poverty… do you take Mina…"

His answer was perfectly clear.

"I do."

The ballroom erupted. I dug my fingers into the crack in the floor beneath me—my nails had already torn back, and the raw flesh beneath had been ground so thoroughly against the concrete that I could barely feel it anymore. I had believed, somewhere around the second day, that I had used up everything left in me. But when I heard his voice, tears came anyway, tracking down through the scars on my face and into the corners of my mouth.

Salt and something worse than salt.

He had said those same words to me once.

The day after the Fatasleigh family formally brought me home, Koujirius had taken my hand in front of everyone—relatives, staff, the full assembled household—and told me that the engagement had always belonged to the true Fatasleigh heiress. He would honor it. He would take care of me.

I believed him. I believed him so completely that every time Mina maneuvered me into a corner, I stepped back. I was afraid of burdening the family. Afraid of Jonson's contempt. Afraid that Koujirius would think me petty or jealous or difficult. I made myself smaller and smaller until there was almost nothing left, and then they broke what remained.

The officiant's voice swelled with ceremony. The groom may now kiss the bride.

The floor above me shook with cheering. Koujirius was kissing Mina in front of every important family in the city—Mina, the jewel of the Fatasleigh household, radiant and beloved—while I, the one who actually carried Fatasleigh blood, lay locked in the basement directly beneath them like a piece of meat they'd forgotten to throw out.

Then Mina's voice, amplified and trembling with artful emotion, floated down to me.

"Thank you all for being here. I've felt so guilty since Nepheia disappeared. If I hadn't touched her watch that day, she wouldn't have gotten upset. She wouldn't have left on her own."

I looked down at the old scar along my throat, the one left by the glass.

The watch was long gone.

It was the only thing I had brought with me when the Fatasleigh family collected me at eighteen—a silver-cased pocket watch from my foster mother, the case worn smooth, the movement running slow, and I had polished it every night before sleep regardless. Three months ago, Mina plucked it out of my hands and held it up with the particular smile she used when she wanted you to know she was winning.

"Why are you still holding on to this piece of junk?"

I asked her to give it back.

She opened her fingers.

The watch hit the marble floor and the crystal face shattered. Then she raised her heel and brought it down on the photograph tucked inside the case—the only picture I had ever had of myself and my foster mother, pressed between the inner cover and the movement for safekeeping—and ground it under her shoe.

I slapped her.

It was the first time I had fought back since coming to the Fatasleigh house. The first and, as it turned out, the last.

Mina dropped to the floor with her hand over her cheek, tears immediate and perfect, and while Jonson was still running down the hall toward us, she picked up a shard of the broken crystal and drew it lightly across her own face—a single thin line of red appearing on her cheekbone, so fine it was almost decorative.

When Jonson burst in, she was already defending me. She told him it was an accident, that she had only wanted to look at the watch and had lost her grip, that none of it was my fault.

Jonson looked at me and said, "Mina has lived in this house for over twenty years. You don't get to treat her this way."

I told him what had actually happened. He had two people hold me down, then lifted the golf club from against the wall. Before he swung, he asked me whether I was prepared to apologize.

I wasn't.

It was one of the few moments of stubbornness in my short life, and the most catastrophically stupid. I knew—I already knew—that nothing I said would be believed. And yet some remnant of something in me held out for the possibility that Jonson might, just once, look at the evidence rather than at Mina's face.

He smiled the way people do when they've already decided, shoved something into my mouth to muffle the sound, and swung. The first blow landed on my left leg. The pain was so complete that my vision went white, but I kept my eyes on Mina. Jonson swung again. And again. By the time he was finished, both legs were broken.

Mina wept throughout—shoulders shaking, tears clinging to her lashes—and when Jonson's back was turned, her lips moved.

Serves you right.

The story Jonson told afterward was that I, consumed by jealousy over the family inheritance, had deliberately cut Mina's face with the watch glass. My broken legs became evidence of a fall down the stairs during my subsequent attempt to flee.

I dragged myself to Koujirius on those broken legs.

He was still wearing our engagement ring. He listened to everything I said, then looked down and wiped his hands on a cloth.

"You were manageable when you first came back, Nepheia. I think we've given you too much. You've started wanting things you have no right to want."

I asked him what that meant.

"Mina surrendered her position in this family to you. She has suffered for it. And you repay her by destroying her face. That's not someone I can protect."

There was a bottle of whiskey on the table. I watched his hand close around it, and I thought he was going to pour a drink. Instead, he pressed my face down into the broken glass on the floor.

I fought as hard as I could. I tore open the back of his hand with my nails before two of his bodyguards locked my arms behind me. Then he crouched down, selected a suitable shard, and worked methodically from my brow to my jaw, opening my face in a series of long deliberate cuts.

I kept saying I hadn't hurt Mina. I said it until the blood ran into my mouth and I was saying it into the floor.

Eventually, Koujirius sighed.

"What does it matter whether you did it or not?"

That sentence quieted me completely.

They had always known the truth. They simply did not care.

After that came the island. Men who had been paid to do a specific job surrounded me on the rocks with a camera pointed at my ruined face, and added more damage of their own. They tore my clothes and told me that Koujirius and Mina's instructions had been to leave me breathing—everything else was at their discretion.

By the next morning, videos were circulating online: the Fatasleigh heiress, promiscuous, depraved, caught with multiple men. My body remembered what my mind forced itself to forget. For months afterward, if a man came too close, I vomited. I shook. I pressed myself into the nearest corner and covered my head.

When they were done with me, I found a moment and crawled to the water and found a boat. Jonson's people met me at the shore. There was no hospital, no police. They brought me directly to the basement, where I signed a share transfer agreement with a thumb pressed in my own blood, and then signed a second document declaring that I was voluntarily severing all ties with the Fatasleigh family.

I still had hope, even then. Something small and idiotic that I hadn't managed to kill yet—the idea that my grandmother might hear what was happening and come. That blood might count for something.

Then Mina appeared at the observation window in the iron door.

She told me my grandmother had already transferred my dowry to her in full. "Jonson says you're a liability. Koujirius doesn't want any complications at the wedding." She turned her hand so the ring caught the light. "Seriomel agreed as well."

Seriomel. The most dangerous figure in the Leneaux family—cold, reclusive, Koujirius's uncle, a man rumored to be a bastard son who had built his power on a foundation of ruthlessness that kept even his own family from approaching him directly. He had never involved himself in domestic disputes. Until Mina.

Once Mina secured his backing, Jonson stopped pretending that blood relations meant anything. Koujirius accelerated his efforts to distance himself from me publicly. The last few household staff who had occasionally spoken in my defense were dismissed overnight. After that, every guard stationed outside my door wore the silver serpent embroidery on their cuffs—the mark of Seriomel's people.

I had never understood why he helped her.

At the welcome dinner the night I was first brought home, while everyone else watched me with poorly concealed contempt, Seriomel had looked at me for a long time from the far end of the table—black shirt buttoned to the collar, the wine at his elbow untouched. When Mina approached him with a toast, flushed and smiling, he glanced up at her once. His expression was the temperature of open water in January.

And yet, in the end, he stood with her.

The music upstairs softened. The bouquet toss, probably. The officiant's voice floated down, warm and congratulatory: whoever catches it will find the most perfect love.

Mina's life had always been perfect. She took everything she reached for—my name, my family, my engagement, and finally my life itself. Whoever caught her flowers would be very happy, I was sure.

I began to move toward the door.

It was not fast. My knees had been treated once, badly, and the concrete had since removed most of the skin from them. Every inch forward felt like being opened with a dull blade. But there was a gap at the bottom of the iron door—a thin line where the light got in, pale and steady across the floor.

I wanted to touch it before I died. That was all.

My fingertips were almost there when the door swung open. The guard's silhouette blocked the light entirely. He looked down at me with the expression of a man who has stepped in something.

"Still trying to crawl out?"

I looked at the silver serpent on his cuff. My lips were cracked so deeply that moving them hurt.

"Hungry…"

He made a small sound of disgust, as though proximity to me posed some kind of contamination risk, and kicked me in the chest.

I rolled into the wall. Something warm came up my throat. The door closed.

From somewhere distant, a clock began to strike the hour.

One. Two.

I curled on the floor in the dark, my stomach contracting on nothing, and Seriomel's face surfaced behind my eyes without my permission.

If I could do it again—any of it—I would not beg Jonson for the truth. I would not wait for Koujirius to turn back. I would not make the mistake of treating the Fatasleigh family's blood ties as though they were a lifeline. I would have taken the watch and walked out the door the day I arrived, and kept every last thing my foster mother had given me.

And everything they owed me, I would have collected myself.

The twelfth strike fell.

I exhaled for the last time.

In the moment before consciousness dissolved entirely, the sound of the ocean rose up and drowned out the clock—and then cold seawater flooded my mouth and nose all at once.

I opened my eyes.

Rough rock beneath me. A sky pressed low by clouds. The island.

A man's ragged breathing close to my ear. My wrist wrenched back in a grip that left no room for argument. Another set of hands at my clothes.

"Playing dead now?"