Chapter One: Pay with Yourself
Elena
Rain hammered the luxury resort on the outskirts of Las Vegas without mercy.
Inside the presidential suite, the air was thick and suffocating.
"Chris, slow down… mmh…"
Dorothy was on her hands and knees across the bed, her upper body collapsed against the mattress, breasts grinding against the sheets with every thrust.
She was gasping for breath—and staring straight at me.
Behind her knelt a man, face flushed crimson, eyes clouded with alcohol and raw hunger, his body slamming into her in a steady, brutal rhythm.
Smack. Smack. Smack.
The sound of flesh on flesh filled the room. Dorothy rocked back and forth with each impact, working against him, drawing him deeper.
Chris had one hand kneading her hip. In the other, he held a long red candle, still burning.
Drops of scarlet wax rained down onto Dorothy's pale skin in time with their frenzied laughter, each drop wringing another theatrical cry from her lips.
"Ah—it burns! Chris! I can't take it anymore~"
Chris drove into her harder, fingers digging into her waist, and shot me a look of undisguised contempt.
"Take it, you filthy little slut. Scream louder—let Miss Williams over there get a good listen. Maybe she'll learn something."
"Chris, you're so bad…" Dorothy murmured, half-lidded eyes curling into a smile. "Ah~ Your fiancée looks absolutely miserable. What if she's too humiliated to stay?"
"Run?" Chris's eyes went bloodshot. "She's tied to that chair. Where the hell is she going?"
He thrust forward again, savage and deliberate. "The Williams family is a stray dog waiting to be put down. If she walks out that door tonight, I cut off her father's funding tomorrow—every last cent."
"She's not going anywhere. She's going to sit there and watch every second of this."
"Chris… you're terrible… ah! Don't let her look away… make her watch…"
They tangled together again, lost in each other, the wet sounds of their bodies filling the empty suite.
My fiancé and my closest friend. Rutting like animals.
I couldn't move. I turned my face away.
Nausea clawed up my throat. I forced it back down.
I was bound to a high-backed chair in the center of the room, wrists and ankles lashed tight with coarse rope. This was Chris's masterpiece for the evening—his chosen method of grinding what remained of my dignity into dust. He wanted me as an audience. A witness. A prop.
Honestly, I didn't find it particularly humiliating.
Because I had always known exactly what Chris was: gutter trash with a good last name. His depravity didn't surprise me. Nothing about him had ever surprised me.
What turned my stomach was something else entirely.
My mother—after all her deliberation—had selected this worthless creature as our family's salvation, and pressured me into a marriage that would keep the Williams name out of bankruptcy court. A man I held in open contempt had somehow become the lifeline I was expected to beg for.
That was what made me want to be sick.
"Chris. Dorothy."
My voice came out flat and cold. "Be careful with that candle. If you burn this place down and it makes the news, don't expect me to stand next to you for the cameras."
Dorothy reached across the marble nightstand without breaking her rhythm and picked up a sleek, expensive bottle of massage oil. She uncapped it with a smirk—slowly, deliberately—and began smoothing it over her skin while she held my gaze.
Then, for good measure, she upended half the bottle onto the bed. The oil soaked into the silk sheets in dark, spreading blooms.
"Elena, drop the heiress act. Without Chris's money, your family files for bankruptcy tomorrow morning."
"You wouldn't even be allowed through the front gate of this place if he hadn't brought you. What we do here is none of your business."
"She's just jealous," Chris said, a lewd grin spreading across his face. "I wouldn't touch her if you paid me. No fire in her at all—doesn't even know how to beg."
Dorothy's performance seemed to tip him over some edge. His breathing turned ragged. He grabbed her and pressed down again, hoisting the candle high above them both, voice dropping to a crude, guttural growl.
"I'm going to wreck you tonight, you little devil."
And then, at the precise moment their frenzy crested—
Chris lost control of his body entirely.
His mind went blank. His grip went slack.
The candle slipped from his fingers.
Thud.
It traced a lazy arc through the air and dropped straight onto the center of the bed.
The oil caught instantly. A column of flame erupted upward with a sharp crack, and the fire spread—fast, purposeful—racing along the wool carpet and the silk drapes as though it knew exactly where it wanted to go.
"Ah—! Fire! Chris, help me—!"
Dorothy screamed. The two of them scrambled in a blind panic.
The flames fed greedily on everything in the room—curtains, upholstery, bedding—growing larger by the second.
"Cough—" Thick smoke hit the back of my throat.
I struggled on instinct. The rope answered by pulling tighter, the coarse fibers tearing into my skin, a hot, sticky wetness spreading beneath the knots.
The rope didn't give.
I couldn't stand. I couldn't run. I had no options at all.
"Chris—untie me!" My voice came out raw and hoarse.
The shout drew in a lungful of smoke. The room tilted. Darkness rushed in from the edges of my vision, and my body went limp—the chair toppled, and I hit the floor hard.
"Oh god—what do we—Chris, look, Elena passed out!"
I could hear Dorothy's voice from somewhere above me.
"Forget her."
Chris was coughing, swinging a lamp against the floor-to-ceiling windows of the balcony.
"The fire's too far gone. Leave her. If she dies here, the Williams engagement dies with her. That's one less problem. Move."
A violent crash. The glass gave way.
Through the haze blurring my vision, I watched Chris vault through the shattered frame and drop to the balcony below. Dorothy was right behind him.
Two cowards. Two animals who chose their own skins without a backward glance.
They left me on the floor of a burning room and walked away.
I don't know how long I was unconscious.
What brought me back was pain—the searing, specific agony of skin beginning to burn.
The suite had become exactly what Chris called it: hell on earth. Flaming debris rained from the ceiling. I lay sprawled on the scalding floor, throat so parched it felt like it might crack, lungs too choked with smoke to form a single intelligible cry for help.
Is this where I die?
Burned alive in the wreckage of these two animals' sordid little game?
No.
I refuse.
