Chapter 3 One year left

As she left the city, Evelina's mind began to wander.

She was already twenty-two and had never once had a boyfriend. School had been nothing short of a living nightmare for her. Because she was naturally quiet and introverted, she had quickly become the prime target for the cruelest teenagers in her class. They spent years relentlessly mocking her, calling her a boring goody-two-shoes, a freak, or little Miss Priss. The constant whispers in the hallways and the mocking laughter whenever she entered a room had turned her academic life into a masterclass in survival.

To cope with the torment, Evie had learned to build thick walls around herself. The bullying had forced her into an absolute isolation, but she refused to let their malice break her spirit. She had trained her mind to ignore the cruelty, constantly telling herself never to let the storm raging outside enter her own ship, or she would surely drown. She developed a fiercely guarded, unyielding mindset, deciding early on that there was no way she would let the absolute worst kinds of people pull her down into their darkness.

Outside of the vicious high school rumors, there was a far deeper, hidden reason for why she had never allowed a partner into her twenty-two years of existence. When she was seventeen, she realized that she had developed a profound, deep-seated trauma: she was absolutely terrified of having someone fall in love with her.

Evie had witnessed firsthand exactly how much her father suffered day by day, even years after her mother died. It was unbearable for her to watch him. Her father had loved her mother so intensely that even after nearly two decades since her passing, Evie still caught her dad crying in the middle of the night, staring helplessly at his late wife's photograph. She had seen how agonizingly painful it was to lose the person you loved—it was nothing short of psychological torture. She had even overheard her father saying that he hadn't felt truly alive since the day her mother died. Evie knew that the only reason her father was still holding on to this world was because of her.

Then, just a short time ago, Evie was diagnosed with the exact same severe, incurable heart defect that had taken her mother. It appeared she had inherited the fatal flaw down to her very cells. The diagnosis was a definitive, brutal expiration date: she had exactly 12 months left to live.

That was why she had spent her life rejecting any boy who showed the slightest interest in her. There had been a few, but her fear would instantly trigger the moment someone tried to get close. All she could ever say to them was a quiet, apologetic 'sorry'. Because of that, Evie avoided relationships entirely. She had even started purposely dressing in an unfashionable, plain manner just to make herself as invisible and unattractive as possible, ensuring the world left her alone.

However, as the months ticked down, Evie began to question herself. Am I really going to die just like this? Quietly fading away in a hospital bed, having never truly experienced the world?

The deep, wild desires that she had been suppressing all this time were suddenly clawing to the surface, completely out of control. She didn't want a sweet, safe, or ordinary life anymore. If she only had one year left, she wanted to burn bright and fast. She wanted to live dangerously, to create a bucket list of absolute madness, and to blindly explore all of her deepest, wildest fantasies. She wanted to know what it felt like to chase high-stakes adrenaline, to dive into the dark, and to feel the thrill of a powerful, dangerous man's embrace without any real-world consequences or emotional baggage. She didn't want a fairytale; she wanted an adventure that made her heart race, proving she was still alive before her clock ran out.

But she was torn. She was worried sick and terrified of leaving someone behind to suffer when she was gone. She refused to let anyone experience the crushing loss and endless grief that her father went through every single day.

For years, she thought she had accepted her quiet fate. But now that her clock was ticking out loud, the longing to break all the rules only grew stronger. She decided to be exceptionally brave, determined to make her wildest bucket list fantasies come true with the small amount of time she had left.

The only logical solution she could think of was to strike a purely transactional contract with a man who could introduce her to that dark, thrilling world but was entirely incapable of ever forming a real emotional attachment to her. She didn't want his heart—in fact, she needed him to be completely heartless. She could easily handle a cold, demanding arrangement, but she could never handle leaving someone behind to mourn her. She just needed a partner in crime who wouldn't blink an eye when she finally vanished.

Evie had once anonymously shared her dilemma on an online forum, asking for advice on how to navigate a high-risk bucket list without leaving a trail of broken hearts. Her thread had garnered an immense amount of attention, sparking contradicting debates.

"Since you want to live on the edge without making anyone care, why don't you just pick a dangerous, heartless bad guy?" one user had advised, a comment that stuck with her. "There are plenty of cold, ruthless bastards out there who only know how to take what they want anyway. A guy like that won't cry when you're gone." It was the one piece of advice she had actually considered trying. After all, what were the chances that a truly cold, ruthless man would ever care about losing a little lamb?

Now, Evie had exactly one year left.

She was doing fine for the moment. The people around her, except for her immediate family, didn't even know she was sick. But she remembered how her mother had faded toward the end. Evie knew that her health would inevitably begin to decline rapidly as the final months approached. She could already foresee that she might have to start going back and forth from the hospital in just a month or two.

She was acutely aware that her time was bleeding away. And staring down at the sleek, heavy black card Elias had left in her hands, she knew she had just found the most heartless, dangerous man in the city—the perfect accomplice to help her ruin her life in the best way possible.