第1章

"Guys, this man is going to be the death of me."

On the stream, Mara Quinn was sobbing so hard that her makeup streaked down her face.

She held up a crumpled hospital injury report.

Tears rolled down her face and hit the white desk, one after another.

The viewer count was climbing like crazy.

One million, two million, five million. It would not stop.

The comments scrolled past in a solid wall, every one of them cursing me.

"A guy who lives off his wife and beats her should just die!"

"Mara, don't be scared, ten million of us have your back!"

"Dox him! Make sure he can't show his face in this city!"

I sat on the couch in the living room with my phone lit up in my hand, and the woman on the screen was still crying.

She was my wife. Three years married, and nobody knew.

She was also the fraud-busting influencer with ten million followers whose career I had built from scratch.

Now the first fraud she was exposing was me.

What she did not know was that her top donor, the man showering her with gifts every night, was one of my security guards.

She did not know that the assets in my name were worth more than the combined fortunes of every man she had ever met.

To her I was a deadbeat who sat at home all day.

For three years I had never once let her touch the fingerprint-locked computer in the study.

Something slammed against the front door, hard.

Then came the whine of a power drill and the dull splatter of red paint hitting the steel door.

On the security feed, a few young men in masks were beating on the door like animals.

The floor out there was covered in delivery boxes packed with dead rats and filth, and more than a dozen funeral wreaths had been nailed up in front of my door.

Anyone could see that they did not just want to ruin my name. They wanted me gone for good.

All of it was a gift from my wife.

One phone call and security would have cleared them out. One phone call and Adrian Cole, the so-called richest man in New York, would have canceled tonight's stream.

I did not make either one.

I put the phone down.

She was going to pay for how far she had pushed this.

She wanted a stage, so I gave her one. She wanted an audience, so I gathered one for her. She wanted to grind me into the dirt in front of millions of people.

I would let her play it out to the bitter end. Then, at the moment she felt most untouchable, I would tear the stage down myself.

My phone buzzed. A text.

From Mara, who was crying on camera at that exact moment.

"See what's going on outside your door?"

"That's just the start."

"If you want to live, sign the downtown penthouse over to me tomorrow."

"Otherwise, I'll destroy your reputation and take everything you have."

I read it and thought about a summer three years ago.

In our rented room in a rundown corner of the city, she burned a box of mac and cheese, scorched the bottom of the pot, then scrambled to pick out the noodles that were not black and put them in my bowl. With a goofy grin, she said, "Babe, we're going to be broke and happy like this forever, right?"

Back then she could not cover next month's rent, and she smiled like nothing in the world was wrong.

Now she sat in a thirty-million-dollar apartment, in front of thirty million people, ready to crush me herself.

On the screen she was still working through her tearful accusations.

"He doesn't just spend my money. He makes me entertain men over drinks so he can profit from it. When I said no, he did this to me."

She pushed up her sleeve. A wide bruise covered her arm.

The comments boiled over again.

Every filthy word people could think of came at me.

I ran a thumb over the back of my hand, where a deep scar sat.

Three years ago, Mara cut her wrists during a depressive episode. I rushed over and grabbed the blade with my bare hand, slicing my skin open.

That bruise on her arm came from two nights ago, when she got wasted at a club and fell down a flight of stairs on her own.

Now it was hard proof that I beat her.

A dazzling gift animation suddenly lit up the stream.

A hundred Universe gifts fired off back to back and drowned the screen in gold.

Her top donor, Knox, had arrived.

He posted in the main chat in huge bold letters.

"Mara, don't cry, I've got you."

"I already tracked down this loser's address."

"Tomorrow I'm sending people to break his legs and make him crawl back to you and beg!"

Mara looked at the screen and smiled right away.

"Thank you, Knox. You're so good to me."

She used to look at me like that too, all that worship and gratitude.

That was a long time ago.

Long enough that I had almost forgotten she started out as a broke college girl who could not make rent.

I looked at that glittering gold username, picked up my phone, and pulled up the company's internal system.

Test account: Knox. Spending today: $1 million. Server load: 78.6 percent.

The notes field read: livestream platform stress test.

Assigned to: Knox, security department.

Created: three months ago.

The idiot really committed to spending those Universes.

His performance pay next month was gone, though.

I closed the stream and took a long drag on my cigarette.

Through the smoke I could see the huge wedding photo on the wall.

Mara was smiling sweetly in it.

It was taken the day we got married at City Hall.

I paid through a shell company to put my proposal on the biggest billboard in the city, disguised as part of a "Love New York" campaign.

She assumed it was a city event and never once asked who was behind it.

To support her career as an influencer, I stayed out of sight.

Money, traffic, paid trending spots, the best PR team available.

I took her from an unknown creator to an influencer with ten million followers whom the entire internet watched.

She built a brand around being an independent woman and became an idol to countless girls.

Then it went to her head.

Deep down she thought a man who sat at home all day was beneath her.

To her, the big donors showering her stream with gifts were the only "real men."

She wanted a divorce.

But she did not want to carry the blame, and she definitely did not want to give up a thirty-million-dollar apartment.

So she staged the entire livestream to destroy me in the court of public opinion, force me out with nothing, and keep the penthouse for herself.

She thought the endorsement fees and her cut of the donations were going into her own pocket.

She never realized that the other party on every contract she signed was my company.

The money ran through the company books first, then landed on her card as performance pay.

The money that passed through her account would not have covered the building fees on this place.

The phone buzzed again.

Mara: "Kade, don't play dead."

Mara: "Knox is somebody in this city."

Mara: "Make him angry and you won't even know what killed you."

I looked at the name Knox on the screen and smirked.

She probably had no idea.

The top donor throwing money around on her stream and promising to break my legs was Knox Bennett, the captain of my security team.

Every Universe he sent came out of company funds, and the only point was to test the server capacity of the streaming platform we had just acquired.