Chapter 1

“So hungry,” I muttered, eyes glazed over, unfocused.

People streamed back and forth along the street, but passersby all gave me disgusted looks and veered around me.

Ignoring their strange stares, I spotted a trash bin ahead.

Stumbling toward it, I struggled to bend over and buried my upper body inside the bin to rummage through it. I got lucky this time.

I found a portion of spoiled leftover pasta, glistening with a translucent green liquid on top. Without hesitation, I shoved it into my mouth.

I had gone without food for three days, but the rancid pasta was hard to swallow. After only a few seconds, I couldn’t hold it down and vomited everything out.

My stomach growled loudly and my eyes suddenly stung. I gripped the trash bin tightly as my throat choked up, but the tears in my eyes seemed to have completely dried out.

Not a single tear would fall.

All that came was a hoarse, unpleasant whimper.

I longed for a single bite of al dente pasta, but for someone like me now, even that was unbearably difficult.

“Starving?”

Shawn Crawford stood behind me, his cold voice tinged with mockery.

I sniffled and refused to look up. Neither did I have the strength to lift my head as I leaned my entire body against the trash bin.

Annoyed that I had disturbed their feeding, the flies now buzzed around my face.

“What game are you trying to play this time?” I asked weakly.

Ever since the school belle, Summer Manning, died, Shawn had been scheming to make my adoptive parents lose all faith in me, destroying my reputation and turning me into a pariah.

The entire city blacklisted me; no restaurants would serve me and no companies dared to hire me.

Shawn toyed with me slowly this way. When I was nearly starving to death, he’d propose a game.

Only when he was amused would he grant me a sandwich or a bowl of pasta, both plain.

He once ordered me to livestream myself scrubbing every public restroom in the city and rewarded me with two sandwiches.

He chained my neck, parading me through the streets for the crowd to gawk at, and even letting them ride on my back. It was all for a single bowl of plain pasta.

…

Sneering coldly, he ordered his bodyguards behind him to carry me away.

They roughly hoisted me by the wrists and dragged me away toward a van parked nearby.

The searing pain from my feet scraping the ground had me bite down hard on my lower lip, drawing blood.

Shawn watched with a cold glare, ignoring the trail of blood I left behind.

Bystanders pointed and whispered, none daring to intervene. Who would provoke the unpredictable young master?

The last person who tried to help me was still lying in the hospital with both hands shattered; his bones crushed and fingers broken apart.

So, I no longer hoped for anyone to save me for fear of anyone getting hurt for my sake.

I stared blankly at Shawn who was standing in the sunlight. He was no longer the big brother whose eyes had once been filled with only me.

No longer the boy who, back when the orphanage director pinched pennies and refused to let us eat our fill, would sneak into the kitchen by jumping through a window to steal a few ham sandwiches for me when my stomach growled.

Still vivid in my mind was us, crouching in a corner with red eyes, devouring those ham sandwiches ravenously.