Chapter 2

The boutique was tucked into a hillside villa district, far from the city, and the road was empty—not a single passing car, let alone a cab.

I was still wearing the stiletto heels they'd paired with the gown. I hadn't walked a kilometer before the heels had torn my feet raw. Every step felt like walking on a knife edge. My whole body was shaking.

I couldn't keep going. I crouched by the side of the road and called Leo.

Even after he'd hurt me beyond anything, when I had nowhere else to turn, he was still the first person I thought of.

He picked up fast. My voice came out thick with tears.

"Leo, can you send someone to get me? I'm on the road outside the boutique. My feet are bleeding—I can't walk."

I hadn't even finished before he cut me off, sharp and angry.

"It's only a few kilometers. Walk back yourself. Do you have any idea how long Mia cried over the blood you got on the dress? Don't bother me."

The line went dead. When I tried again, it was already busy.

I looked down at my phone. The battery indicator was red. It could die any second.

Everything I had been holding in broke out of me at once.

I crouched by the roadside, buried my face against my knees, and cried until my whole body shook.

That was when I heard it—a Harley engine tearing down the road, deafening, coming closer.

On instinct, I pressed myself to the edge of the road. But the modified black Harley didn't slow down. It came straight at me.

The midday sun glared off the windshield, but through the tinted visor I could see the rider's face.

It was Frank. Mia's most loyal lapdog. The same Frank who, with her, had spent two years of high school making my life hell.

He kept the throttle wide open. At the last second, I threw myself toward the shoulder, but it was too late—the front wheel clipped my right leg and sent me flying.

Agonizing, bone-shattering pain crashed over me in an instant. I crumpled heavily in the middle of the road, covered in blood, and could only watch helplessly as Frank spun his motorcycle around and sped away.

Through fading consciousness, I dragged myself forward across the scorching asphalt with my last shred of strength. My fingers finally brushed against my phone, discarded on the roadside, and I fumbled instinctively to dial the emergency line.

Then darkness swallowed me whole, and I slipped into complete unconsciousness.

My muddled dreams were flooded with fragments of the past.

Back in my first year of high school, news of my mother’s suicide by wrist-cutting spread across the entire campus overnight.

Gossiping classmates dug up every ugly detail of our family’s secrets, plastering the bulletin boards with cruel rumors branding my mother a mistress and me an illegitimate child.

Mia, the legitimate daughter and my elder half-sister, attended the same school.

From that day on, I became her and her followers’ plaything.

When she failed an exam, she seared scars into my skin with a scorching curling iron.

When she was scolded by teachers, she ordered her lackeys to pin my hands down and force toilet water into my mouth.

When she fought with her boyfriend, she’d have Frank beat me with a towel-wrapped fist, aiming only at hidden parts of my body. The pain left me tossing and turning through sleepless nights, yet I dared not show a single bruise to anyone.

In the end, crushed by public pressure, the principal forced me to drop out.

Motherless and abandoned by school, I scraped by on odd jobs to survive.

Until one early morning, on my way back to my cramped rental room after work, I was cornered in an alley by a gang of thugs. They robbed me of every cent I had and leered as they laid their hands on me.

That was when Leo appeared and saved me.

He held out his hand to me against the light, asking if I would stay by his side, working as his live-in caretaker.

I recognized him at once. He was the senior one grade above me, the school heartthrob who always ranked first in every exam—the quiet crush I’d hidden deep in my heart, too afraid to confess.

I took his hand, clinging to it like the only light in my endless darkness.

The day I moved into his villa, he saw the unhealed, crusted scars covering my body. His fingers trembled as he tended my wounds, whispering softly to ask if I still hurt.

I shook my head and told him I was fine.

Truly, the moment he stepped into my life, all my pain had vanished.

The villa servants whispered behind my back, sneering that I was a mistress’s daughter, doomed to follow in my mother’s footsteps—a bewitching girl born only to lure men.

Leo took my hand, stood before every last one of them, and said in a cold, unyielding tone:

“If you believe a parent’s choices define a child’s future, then your own children will be nothing but servants for the rest of their lives.”

No one dared speak of my background again after that.

Fearing I would suffer further cruelty if I returned to school, he never forced me to go back. Instead, he hired private one-on-one tutors, granting me anything I wished to learn—finance, painting, foreign languages, without hesitation.

He’d brush my hair gently and say:

“Eva, the world is vast. Don’t trap yourself in the past. Learn to look forward.”

Back then, I had foolishly believed he genuinely wanted me to heal and grow.

Only now do I understand. He had simply wanted to make me forget every terrible thing Mia had ever done to me.