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Chapter 19: What The Fire Couldn’t Take
publish date:
2026-10-27 23:09:22
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THEY CHOOSE THE FAKE, NOW I OWN EVERYTHING Chapter 27: Not Worth Her Time
Anton Moreau hung up and left me alone in the dark, and the strange part was that it wasn't his voice I couldn't shake that night. It was Ray's face behind the pillar.I sat on the edge of my grandfather's bed with the phone still in my hand and thought about the way he had looked at me across the courtyard. There had been no anger in it, and no hurt either. Only a quiet, careful distance, like someone stepping back from a stove he had been told was never meant to warm him. I had made Felix drink from that fountain with a steady hand and a cold heart, and I did not regret a drop of it. But I regretted the look on Ray's face. I could not say why.I found him the next day at lunch, in the farthest corner of the school library, behind a shelf of old encyclopedias. He had a paper bag open in front of him and a sandwich he hadn't touched, and when he saw me coming, he started to stand up so fast that his chair scraped the floor."Tess. Hi. I was just..." He gestured vaguely at the books. "
THEY CHOOSE THE FAKE, NOW I OWN EVERYTHING Chapter 26: What He Did To Me Once
The whole room held its breath, waiting to see whether I would blush. I looked at the red rose lying across my notebook, then up at Felix Moreau's smiling face, and I almost felt sorry for how well he played the part. He had the easy grin and the careful tilt of the head of a boy who had practiced in a mirror. A few girls near the window sighed. Mara Quince clasped her hands together. In the second row, Lydia lowered her eyes with a small, secret smile, and her voice drifted lazily into my mind. Look at her face. She doesn't know what to do. "That's very kind of you," I said evenly, and moved the rose to the corner of my desk. "I'm afraid I have class." "Then I'll wait." Felix perched on the empty desk beside mine as though he'd always sat there. "I've got all the time in the world for you, Tessa." I kept my face calm. But my heart had begun to beat a little faster, and not from nerves. I knew this boy. In my first life, he had been three years above me, the son of the richest
THEY CHOOSE THE FAKE, NOW I OWN EVERYTHING Chapter 25: The Boy In The Alley
I had stopped trying to argue with my visions a long time ago, so I did the only thing I could, which was run."My lady?" Hollis was already behind me, one arm in its sling, his long coat flapping as he hurried to keep up. "What did you see?""Behind the school. The alley with the fence." My breath was coming fast, and my bandaged hand throbbed with every stride. "They're going to hurt him, Mr. Grant. Tobias and his friends. Ray's on his knees."He didn't ask another question. He caught the arm of a security man beside the SUV and said something low and quick, and then the three of us were moving down the long side path between the gym and the fence. School was out. The courtyard had emptied, and the late sun lay in long gold bars across the cracked concrete. I was counting the seconds in my head the way I had counted them on the roof, and every one felt like a stone dropped into a well.We heard it before we saw it. A thin, muffled cry, and a harsh, ugly laugh."Come on, Greer. You w
THEY CHOOSE THE FAKE, NOW I OWN EVERYTHING Chapter 24: The Boy Who Walked Me To The Post Box
The two men from Greywood were halfway across the courtyard when someone said my name, and it was a name nobody in this school had ever called me."Tess."It was barely a whisper, so soft that I almost thought I had imagined it. Only one person in my whole life had ever called me that. I turned my head slowly, and the crowd of students seemed to ripple apart as a thin boy in a faded gray blazer stepped out of the back row. He was tall and narrow, with wire glasses held together at one hinge by a piece of tape, and a worn canvas backpack hung from one shoulder. In his hand, he held an old phone with a cracked screen, and his fingers were shaking so hard that the phone trembled.I knew him before I could say why. Something in the set of his shoulders, the careful, apologetic way he tried to take up as little space as possible."Ray?" I whispered.His face went red from his collar to his hair. "Hi, Tess.""Greer?" Tobias Hale lifted his head from the pavement, wiping blood from his lip.
THEY CHOOSE THE FAKE, NOW I OWN EVERYTHING Chapter 24: The Smile She Didn’t Expect
I caught Tobias Hale's wrist an inch from my face, and I smiled, because I had been hearing his punch coming for the last forty minutes.Lydia's thoughts had been following me since the car pulled out of the mansion gate. I had listened to her rage in the garage, to the squeak of that sorry bicycle all the way down the hill, to every sweet, poisonous word she pushed into the heads of the students waiting by the school gate. By the time I stepped out of the SUV, I already knew who would throw the first punch and what he would be thinking when he did. Tobias thought he was protecting a girl who had never been in danger. That was what made me sad."What are you smiling at?" he snarled, trying to wrench his arm free."Nothing," I said. "I'm just sorry for you."I turned his wrist, not hard, only enough to throw him off balance, and he stumbled forward onto one knee with a grunt of surprise. A ripple went through the crowd. I let go, stepped back, and raised my bandaged hand in a calm, ope
THEY CHOOSE THE FAKE, NOW I OWN EVERYTHING Chapter 22: Lydia’s Morning
Lydia's POVI made a promise before I even opened my eyes: by the end of the day, my sister would wish she had never come home.The bed was narrow and hard, and the blanket smelled of bleach and old soup. Somewhere on the other side of a wall so thin I could hear every breath, my father was snoring in short, angry bursts. My mother was crying again, softly, the way she had cried all night, as though she thought no one could hear. I lay on my back and stared at the cracked ceiling, and I thought about the black sedan and the silk sheets and the tall windows of my room, and my throat closed with a rage so hot that it frightened me.I had not even been sent to the servants' quarters. I could have stayed upstairs in my own bed. But I had followed Mommy down the back hall the night before, holding her hand and whispering that I would never leave her, because I knew that was the only way to keep her. It had worked, as it always did. She had pulled me into her arms and cried into my hair. I
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