All Chapters of Oh! My Pretty Boy: Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

I went to the hidden house before anyone could forbid me.That was not courage.It was timing.Elise was still screaming into three phones in the library. Grandmother had been taken to her room after the unknown call left her looking older than I had ever seen her. Yvette had locked herself in the east guest room, and for once even I understood that knocking would be a mistake.The house was busy recovering from the public appearance.No one watched me closely enough.Except security, of course.But security belonged to me.The gardens were wet from last night’s rain. My shoes sank slightly into the grass as I crossed the lawn and headed for the trees beyond the east path. The air smelled of mud, leaves, and the faint metallic scent that came after storms. Behind me, the mansion stood bright and correct, all its windows polished, all its doors pretending innocence.Ahead, the hidden house waited.It looked smaller in daylight.That should have made it less disturbing.It did not.Vine

The letter arrived in a box of oranges.That was the first clever thing about it.Reporters expected scandal to come in black cars, sealed envelopes, anonymous emails, or trembling servants. Security searched packages from law offices, media companies, and people foolish enough to send flowers to a woman they had never met. They did not expect danger to arrive under fruit from an old farm in Batangas.The box came through the kitchen entrance at ten in the morning.By eleven, the cook had set three oranges aside for Grandmother, two for Elise, and one for Yvette because Grandmother had decided she needed vitamins in addition to peace, neither of which this house provided reliably.At eleven-oh-seven, Yvette found the key.I was in the library with Elise, signing a revised schedule I had no intention of following, when a maid appeared in the doorway.“Señorito,” she said, pale. “Madam asks you to come to the breakfast roo

I did not sleep until almost dawn.That was what I told myself.It sounded better than the truth, which was that I was afraid to close my eyes.Fear was an ugly word. I had rejected it in boardrooms, hotel rooms, dressing rooms, and the polished back seats of cars while Elise read comments aloud in a voice too amused to be merciful. Fear belonged to men without drivers, without lawyers, without family names thick enough to stop bullets and rumors before they reached skin.Fear did not belong to me.And yet I sat in my room while the house breathed around me, fully dressed at three in the morning, staring at the golden key in my palm as if it might confess if I waited long enough.The rain had stopped.The silence after it was worse.Water dripped from the eaves. Somewhere deep in the mansion, wood settled with a faint crack. The old portraits in the corridor seemed too awake. I had left the door to my room open

Dinner was my father’s idea.That was how I knew it was a trap.He did not call it that, of course. Men like my father did not name traps. They called them family obligations, legal prudence, private discussions, necessary appearances. He sent the invitation through my mother, who sent it through the family secretary, who sent it to Elise, who walked into the library at noon with the expression of a woman about to ruin everyone’s digestion.“Your family is coming for dinner,” she said.Yvette looked up from the scanned ledger pages. “Whose family?”Elise pointed at me.I leaned back in my chair. “Absolutely not.”“They are already on the road.”“Turn the road around.”“That is not how roads work, Sandro.”“Then invent something. You are always calling yourself essential.”Elise dropped her phone onto the table. “Your father says the engagement must be acknowledged privately before it is defended publicly. Your mother says she wants to meet your fiancée. Your aunt says the family shoul

Yvette learned about the surveillance because I was careless.That was the version Elise would have used.Grandmother would have called it inevitable.Yvette would have called it proof.The truth was uglier than all three.I had become comfortable with disobedience as long as it stayed quiet.The morning after the clinic photographs went public, the house pretended to be calm. The kiss had done what Elise wanted. The headlines had softened. The worst comments had been drowned by edited clips of Yvette crouching before the little girl with the toy rabbit, by slow-motion images of my hand on Yvette’s shoulder beneath the bougainvillea, by strangers declaring that love looked best when photographed from the correct angle.Elise was pleased.That made her unbearable.“Public sentiment is shifting,” she announced over breakfast, sliding her tablet across the table as if presenting a war trophy. “Victim narrative down twelve percent. Fraud narrative down eight. Romantic mystery up thirty-on