Ruined By Design Novels & Stories

"It's the computer blueprints for the designs… They've been altered." A thick silence fell over the room. Eliana's heart raced. "Altered how?" Amara brought up the files on the enormous touchscreen screen. Rather than the sleek, polished designs they had toiled over, the digital patterns were warped, mismatched, and utterly unusable. Some of the changes were subtle—just enough to destroy the precision of the finished product. Others were extreme—making their high-end pieces into catastrophes waiting to happen. Eliana's hands curled into fists. This was no accident.

His thoughts raced, and he muttered to himself, "If those were the little things, what on earth are the main things?" O'Malley didn’t miss a beat. He turned and pointed to the screen behind him, where a rough, incomplete layout of the ruins came into focus. Danial and the others leaned forward, studying the details closely. A portion of the ruins, notably the sections leading deeper underground, appeared blurred and distorted, almost as if the scan had hit an invisible wall.

All of it ugly, all of it mean, all of it designed to destroy everything we'd built. The war wasn't coming. It was here.

I leaned against my car, unbothered “what does that have to do with me, I don’t work for you remember?.” “This isn’t the time for games Clarissa.” I laughed softly. “ you think i have time to play games with you, I’m too busy for that Blake, please don’t call me again” i said and ended the call. A few seconds later, the phone rang again, I picked. But this time his voice was lower, almost like he was pleading. “Please this is important Clarissa, the company is on the verge of bankruptcy, I’m loosing everything Clarissa, everything we built, I’m sorry I kicked you out, but I really need your help right now.”

But somewhere farther up that mountain, a man who believed he was correcting instability had just received confirmation that his design had been broken. And Jaden was not the kind of man who accepted broken systems.

He had weaponized our past and turned our hope to despair. But he had not calculated this. He had not calculated redemption. Lucas's act was an equation that did not balance. A variable that should not exist. It was a flaw in the perfect, cruel logic of his design. And for a mind like his, a flaw was an abomination.

The sound of my ringtone was starting to fucking piss me off. I grabbed my phone from the nightstand just as it stopped ringing. A message notification popped up and I hesitated opening it, but then I did, my expression blank as I read through the message. Dad: Where the hell are you? You’re a fucking disappointment. Do you ever get anything right? Every single time I give you responsibility, you screw it up. You’re still as incompetent as ever. Just useless. A complete failure. I wasn't fazed by his insults. It didn’t even sting anymore. Failure, Incompetent, Useless, Pathetic, Disappointment, name it. There's nothing I've not heard him say.

When I got home, I couldn't stop thinking about his offer. I took out my savings box to calculate how much I had saved so far because I had put in extra money last night only to discover the money was all gone. My body suddenly grew weak as the box fell to my hand. I was supposed to move the money to a bank about a month ago. But I had been procrastinating because of how busy I had been. Now see what it has done to me. I stormed to Sophia's room and pushed the door open. There she was, scrolling through her phone while lying on her bed.

“You better be careful not to ruin the lives of men that have dedicated the entirety of their being to you just because you hold a grudge against your parents and yourself. That self loathe and self destructiveness shouldn’t be the reason you make mistakes that couldn’t ever be reversed.” Alex had exhaled a shaky breath, his locked jaw grinding irritatedly. He spun around on his heels and began making his way out, his words hanging heavy in the air. He wasn’t completely wrong though. I was self destructive, and I was willingly going to destroy myself. And I hadn’t cared who got taken down in the process.

I stared up at the ceiling, heart still racing. What a wild night. I was completely doomed. I shouldn’t have agreed to come to Italy with him. Because it was clear now — he was going to ruin me in bed, night after night. And the worst part was… a small part of me was already afraid of how much I might let him.