"Enough! Tilly, stay out of this. I'll deal with what happened with Lucinda myself."

His grip was crushing. My thin wrist throbbed under his fingers, the skin already flushing an angry red.

I looked up into his eyes and found something that stopped me cold—wariness. The kind of guarded vigilance reserved for someone he considered a threat.

I laughed.

Something stirred in the dead hollow of my chest. Not sorrow. Not resignation. Anger.

What gave him the right to assume I was the one capable of hurting someone?

Just because she was Lucinda Vance?

My heart clenched like a fist. I tightened my grip on the whip and swung it straight at Nathan—

"No!"

A slender figure threw herself forward, shielding him with her body.

The whip cracked through the air, sharp and shrill.

"Ah!"

Lucinda cried out, her delicate frame swaying once before she crumpled.

Nathan caught her. When he lifted his gaze, his eyes were glacial.

"Tilly, you've gone too far this time!"

He turned on his heel, Lucinda limp in his arms, and the door slammed behind him hard enough to rattle the walls.

I stood there, alone. The whip trembled in my hand until my fingers gave out and it clattered to the floor.

That night, after the nurse finished her rounds, someone lunged from the darkness and clamped a cloth over my mouth and nose.

A sharp, chemical smell flooded my sinuses. I thrashed twice before the world dissolved.

When I woke, everything was black.

A blindfold pressed tight against my eyes. My wrists were bound to a chair, every muscle locked in place.

Crack.

The first lash struck my chest. Pain tore from my collarbone down to my stomach, and my spine arched involuntarily.

"This is what happens when you cross someone you shouldn't have crossed. Consider it punishment."

The voice came from directly in front of me.

Crack. Crack. Crack.

The lashes fell like a downpour, each one splitting the air before splitting my skin. I could feel myself coming apart—wet, raw, burning.

"Is this because of Lucinda?"

I bit down on my lip until I tasted iron, forcing the words out through clenched teeth.

The whip paused. Ten seconds. Twenty.

Then it came down harder. Faster.

It went on and on, until my thoughts blurred at the edges and my body stopped registering individual strikes. Only when I was barely conscious did it finally stop.

Then—the sound of a phone being dialed.

"Sir, ma'am, it's done." The man's voice was deferential. Polished.

From the other end of the line, a woman's voice. Familiar.

"Good. I'll pass the word along to Mr. Sanchez. Take her back."

Every drop of blood in my body turned to ice.

That was my mother's voice.

One accidental lash on Lucinda—and they'd repaid me with ninety-nine.

Agony and cold devoured me whole. Inside my mind, the System's voice flickered to life.

[Host, hold on. I'll bring you home soon.]

I didn't expect to open my eyes again.

The doctor told me I'd been unconscious for half a month.

My parents and Nathan had kept vigil at my bedside every single day—donating blood, flying in the best specialists money could buy, doing everything in their power to pull me back from the edge.

When Nathan reached over to press the nurse call button, his sleeve rode up. The skin of his wrist was striped with welts.

His eyes were heavy with guilt. "Tilly, I failed you. I let someone take you, let them hurt you like this. However many lashes you took, I gave myself the same. I wanted to carve your pain into my bones—so I'd remember. So I'd never let it happen again."

I laughed. Tears spilled down my cheeks.

He was the one who'd ordered it.

I turned my face away. I didn't want to waste another word on him.

Nathan took my silence for sulking. Every day after that, a fresh bouquet of Juliet roses arrived—flown in from halfway across the world.

My parents, too, showered me with gifts. Couture gowns. Diamond jewelry. One extravagant offering after another.

But every time they left, like clockwork, a text would light up my phone.

Lucinda, lounging in a sea of Juliet roses worth a fortune,

The broken stems on the ground were identical to the ones Nathan had given me.

The jewelry my parents had sent over was clearly castoff pieces from Lucinda's wardrobe—I could tell at a glance.

"Trash gifts for a trash person. If I were living your life, sis, I'd have killed myself already. Hehe."

No need to guess who sent that message.

When I woke again that night, my hands and feet were bound. Strapped to my chest was a bomb with a fifteen-minute countdown timer.

Lucinda was there with me.

She wasn't the least bit panicked. When she saw me open my eyes, she fixed me with a vicious smile.

"Matilda, take a guess—if we're both kidnapped at the same time, who do you think Nathan and Mom and Dad will come to save? Oh, and here's something you didn't know. I'm carrying Nathan's baby. He'll choose me. And you? You were always meant to be abandoned."

I thought of the lipstick mark on Nathan's neck that day. I wasn't surprised in the slightest.

When I showed no reaction, Lucinda stood and slapped me hard across the face, then pressed her foot down on the unhealed whip wounds across my chest.

The pain drained the color from my face. I clenched my jaw until my teeth ached.

"You worthless bitch! Ha! How does it feel? You should've died out there! Who told you to come crawling back and steal my money and my Nathan?! All I had to do was shed a few tears, and those three pathetic lapdogs hired kidnappers to set you up—had you whipped ninety-nine times! You cling to them like gum on a shoe, and it's disgusting! They don't love you anymore! Why won't you just leave?!"

She grew more frenzied with every word.

By the end, she was grinding her heel into my skull as if venting every ounce of hatred she'd ever felt.

My cheek scraped against the rough concrete floor. My face burned like it was being pricked by a thousand needles.

She didn't stop until the shrill screech of tires sounded outside.

Lucinda looked down at me with the imperious gaze of someone who'd already won.

"Matilda, your time is up. This bomb is real. The detonator is in my hand. The moment I walk out that door, I'll trigger it. So go ahead and die."

Blood ran down my face. I didn't care.

It didn't matter who they chose. I hadn't planned on surviving anyway.

A commotion erupted outside. Moments later, several bodyguards in black escorted Nathan and my parents through the door.

Their eyes locked onto Lucinda almost instantly.

A flash of triumph darted through Lucinda's gaze before she crumpled into a picture of fragile, weeping helplessness.

"Nathan… Mom, Dad, please save me, I'm so scared. They hit me, they screamed at me—the baby, the baby can't take it…"

The anguish in Nathan's eyes was so thick it practically spilled over.

My parents were even worse. Ignoring the knife-wielding kidnappers entirely, they stepped closer to Lucinda, pleading, "We'll agree to anything you want. Just please—let our daughter go!"

But when the kidnappers asked who they wanted to save, they hesitated.

"Both of them. We'll pay more."

The kidnapper shook his head and pressed a blade to Lucinda's throat. "You can only pick one."

Nathan closed his eyes. Then, abruptly, he turned to me. "Matilda, why did you run off on your own?"

I had nothing to say. But something dark flickered behind his eyes, and his expression turned so cold it could have frozen ink.

"I'm saving Lucinda."

"Matilda, you orchestrated this whole thing yourself, didn't you? All because you couldn't get over the whipping? I already found out everything. How can you be this vile?"

"Ever since you came back to the Vance family, Lucinda has bent over backward for you—terrified of doing the slightest thing wrong in case it triggered an episode. We all know your depression is an act. We chose not to call you out, and you just pushed further and further!"

"I'm saving Lucinda. Consider this a lesson. When you've come to your senses, find your own way back. And stop staging these fake suicide attempts. You don't actually want to die. Eleven trips to the ICU and you still haven't had enough of the act? Well, I've had enough of playing along. We're leaving. You're on your own."

I drew a deep breath and let a faint smile surface.

Nathan's heart clenched without warning—a sharp, sudden sting, as though something precious was slipping through his fingers.

Lucinda clutched at his wrist. "Nathan, my stomach hurts so much... the baby must be suffering..."

At the mention of the baby, Nathan pushed the feeling aside. He scooped Lucinda into his arms and carried her out of the abandoned factory.

The kidnappers had tied me to a pillar. They were already gone, fled through the back door.

I could barely lift my eyelids. I made one final deal with the system.

"Every point I have—cash them all out. Everything that's happened, every last detail from the past and today, broadcast it on the public screen for the entire world to see."

The words had barely left my lips when—

BOOM.

A deafening explosion tore through the building. Fire surged upward like a living thing and swallowed me whole.

My parents and Nathan whipped around. The column of flame lit up the sky, and every drop of color drained from their faces.

Two voices rang out at the same time:

"Tilly!"

Congratulations, Host! Welcome home!