"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,
