I have a goal on Ko-fi to try and buy a new Laptop. If anyone can donate to help me, I would be grateful. I haven’t received a single donation yet ???
….
The light of morning didn’t have the same aggressiveness as yesterday’s. It slipped through the slats of the living-room blinds more gently, painting golden stripes across the mattress where Bianca and I were still tangled together. I tried to stretch, but my body sent an immediate, painful reminder: my ribs were still far from healed. With every deep breath, a sharp twinge reminded me of the night in the sewers, and the effort of a night of pleasure with Bianca had left my muscles with that “ground down” feeling—a mix of pleasant fatigue and very real physical exhaustion.
I stared at the ceiling for a few moments, processing the apartment’s silence. Right then and there, I decided that college would have to wait. Trying to carry a heavy backpack and walk between classrooms in that state would be pure masochism. I needed at least another day or two of absolute rest if I wanted to be whole for whatever Artem and Jonathan were planning for the end of the week.
I felt movement beside me. Bianca began to wake, stretching her arms above her head in a fluid, carefree motion. The blouse she had worn yesterday had been lost somewhere in the living room, and she didn’t seem to care in the slightest about her own nudity. She opened her eyes, met mine, and a sweet smile—something I never would have imagined seeing on her face a few months ago—lit up her expression.
“Good morning,” she whispered, her voice still hoarse with sleep.
She leaned in and sealed our lips in a light, almost chaste kiss, yet loaded with a tenderness that said more than a thousand words. Bianca got up from the mattress with feline naturalness. I stayed there, lying down, admiring the sight of her walking toward the kitchen. The way her ass swayed from side to side, her pale skin catching the morning light… it was a vision that could heal any wound. She was the center of attention on any runway in the world, but there, barefoot and tousled in my apartment, she seemed far more real and precious.
“Don’t you dare get up from there, Luke,” she called from the kitchen, the sound of dishes and the coffee maker beginning to fill the space. “I’m making breakfast. I know your body is still complaining, and today I’m your private nurse again.”
I smiled, closing my eyes again for a moment. It was strange how life had taken this turn. I, who had always been the protector, was now being pampered by the woman who once looked down on me.
After a hearty breakfast that she insisted on practically feeding me herself, Bianca began to get ready. She had a few unavoidable commitments—contracts that couldn’t be postponed again. Before leaving, she stopped at the door, checking that I had water and my medication nearby.
“Take proper care of yourself, hear me? If I come back and find you straining yourself, you’ll see,” she teased, giving me one last kiss before closing the door.
I was left alone with my thoughts. The peace of the apartment was a violent contrast to the whirlwind inside my head. I picked up my phone and opened the group chat. I wrote to Vanessa and Sofia, letting them know I’d be missing college again.
“Still a bit broken from the ‘sewer trip.’ I’m staying home today to catch my breath. See you soon.”
Vanessa’s reply came almost instantly: Rest, my love.
Sofia sent only a heart emoji and a knife—her way of saying she was worried, but would kill me if I didn’t take care of myself.
The day passed at a slow pace. I dozed, watched a few documentaries without really paying attention, and applied ointment to my ribs. The purple bruising was starting to turn yellow around the edges—a sign the inflammation was receding. Still, the isolation began to make me restless. Around 6:00 p.m., the daylight was already fading. Bianca still hadn’t returned, probably stuck in some endless photo shoot.
The silence was broken by the shrill ring of my phone. I glanced at the screen, expecting Vanessa’s or Bianca’s name, but the name that appeared made me frown: Olivia. I slid the call icon up and answered.
“Hi, Olivia.”
“Luke… help me.” Her voice came out desperate and breathless, as if she were running.
“What happened?” I asked, worried.
“They… they’re after me… Don’t—ah, let go of me.”
Olivia’s words were cut off by a scream.
“Olivia?”
“We’re taking her to the karaoke… let go.” I heard a familiar voice—and Olivia’s—before the call ended.
There was only one karaoke bar in the city. I left the house to go there.
…
(POV Olivia)
Last Saturday.
The ceiling of my bedroom looked more monotonous than usual. I was sprawled on the bed, staring at the plaster and wondering whether my life would boil down to being “Popular Olivia”—the one who smiles at everyone in the hallway, only to return to an empty apartment where the only sound is the upstairs neighbor dragging furniture around. I was bored, wrapped in a dry melancholy that was broken only by the sharp vibration of my phone on the nightstand.
It was Vanessa.
Ever since we’d become “best friends,” my routine had gained colors I didn’t even know existed. Vanessa doesn’t ask—she summons. And honestly? I loved it. By her side, I wasn’t the idol of a bunch of college idiots; I didn’t need to polish my image for a fan club of boys who barely knew my last name. With her, I felt real. She invited me to a “girls’ day” with Sofia. I knew little about Sofia, only what I’d picked up at our last lunch: she was Luke’s shadow from the past, a childhood friend who seemed to carry something dark behind those green eyes.
Obviously, I said yes.
At the agreed time, the sound of a powerful engine echoed down the narrow street. I looked out the window and saw Vanessa’s sleek car parked in front of my gray building. I practically ran downstairs. When I got in, the smell of new leather and imported perfume enveloped me. Vanessa was impeccable, wearing her signature designer sunglasses that hid any trace of fatigue. Sofia sat in the back seat, reserved but greeting me with a gentle nod.
The day was, genuinely, the best I’d had in months. At the mall, we were just three young women browsing storefronts. We bought clothes I probably wouldn’t have anywhere to wear, ate ice cream while laughing about celebrity gossip Vanessa swore she knew firsthand, and for a few hours the silent rivalry between us—the obvious fact that we all wanted Luke’s heart—took a back seat. There was an unspoken truce, a camaraderie forged by shared admiration for the same man.
When night began to fall and the city lights came on, Vanessa suggested it: “Pajama party at my place. No excuses.”
Sofia and I exchanged a look and agreed. Vanessa insisted on taking us to our places to grab overnight bags and toiletries. The mood was light—but everything changed when the car approached the gates of her family’s mansion.
I felt the temperature in the car change before I even saw what was happening. Vanessa slammed on the brakes so hard the tires squealed on the asphalt. Her hands—always so steady on the wheel—were visibly shaking. Her eyes were fixed on a black sedan pulling out of the property.
“That car…” she whispered, her voice breaking.
As soon as the vehicle disappeared, Vanessa shot out of the car before I could even unbuckle my seatbelt. She ran toward the mansion entrance, the elegance from minutes earlier replaced by visceral desperation. She shouted for a single person, her voice echoing across the marble courtyard:
“DAD!”
Artem, who was standing near the entrance, spun around in shock. The look on his face was that of someone caught in an act of betrayal. He hadn’t expected his daughter to return at that moment. Sofia and I got out of the car and approached in silence, like shadowy spectators to a drama far bigger than we could understand.
“Why were you in Jonathan’s car?” Vanessa fired, her words coming out like knives. Her tone was something I’d never heard before—a mix of wounded authority and pure terror.
Artem ran a hand over his forehead, a rare gesture of fragility. He sighed deeply, his shoulders sagging, and saw there was no way to hide the truth anymore.
“We carried out Luke’s plan today, Vanessa.”
My heart jumped so hard I felt it slam against my chest. Luke. Vanessa’s father spoke his name with a familiarity that made me dizzy. Were they accomplices? Had they been working together while we ate ice cream?
“You said it would be tomorrow!” Vanessa screamed, stepping closer. “You lied to me!”
“Luke asked me to lie,” Artem replied, his voice gaining a sad firmness. “He didn’t want you staying up all night sick with worry. He wanted you to have this day with your friends.”
I watched the color drain completely from Vanessa’s pale skin, turning translucent like cold porcelain. “Where is he? Where is he, Dad?”
“He’s on his way… I hope,” Artem confessed—and that I hope terrified me most. If a man like him was uncertain, what was Luke facing? “He and his associate—the guy he brought—worked in the shadows. Since they couldn’t be caught by Jonathan and his guards, they had to keep a dangerous distance, act on the edge.”
I didn’t understand half the terms, didn’t know who Jonathan was, but the panic in Vanessa’s eyes and Sofia’s rigid silence beside me told me Luke was walking a razor’s edge. The air seemed to thin.
We stood there under the night sky, time dragging on in leaden seconds. Until the sound of an engine approached. A battered car, marked by dust and haste, pulled onto the mansion grounds.
Artem let out a sigh of relief that seemed to lift tons from his shoulders. A tense but genuine smile appeared on his face. “It worked. They made it.”
I stared at the car as it stopped, my hands sweating. Luke was inside. He had faced danger while I chose dresses. And in that moment, I realized that the life I knew—the life of empty popularity and trivial problems—was over for good. I was submerged in his world now.
The dying engine was replaced by a sepulchral silence that seemed to weigh tons. When the car door opened, my heart raced in a way I couldn’t control. I expected to see the usual Luke—the confident guy with that crooked smile that disarmed any of us. But the man who emerged from the dented metal left me frozen, my icy hands glued to my sides.
He looked like he’d just come off a battlefield. His clothes were torn, smeared with grease and something I knew, with a knot in my stomach, was blood. Dark bruises were forming on his face, and he moved with a stiffness that betrayed battered ribs. Vanessa didn’t hesitate. She let out a choked sob, tears finally breaking past her lashes, and ran to him. She wrapped him in a desperate embrace, as if trying to keep his pieces together.
I watched the scene in a painful trance. I saw Luke return the hug with difficulty, whispering into her hair: “It worked, Vanessa… it’s over.”
He felt the weight of our gazes. He knew that after that scene, there was no keeping us in the dark. With a tired nod from Artem, Luke sat on the entrance steps, breathing heavily, and began to unravel the web of lies around us.
He talked about Jonathan—a name that now sounded like a sentence. He explained how the man had been trying to use Artem’s empire to launder money and expand a drug route, using blackmail over a residency visa like a knife at Vanessa’s father’s throat. He explained the risky plan he’d carried out in the shadows to break that cycle, and the brutal fight that followed to ensure the files reached the right hands.
As he spoke, Sofia stepped closer. She didn’t say a word, but her expression was bitter—a mask of hurt and contained fury. She grabbed a first-aid kit and began cleaning his cuts with mechanical motions, almost aggressive in their tension. It became obvious that she, the childhood friend, had also been kept in the dark. The betrayal of trust seemed to hurt her as much as the cuts hurt him.
Me? I just watched, feeling small. I looked at the broken man before me, and a selfish, painful question hammered my mind: He risked his life for her. He bled to keep Vanessa’s world intact. Would he do the same for me? I was just “popular Olivia,” the ordinary girl he barely knew compared to the other two.
The night passed in a blur. The tension in the mansion was so thick we could barely breathe. By a tacit need for safety and comfort, the three of us—me, Vanessa, and Sofia—decided to sleep in Vanessa’s huge bedroom. We spread sheets and settled in, but the air was heavy. No one brought it up. Luke’s name wasn’t spoken, but he was the only thing on our minds. As I closed my eyes, trying to calm my pulse, the image of him—wounded and heroic—was the last thing I saw.
In the middle of the night, I woke with a chill. The room was bathed in a bluish dimness, and my eyes took a moment to focus. I reached out on the mattress beside me, expecting to feel the warmth of the others, but found only cold sheets.
Vanessa and Sofia weren’t there.
The room was empty, the door ajar letting a sliver of light spill in from the hallway. A dark premonition, mixed with a curiosity burning in my chest, made me get up.
I walked barefoot through the corridors of Vanessa’s mansion, feeling the cold marble rise up my legs. The silence of the house was absolute, broken only by the heavy, rhythmic sound of my own heart, which seemed to want to escape my chest. Every shadow cast by statues and expensive vases seemed to watch me, but I couldn’t stop. I was being drawn by an invisible magnet toward the guest room—the place where Luke had been left to rest, or so I thought.
I reached the door with trembling hands and a dry throat. That’s when I heard it: not cries of pain or the coughing of a wounded man, but a symphony of muffled sounds, sharp moans, and the unmistakable noise of bodies colliding with primal urgency.
An inner voice screamed for me to turn back, to run to the bedroom and pretend I’d never left the sheets. But curiosity—that dark desire to see what lay behind the veil—spoke louder. I turned the doorknob with millimetric slowness, the cold metal creaking almost imperceptibly, until a slit of golden light escaped from within.
What I saw made me freeze, my breath trapped in my lungs.
There was Luke—the man who hours earlier had seemed on the verge of collapse—now transformed into a center of carnal gravity. Sofia and Vanessa were on him in a wild act, devoid of any hesitation or rivalry. The lamp light accentuated the sweat on Luke’s back and the way Vanessa’s hands gripped his shoulders, while Sofia, with an expression of absolute surrender I never imagined seeing on that rigid woman, merged with him in a frenetic rhythm.
It was a scene of adoration and lust, where Luke’s blood from battle seemed to have turned into fuel for that insatiable desire. My mind short-circuited. Thousands of questions spun: How did they manage to set jealousy aside? Since when was this planned?
But reality hit me like a punch when Vanessa’s voice rose among the moans, hoarse and charged with dark intent: she wanted me there too.
My blood ran cold. I hadn’t just heard my name—I’d heard an invitation. Did they know? Were they waiting for me? The idea of the three of us together, surrendered to the same man, defied all logic of my life.
I slammed the door shut and slid my back down the wood, sitting on the cold hallway floor. The sound of my rapid breathing was all I heard now, drowning out the noises still coming from the room. My heart hammered against my ribs, and the image of that triple surrender looped before my eyes like a film on repeat.
Involuntarily, my hand slid down beneath the thin fabric of my pajamas, finding its way into my panties. I was soaked. The heat emanating from between my legs was a violent contrast to the cold marble. The initial shock was quickly being replaced by visceral arousal, a hunger I had never allowed myself to feel.
The idea of opening that door again, of walking toward that bed and joining them, no longer felt like a mistake or an absurdity. It felt… inevitable. I stayed there, on the edge between sanity and desire, feeling the pulse of my own body betray me.
