Chapter 2Vengeance of the First Love

Nobody knew the real reason I took Molly's three million dollars. I had a younger brother whose kidneys were failing. He was dying.

Our parents had died in a horrific car crash when I was very young. For years, I juggled multiple minimum-wage jobs while going to school, desperately trying to keep my brother, Toby, fed and clothed. He was eight years younger than me.

When he was little, he would rest his chin on my shoulder and whisper softly. "Stella, I'm going to grow up fast."

"When I get big, I'm going to buy you a closet full of beautiful dresses."

He was always such a good kid. He studied hard, stayed out of trouble, and grew from a tiny toddler into a handsome, six-foot-tall young man.

Even when he was confined to a hospital bed, his face pale and sickly after grueling dialysis sessions, he would still hold my hand.

He would tell me over and over again. "Stella, Sebastian is a bad person. You need to leave him."

I would stroke his hair and lie through my teeth. I told him it was fine. I told him Sebastian was just a little immature, but he was a good guy deep down.

Toby would just look at me and silently cry.

He told me he was nothing but a burden. He said he had been dragging me down since he was born.

I wanted to shake him. I wanted to tell him that my Toby was never a burden. He was my only anchor in this brutal world.

People need an anchor to survive.

But then I lost him.

I watched helplessly as the boy I raised was reduced to an urn small enough to hold in my hands.

My only tether to this world was gone.

The day the doctor told me I needed to be hospitalized for my own failing health, Sebastian's first love touched down at the international airport.

It was treated like a royal homecoming.

A mutual friend screenshotted Sebastian's Instagram story for me. It was a photo of the two of them. Molly looked breathtaking in a white designer dress, stepping out of the private terminal with a massive bouquet of roses pressed to her chest. She looked elegant, wealthy, and flawless.

The caption read: "Finally."

The comments were flooded with his elite friends kissing their feet.

Sebastian actually seemed to care about Molly. He wiped his social media completely clean of his playboy past. He curated his image to look like a devoted man who had spent years waiting for his true love to return.

If he hadn't used a burner phone to text me at two in the morning, I might have actually believed he had changed.

The text read: "Stella, if you behave and crawl back, I'll pretend your little tantrum never happened."

I blocked that number too.

What a piece of trash.

Three years ago, just days after Toby was admitted to the ICU, a mountain of medical debt threatened to bury me alive.

That was when Molly found me online.

She offered me a deal. If I agreed to act as Sebastian's girlfriend, report his every move to her, and keep him occupied until she returned, she would wire me three million dollars.

I agreed in a heartbeat. That money was Toby's lifeline.

My logic was beautifully simple back then. I just wanted the cash to cure Toby, and then we would vanish together.

God only knows how exhausting it was to play the submissive, sweet girlfriend for three years. There were so many days I fantasized about kicking Sebastian down a flight of stairs.

I finally held out until Molly returned. The moment I tasted freedom, the air had never felt sweeter.

Go back to him?

He could rot in hell.