Chapter 1Our Beautiful Terrible Lie

The third time the System ordered me to humiliate Liam, the brooding, broke campus legend I had once adored, I hesitated.

My voice was a guilty whisper in my own mind. "Do I really have to burn him with the cigarette?"

The man kneeling on the floor, surrounded by scattered hundred-dollar bills, inexplicably looked up, his eyes dark and unreadable.

The System’s voice was cold steel in my head. Deviation from the script will result in punishment.

A chill crawled up my spine.

But in the next second, something impossible happened.

Liam lunged forward, snatching the smoldering cigarette from between my fingers. With a choked gasp, he pressed it into the back of his own hand.

His eyes, blazing with a fierce, restrained disgust, met mine.

"Stop the act," he rasped, his voice raw.

I froze.

I hadn't said a word out loud.

How did he just play out the scene by himself?

* * *

The third time the System issued its directive—Humiliate Liam Walsh—I took the wad of cash he’d handed me and flung it into the air.

The crisp hundred-dollar bills rained down around us like crimson confetti in the dim light of the club.

His face, usually a mask of indifference, tightened for a fraction of a second. His thin lips pressed into a hard line.

I curved my own lips into the sneer the script demanded. "Kneel," I said, my voice dripping with manufactured scorn. "Pick up every last one. Do that, and maybe I’ll consider forgiving the interest you owe me."

It was a perfect, cliché villainess line.

We were in Onyx, a place where the city's elite came to burn through their trust funds. The colored light from the bar glinted off bottles of liquor that cost more than a semester's tuition. In the velvet-draped booths of this gilded cage, anything could happen. Forcing a scholarship kid to his knees over a little debt? That was so mundane it wouldn’t even earn a second glance from the table next to us.

Liam's shadowed gaze darkened. A flash of anger, there and gone, replaced by that familiar, cold detachment. His obsidian eyes swept over me once, then he slowly, deliberately, knelt.

He actually began gathering the scattered bills.

A wave of snickering rippled through my friends.

"No way, he's actually doing it. So much for pride. I heard he was some kind of legend at Blackwood University. Doesn't he have any self-respect?"

Someone else scoffed. "Self-respect? Genevieve's family paid for his scholarship. The guy doesn't own the shirt on his back. What right does he have to self-respect?"

"He really thought because Gen played with him for a couple of months, he could climb his way into the Sinclair fortune. Pathetic."

The people in my circle were all heirs to one fortune or another, but the Sinclair name carried more weight. They orbited me, and seeing me put Liam in his place was just another form of entertainment, another chance to get on my good side.

The man on the floor didn't even look up. His face was lost in the shadows, but I could see the tension in his hand as he gripped the money, his knuckles white.

He could take it.

Of course he could. This was the man who would one day become a ruthless titan of industry, cold and untouchable.

The laughter around me continued.

Laugh it up, I thought, a bitter taste in my mouth. You're all on his hit list. Enjoy the party while it lasts.

Oh, right. So was I.

I reached for my cigarette, my hand trembling slightly. I tapped the ash into the crystal tray. Tapped it again. And again.

Stop it. Stop shaking.

On the outside, I was Genevieve Sinclair, the cruel, untouchable heiress. On the inside, I was out of options.

I screamed at the System in the privacy of my mind. "Are you absolutely sure he won't have me murdered the second he gets a chance?"

We guarantee your safety upon completion of the plot, it replied, its tone maddeningly serene.

"That's not a no!"