Chapter 1His Regret After Live Streaming My Detox

Three years with terminal bone cancer.

The ex I'd "abandoned"—now a detective—stormed into my apartment as I reached for morphine just to stay upright.

He watched, coldly sneering, as I shook on the floor. "Seven years, and you're a junkie now? Where's that gold-digger pride?"

Trembling, I pointed. "Please… the medicine."

Vincent laughed, snatched the bottle, and flushed it all. "Want it? Go to rehab."

Looming over me, he added, "Seems when you ran off, your bones rotted too."

Agony ripped through me; I curled up, shaking. "Am I… going to die?"

He just filmed my suffering. "For the anti-drug campaign," he said.

* * *

“Get the camera rolling,” Vincent barked at his subordinate.

“Zoom in. Close-up on her face. I don’t want to miss a single, pathetic detail. This will be the most powerful lesson in our new PSA.”

The flashbulb went off, blinding me as the lens focused on my sweat-drenched face.

The pain was a living thing inside my skeleton, a million ants with fiery teeth gnawing at the marrow of my bones. It was an itch I couldn't scratch, a fire I couldn't put out. I tried to claw at my own limbs, but my nails only scraped against the cold linoleum, a sound like screeching metal.

Vincent crouched down, the tip of his black baton forcing my chin up. His face was a mask of disgust.

“Look at the state of you. Even the stray dogs in the alley have more dignity.”

My vision blurred. All I could see was the sharp line of his jaw, a line I once loved to trace with my fingertips.

“Meds…” I squeezed the word from my throat, a dry, desperate whisper, and reached for the hem of his pants.

Just then, a figure in a white coat stepped into the room.

It was Sophia.

The squad’s medic. Vincent’s trusted right hand. And once upon a time, my best friend.

Her eyes swept over me, lingering for a moment on the faint, scarred lump just below my collarbone—my chemo port.

“Oh my god, Vincent, look at her arm,” Sophia gasped, her voice a perfect symphony of feigned shock. “Classic track marks from long-term IV drug use. They’ve formed a venous cord. Can you imagine the kind of addiction it takes to do this to yourself?”

I opened my mouth, wanting to scream that it wasn’t a track mark, that it was a port for my treatment. But my throat was a desert, scorched raw by pain. All that came out was a dry, rattling hiss.

Hearing Sophia’s “expert” diagnosis, the last flicker of complicated emotion in Vincent’s eyes vanished, replaced by pure, undiluted loathing.

He kicked my hand away from his pants with a vicious snarl.

“Don’t touch me!”

The force of the blow sent me rolling into the corner. My bones hit the wall with a dull, heavy thud, and a new, blinding wave of pain exploded through my body.

“Make the announcement,” Vincent’s voice echoed in the small room, cold and final. “The suspect, Clara Hayes, will be put under a twenty-four-hour mandatory ‘detox’ live stream.”

“Let everyone see what drugs do. Let them watch how a once-beautiful woman can become this… this thing. Neither human nor ghost.”

“Captain, that’s… that’s not exactly by the book,” a younger officer stammered.

Vincent whipped his head around, his eyes bloodshot, his voice a low, furious growl. “For a dealer who treats human life like a joke, you don’t go by the book. You make an example. I want every potential user out there to see this. This is their future. If there’s any fallout, I’ll take the heat. All of it.”