Chapter 2The Brother Who Built My Hell

Three years ago, on the day the Aldridge family brought me back from the foster care system, their Greenwich mansion had been practically drowned in blush-pink balloons.

My mother had wept, soaking the collar of my thrift-store sweater as she clutched me to her chest. My father, a titan of private equity, had slid a stack of black cards into my palm with trembling hands. "Natalie," he had rumbled, his voice thick with emotion, "this is your home now. No one will ever make you feel small again."

Harrison had walked away from a nine-figure merger closing just to cook dinner for my welcome-home party. He had ruffled my hair at the dining table, his blue eyes soft with a big brother’s protective warmth. "You've had it rough, Nat. From now on, you've got me. Nobody touches a hair on your head."

It was the fairy tale I had constructed a thousand times in cold dormitory beds. I thought I had finally crawled out of the gutters of neglect, that this family would be my fortress.

Then, six weeks later, Sienna tumbled down the grand marble staircase.

She was the daughter they had adopted when they thought they would never find me. Sitting in her newly delivered titanium wheelchair, tears streaming down her porcelain cheeks, she had looked at the family and whispered:

"Even if Natalie pushed me, she didn't mean it. It’s my fault. I stole twenty years of her life as the Aldridge daughter. If losing my legs pays for that... I’m glad."

With a single breath, I went from the long-lost daughter to an irredeemable monster.

That night, Harrison pushed open my bedroom door holding a warm glass of milk.

"Natalie," he’d said gently, sitting on the edge of my mattress. "I was harsh earlier. Drink this, get some sleep, and tomorrow we’ll fix everything."

Touched beyond words, terrified of being discarded, I had drained the glass without hesitation.

The last thing I remembered before blacking out was Harrison’s quiet, clinical sigh from above:

"When you do bad things, Natalie, you have to be punished."

When my consciousness reconstituted, I was in that foul, lantern-lit hell. A burly brothel keeper stood over me, swinging a heavy leather strap across my collarbone before I could even draw breath.

"Playing dead, you worthless bitch? The minister's boy is waiting upstairs. Get your ass up and earn your keep!"

From that hour on, I was reduced to a piece of meat.

To survive, I dragged myself through mud and filth, learning how to press my forehead to the dirt and kiss the boots of wealthy sadists. Garrett, who played the minister’s heir, had a fetish for broken bones. He once planted his heel on my sternum and pressed his full weight down until three ribs snapped like dry twigs, watching with dead eyes as I choked on my own blood.

Damian preferred visceral butchery. Over those thirty-six months, the simulation algorithm subjected my avatar to nine phantom pregnancies. Every single time, Damian pinned my head to the floor with his knee, pried my jaws open, and forced a bowl of boiling black pennyroyal down my throat until the lining of my esophagus peeled.

I remembered curling up on the foul straw, feeling warmth and life drain out between my thighs, leaving behind dark, clotted pools. The child inside me never had the chance to draw a simulated breath before it was washed away into the soil. My nails scraped against the brick walls until the beds tore and bled, accompanied only by their raucous, drunken laughter.

Eventually, the system simulated a chronic pelvic infection. My flesh festered; foul fluid seeped from open sores. The madam considered me bad luck and threw me into a crumbling, rat-infested outhouse to rot.

Yet, I endured. I clung to life with a feral, terrifying obstinacy.

All because of my secret promise to the young lord—the man who shared Harrison’s face, the man who stepped through the shadows time and time again to save me.

I have to wake up. I have to make it back to the real world.

During the worst infection, when fever burned through my nervous system and death felt like a welcoming shadow, the young lord had come. He stepped delicately over the filth, knelt in the muck beside my pallet, and used a clean linen cloth to apply soothing balm to my lesions.

"Hold on, Natalie," he had whispered, his voice an oasis in a desert of screams. "Just hold on. I'm going to take you away from here."

Every time he visited, he pulled a warm pastry from his coat, fragrant with honey and cinnamon, carrying the heat of his own body.

I would bury my face in his lap, sobbing until I couldn't breathe. "Harrison... I want to go home... I miss you so much..."

He would stroke my matted hair, his touch infinitely gentle. "Soon, Nat. Just endure a little longer, and I’ll take you home."

Because of those words, I let Garrett grind lit cigar butts into my shoulder blades. I let Brooks flay the skin off my back with his riding crop without biting through my tongue. I rehearsed the speech a million times in the dark: When I wake up, I’ll hold Harrison’s hand. I’ll tell him I'm sorry for whatever I did wrong, and thank him for never leaving me alone.

It was only in the final seconds before my brain flatlined that the truth ripped through me.

The savior who brought me ointment, who listened to me weep, who promised me freedom—the man under the neural interface was my brother.

The savior, the sadist with the cigars, and the butcher with the abortifacient—they were all part of the same VIP suite. Harrison had rented out the system, invited his sociopathic friends, and watched from behind a double-sided monitor as I begged for mercy from his own avatar.

He had constructed a beacon of hope with his own hands, solely so he could watch the light leave my eyes when he shattered it.