Chapter 3

Prove it.

The words were a death sentence. Dereck Campos wasn't a man who accepted excuses. He wanted evidence. Text messages were useless. He would see through them in a second.

Giselle's eyes darted around the room, searching for a weapon, a tool, anything. They landed on her desk. A bottle of DayQuil, still sealed in its plastic and cardboard prison. She had bought it last week, preparing for the New York winter.

A plan formed. It was desperate, but it was all she had.

She grabbed the phone and opened the voice memo app. She took a deep breath, trying to channel the weakness she felt in her bones. She let the fever do the work. She started to cough, forcing it deep from her chest until it hacked through her vocal cords.

"Daddy..." she rasped into the microphone, her voice raw and thin. "I really am sick... My head is spinning, and I feel so weak..."

She stopped the recording and played it back. It sounded fake. Too performative. She deleted it and tried again. And again. On the fourteenth take, she didn't act. She just let the exhaustion and the terror wash over her. The resulting voice was a frail, trembling whisper that sounded like a ghost.

Good. Now for the visual.

She picked up the bottle of DayQuil. The safety seal was intact. She placed the bottle in her right hand and gripped the cap. Instead of using her palm to apply pressure, she pinched the cap between her thumb and her index finger, digging her knuckles into the sharp plastic ridges.

She twisted. Hard.

The plastic bit into her skin. A sharp, burning sensation flared across her knuckles. She ignored the pain and twisted again. The cap didn't budge, but her skin did. The friction scraped away the top layer, leaving a raw, red patch that immediately began to throb.

She kept twisting for another ten seconds, grinding her bones against the plastic, until her fingers were trembling and the red patch turned an angry, blotchy purple.

She put the bottle down and looked at her hand. It looked pathetic. The skin was broken, the knuckles swollen and red. It looked exactly like the hand of a girl who was too weak to open her own medicine.

She held the phone over her hand, framing the shot carefully. The background was just a blur of white sheets, completely anonymous. She snapped the photo.

She attached the voice memo and the photo to the chat.

"Daddy, I don't know why you're scaring me," she typed, her thumbs flying across the screen. "I'm sick and alone, and now you're saying weird things. I can't even open my medicine bottle... Did I make you angry by cancelling our date? I'm sorry... I'm really sorry..."

She hit send before she could second-guess herself. She dropped the phone on the bed and slid down to the floor, her back against the frame. She pressed her injured hand against her forehead, the coolness of her skin a relief against the fever.

A minute passed. Two. Five.

Then, a chime. Not a text message notification. An email.

Giselle crawled onto the bed and opened her laptop. The email was from a generic banking address. Wire Transfer Confirmation from The Cayman Islands.

She opened it. The number on the screen made her vision blur. $150,000. One hundred and fifty thousand dollars, transferred from an offshore account to the MoonCookie linked account. A line of text at the bottom read: Funds on hold pending recipient identity verification. An account she had the password to. An account that was currently empty because her ex had drained it.

Her phone buzzed. A text from Oero.

Find the best doctor in New York. I don't care what it costs. Consider this a down payment on your recovery. Don't refuse it. And I'm sending my driver to your building to deliver whatever you need.

The room tilted. The money was a trap. The driver was a firing squad. If she accepted the money by verifying her identity, she was a thief. If she let the driver in, he would see her face, see that she wasn't Carleigh, and report back to his boss.

She had to refuse. She had to reject the money from the most powerful man in New York. She logged into the linked bank account on her laptop, her hands shaking, and clicked the bold red button: DECLINE TRANSFER.

Then she picked up the encrypted phone. She couldn't let his driver or any doctor near her apartment.

"No! Absolutely not! Daddy, I appreciate you caring about me, but I don't need a doctor or your driver! I can't accept all this. It makes me feel... overwhelmed."

She was framing it as a moral objection. It was the only angle she had. A greedy sugar baby would take the cash. A girl who actually cared about the relationship might not.

"Please, I'm a big girl. I have my medicine now. Just let me rest. If you send anyone, I won't open the door. Please understand."

She hit send. She grabbed her own phone, the one with the cracked screen, and opened the CVS app. She ordered a bottle of NyQuil and a pack of Gatorade for delivery to her building. She paid the extra fee for one-hour delivery. She needed a real transaction to back up her story.

The silence from Oero's phone was deafening. She could feel him thinking, analyzing, calculating. She had just told a predator no.

Finally, the screen lit up.

Fine. Rest. We'll talk tomorrow.

Giselle let out a sob. She collapsed onto the floor, her body going limp. The cold sweat on her back soaked through her t-shirt. She had survived. For now.

She looked at her laptop screen, still showing the wire transfer. The money was a ghost-a massive sum she couldn't touch without revealing herself. The account itself, drained by her ex, was still functionally empty. The money wasn't gone; it was a trap waiting to be sprung. The debt, however, was very real.

She opened a new spreadsheet. She titled it Project Repayment. She had no money, no connections, and a million-dollar debt to a psychopath. But she had her brain. And she was going to use it to buy her life back.