Chapter 1

For two years, I believed I was the luckiest woman alive.

I was living with Liam Hayes, the tech mogul whose face was on every business magazine. After a terrible car accident, he' d lost his memory. He didn' t remember his company, his friends, or his past. But he remembered me. Or so he said.

He' d claimed he saw my face in his fractured memories, a beacon in the fog. He pursued me with a relentless, dizzying passion that swept me off my feet. I, a struggling artist barely making rent, found myself in a fairy tale.

I played along. I became the girlfriend he thought I was. I filled in the blanks of his "lost" memories with stories of a love that had never existed before the crash. It started as a game, a kindness to a man who seemed so lost. But somewhere along the way, I fell for him. Deeply.

Today, the two-year anniversary of his accident, was supposed to be special. I held a positive pregnancy test in my trembling hand. My heart hammered against my ribs. I was going to tell him. We were going to be a real family.

I walked towards his home office, the little plastic stick hidden in my pocket. I wanted to see the look on his face. I stopped outside the door, hearing voices. He was on a video call. I smiled, deciding to wait a moment.

Then I heard her voice, a voice I hadn't heard in years but could never forget. Chloe Jenkins. My rival from college, the one who always saw me as a threat.

"Liam, are you almost done?" Chloe's voice was like sugar-coated poison. "It' s been two whole years. Ninety-nine times. You promised."

My blood ran cold. I pressed my ear against the wood of the door.

Liam' s rich, familiar laugh filled the room. It wasn't the gentle laugh I knew. This was sharp, cynical. "Patience, my love. One more to go. We need to hit the century mark. It' s more poetic that way."

"I can' t believe you actually kept it up for so long," Chloe said, a hint of admiration in her tone. "Faking amnesia. It's brilliantly cruel. Especially for Ava Miller."

"Ninety-nine pranks, Chloe. Ninety-nine times we've made her look like a fool," Liam said. "Remember when we replaced her gallery submission with a child' s drawing? Or when we convinced her that her favorite, very-much-alive painter had died and I 'bought' her his last, forged painting?"

Their laughter echoed through the door, a physical force that made me stumble back.

My mind reeled, flashing through the endless small humiliations, the "unfortunate accidents" and "silly misunderstandings" of the past two years. The ruined artworks. The canceled shows. The public embarrassments. Each time, Liam had been there to comfort me, to hold me, his eyes full of fake sympathy.

"Just one more, Liam," Chloe purred. "Then you're mine. You get back at her for me, and I' ll finally agree to date you. One hundred pranks, one hundred proofs of your love for me."

"Anything for you, Chloe," Liam replied, his voice dripping with an adoration I'd once believed was for me. "She was just a means to an end. A pawn."

A pawn.

The word slammed into me. The pregnancy test in my pocket felt like a block of ice. My love, our life, our future baby-it was all just the punchline to a very long, very sick joke. I was a game piece in his twisted quest to win back his long-lost love.

I backed away from the door, my hand clamped over my mouth to stifle a sob. My fairy tale had been a cage. My prince was a monster.

He wanted one hundred pranks. A century of my pain.

A slow, cold smile spread across my face. It felt alien. He was right. It did need to hit one hundred.

But the final prank would be mine.

He would find me in the wreckage of a boating accident. He would search frantically, his heart breaking for the woman he' d tormented. And in the debris, he' d find a single locket.

Inside, an inscription: "100th prank: I bet you love me."

He would collapse. He would be hospitalized. He would be broken.

And I, from a secluded cabin in some snowy, forgotten mountain range, would watch his world burn to the ground. He faked amnesia to play with my heart.

I would fake my death to teach him what it truly means to lose everything.

I remembered the early days of the "prank." A few months in, Liam threw a lavish party. He invited all his wealthy, entitled friends. They all knew about his "amnesia." They all came to watch the show.

That night, my portfolio, which I had spent months preparing for a major grant application, was "accidentally" destroyed. A server, one of his friends in disguise, spilled an entire tray of red wine over it. Liam had rushed to my side, his face a mask of concern.

"Ava, I'm so sorry! This is horrible!" he'd said, wrapping his arms around me as his friends snickered behind their hands.

I had cried in his arms, believing his comfort was real. Now, the memory made my stomach turn. I saw it for what it was: a performance for an audience of vipers.

Just last month, he' d found one of my old sketchbooks. He' d flipped through it, his eyes wide with what I thought was admiration. "You're so talented, Ava. It's incredible."

I later found that sketchbook in the trash, pages torn out, with notes scribbled in the margins in Liam's handwriting. "Prank #92: Compliment her mediocre scribbles. Reaction: blushed, almost cried. Pathetic."

He kept a log. A detailed, numbered list of my every humiliation.

He would hold me at night, whispering about how I was his anchor, the only thing that felt real in his confusing world. He' d kiss the paint stains on my fingers and call them stardust.

And then he would meet with Chloe and his friends and laugh about how gullible I was. How easily I believed the lies.

The contrast was sickening. The man who made me breakfast in bed was the same man who plotted to ruin my career. The man who nursed me through a fever was the same man who numbered my heartbreaks like trophies. The sickness of it all rose in my throat, hot and bitter.