Chapter 1

Ethan Miller stared at the lines of code on his screen until they blurred into a meaningless river of green and black. He was building a world from scratch, a small, pixelated universe that was his escape and his passion. But tonight, the passion wasn't flowing. His fingers felt heavy on the keyboard.

He pushed his chair back, the wheels groaning on the worn wooden floor of his small apartment. He needed a break. He picked up his phone, his thumb moving almost on its own, opening the social media app he usually avoided.

The top trending video was a livestream from the "Innovate Tomorrow" tech gala, the biggest event of the year. He almost scrolled past it, a world of corporate excess he had no interest in. But the camera panned across the glittering crowd, and a woman' s laugh, bright and familiar, caught his attention through the phone' s tiny speaker.

His heart stopped.

It was Chloe. His fiancée.

She was on the arm of a man old enough to be her father, a man he recognized instantly from tech journals: Julian Harrison, the billionaire mogul behind Harrison Dynamics. She was looking up at him, her smile wide and dazzling, a smile he thought was reserved only for him.

He zoomed in. The image became grainy, but the scene was clear. The way her hand rested on Harrison' s tuxedo sleeve, the way her head tilted just so. It wasn' t the polite gesture of a guest; it was intimate. Possessive.

A cold dread washed over him. It couldn't be. Chloe was supposed to be at a "networking event for her influencer brand." She had said it was boring, just a bunch of handshakes and fake smiles.

Then his eyes locked onto a detail on her wrist. A diamond-and-sapphire tennis bracelet. It glittered under the ballroom lights, catching the camera' s flash. He knew that bracelet. She had shown it to him online a month ago, her voice full of longing. "Isn' t it perfect, Ethan?"

He had looked at the price tag-more than he made in a year from his freelance coding jobs-and his stomach had twisted. "It' s beautiful, Chloe, but... you know I can' t..."

"I know," she had sighed, the disappointment clear in her voice.

Now, it was on her wrist.

The initial shock in Ethan' s chest curdled into a hot, burning anger. The air in his small apartment suddenly felt suffocating. The game on his monitor seemed childish, a pathetic little dream.

He didn' t think. He just moved.

He grabbed his keys from the hook by the door, his worn-out sneakers slapping against the floor as he ran. He needed to go there. He needed to see it with his own eyes.

He had to know if the world he had built with her was as fake as the pixels on his screen.