No More Love, Just PaybackChapter 1
The room glowed with soft light, laughter echoing from the end of the long dinner table. I sat opposite Marcus—my stepbrother, my secret—and his ever-loyal best friend, Seth. They were deep in conversation, laughing at something I didn’t quite catch. My mind was elsewhere.
Five years. That’s how long I’d worn this mask, hiding the jagged scar that had once disfigured half my face—an uninvited souvenir from an "accident" I never fully understood. But the surgery had changed everything. The scar was gone. The mirror no longer mocked me.
And tonight, I would finally take the mask off.
I’d rehearsed the moment endlessly—how Marcus' eyes might widen, how he’d see me not as the broken girl he once comforted, but as a woman—whole, strong, in love.
But all that faded when the language at the table changed. Italian. Fluid, elegant… deadly. They thought I didn’t understand.
They were wrong.
I had secretly studied the language after overhearing Marcus speak it once with his friends. I never wanted to feel excluded again. And now, I wished I didn’t understand at all.
“So, you’re really taking Maggie back?” Seth’s voice floated across the table, calm, lazy.
Maggie. The name hit like a slap. Marcus' ex. The girl who shattered him—and yet, clearly, not enough.
Marcus' response was cool, sure. “Always been her. I don’t care what she did. She’s the one.”
I stopped breathing. My fork hung midair.
“And Annette?” Seth asked, barely audible. “Your little secret? She still thinks she’s your future.”
A beat of silence. And then—
“She’s just a game,” Marcus said, his voice tinged with something cruel. “A convenient placeholder.”
The words sliced clean through me.
My heart thundered. My stomach twisted. But I didn’t flinch. I couldn’t. I wouldn’t let them see me fall apart.
Memories surged—his whispered “I love you”s in the dark, the way he held me, like I was something fragile and precious. Lies.
I thought about how we even ended up like this. My mom marrying his dad after a nasty divorce. Two broken families forced into one dysfunctional mess. Somewhere in that chaos, I found him. I thought I loved him. Maybe I still did.
A tremble worked its way into my fingers as I reached for my glass. It slipped. Shattered. Water spilled across my dress.
Their conversation halted.
“Wait,” Seth said, eyes narrowing. “What if she understood?”