The Price of Stolen Genius

The Price of Stolen Genius

Gavin

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My phone screen was the only light in the suffocating darkness, casting a sickly blue glow on the corrugated steel walls closing in around me. A notification popped up with Nicole' s latest livestream, her face triumphant, showing a thumbnail of me, huddled and sketching on a dirty cardboard box. "My pathetic 'brother' making trash art for change," the title read, a cruel mockery of my homelessness and desperation. Then, her message: "Feeling cramped, Caleb? I remember you don't like small spaces." My heart hammered as the air thinned, the walls pressing in; I was trapped, locked in a storage unit, betrayed by the girl I once called my sister. I gasped, scrabbling against the unyielding metal as my vision blurred, the darkness crawling inward. My last conscious thought was the cold, unyielding finality of it all; heart failure, alone and forgotten. But then, the distinct smell of turpentine and acrylic paint jolted me awake. I wasn' t in a storage unit; I was back in the bright art room of Northgate High, eighteen years old again. And there she was: Nicole, laughing perfectly, with Ethan, the star quarterback, arrogant and untouched by his future accident, by his downfall. The raw memory of my death, the cold, suffocating terror, slammed into me, a tidal wave of pure, undiluted rage. I grabbed the nearest jar of murky paint water, and without a second thought, hurled it straight at Ethan' s chest. His pristine jacket exploded with gray water and glass, and the fight that ensued was just the beginning. I was back, and this time, the masterpiece of revenge would be mine.

Introduction

My phone screen was the only light in the suffocating darkness, casting a sickly blue glow on the corrugated steel walls closing in around me.

A notification popped up with Nicole' s latest livestream, her face triumphant, showing a thumbnail of me, huddled and sketching on a dirty cardboard box.

"My pathetic 'brother' making trash art for change," the title read, a cruel mockery of my homelessness and desperation.

Then, her message: "Feeling cramped, Caleb? I remember you don't like small spaces."

My heart hammered as the air thinned, the walls pressing in; I was trapped, locked in a storage unit, betrayed by the girl I once called my sister.

I gasped, scrabbling against the unyielding metal as my vision blurred, the darkness crawling inward.

My last conscious thought was the cold, unyielding finality of it all; heart failure, alone and forgotten.

But then, the distinct smell of turpentine and acrylic paint jolted me awake.

I wasn' t in a storage unit; I was back in the bright art room of Northgate High, eighteen years old again.

And there she was: Nicole, laughing perfectly, with Ethan, the star quarterback, arrogant and untouched by his future accident, by his downfall.

The raw memory of my death, the cold, suffocating terror, slammed into me, a tidal wave of pure, undiluted rage.

I grabbed the nearest jar of murky paint water, and without a second thought, hurled it straight at Ethan' s chest.

His pristine jacket exploded with gray water and glass, and the fight that ensued was just the beginning.

I was back, and this time, the masterpiece of revenge would be mine.

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Contract With The Devil: Love In Shackles

Contract With The Devil: Love In Shackles

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5.0

I watched my husband sign the papers that would end our marriage while he was busy texting the woman he actually loved. He didn't even glance at the header. He just scribbled the sharp, jagged signature that had signed death warrants for half of New York, tossed the file onto the passenger seat, and tapped his screen again. "Done," he said, his voice devoid of emotion. That was Dante Moretti. The Underboss. A man who could smell a lie from a mile away but couldn't see that his wife had just handed him an annulment decree disguised beneath a stack of mundane logistics reports. For three years, I scrubbed his blood out of his shirts. I saved his family's alliance when his ex, Sofia, ran off with a civilian. In return, he treated me like furniture. He left me in the rain to save Sofia from a broken nail. He left me alone on my birthday to drink champagne on a yacht with her. He even handed me a glass of whiskey—her favorite drink—forgetting that I despised the taste. I was merely a placeholder. A ghost in my own home. So, I stopped waiting. I burned our wedding portrait in the fireplace, left my platinum ring in the ashes, and boarded a one-way flight to San Francisco. I thought I was finally free. I thought I had escaped the cage. But I underestimated Dante. When he finally opened that file weeks later and realized he had signed away his wife without looking, the Reaper didn't accept defeat. He burned down the world to find me, obsessed with reclaiming the woman he had already thrown away.

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