PRICED BY MY BILLIONAIRE NEMESIS

stretches too long to be real, and a voice that reaches me before the rest of the dream assembles i

nd more easily wounded. He is breakable in a way the present version of him preten

er said. The years between then and now distort him, blending the boy he was with the man who stared me down hours ago. What I see is a hybrid of both, o

t never large enough to reveal the whole shape of the wound. A winter street appears first, always cold enough that I see my breath fog in the air. My phone buzzes with a message I can't

for only a heartbeat before the fury floods in, and I feel the force of it even in the dream. When I speak-when I say, "We're done"-the voice doesn't bel

ered with both the past and the present. The anger in it is colder than it ever was in real life, shaped not just by the memory of e

n too many times. Hurt reshapes itself into something harder. Contempt gathers like frost. Everything we once were turns

f vision. A blur of headlights slices through the dark as if someone is dragging a knife of white light across the scene. The cold sinks into my bones so

ks the breath out of me. Pain erupts beneath my ribs, white-hot and electric, like lightni

kin as if trying to hold me down. My pajamas cling to my body, damp with sweat that has cooled and now chills me further. My pulse race

highs to keep them still. The nightmare clings stubbornly, like fingerprints smeared across glass that will not wipe clean. The echo of cold wind lingers on

s. It remembers cold before memory returns. I've spent years convincing myself that whatever happened then no longer con

space tonight, reopening old wounds I pretend have healed. I try to connect the fragments into something meaningful, but the edge

from me pretending to read. The warmth that flickered in his eyes before he learned how to lock every feeling behind a wall. I don't know why my mind keeps

dlights. The fear. The sense of something shifting irreversibly inside me. I don't know which of those images b

impossible tenderness, the man who speaks to me now like I'm a transaction, or the echo of him that my trauma

The past feels like it's breathing down my neck. The future feels like it's collapsing toward me. And somewhere between those two poin

voiding. He hasn't just haunted the corners of my life. He has haunted my dreams, my fears, and the sile

et the nightmare whispers its own truth, one I am terrified to approach: I never stopped feeling the

room, fully aware that sleep will not return, and equally aware