POV: Jasmine
After the first day, I cannot return to Liam's villa.
Cannot face the brothers with Jackson's fingerprints still burning on my skin, his cologne clinging to my clothes like evidence of collaboration. Cannot look into Liam's earnest eyes and explain that his father touched me while I stood there and took it. Cannot watch Asher calculate the damage or see Finn's playfulness shatter against the reality of what I'm enduring for them.
So instead of driving toward the villa, I turn the car in the opposite direction. Autopilot takes over, muscle memory guiding me through familiar streets until I'm parked outside my old apartment building. The one I shared with Leo before everything went to hell.
My key still works. The lock clicks open with the same stubborn resistance it always had, and I step into air that smells like dust and abandonment and a life I don't live anymore.
The space feels like a museum. Leo's jacket still hangs by the door. Dishes sit in the drying rack, waiting for hands that won't return to put them away. Everything frozen in the moment we left, preserved like evidence of who we used to be.
I walk to Leo's room and lie down on his bed.
It still smells like him. Like cheap cologne and the fabric softener I always bought because it reminded me of something safe, something normal. Like the little brother I raised and lost in the same breath.
The memory surfaces before I can stop it—we were eight and eleven, trapped in the Henderson foster home. A house that looked respectable from the outside but rotted with neglect behind closed doors. Leo had nightmares every night that first month, crying for parents who were too high to remember they had kids, too lost in their own addiction to notice their children had been taken.
"Jas?" His small voice would find me in the darkness, trembling. "Jas, are you awake?"
"I'm here." I'd crawl into his narrow bed, pulling his shaking body against mine. "I'm always here."
"I dreamed Mom came back. But she didn't recognize me. She looked right through me like I was a ghost."
"It was just a dream, Leo. Just a bad dream."
"What if she never comes back? What if we're stuck here forever?"
"Then we'll be stuck together." I'd hold him tighter, feeling his heartbeat slow against my chest. "I'll never leave you. No matter what happens, no matter where they send us, I'll always find you. That's my promise."
I'd broken that promise.
Traded him for three men and a future that didn't include being his protector anymore. Watched him walk away at that farm because my saving had become suffocation, my love a cage he needed to escape.
My phone buzzes against my hip, shattering the memory. Then again. And again. The screen lights up with a cascade of messages I can't bring myself to read.
I pull it out anyway, scrolling through the damage.
Liam: Where are you? You were supposed to come home after work.
Liam: Jasmine please answer
Liam: I'm getting worried. Just tell me you're safe.
Asher: Report. What happened with my father today?
Asher: Your silence is not reassuring.
Finn: Sunshine where'd you go? We're all freaking out here
Finn: Please just let us know you're breathing
The kitchen table catches my eye through the bedroom doorway—the same table where Leo and I planned our survival strategies over microwave dinners, calculating how to stretch food stamps and dodge social workers and keep each other alive when the world seemed determined to let us die.
The couch where I'd sat during his addiction spiral, watching him lie about where he'd been, who he'd seen, what he'd taken. Watching him destroy himself slowly while I scrambled to hold the pieces together.
The window through which I'd watched him leave for "meetings" that were actually drug deals, knowing and not knowing, hoping and dreading in equal measure.
Every surface holds memories I can't escape. Every corner whispers about choices I can't unmake.
I force myself to type a response, fingers numb against the screen.
I'm fine. Need space tonight. Will explain tomorrow.
Liam's response is immediate, desperate: Please let me come to you. Whatever happened, you shouldn't be alone.
Asher, clinical even in crisis: We need to discuss what happened. Avoidance solves nothing.
Finn, his charm stripped to raw worry: Sunshine, you're scaring us. Just tell us where you are. We won't push. We just need to know you're okay.
I stare at their messages until the words blur. Three men who say they love me. Three men whose father violated me today while I stood there and took it because the alternative was watching everything they'd built collapse.
How do I explain that? How do I look at Liam and tell him his father's hands were on my body? How do I watch Asher calculate whether the trade was worth it? How do I see Finn's smile die when he understands what I'm enduring for them?
I turn off the phone and lie in darkness.
Six more days. Six more days of Jackson's "assessment." Six more days of short skirts and wandering hands and counting backwards from one hundred while I dissociate from my own body.
The ceiling above Leo's bed has water stains I never noticed before. Or maybe I did notice, and I've just forgotten. So many things I've forgotten about this apartment, this life, the person I used to be before the auction and the brothers and the scandal that ripped everything apart.
Who was I before all this? Before I sold myself to save Leo? Before I fell in love with three men who couldn't protect me from their own father?
I was the girl who survived. The girl who kept her promises. The girl who held her brother through nightmares and swore she'd never leave.
Now I'm the woman who left. The woman who chose. The woman lying alone in an empty apartment trying to figure out how to survive without losing herself entirely.
A sound from the living room jolts me back to the present.
Movement. Footsteps. Someone is in the apartment.
I stand slowly, heart hammering against my ribs, and creep toward the noise.