POV: Jasmine
The café was tucked into an unfamiliar neighborhood—quiet enough that running into anyone I knew was mercifully unlikely. I arrived first, choosing a corner booth with a clear view of both exits. Survival instincts trained by a childhood of chaos never fully disappeared.
I ordered coffee I didn't intend to drink and waited.
My mother appeared ten minutes later, and I barely recognized her.
She was skeletal and pale, her face gaunt in ways that spoke of hard living and harder chemical dependencies. This wasn't the version who'd shown up at Leo's apartment high and incoherent years ago. This was someone who'd been using so long that sobriety looked like illness, her body consuming itself in the absence of the drugs that had sustained it.
She spotted me and hesitated at the edge of the booth, like she was waiting for permission to sit.
"You came," she whispered, sliding onto the bench across from me. "I didn't think you'd come."
"Talk fast." I kept my voice flat. "I don't have much patience for you."
She flinched but didn't argue. Her hands shook as she slid medical documents across the café table—hospital letterhead, doctor signatures, medical terminology I didn't fully understand but recognized as serious.
"Stage four lung cancer," she said quietly. "Terminal. Inoperable. The doctors gave me six months. Maybe less."
I stared at the papers without touching them. Proof that she was telling the truth. Proof that my mother was dying.
I felt nothing.
"Your father died two years ago." Her voice cracked on the words. "Overdose. Motel room outside Atlantic City. They found him three days later."
The information landed somewhere in my chest but didn't detonate. This man had stopped being my father when I was eleven. His death was just a fact now—a piece of data about a stranger who shared my DNA.
"Why should I care?"
"You shouldn't." Her honesty was startling. "He never gave you reason to. Neither did I."
"Then why are we here?"
"Because I tried to get clean after that." She met my eyes, and I saw something I hadn't expected—clarity. Real, painful clarity. "Seeing him like that, dead for three days before anyone noticed... it scared me straight. I managed eighteen months. Then came the diagnosis."
"Eighteen months of sobriety and you didn't think to call?"
"I wanted to get better first. Wanted to show up with something to offer instead of just more need." Her laugh was bitter. "Turns out I ran out of time."
I pushed the medical documents back toward her. "What does any of this have to do with me?"
"The money." She swallowed hard. "The money Leo was sending—the thirty-seven thousand that got him in trouble with those loan sharks—it was for my chemotherapy."
The words hit like a slap.
"He didn't know," she continued quickly. "I told him it was for rehab, for getting back on my feet. I didn't want him to know I was dying. Thought I could beat it and come back healthy, show up as a real mother for once."
"You let him borrow from criminals to pay for your cancer treatment." My voice came out deadly quiet. "You let him risk his life for money you never told him the truth about."
"I know. God, I know." Tears spilled down her hollow cheeks. "I was selfish. I've always been selfish. But I'm trying to make it right."
"There is no making this right."
"I know that too." She reached across the table, then stopped herself before touching me. "I want to see Leo. I want to apologize to both of you. Properly. While I still can."
The audacity made me want to laugh. Or scream. This woman had destroyed our childhood, chosen drugs over us again and again, let CPS take us without fighting. And now she wanted forgiveness because she was dying?
"You think dying earns you absolution?"
"No." Her voice was small. "I think dying means I'm out of chances to try."
I stared at her—this hollow shell of the woman who'd given birth to me. She looked older than her years, worn down by decades of addiction and whatever fight the cancer was waging inside her. Part of me wanted to feel something. Grief, maybe. Compassion. The instinctive love a daughter should have for her mother.
But that part had died a long time ago. Starved to death in foster homes while she got high.
"I need to think about it," I heard myself say.
She nodded, understanding she didn't deserve more. "I know I have no right to ask anything of you. But Leo—he was sending me money for months. He deserves to know the truth about where it went. About why I'm dying."
"That's his decision to make. Not mine."
"I know." She wiped her eyes with trembling fingers. "I just... I wanted you to know first. You were always the strong one. The one who held everything together when I couldn't."
"When you wouldn't," I corrected sharply. "There's a difference."
She didn't argue. Couldn't argue. We both knew the truth.
I stood, unable to stay in this booth any longer. The air felt too thick, the past pressing in from all sides. Fifteen years of abandonment sitting across from me in human form, asking for things she'd never earned the right to request.
"I'll talk to him," I said finally. "That's all I can promise."
"Thank you." The words came out broken. "Jasmine, I—"
"Don't." I held up my hand. "Don't say you're sorry. Don't say you love me. Don't say anything that sounds like you expect this to fix what you broke."
She closed her mouth. Nodded once.
I walked out without looking back.
The afternoon sun was too bright after the dim café, making me squint as I fumbled for my keys. My hands were shaking—I noticed it distantly, like watching someone else's body betray them.
My phone buzzed in my pocket.
I pulled it out expecting Liam, expecting one of the brothers checking in. Instead, an unknown number filled the screen with a message that stopped my heart.
I know about the Virtue Exchange. I know you auctioned your virginity. Drop the lawsuit defense, or the whole world finds out at the trial.
I read it twice. Three times. The words didn't change.
Someone knew. Someone had found out about the auction, about how I'd first met the brothers, about the secret that could destroy everything we'd built.
And they were going to use it against us.