The plot was supposed to be solid.
Ichiro would continue to rise, untouchable, while Jin — the forgotten true heir — faded quietly into the background, scorned, dismissed, and eventually erased.
But something was off.
It began with Su.
She was the loudest, the most brash, the one always first to jump to Ichiro's defense.
Now?
She stared at Ichiro from across the dinner table with narrowed eyes, her spoon paused mid-air.
[He's going to gaslight her into thinking she leaked the student council documents. He already planted the fake evidence.]
Su flinched.
She dropped her spoon. "I… need to check something."
She left the table in silence.
Ichiro blinked. "What was that about?"
Jin didn't answer.
[Another one catching on. Hilarious. I didn't even have to say anything.]
He was sprawled on the patio couch, sipping watermelon juice, the very image of disinterest.
Meiyu passed by, pretending to be focused on her phone.
But her eyes were glassy.
She remembered what he had thought two nights ago:
[She'll be the first to fall. Not by poison or blade — by betrayal. She'd hand her life to the person holding the knife.]
Meiyu: "…"
She had started sleeping with the door locked now.
---
Meanwhile, Yujia sat in her room, rewriting her speech from scratch.
She had always been confident, sharp-tongued, effortlessly sure of herself.
But those [brackets]—those raw, cutting truths she heard from Jin's heart—lingered in her mind like scars.
[She wants to succeed so badly, she'll let her ambitions blind her. She'll destroy her own credibility just to one-up Ichiro, who already set her up.]
She threw her pen across the room and whispered, "I'm not a fool."
Then louder, "I'm not a fool!"
---
Back downstairs, the youngest sister, Xinyi, watched from the hallway.
She wasn't supposed to know anything.
She wasn't supposed to matter in the plot.
But she had heard everything too.
[She disappears in the second half. No one even remembers how. One day she's gone, and no one looks for her.]
The memory chilled her to the bone.
She tiptoed to Jin's room and left a small handmade lucky charm on his desk.
A wordless offering of thanks.
---
The family was changing.
And Jin had no idea.
In his mind, the script was fixed. The story, irreversible. He was just a ghost walking through someone else's narrative.
[The more they talk to me, the closer they get to the blade. They'll only suffer.]
[This isn't a family. This is a prologue to a tragedy.]
But even tragedy could change course.
And slowly, painfully, they were choosing not to follow the script.