I was never meant to survive past twenty-one.
That prophecy was written long before I understood what dying meant.
My father owned half the skyline you see from any penthouse window in this city.
He owned the ports that swallowed cargo ships whole, the banks that decided which countries ate and which ones starved, the towers that clawed so high into the clouds they had their own weather systems.
He built an empire on secrets and steel, and then, at thirty-seven, he coughed his lungs out across a mahogany table while holding my two-year-old hand so tightly the lawyers still talk about the bruises he left on my fingers.
They say he refused morphine for four straight hours.
They say he dictated the will himself, voice wet with blood, eyes already glazing over.
"Everything," he rasped, kissing each of my tiny knuckles like he was sealing a pact with God and the devil at the same time.
"Every share, every vault, every dirty little secret I buried in the foundations of this city, hers alone. Not a cent moves until the morning she turns twenty-one. Swear it on your lives."
They swore.
The empire froze solid.
Nineteen years of perfect, unbreakable ice.
My mother melted first.
She lasted four years after the funeral.
Four years of sleeping in a bed that still smelled like hospital antiseptic and the cologne my father wore the day he died.
Four years of waking up screaming his name until my stepfather-to-be started sitting at her bedside, holding her hand, telling her it was okay to let go.
He moved in the week the grave was still fresh dirt.
Six months later he brought a new wife, beautiful, soft-spoken, with a daughter exactly my age who smiled like she'd been practicing in mirrors her whole life.
Suddenly the house had new laughter, new rules, new bedtime stories.
Suddenly I had a stepfather who looked at me like I was a ticking bomb wrapped in silk.
A stepmother who cried when she thought no one was watching.
A stepsister who called me "big sis" in a voice sweet enough to rot teeth.
They were so, so gentle with me.
They had to be.
I was, after all, dying.
It started the way most poisons do, slow enough that you mistake murder for mercy.
Headaches that felt like someone driving nails through my temples.
Legs that turned to water halfway up the grand staircase.
Afternoons where I slept so deeply the maids came in twice to make sure I was still breathing.
By ten I couldn't finish a single flight of stairs without black spots blooming across my vision like ink dropped in water.
By twelve I collapsed in the school courtyard during morning assembly, woke up with my stepmother stroking my hair and whispering, "Poor darling, you're just so delicate," while her eyes flicked to the calendar on the wall.
Doctors paraded through the house like guests at a never-ending funeral.
Blood tests.
Heart monitors that beeped too slow.
Genetic panels that came back with question marks.
They all said the same thing, just with fancier words:
Chronic fatigue syndrome.
Possible autoimmune disorder.
Rare iron deficiency that didn't respond to treatment.
Nothing conclusive. Nothing curable.
Just a fragile girl in a house too large for one heartbeat.
My stepfather fired the chauffeurs and hired private tutors so I wouldn't have to walk crowded hallways.
My stepmother started bringing warm milk to my room every night, thick, honey-sweet, served in the same crystal glass my real mother used to use for champagne on New Year's Eve.
There was a faint metallic aftertaste I learned to ignore.
I drank it like the obedient daughter I had been raised to be.
I believed them when they said my body was simply wrong.
I believed the world was too bright, too loud, too fast for someone made of glass.
I believed it right up until the Tuesday in my second year of high school, sixteen years old, held back one grade because illness had stolen too many months, when a boy I had never spoken to decided to shatter every lie I'd ever been told.
The corridor smelled like floor wax, strawberry vape, and teenage desperation.
Lockers slammed in rhythm like gunshots.
I walked alone, always alone, arms wrapped around books I barely had the strength to carry. He stepped out from the alcove near the water fountain like he'd been waiting there since the building was built.
Fifteen years old.
One full grade below me.
Still half an inch shorter.
Black hair falling into eyes that looked like someone had poured midnight into them and forgotten to add stars.
His uniform tie hung loose, sleeves rolled to the elbows, the kind of careless that felt rehearsed down to the last wrinkle.
He planted himself dead center in my path and waited.
The noise didn't just quiet.
It died.
Then he spoke.
Low. Calm. Certain.
"I like you. Marry me."
No smile. No blush.
No upward lilt to make it a question.
Just those few words hanging in the air like a blade that had already decided where it would fall.
Someone behind me dropped their phone.
Someone else let out a laugh that cracked in half.
Phones came out three, four, five, six of them, red recording lights blinking like predatory eyes.
Heat flooded my face, my throat, my chest.
I was sixteen.
He was fifteen.
He was shorter than me.
I laughed the way heiresses are taught to laugh, cold enough to leave frostbite, sharp enough to cut diamonds.
"No," I said, and stepped around him like he was furniture.
I expected him to crumble.
To turn red.
To become another forgettable boy who thought money made me a prize he could win with audacity.
He did none of those things.
He tilted his head, slow, deliberate, and smiled.
Not a wide smile.
Not a crazy smile.
A small, private curve at one corner of his mouth, the kind you give when you've just found the exact vein you plan to open later.
I told myself I forgot him by the time the lunch bell rang.
I lied.
Because that night, for the first time in years, I didn't fall asleep the second my head touched the pillow.
I lay awake staring at the silk canopy above my bed, heart racing too fast for my supposedly fragile body, palms sweating against 1200-thread-count sheets.
I dreamed of teeth sinking into flesh.
I dreamed of white foxes with nine tails made of smoke and starlight, circling a bed that looked exactly like mine.
I woke up tasting metal.
Downstairs, someone was already warming tomorrow's milk.
Five more years until the money was mine.
Five more years of gentle hands and bedtime stories and doctors who couldn't explain why I kept fading.
They thought they had all the time in the world.
They thought I was the only one running out of it.
They had no idea a fifteen-year-old boy had just looked at me like I already belonged to him, body and soul, and decided the entire countdown now belonged to him instead.
I didn't know his name yet.
I didn't know he would learn every crack in my armor before I ever learned his favorite color.
I only knew that when I finally slipped back into sleep, my last coherent thought was the echo of his voice sliding under my skin like a promise and a threat all at once:
Marry me.
And somewhere across the city,
in a bedroom I would not see for years,
a boy smiled at the ceiling and began to count the days until I had no choice but to say yes.
[To be continued in chapter 2]