Chapter Twelve - Circling
942 Words
JT: Come to my office tomorrow Lena. Let's see what we can work out about the debt.
My pulse stutters before sharpening into something cold.
Jaden Taemin. Smelling blood in the water and appearing exactly when I'm weakest. He has a talent for that. Finding me when vulnerability clings to me like a bruise. Just like eight years ago at university, when he offered "help" with my tuition that came wrapped in strings, knots, and a noose.
I barely escaped him then, and it cost me everything that mattered. My reputation. My freedom. Adrian.
Now here he is again. Circling. Waiting. Calculating which version of my desperation he can exploit this time.
I set the phone face down on the dresser. I don't answer. Not yet. Answering means he knows I'm reading his messages, knows I'm scared enough to respond, and Jaden Taemin feeds on that kind of information the way other men feed on kindness.
I sit on the edge of my bed and stare at the wall.
Three men. Three different kinds of damage. The debtors who want money. Jaden who wants control. Adrian who doesn't want anything from me, which is somehow the worst of all three, because wanting nothing is its own kind of verdict.
My hands sit in my lap, perfectly still, because if I let them move I might pick the phone back up and do something I can't undo.
The morning presses in around me. My mother's voice carries from the kitchen now, soft and familiar, the particular tone she uses when she's trying not to worry out loud. My father's cough again, shorter this time, like he's trying to manage even the sound of his own body.
They don't know. They can't know. If my mother finds out what last night cost me she will never forgive herself for letting me go. If my father finds out how close the debtors are, how little time remains, the shame alone will break something in him that I won't be able to fix.
I am the only wall between this family and everything trying to get in.
My phone buzzes again. Face down on the dresser, the vibration rattles faintly against the wood. I don't move.
It buzzes a second time.
A third.
I cross the room and pick it up.
Three more messages from Jaden, each one a degree colder than the last.
Don't make me come to you.
I know where you live, Lena.
Tomorrow. My office. Ten o'clock. Don't be late.
The cold that moves through me is not fear exactly. It's the particular stillness that comes when you've been afraid for so long that the feeling has worn a groove through you, and now it moves through that groove the same way every time, smooth and practiced and almost numb.
I know what Jaden's office looks like. I have been there once before, eight years ago, when I was nineteen and desperate and stupid enough to believe that powerful men offered things without expecting repayment. The walls were all glass. There was nowhere to look that didn't reflect you back to yourself. He sat behind a desk the size of a small country and smiled at me like he was doing me a favor, and I was so grateful I almost missed the way his eyes were already calculating the cost.
I didn't miss it. Not quite. But I was close enough to ruin that the distinction barely mattered.
The difference between then and now is that I know what he is. I know how he operates. I know that whatever he's offering will come with strings I can't see until they're already wrapped around my wrists.
The difference between then and now is also that I have fewer options. Which is exactly why he's texting me at seven in the morning with that particular brand of confidence that belongs to men who have never once been told no by someone who could make it stick.
I think about the checks in my drawer. Twenty-five thousand dollars that feel like a trap. Half a million dollars I don't have. A deadline closing like a fist.
I think about Adrian's face when he saw me in that hotel corridor. The way certainty settled into his expression like something he had been waiting years to confirm.
I lift the phone and stare at Jaden's last message until the screen dims.
Then I look up at my reflection in the window.
"I'm not the girl who broke," I say quietly. "I'm the girl who survived."
I say the words like both men are standing right in front of me. Jaden, who used me. Adrian, who broke me. Both surrounded by the ghosts of eight years and the debt that keeps dragging us all back into orbit.
The debtors want something. Jaden wants something. Life itself wants something.
As for Adrian, he kicked apart the pieces I barely managed to glue back together.
I still have a spine.
Today, I'll use it.
I set the phone on the dresser, screen up this time. I watch Jaden's messages sit there unanswered, and I feel something quiet and dangerous settle into my chest. Not calm exactly. Something closer to the feeling that comes right before a decision you can't take back.
I do not know yet what I am going to do about Jaden Taemin.
But I know this: whatever I decide, it will be my choice. Not his. Not Adrian's. Not the debtors who think a deadline is the same thing as an ending.
My choice.
The only thing in this mess that still belongs to me.
- Writer
