Part 3His Brother's Bride

I thought he was going to kill me.

But he didn’t.

Tears of asphyxiation welled in my eyes. I managed to squeeze a sound from my crushed throat. “Hurts-hurts-hurts-hurts-hurts-hurts-hurts!”

Caleb’s grip vanished instantly.

He stared at me, his brow furrowed in confusion. “Who told you to say it like that?”

I coughed violently, dragging air into my starving lungs. “Say what like what? What the hell is wrong with you?”

“Seven times. Exactly seven. ‘Hurts’… When did you pick up that habit?”

“What habit? That’s just… a thing people say!”

“I’ve never heard anyone say it like that,” he said, his eyes scanning my face, searching. “Except for Finn.”

“Then you haven’t met enough people.”

He studied me for a long moment, his gaze intense and unnervingly perceptive. Finally, as if confirming to himself that I was, in fact, still just Ava, a wave of profound weariness washed over his expression.

“This sham marriage is over,” he said, his voice flat. “I’ll have my assistant draw up the divorce papers and send them to you.”

Without another glance at my coughing, sputtering form, he turned and left.

Ten years, and Caleb hadn’t changed a bit.

I cursed the System a thousand times over. I knew it was unreliable from the start. Back when it first recruited me, it took weeks to realize it had mistaken me, a girl, for the “villainous male supporting character” it was supposed to bind to.

I spent the next six years of my life pretending to be a boy. Going to the bathroom felt like a covert spy operation.

The missions it gave me were absurd.

“The male protagonist has deviated from his destined path. Your job is to guide him back to becoming the exceptional man he’s meant to be, while maintaining your persona as his evil arch-nemesis.”

Seriously? It was a miracle that thing was a System and not a paperweight.

Still, I had a strategic advantage. After Caleb’s parents divorced, his father remarried. My mother. She was a gold-digger who saw her new stepson as a threat to her inheritance, and she’d abuse him whenever her husband wasn’t looking. I was the son she brought with her.

To make my backstory seamless, the System concocted a premise: my mother, obsessed with having a son, couldn’t accept that she’d given birth to a daughter, and so she raised me, her child Finn, as a boy.

What could I say? I leaned into the role.

When Caleb skipped school, I’d sneer, “Can’t even handle a classroom? You’ll end up a drain on society.”

When his grades improved, I’d scoff, “Is that it? No wonder your parents don’t give a damn about you. You’re pathetic.”

When he rode his bike to school, I’d slash his tires. “Why are you riding? Run! You’re built like a damn string bean!”

Caleb hated me. He had to. No one could endure six years of relentless torment without developing a deep-seated loathing.

One time, a group of local thugs cornered me in an alley, trying to shake me down for cash. Caleb saw it happen. He met my eyes, then turned and walked away without breaking stride.

When I got home, I asked him, “Why’d you just walk away like you didn’t know me?”

He looked at me with those dark, unreadable eyes. “Didn’t you tell me never to acknowledge you in public? Bro?”

He rarely called me that. Only when the sarcasm was meant to sting.

In the end, I failed my mission anyway. As the six-year deadline approached, Caleb suddenly dropped out of high school. He had no intention of taking the SATs or going to college.

Panic set in. I went to confront him (i.e., start a fight).

We fought. Caleb won, of course. No matter how convincing my disguise, I was still a girl underneath, and I was no match for his strength.

The System’s voice was already announcing my failure in my head, a cold, robotic countdown to my demise. But I had to know. “Why did you quit?”

“Because of you.”

“What the hell does that have to do with me?”

“My dad said you’re a genius,” he said, a bitter, mocking smile twisting his lips. “He said that after you get into a good college, I have to apply to the same one next year. And if I don’t get in, he’ll beat my ass.” He let out a sharp, humorless laugh. “But he doesn’t know that there is no one on this planet I hate more than you. I’d rather not go to college at all than go to the same one as you.”

I sighed. It was over.

After getting the System’s permission, I showed Caleb the truth. The bruises blooming on my skin were fresh from his fists.

I gave him a small, sad smile as he stared, speechless and utterly bewildered. “You get to be yourself, Caleb. How great is that?”

The next day, I left that world. The System staged a fatal car accident.

I never expected that my death would be the catalyst. With me gone, Caleb went into overdrive. He threw himself into his studies and, against all odds, got into the very university I had always dreamed of attending. The one he was destined for all along.

And so, I was revived, granted a life of freedom I had inadvertently earned.

Except I’d almost died again within the first five minutes.

Damn you, Caleb Davenport.

This rich-wife gig was more dangerous than it looked. Divorce was the only way to guarantee my survival.