Three Letters That Died With Love

On my thirtieth birthday, I walked out of prison.

Waiting for me were three letters written by three men a decade ago.

The first was from Ethan: Ten years from now, I'll have married the only woman I'll ever love. That woman will be you.

The second was from Sebastian: If you choose him, I'll throw everything away to stop that wedding. I can't stand the thought of you belonging to someone else.

The third was from Caleb: Even if you don't love me, I'll spend my whole life protecting you. That's the one thing I'll never give up on.

I'd barely finished reading the opening lines when I looked up.

All three of them were standing right there.

They stared at me with cold, hard eyes, surrounding me like I was some kind of dangerous criminal.

"Two years ago you fabricated lies to hurt Yvonne, left her disabled, and got yourself thrown in prison. Have you learned your lesson?"

I looked up at the three men who had once sworn they would love me forever.

Slowly, I rolled up my pant leg and revealed my prosthetic.

"Yes. I've learned my lesson."

What they didn't know was that Yvonne's legs were perfectly fine.

The one who was truly disabled now was me.

Whatever love they once had for me had died the moment Yvonne appeared.

And now, I didn't need any of them anymore.

A voice rang out inside my head the system's voice.

Task complete. Do you wish to leave this world?

Before I went to prison, I had shown them the prosthetic, just like I did today.

They hadn't believed me then either.

"You're a dancer. If you were really an amputee, you'd have nothing to live for you'd be better off dead. You don't have the guts for that. It's fake."

To get back at Yvonne, Ethan pulled strings and deliberately arranged for me to share a cell with a convicted killer.

The woman didn't dare take my life inside those walls, but she found every other way to make me suffer.

A dislocated jaw. A broken nose. Patches of scalp torn away. That was just a normal week for me.

Doctors would treat my wounds and keep me alive.

Then they'd send me right back. The cycle never stopped.

But the official report always read the same: Inmate #44 status: satisfactory.

The fact that I made it out of there breathing was nothing short of a miracle.

Sebastian grabbed me by the hair right at the spot where my scalp had never fully healed. The pain was blinding. Tears burst from my eyes before I could stop them.

He startled and quickly let go, but a second later his brow furrowed again.

"What, do you think you're royalty? I barely touched your hair. Don't be so dramatic."

I could feel the scalp slowly seeping blood, the pain settling into a deep, numbing ache.

I didn't want to waste another second on them. I just wanted to find a clinic, get the wound treated, and then do what the system had set out for me leave this world behind.

I'm a traveler. I move between parallel worlds, completing missions.

And these three Ethan, Sebastian, and Caleb were the strangest targets I'd ever been assigned.

I didn't have to chase them down or strategize. The moment they met me, they flipped the script and came after me instead.

Thinking back on those absurd, almost comical memories, I let out a dry, self-mocking laugh.

I'd traveled through so many worlds. I'd met men far better than these three.

So how on earth did I end up getting burned by them?

But clearly, the three of them had no intention of letting me walk away.

Caleb grabbed my wrist, his eyes flat and cold. "Yvonne knows you're out today and she's not doing well. Come with us to apologize to her. Get down on your knees and make it right."

A sharp crack cut through the air.

My wrist had just fractured.

Ethan looked mildly confused. "Why didn't you hold back?"

Caleb pulled his hand away in a panic, his expression equally baffled as he stared at me. "I barely used any force."

He really hadn't.

The problem was that the killer in my cell had already snapped that wrist once before. Even after it healed, it never fully recovered. One wrong move and it broke all over again.

"It's just a fracture. It'll heal." Ethan waved it off like it was nothing. "Let's take her to Yvonne first."

At that point, Sebastian reached over and snatched up the three letters.

He skimmed them quickly, exchanged a glance with the other two, then dropped all three into the trash.

The love letters they had written to me with their own hands apparently the sight of them made these men sick.

"If I could do it over, I wouldn't waste a single second on you. Only Yvonne deserves that."

My scalp was still bleeding. My thoughts were starting to blur at the edges, and my vision wasn't far behind.

Caleb was the first to notice something was wrong. "Why is there blood on her forehead?"

Blood from my scalp was trickling down my face in a slow, steady stream, dripping onto the floor each drop hitting the concrete and blooming into a small, dark flower.

My body swayed.

I was relieved they'd finally noticed. Maybe now they'd take me to a clinic first.

But instead, Ethan let out a cold laugh. His voice dripped with contempt.

"That trick's already been used once. We're not falling for it again."

"Kayla, you're not the same person you were at twenty."

"All these years, under our protection and instead of staying the person we knew, you just got crueler with every passing year."

Ethan's mention of my twenty-year-old self pulled me straight back into the past.

At twenty, I was the kind of girl other women envied.

My family had money, and I'd been told more than once that I was beautiful.

On top of that, I had three remarkably good-looking men who never left my side.

Ethan, Sebastian, and Caleb lifelong best friends who had grown up practically joined at the hip.

Maybe because their lives had always run on the same track, their taste in women ended up nearly identical. All three of them fell for me at the same time.

Strangely enough, they didn't fight over it. Instead, they made a pact fair competition, no dirty moves.

They each had their own way of pursuing a girl.

At twenty, I was obsessed with those over-the-top romance novels about powerful, possessive men who swept women off their feet. I couldn't resist Ethan's bold, unapologetic approach.

So I chose him.

The whole campus assumed that once I was taken, Sebastian and Caleb would finally shift their attention to other girls.

They didn't.

They stayed by my side as they always had. If Ethan ever slipped up even slightly, neither of them needed me to say a word they'd handle him themselves.

The four of us existed in a dynamic that was complicated, but somehow it worked.

That life lasted until I was twenty-six.

That year, my family's business collapsed. My parents moved back to their small hometown. The pampered girl I used to be was gone.

I turned down all three of their offers to help and found work on my own performing as a dancer at a local theater.

At a dinner one evening, I crossed paths with a young woman named Yvonne, who was being harassed by her boss.

She was four years younger than me, fresh out of college, and she looked completely lost.

I had never been able to stomach watching someone get pushed around. And having been sheltered and spoiled my whole life, I had a tendency to act first and think later.

I grabbed a bottle off the table and smashed it over the man's head.

He let go of Yvonne but then turned his attention to me.

The situation dissolved into chaos. I fought back, and by the end of it my face was bruised and swollen.

Fortunately, Ethan and the others showed up in time.

Dealing with a paunchy middle-aged man was effortless for the three of them like handling a child.

Once the man was gone, Yvonne dropped to her knees in front of me.

She pressed her forehead to the floor, her eyes full of tears. "I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry you got hurt because of me."

I couldn't bring myself to be angry with her.

I thought that would be the end of it a brief encounter, nothing more.

But while I was recovering at the hospital, Yvonne showed up with fruit she'd bought on sale.

I was in the VIP suite Ethan had arranged. Yvonne looked visibly out of place, fidgeting with her hands.

"Kayla that night, if you hadn't stepped in, I don't know what would have happened. I asked Ethan what you liked, and he said durian, so I bought some. I really hope you feel better soon."

The durian she brought had gone partially bad.

I didn't want to make her feel worse, so I ate it anyway.

The spoiled fruit wrecked my stomach. I was sick for days.

Ethan and the others scolded me first for being too soft-hearted, then went and yelled at Yvonne.

The poor girl had never been on the receiving end of anything like that. She sobbed so hard she could barely breathe.

Between tearful apologies to me, she vented about being let go from her internship.

Back then, I just thought she was sweet and a little naive.

I liked her. I wanted to help her.

So I got her a position at the theater and took her on as my personal assistant.

It was the decision I would regret most in my entire life.

"Hey. Stop spacing out."

Ethan snapped me back to the present and pushed me into the car.

All four of us in one vehicle it felt strangely like those old days when there was no tension between us, when everything was easy.

I felt exhausted. I leaned against the window, closed my eyes, and tried to rest through the pain.

The car was sealed. The thick, metallic smell of blood spread quickly through the enclosed space.

Caleb's brow furrowed slightly. He spoke carefully, like he wasn't sure he wanted the answer. "Is that blood I'm smelling?"

Ethan, behind the wheel, frowned hard.

"Ask her," he said.

Caleb nudged me.

I nearly blacked out.

But I forced my eyes open and looked at him, not quite focused.

Caleb lightly pressed his fingertip to the blood on my forehead, then studied it. "Since when do they make stage blood this realistic?"

Looking at his expression, I couldn't help but let out a small, humorless smile.

"What's funny?" he asked.

I shook my head and said nothing.

I was laughing at how stupid they were.

No that wasn't right.

All three of these men were intelligent. Highly intelligent.

They had simply decided, before they ever looked at the facts, that I was the villain.

I stayed quiet, and they didn't push. They figured the blood was fake and left it at that.

The car pulled up in front of a sleek high-rise apartment building not long after.

The moment I saw the building, it hit me like a physical blow.

I had grown up here. My family lived here before everything fell apart, before my parents were forced to sell the unit to pay off the debt, before we had to leave.

From the passenger seat, Sebastian offered a flat explanation. "Don't look so surprised. Yvonne said she loved this place, so we bought it for her. A gift."

A bad feeling settled over me.

Standing at the door of the home I had grown up in, I finally couldn't hold it back.

I looked at the three men who had once promised to protect me always. "You knew I was saving up to buy this place back. That was the whole point I wanted to give it to my parents. And you gave it to Yvonne as a birthday present?"

My parents had never really let go of that apartment.

Too many memories lived inside those walls the three of us, back when life was whole.

That was why I had refused to take their money at twenty-six. I wanted to earn it back on my own terms.

The place wasn't cheap. I didn't want it handed to me by a man.

I had almost saved enough when they put me in prison.

And sometime during those two years, the apartment went to Yvonne.

Something small and aching stirred in my chest.

The three of them exchanged a glance. Something shifted in their eyes not quite guilt, just a kind of settled certainty.

Then they answered me, as if the matter were perfectly obvious.

"It was Yvonne's birthday wish. Of course we made it happen."

"There are other units available in this building. If you want one that badly, just buy a different one."

"Besides, you're the one who put Yvonne in a wheelchair two years ago. Giving up a little for her is the least you can do. Think of it as making amends we were actually doing you a favor."

And what I was supposed to thank them for that?

It was almost funny.

Just then, the front door opened.

A girl appeared in the doorway, her face pale and delicate as porcelain. She was wearing a long white dress and sitting in a wheelchair.

When she saw me, Yvonne let out a soft, startled sound and turned her face away.

"She's why did you bring her here"

The tears came right on cue, sliding silently down her cheeks.

Two years, and nothing had changed. Yvonne could still cry on command.

If I had known how this would all unfold, I never would have made her my assistant. I should've pointed her toward acting she clearly had the talent for it. Maybe none of this would have happened.

Yvonne's distress flipped a switch in all three of them. They turned to look at me with hard, watchful eyes, as if they expected me to lunge at her any second.

The crying made my head throb even worse.

I looked at Yvonne's legs completely hidden beneath the long hem of that white dress. Those supposedly ruined legs.

I spoke first.

"Why don't you lift your skirt and show them the prosthetics?"

The words had barely left my mouth before Ethan's hand came across my face.

My ears rang.

His expression was full of disgust. "Do you have to keep pushing her? What happened to you?"

It would've been almost funny, if my ears hadn't been ringing so badly I could barely make out what he was saying.

Yvonne didn't have to do anything.

All she had to do was sit in that wheelchair and cry, and these three men would march into battle for her without a second thought.

When she first came to work for me, Yvonne was practically glued to my side twenty-four hours a day, diligent and eager.

Whenever I spent time with Ethan and the others, Yvonne was always there too.

The balance the four of us had built over the years began to crack.

My dance career was going well. Within a year, I was headlining solo tours.

That meant I spent more and more time away from the city.

Yvonne always found a reason to stay behind. She never came on tour with me.

I wasn't happy about her work ethic, but I let it go.

Then, little by little, I noticed the group chat the four of us had shared for years going quiet.

It didn't take long to figure out why.

Yvonne had started a separate group chat with all three of them. They were more active in that one than they'd ever been in ours.

I could accept Yvonne becoming part of our circle. What I couldn't accept was being the one pushed out of it.

Especially when one of those three people was my boyfriend.

I picked a fight with Ethan. Desperate and furious, I pulled a stupid stunt fake blood, trying to scare him into paying attention.

When he saw through it, the look in his eyes was like looking at a stranger. "Funny. I never noticed how unhinged you were until now."

After that, Ethan and I fell into a cold war. I stopped talking to Sebastian and Caleb too.

Then came another tour. Yvonne refused to come, as always but this time I didn't give her a choice. I made her come with me.

That rehearsal was when everything went wrong.

My opening number required me to descend on a wire harness from nearly fifty feet up.

When Yvonne helped me check the rigging, something felt off. I told her multiple times to tighten it.

She kept insisting it was fine.

The rest of the crew had left for their dinner break. It was just the two of us in the theater.

"Kayla, if you're scared, I'll go up with you," she offered, her voice sweet.

She strapped into a harness, but she never actually rose with me.

I went up alone.

At the top, the rigging gave way exactly as I had feared.

The safety lock had come undone. I fell from that height five stories up and hit the stage.

I didn't die. But it felt like every bone in my body had come apart. My screams echoed through the entire theater.

Yvonne called a cab and dragged me into it, taking me to a hospital on the far end of the city.

The fall was severe. The delay made it worse. My legs couldn't be saved.

The amputation happened on my twenty-eighth birthday.

The only person with me that day was Yvonne.

She told me Ethan and the others were busy. That they couldn't make it.

I was devastated, but I was too far gone in grief to dwell on it.

Two days before I was discharged, Yvonne disappeared.

I came home on prosthetics, and the police were waiting for me.

Ethan, Sebastian, and Caleb had turned me in together.

Their story: driven by jealousy, I had attempted to kill Yvonne. The attempt failed, but left her permanently disabled.

I was drowning in grief and had no way to prove anything. Before they took me away, I showed them the prosthetics one last time.

They weren't moved. They mocked me instead.

My head was spinning now. My vision was going white at the edges.

Blood loss. A body that had never really recovered.

I passed out on the spot.

As the darkness closed in, I heard Ethan's voice lazy, contemptuous.