My Ex's "C" Was Never Me

My Ex's "C" Was Never Me

Luo Xi

5.0
Comment(s)
95
View
11
Chapters

Another wire transfer pinged. It was another "apology payment" from Victoria Sterling, my girlfriend of five years. This one was different: $500,000. Far more than her usual fifty thousand, a sum that had already made me secretly rich. I' d played the role of the devoted, slightly naive boyfriend perfectly for too long. But this unprecedented amount felt less like an apology and more like a severance. Then, a video message arrived from Dylan Price, from Vicky' s social circle. It showed Vicky at a party, her arms wrapped around a young man, kissing him deeply. He looked unsettlingly like me, a younger, perhaps less worn version. Dylan' s text followed: "That' s Caleb Vance. Her childhood flame. Guess who\'s back?" Suddenly, Vicky' s pet name, "My C," and her online handles like "ForeverC," made a sickening kind of sense. I was never "C" for Ethan. I was a stand-in. A sharp pang of genuine hurt hit my chest. I remembered being a scholarship kid from Appalachia, chasing her, believing she saw something in me. Her friends had called me a "charity case." I later found her hidden love letters to Caleb, recently signed, calling me "just a boy, a distraction." When I finally confronted her during our breakup, she exploded. "You don\'t break up with me, Ethan. I decide when this is over! You belong to me!" I was shocked by the raw possessiveness in her voice. Her absolute conviction that she owned me, body and soul. She saw me as nothing more than an expensive pet, a compliant placeholder. How could I have been so blind, so foolishly naive for five years? But that immediate hurt quickly turned cold, pragmatic. If I was a substitute, I was a well-paid one. That $500,000 wasn't severance; it was a bonus for a long-term performance. With millions now in my accounts, I was financially independent. It was time to leave Vicky and her gilded cage behind.

Introduction

Another wire transfer pinged.

It was another "apology payment" from Victoria Sterling, my girlfriend of five years.

This one was different: $500,000.

Far more than her usual fifty thousand, a sum that had already made me secretly rich.

I' d played the role of the devoted, slightly naive boyfriend perfectly for too long.

But this unprecedented amount felt less like an apology and more like a severance.

Then, a video message arrived from Dylan Price, from Vicky' s social circle.

It showed Vicky at a party, her arms wrapped around a young man, kissing him deeply.

He looked unsettlingly like me, a younger, perhaps less worn version.

Dylan' s text followed: "That' s Caleb Vance. Her childhood flame. Guess who\'s back?"

Suddenly, Vicky' s pet name, "My C," and her online handles like "ForeverC," made a sickening kind of sense.

I was never "C" for Ethan.

I was a stand-in.

A sharp pang of genuine hurt hit my chest.

I remembered being a scholarship kid from Appalachia, chasing her, believing she saw something in me.

Her friends had called me a "charity case."

I later found her hidden love letters to Caleb, recently signed, calling me "just a boy, a distraction."

When I finally confronted her during our breakup, she exploded.

"You don\'t break up with me, Ethan. I decide when this is over! You belong to me!"

I was shocked by the raw possessiveness in her voice.

Her absolute conviction that she owned me, body and soul.

She saw me as nothing more than an expensive pet, a compliant placeholder.

How could I have been so blind, so foolishly naive for five years?

But that immediate hurt quickly turned cold, pragmatic.

If I was a substitute, I was a well-paid one.

That $500,000 wasn't severance; it was a bonus for a long-term performance.

With millions now in my accounts, I was financially independent.

It was time to leave Vicky and her gilded cage behind.

Continue Reading

Other books by Luo Xi

More

You'll also like

Jilted Bride's Revenge: The Valkyrie Awakens

Jilted Bride's Revenge: The Valkyrie Awakens

Gujian Qitan
5.0

I had been a wife for exactly six hours when I woke up to the sound of my husband’s heavy breathing. In the dim moonlight of our bridal suite, I watched Hardin, the man I had adored for years, intertwined with my sister Carissa on the chaise lounge. The betrayal didn't come with an apology. Hardin stood up, unashamed, and sneered at me. "You're awake? Get out, you frumpy mute." Carissa huddled under a throw, her fake tears already welling up as she played the victim. They didn't just want me gone; they wanted me erased to protect their reputations. When I refused to move, my world collapsed. My father didn't offer a shoulder to cry on; he threatened to have me committed to a mental asylum to save his business merger. "You're a disgrace," he bellowed, while the guards stood ready to drag me away. They had spent my life treating me like a stuttering, submissive pawn, and now they were done with me. I felt a blinding pain in my skull, a fracture that should have broken me. But instead of tears, something dormant and lethal flickered to life. The terrified girl who walked down the aisle earlier that day simply ceased to exist. In her place, a clinical system—the Valkyrie Protocol—booted up. My racing heart plummeted to a steady sixty beats per minute. I didn't scream. I stood up, my spine straightening for the first time in twenty years, and looked at Hardin with the detachment of a surgeon looking at a tumor. "Correction," I said, my voice stripped of its stutter. "You're in my light." By dawn, I had drained my father's accounts, vanished into a storm, and found a bleeding Crown Prince in a hidden safehouse. They thought they had broken a mute girl. They didn't realize they had just activated their own destruction.

Chapters
Read Now
Download Book