My Husband Sold My Innocence Fifteen Times Chapter 08

My Husband Sold My Innocence Fifteen Times Chapter 08

Nearly a year had passed in the new world. Another mission, 

another villain to save. 

This time I didn’t take the female lead’s role. I chose a 

nobody a background character who ran a bakery. 

The villain’s name was Julian Croft- fifteen years old, raised by a single mother, with no money to speak of. His mother was dying, and he was the one keeping them afloat: groceries, rent, hospital bills – all of it resting on a kid’s 

shoulders. 

He might have managed, except for the bullies at school. 

They were after him every single day. 

Whatever money he managed to scrape together for his mother’s treatment was gone within minutes. The winter coats he and his mother had worn for five or six years went 

up in flames with a single match. 

Every evening, I set aside the day’s unsold bread and 

brought it to him- passed it off as leftovers so he wouldn’t feel like a charity case. Small things, but enough to keep the 

bitterness from taking root. 

More than once, I showed up at the school gates to get the 

bullies off his back. 

The rest of the time, I watched over him from a distance – 

quietly enough that he’d never feel pitied, close enough that 

he might start to believe the world wasn’t made of cruelty 

alone. 

It was a good life – quiet, purposeful, full in a way I hadn’t expected. The kind of life that lets the old one fade. A year 

was almost enough to make me forget everything. 

Their faces had blurred into almost nothing. Everything was 

going exactly the way it should. 

Until the night I locked up the shop and the system’s voice – 

familiar, mechanical, unwelcome – crackled back to life 

inside my head. 

– 

[Hey, host do you remember Ethan and Liam? From the 

last world?] 

I went still. I didn’t answer. The system kept talking anyway. 

[Somehow, they tracked me down. Don’t ask me how. They 

want to see you – just once.] 

I frowned. Just hearing their names made something in my 

chest clench, not with longing, but with the dull ache of a 

wound I had absolutely no desire to reopen. 

I said no. The system made a small humming sound, like an 

“oh,” and went silent. 

A month later, they came to me in a dream. Not the vague, dissolving kind, but something sharp, vivid, unmistakable. 

Their voices, their faces, close enough to touch. 

Liam stared at me like I might disappear if he blinked. For a 

long time, he didn’t move, just looked, as if he needed to convince himself I was real. When he finally broke the 

silence, the words barely made it out. 

“Audrey.” His voice cracked on my name. “I’m so sorry.” He dropped his head, and the sound that came out of him was 

barely human–low, shattered, the kind of grief that had nowhere left to go. 

Ethan lurched toward me, half–stumbling, half–running, and grabbed my wrist. 

His tears hit the back of my hand, warm, one after another. I pulled free without a word and wiped my hand against my clothes, the way you’d brush off something that didn’t belong there. 

“Audrey – it’s me. We were wrong about everything. We were so goddamn blind, and we never should have –” 

– 

“Every single day you’ve been gone – every single one I’ve thought about you. I’m sorry. I don’t even deserve to call 

myself your brother. And I know I don’t deserve to be 

forgiven.” 

I looked at him, expression flat. “Maybe that’s the point – 

you were never really my brother. You were just a mission. 

One of many.” 

“Yours was my first world. That’s the only reason I gave either of you anything.” 

Liam stepped closer, his face wrecked with grief, his voice 

barely holding together. 

“And me? What about us – everything we had, all those 

years? Audrey, please tell me it meant something.” 

– 

I’d never seen Liam cry before. Not once, not through 

poverty, not through debt, not through any of it. 

I let out a long breath. I felt absolutely nothing. “That was a 

mission too.” 

“But I love you – I’ve loved you every single day. Chloe was 

never – she was just – I never –” His voice was climbing, 

fracturing. 

I cut him off. “What’s the point of saying any of this now?” 

“I have a life now a good one. Better than anything I ever 

– 

had with either of you. I don’t want to see you again. We 

don’t even belong to the same world anymore.” 

“Don’t come looking for me again.” 

The last thing I saw before the dream dissolved was their 

faces, swollen, red–eyed, ruined. 

I called for the system in silence. “What the hell was that? How did they get into my dream?” 

“Are you kidding me? You’re letting them hijack my dreams 

now?” 

The system giggled. 

[They begged. Wouldn’t stop. And the price of getting in was 

their lives they’ll both be dead by tomorrow. Different 

– 

causes, same ending.] 

[I figured, why not? Gives their world a nice, clean tragic ending. Ties it off neatly.] 

I rolled my eyes. 

“Sure. Sell me out just like that.” 

I pulled the covers up, closed my eyes, and let sleep take 

me. 

Tomorrow would be a fresh start. It always was.