The Day He Donated My Heart, I Reset the World Chapter 02

The Day He Donated My Heart, I Reset the World Chapter 02 The Truth In The Dark
“Ms. Vance, you ever lie awake wondering how we found you every single time?” He tilted his head, studying me the way you’d study a bug in a jar. “Like someone handed us a map.”
Then boot to my gut. White-hot pain crawled through my bones.
I curled into myself on the floor, and just like that the memories hit—every time I ran, every time they dragged me back, the way I’d looked. Broken. Stupid.
And then it landed. All of it—staged.
He squatted down, grinning like he had all the time in the world.
“Shit, you’ve been a real good little cumdump for all of us—mouth, hands, whenever we wanted.” He held up my phone. “So I figure you earned yourself a treat.”
He turned it over in his hand.
“Vance family tagged this thing day one. Every move. Every breath—” He snorted. “Finding you was never even hard.”
I froze. My fingers dug into the floor until grit split the nails.
I should’ve known.
Ever since Celeste Vance, the real Vance daughter, was brought back, I’ve been the spare—the fake heiress everyone tolerated until the real one showed up.
But some stupid part of me believed the time we spent still meant something—that my own parents wouldn’t watch me drown.
I was wrong. They didn’t just refuse to throw the rope. They cut it themselves.
And Cassian. My husband. The man who said he loved me every damn day.
He was just harvesting me and handing every piece to Celeste.
“Fuck. I haven’t done anything yet. I was saving her for when I had time to enjoy it—and she’s already crashing? And what? The world ends if she dies? That’s the system’s brilliant plan? I’m the one who got dropped into this story—I’m the one keeping it running. What the fuck?”
His voice echoed in my skull.
The dead thing in my chest twitched. Not hope. Something worse.
I had a weapon now. The only one he couldn’t take from me.
My death. If I died, the whole thing went—him, Celeste, the world he lived in. He couldn’t afford to lose me!
Suddenly the outside door flew open. Cassian’s voice hit the walls like a fist.
“I didn’t bring you here to give her a spa day. What the fuck am I paying you for?”
“Where is the kit made for women? I didn’t buy it for decoration.” His voice went flat. “Break her. Properly. Or I break you.”
His thoughts chased the words, frantically.
“This doesn’t make sense. The universe rewrote itself to put me here. So why is the system telling me the world hinges on Aurelia Vance? She deserves it. I didn’t take anything from her that wasn’t already mine to take. That’s how this works.”
His eyes found his crew. Still planted. Doing nothing.
“MOVE! THE FUCK ARE YOU STANDING AROUND FOR? You want me to tell you how to do it?”
One of them twitched—then all of them, stumbling over each other, shoving through the inner door.
CLANG. The outer door sealed shut. The thin light from outside vanished.
“Fuck this system. I blew all my points on a fake heart for her and she’s still coding out? Bitch is supposed to be the main character—how’s she dying this easy?”
His voice looped in my skull like a notification I couldn’t dismiss.
Then the heart he’d bought me started to hum. Each pulse stealing a little more air, a little more time. Like lying in the dark and hearing the clock tick toward something you can’t stop.
They had me in the chair before my brain caught up. Metal kissed my bare back.
Then the clamps. Two wires like tails, trailing back to the battery. One pried my legs apart. The other clamped the jaws onto my pussy.
The leader leaned in close. A grin crawled across his face—wrong, hungry, the kind that made your skin crawl. Eyes rolled over my body.
“First time using the Tickler setup. Supposed to be something interesting. Let’s find out. Try not to squeeze too hard. We still need that mouth working for the rest of us.”
He hit the button.
“Ah—!”
Tearing pain from the waist down. My whole body seized, muscles contracting around nothing. Then the room tilted. I was still convulsing but I was already leaving—sliding into the dark one thread at a time.
THUD!
Something hit the door.
Then hands—on my face, warm, shaking.
Cologne. Sweat. Cigarettes. I knew the smell in my bones.
Cassian.
His voice cracked perfectly. If I couldn’t hear what he was really thinking, I’d have bought the whole act.
“Baby. I’m here. Nobody’s touching you again.” His hands framing my face, shaking. “I’m taking you home.”
A breath. Ragged. Performed.
“Stay with me. Don’t you dare close your eyes. You don’t get to do this to me. I’ve got nothing. You hear me? Just—open your eyes.”