They Loved Their White Moonlight, Till I Disappeared Forever Chapter 01

They Loved Their White Moonlight, Till I Disappeared Forever Chapter 01

At the Rhodes family’s Thanksgiving dinner, Merritt Rhodes, president of the Rhodes Group, cut ties with every woman in his orbit for the sake of the one he’d never been able to let go.

The others took their checks and left to enjoy the holiday. I was the only one with nowhere to go.

Clutching the bottle of sleeping pills I had stockpiled, I walked into the abandoned laundry room beneath my apartment building, ready to take them all.

My soul arrived in this world twenty-one years ago, inhabiting this body ever since.

I had spent those twenty-one years trying to win over the four targets of my mission. Now, the last one had failed.

The System promised that once this body died, I could return to my own world, to my family.

But just before I lost consciousness, I thought I heard someone shouting my name, their voice raw and frantic.

…

The laundry room was secluded; no one would come here at this hour. I sank to the floor, my back against the cold wall.

I twisted off the cap and shook a cascade of white pills into my palm.

I could go home soon.

I missed home so much. I tilted my head back and swallowed the pills in one gulp. A bitter, chemical taste coated my throat, and my stomach began to churn almost immediately.

My consciousness started to fray. The distant music from the party upstairs grew fainter. Everything I had experienced in this world flashed before my eyes, a film on fast-forward.

I had been here for twenty-one years. There were four targets. All I had to do was make one of them love me unconditionally, and the terminal illness I had in my original world would be cured.

All four men were extraordinary. And all four of them hated me to the bone, all because of a girl named Seraphina. They all wished I would just disappear.

Now, the System had declared the mission a failure. I could finally give them what they wanted.

In the haze, I heard someone calling my name.

When I regained consciousness, someone was prying my jaw open with brutal force, shoving fingers down my throat to make me vomit. I choked and retched until it felt like I’d turned my stomach inside out.

I lifted my head and saw a man in a Tom Ford suit slowly turning a black ring on his finger. His expression was thunderous as he stared down at me.

I knew that face too well. My mind was still clouded, but his name slipped past my lips.

“Zane?”

The second I said it, I regretted it.

Sure enough, the man’s brows snapped together. His eyes filled with disgust.

“Don’t say my name, Helena. You don’t deserve to.”

The man standing before me was Zane Santoro, founding partner of Santoro & Marlowe. He was the one who cleaned up the Rhodes family’s messes. He was also one of my mission targets.

Years ago, after his family fell apart and his father killed himself following his bankruptcy, I risked my life to pull a badly injured Zane from the clutches of debt collectors. I took him home and nursed him back to health for more than half a year.

Back then, Zane had just lost everything. He was like a wounded animal, lashing out at anyone who came near.

It took me a long time to coax him into speaking, to persuade him to stop self-destructing with alcohol and pills.

Later, he decided to rebuild his family’s name. He started at the bottom, hiding his identity as an assistant at a law firm and slowly clawing his way up. In the end, he founded Santoro & Marlowe and remained the Rhodes family’s most trusted private counsel.

I had seen him at his lowest. I had also known him when he trusted me completely.

But that was four years ago.

Four years ago, on Thanksgiving, Merritt Rhodes and I got engaged. Everyone was there. The System judged my mission to be just one step from success.

On that very day, Seraphina—the woman this world seemed to revolve around—vanished, leaving behind an encrypted USB drive.

On it was a video. In it, she sobbed as she accused me of tricking her into going to a warehouse party where she was assaulted by a group of thugs.

She said she was too ashamed to face anyone, so she had no choice but to leave.

My brother threw me out, disowning me on the spot.

Merritt canceled the engagement and kicked me out of his penthouse.

Using his position as the Rhodes family’s fixer, Zane installed me in this derelict building slated for demolition and cut off all my credit cards.

“Someone as heartless as you deserves to rot in here,” he’d said, “paying for what you did day by day.”

For four years, I lived in miserable solitude. No matter how much I explained, no one ever believed I was innocent.

Now Seraphina was back. Merritt planned to spend the rest of his life with her. They wouldn’t even leave me this broken-down apartment.

The System had already judged me a failure. All I could do was end this life quickly and go home.