— E L L A —
There I was sitting across from the café manager. A woman in her 40s with reading glasses on her nose. And smiled the smile I had been practicing all week. I am capable and pleasant, and absolutely not someone who was dropped from a project three weeks ago, smile. It was getting easier to wear. That was either growth or something sad that I hadn't admitted yet.
The photo shoot had gone well. That was the part that still hurt the most. I had done everything. The pictures were good, the team had liked me, I had walked out of the studio feeling like something was finally happening....Then the contract was pulled. A restructuring, they said. Budget issues. The kind of words that meant it isn't personal, but were entirely personal.
So here I was. Asking about weekend shifts. Trying to look like a person whose life plan hadn't recently been changed without her permission. The manager was talking about the scheduling system when my phone buzzed on the table. I would have ignored it. The notification preview caught my eye, and my brain stopped working.
—Re: Contract. Reinstatement & Apology—
I stopped breathing. "Are you okay, dear?" the manager asked. I was not okay. I was the opposite of okay. I was reading the email with my fingers, eyes scanning the same lines twice because my brain refused to accept the information. As if it all is a dream.
They were reinstating the contract. A formal apology for the trouble. Terms the same as the offer. Pending my confirmation.
Pending. My. Confirmation. "I'm so sorry," I said, already standing up, the woman looking a bit worried. "I'm so sorry, I have to make a call. Excuse me." I was out the door before I finished the sentence, phone to my ear, cold air hitting my face as Sylus's line rang once, then twice. Then his voice came through, calm as ever and collected.
"Ella."
"Sylus-" His name came out amused, half-not composed. "Sylus, okay! I need you to listen to me!"
"I'm listening." Calm. Steady. The voice that never got rattled. "Clam down, little superstar."
"The contract—" I. Then my excitement got ahead of my words, and it came out jumbled. The reinstatement, the apology, the terms all tangled together.
"Ella." His voice was gentle and firm. The tone he used with me.
"Breathe. Start from the beginning." I breathed. One slow breath on the sidewalk outside a café.. Then I told him. Properly, this time, start to finish. The notification. The email. The apology. The offer.
There was silence on his end for a moment.
"Oh my." Quiet. Weighted with pride. "Ella."
"Yeah," I whispered.
"I told you." The warmth in his voice was unmistakable. "I told you the opportunity would come. Didn't I tell you?"
"Yes." I admitted, laughing. "You told me."
"All the best to my superstar." He said simply. Like he had never doubted that this was always where I was headed. I stood on the sidewalk, with the email on my screen, and felt something settle in my chest. A warmth that felt so real, as if I wanted to run into that embrace, that warmth was unknown to me against this cruel world.
------— ✦ —-------
— S Y L U S —
The ice had already started to melt. A square dissolving slowly into amber, seeping cold into the whiskey as I set the phone down on the table. Ellas voice still lingered at the back of my throat. Warm. Excited. The way she got when something good happened. She couldn't contain all that brightness spilling out of her before she could think to hold it back.
I let myself have that for one moment. Then I looked at the photograph on the desk in front of me. Felt the warmth fade to something quieter and colder.
Kangyul.
I leaned back into the chair. Leather, the kind that costs more than most people's monthly rent. Low amber light stretched across the room in diagonals, catching the glass, catching the edge of the open file, catching nothing else worth looking at. This was the empire I had built. Quietly. Methodically. Long before most people in this industry had learned my name, I had already been laying the foundation. Capital, connections, patience.
I sipped the whiskey. Turned a page. His credentials. His career history. His unremarkable rise to creative director of a company that existed in no small part because I had decided it should. I had been growing roots of that place long before Ella had ever walked through its doors.
He had decided on her contract and passed it through without flagging it to me. Without a conversation, a single courtesy.
I felt my tongue poking the inside of my cheek, an unconscious habit when I am pissed off. As I recalled last weekend, when I reached the company, feeling enraged, barely contained, as memory burned into my mind, unable to get off.
How her tears soaked my t-shirt, how she felt unworthy when she had every right to achieve it, every right to be worthy of it after all she did so much hard work.
-------
HR had been a wreck by the time I arrived. I could see it the moment I stepped through the door. The way she held herself still, the way her eyes were doing too much work trying to read my face for information I wasn't giving her. She had tried to get out of it, said something placating about the situation being manageable, that there were protocols, and all I said without bearing a glance at her,
"Get me, Creative Director. And send the re-enlistment email to the candidate."
I walked past her and into the conference room, sat down, and waited. Soon enough, someone walked through. He walked in without knocking.
That alone told me the kind of man I was dealing with. The kind who had been given enough authority to stop checking whether he was allowed to walk through doors. Composed. Almost bored by the thing. Like being summoned by the investor of the company he worked for was a mild inconvenience rather than the only thing standing between him and a very uncomfortable conversation with his own career.
"Greetings Mr.Morano." He said with a smile as if nothing had happened. My cold, calm voice echoed in that empty conference room. " What was the reason to remove the candidate?"
"The decision to remove a candidate falls under my authority, doesn't it?" He actually said that. Standing there with his hands in his pockets, relaxed chin slightly lifted. Like the answer was obvious. Like I was the one who had misread the room.
I stood up, trying to maintain my calm and composure. "The final approval, " my voice came out flat, deep, and authoritative, "rests with me." The silence after that was the kind that people who understood power recognized immediately.
The smirk came next. "Interesting. Seeing our investor this worked up over a single candidate." The undeniable confidence and audacity to comment on a mockery in such a serious situation were quite remarkable. "We go back. She looked really good on top of me-"
My hand was at his throat before he finished the sentence. A sudden collision with the wall. The sound of it cracking through the room, the way sound did when something had passed the point of being a conversation.
"What.The.Fuck.Did.You.Say?" my voice dripped with pure menace and angry seething from me as I pushed him deeper into the wall, gripping harder rings digging into his skin.
He coughed, clawed at my wrist. And still somehow dared to look amused.
"Oo… possessive," he rasped. "That's… interesting." I leaned in. Enough that there was nothing left between us but the truth of exactly how serious I was.
"You don't know what interesting is.. You're about to learn what happens when you push Sylus to the edge."
---------
I turned another page, done with recalling what I have done, his words still burned into me.
"She looked really good on top of me."
I felt my fist clench as the paper underneath it crumbled, anger boiling, coursing through my veins like a damn poison.
The file said he had known her since the orphanage. Since before she had a career to protect or a name worth saying. He had been there through all of it. The years she never talked about in the ones I had learned to hold carefully and never push on. Now here he was, a creative director in a company I invested in, saying her name in a room he was only standing in because I had allowed it.
"Motherfucker." I smirked at the photograph. Kangyul wanted to talk about authority. About whose decisions counted and whose didn't, about what he had the right to say and to whom.
I turned the page of the file and closed it.
"Your time is over .... Kangyul"
------— ✦ —-------
— E L L A —
The grass was dry and soft beneath me, and cold wind brushed past in slow, indifferent waves. I lay there and let it happen under that tree that had shaded me for years. I let the sky hover above me without meaning anything. I let my thoughts wander as they always did when I gave them too much space. They drifted back. I rethought and scrambled every moment that had shaped me into who I was now.
Was I the monster everyone tried to make me? Was I the misery in a life I never wanted?
I didn't know. I had stopped being sure long ago.
Left behind. Abandoned. At some point, quietly and without ceremony, I had simply stopped hoping for a miracle. The pain of that had faded over the years, replaced by work, by routine, by moving fast enough so the past couldn't quite catch up. But the scars never truly healed. Not really. They just buried down.
Then Kangyul resurfaced in my life, and every one of those wounds opened up again. Every scrape, every cruelty, every moment, his face twisted with amusement at something he had done to me. He had enjoyed it. That was what I could never fully push away.
"Not the pain itself, but the pleasure he took in it. The way suffering became entertainment when the pain was yours and someone else was watching."
In those moments, then and now, something in me sank into a place I didn't talk about. It was dark and very still, certain in a way that nothing else in my life ever had been.
"I wanted to kill him. Slowly Inch by inch, just like he had done to me, pulling him down into an abyss so deep and airless that even Kangyul could never find a way back out."
That was one of those moments when I wanted to end him. Cold seeped in through every crack. My palms and wrists felt raw from scraping against the rusted metal of the locked door. The smell mixed with rain, sharp and metallic, filled my lungs with every breath. Water pooled on the rooftop floor, creeping under the gap and soaking through my cold feet, my socks, reaching my skin as if it was determined to get in. I kept working at the door, my fingers were mostly numbed, at a point I wished I was dead.
I pushed harder than before, and suddenly it all gave at once. A glass sill resting against the frame toppled with it, shattering against the wet ground with a loud crack. I crashed into someone on the other side and fell hard, my knees hitting the rooftop floor, rain hitting everything.
I looked up as Kangyul lay flat beneath me. He was fourteen and already ruined in ways that made people like him. That cruel look sat comfortably on his face, as if being pinned under a soaking wet girl in a rainstorm was just another mildly amusing thing in a long line of them.
"So desperate to touch me, hmm?" I moved to stand. His hands found my thighs cold, deliberate, unhurried, holding me right where I was, that sly grin on his face as if He was testing me, how far I would let him go.
Something inside me went still. I felt calm, like the noise had stopped, and my body just decided. My heartbeat filled my ears, steady and slow, the only sound that existed. My fist curled into his soaked shirt. My other hand found the broken glass on the ground beside us without looking, fingers wrapping around it naturally, like it had been waiting for me. The edge cut my palm immediately.
I hurled it up in the air with a speed only to stop a few inches away from his face, as my other hand grabbed his soaking collar twisting it hard. My blood ran down my wrist, dripped, fell onto his face in slow, dark drops.
Only voice left in my head and every fiber in me said
kill.
kill.
kill.
I leaned down until the rain between us was the only distance left.
"I will come for you, Kangyul."
My voice was barely a whisper, soft the way a blade feels before it moves.
"I will take you apart piece by piece until there's nothing left of you>"
" Nothing."
I dragged the edge of the glass across his forearm slowly, deliberately. A thin line of red opened up in his pale skin, wanting to stab him right there in that moment. I felt nothing as I watched it. No hesitation. No horror at myself.
Just the numbness that had settled in since his hands had touched me, spreading to every part of me, cold and complete.
He looked at his arm, at the thin red line, then back at me. He chuckled.
Not the usual mocking, this one felt real. There was something deeper, almost like wonder, beneath the amusement, as if I had shown him a side of something he had been searching for without realizing it.
His grip tightened, finger digging hard into thighs, hard enough it could leave an impression on the skin. He leaned up slowly, rain soaking us both, his face just inches from mine, pulling my wrist, tugging closer, leaving us breaths apart.
"Sure," he said with an excited tone, unhurried, like a promise.
"I'll be waiting, Ella."
His eyes roamed over my face with something dark and too interested, his eyes drinking every bit of me with his gaze, an excitement plastered on his face.
"And if this—" a pause, almost reverent..." is what you look like when you're devastatingly mesmerizing... I would be glad to die by your hands."
I held his gaze, said nothing, just pushed him away harshly as I stood still, face up into that stormy sky, letting everything go numb, blood dripped into that pooled water as I felt his gaze lingering on me as I walked back inside those quiet hallways of the orphanage I went into my room tearing the piece of cloth wrapping it up in my hands and quitely changed and went to bed.
----- That memory was still engraved, still there like an unhealed scar, the kind that didn't fade no matter how many ordinary days you stacked on top of it. As my phone buzzed against the grass.
"Asher."