Chapter 3

A week later, a message appeared on my encrypted phone. It was a single line.

"The library. Midnight. Don' t be followed."

The sender ID was just a string of random numbers, but I knew who it was. Leo Vance. He was a cybersecurity genius, a man my family had taken in and mentored when he was just a boy. He was fiercely intelligent, fiercely loyal, and he had been my friend long before Mark Sterling ever entered my life.

Hope, a dangerous and unfamiliar feeling, flickered inside me.

I slipped out of the penthouse that night, bypassing the new security team Mark had installed. They were his men, not mine. But they didn't know the building's secrets. I did.

Leo was waiting in the shadows of the old city library, a place we used to go as teenagers. He looked older, his face harder than I remembered, but his eyes held the same steady warmth.

"Ava," he said, his voice low. "I know what he did."

He didn' t need to say more. He pulled out a tablet and showed me files, encrypted communications, financial records. He had been watching Mark for years, suspicious of his meteoric rise.

"He didn't just get a lucky break with that scandal," Leo explained, his finger tracing lines of code on the screen. "He orchestrated it. Ruined that man' s life to take his place."

Seeing the cold, hard proof of Mark' s ruthlessness was one thing. But what Leo showed me next changed everything. He pulled up an ancient, digitized text. It was about my family' s gift, the Midas Touch.

"I found this in a restricted section of your family' s digital archives," Leo said. "There are... forbidden techniques. Ways to alter the nature of the wish."

He scrolled down to a passage that made my blood run cold. It described a ritual, a way to channel profound emotional pain-grief, betrayal, rage-into the power source. It could turn the Midas Touch into its opposite. A reverse Midas Touch.

Good wishes would sour and fail.

But bad ones... malicious ones... they would come true with terrifying precision.

"He thinks he broke you, Ava," Leo said, looking at me intently. "Let him think that. We can use this."

A plan began to form in the darkness of my mind, sharp and clear. I would not be a victim. I would be a strategist.

From that day on, I played my part perfectly. I was the broken, submissive wife. When Mark came to the penthouse for appearances, I was quiet and sad. I let him see my tear-stained cheeks. I let him believe he had complete control. He was so blinded by his own arrogance, he never saw the steel hardening in my spine.

My life became a bitter reflection. I remembered our wedding day, the way he' d looked at me, the promises he' d made. Was any of it real? Or was I just a long-term investment he was waiting to cash in? The love I thought was my greatest strength had been my greatest vulnerability. It was a foolish, naive love, and it had cost me everything.

Then came the announcement of the Innovate Global annual charity gala. It was the biggest social event of the year. Mark, of course, was the guest of honor. And on his arm was Dr. Emily Hayes, her hand resting protectively on a small, but visible, baby bump.

The media went wild. The saintly humanitarian was pregnant with the tech king' s child. It was a fairy tale.

I watched it all on a screen, alone in my golden cage.

A few weeks later, the fairy tale cracked. Emily was rushed to the hospital. The doctors diagnosed the baby with a rare, aggressive condition. The prognosis was grim. The child would not survive more than six months after birth.

The news devastated Mark. He became obsessed, frantic. He poured millions into research, flying in specialists from around the world. Nothing worked.

That' s when he came to me.

He found me in the living room. His face was pale, his eyes bloodshot. He looked like a desperate man.

And then he told me his new plan. A plan so monstrous, so depraved, it took my breath away. He needed more golden transformations. He needed another wish. He needed to save Emily' s child.

He had a bottle of pills in his hand.

"I' m sorry, Ava," he said, his voice a strange, soft whisper. "I have to do this."

He drugged my water. As my consciousness faded, the last thing I saw was him on the phone, arranging for a new rotation of security personnel. Different men, every day, with instructions to visit my penthouse. His plan was to use them, to use my fear and violation, to trigger the transformations he so desperately needed.