Billionaire Romance10 min read
"I Won't Be Your Tool" — How I Owned a Novel and Broke Its People
ButterPicks12 views
"I don't owe you anything," I said, and I dropped the rice bowl.
I—Julianna Adkins—was sitting under the village courtyard sun when my life split into two. One moment I was a city woman with a subway card. The next I had a red string and a white jade pendant at my throat and a whole shabby village staring at me.
"This is my house," a woman said, looking at me as if I had no right. She was thin, patched clothes, greedy eyes. "You belong to that family? Bring the water. Bring the soup."
"I came to work," I said, and I kept my voice flat. "Not to be used."
They called this era hard. I called it a chance. I had read the book the night before, a trashy hit called Honey Pet Sweet Wife. I knew the plot beat by beat. I knew how the "original girl" ended—used, stepped on, and then dead. I had that jade pendant. I had the space.
"Julianna, you okay?" Song called from the bunk. She was small, nosy. "You look like you saw a ghost."
"I saw the villain I read about," I said. "And she thinks she can take my things."
Song laughed, soft and mean. "You can't fight everyone."
"Watch me," I said.
I practiced small things first. I kept my mouth sharp. I refused favors. I took my work shift. I kept the pendant hidden where only I could reach. When Alejandra Myers—she was the village's pale, stick-thin woman who smiled like a shark—came with manipulations, I closed my door.
"You owe me," she said one evening, in a voice made of sugar. "You helped me when I fell yesterday. Be nice. Bring Li Wen some soup."
"I'm not your tool," I said. "Don't start here."
Her smile cracked. "You are in the way, Julianna."
"Then move." I slammed the door.
That night I tested the pendant. Blood on white jade opened a flash—my secret yard appeared: a little farmhouse, a full well, fish drying, fruit like summer even in winter. I tasted freedom.
"Keep this safe," I told the pendant like I told a friend. "I will not be a story's pawn."
The days blurred into chores, laughter and pinched danger. Enzo Martin—village leader's son—came by with a grin and sweets.
"Julianna, come to the field," he said, like he owned the road. "I want you to see the harvest."
"I have work," I said.
He pressed. "Everyone says you're with Barrett now. Is that true?"
"Barrett who?" I asked, and Enzo's face did the thing it did when he felt cornered—fast anger, then false hurt. He left like a dog with its tail between legs.
Barrett Kozlov appeared like a storm. He was the stranger who had saved me from a snake on the hill. He had gloved hands, long limbs, and eyes that didn't look at me so much as measure me. People whispered: dangerous, gone-off-to-sea, a man who later becomes a myth.
"Are you hurt?" he asked, and the world narrowed to his flat words.
"I almost died to a snake," I said. "You were helpful."
He left. He returned with a bowl of fish soup. He left it on my table and walked away like a man avoiding debt. I stared at his hand print, the thick warmth that said something like promise.
"I don't like him," I told my bunkmate later.
"Who, Barrett?" Song smiled. "He looks like trouble."
"Good trouble," I said.
Barrett came more. He brought silence and good food. He sat near me with a slow breath and said, "You can choose."
"I choose not to be a tool," I said.
He nodded like he had heard the rule before. "You will be safe with me."
"Not because you say so," I snapped. "Because I made myself so."
We argued. We ate. We bickered like two people learning the edges of one another. He called me "Jules" and hated it. I told him he had too many names for one face.
"Call me Barrett," he said. "Call me what you want."
"I will call you 'dangerous,'" I said, and he laughed—soft and broke the cold around him.
Alejandra did not stop. She moved into schemes with Enzo. She whispered to village women. She painted me as an interloper. She tried to steal the pendant once, breaking into my bunk in the night. She found only a thin slab of bread and a folded shirt.
"Where is it?" she hissed later, face close to mine.
"Ask me like a person," I said. "Not like a thief."
She had no answer. She had only greed. Her moves grew bolder and uglier.
"What is she doing?" Barrett asked when I told him. He did not scold me. He asked like a man who already had the answer.
"She is being a villain in a book," I said. "She is trying to kill the plot."
"We will stop the plot," Barrett said. "On my terms."
He had money in the future. He had power. He could be the man who rewrites a book. For now, he was the man who brought me a coat when I was cold, who stood outside the open door and let no one pass. I could smell the future on him like smoke.
One night, Alejandra cornered me at the well. The sky was a simple black. The well water was a mirror.
"Give me the jade," she said.
"No."
She moved to shove me. I moved faster. I dropped to the ground and prayed I would not die in a heap like a chapter.
"Leave her," a voice said. Barrett stepped into the moonlight and his hand settled behind my neck. He did not touch me roughly, only enough to tell the world he would not let her take me. Alejandra left, teeth like knives.
After that, I felt what the book had always promised its heroine: safety with a man who would cross bodies to keep you. But I was not a heroine. I was a woman with a secret book and a plan.
Three times I opened the small book I had found in the space house. It was the key to jumping forward and back. Once I went forward three years. Barrett was older and richer, and he had built walls and gardens and a home that smelled like orange wood. He had also built himself a fortress of grief.
"Where have you been?" he asked the first night I woke there.
"I came to see you," I said. "Why are you shaking?"
He told me his family history in pieces. How his brother had been taken, how his mother had been killed in the scramble for land and favors. He told me of a wedding where people laughed, and later a body in a hotel room. He told me names that looked wrong until I put them together: Alejandra, Enzo, and some shadowed house called Night House—Night family.
"Did they do this?" I asked.
He did not answer. He looked like he had already answered.
I returned to the present with pieces in my head. If Alejandra and Enzo were involved in Barrett's family's ruin, then the story I had read was built on murder and greed. The book had made villains saints and saints villains. I had the space and the future knowledge. I had to act.
"I will not let them win," I said to Barrett when I told him. He put his forehead to mine and we stayed like that until night fell.
We built our plan small. We proved theft. We collected receipts from the space—jewelry in a wooden box that did not belong to the Myers family, forged signatures, a hotel ledger with Enzo's hand on it the night a man died. I walked the village and pressed cold proof into the palms of old women who remembered. A young helper—Manon Yamamoto—gave me a camera and learned the steps of evidence collecting with quick fingers.
"Film everything," I told her. "When we burn their lies, we will not be able to claim there was smoke."
We chose a place: Barrett's company annual charity gala, a night where the city would come in black and red and the cameras would not stop. I wanted it public. I wanted lights, microphones, cameras, the press. I wanted witnesses.
I rehearsed what I would say. I kept it short.
On the gala night people in glass ceilings ate and clinked and smiled. Barrett walked onto the stage with me like a man who walked onto a battlefield. The band was silent. The hall smelled of perfume and fake trees.
"Barrett," I said into the microphone, my voice steady, "I need five minutes on this stage."
You could hear a pin drop.
He smiled. "Come with me," he said.
I had every camera set up. The LED wall, a thing bigger than the well, flickered to life. Alejandra sat near the front, an ugly pearl on her throat, cheeks painted too bright. Enzo stood near the back, hands like fists. They had taken the seats of people who thought themselves safe.
"I am Julianna Adkins," I said. "And I will show you what greed looks like."
"Show them," Barrett said beside me.
The LED changed. First, a photo: Alejandra's face in the village room where a child had been left unattended. Another photo: Enzo signing a ledger with a hotel stamp. Then the audio: an old tape of voices, Alejandra's voice, Enzo's voice, laughing and planning.
"Play it," I said, and Manon hit the key.
The sound filled the hall. Alejandra's voice, honey and poison: "Get him to the hotel. Make sure the car goes the wrong way. No witnesses."
A murmur moved through the crowd like wind. Alejandra's smile thinned. She stood, and she said, "It's a lie."
"It is not a lie," said an older woman from the audience. "She came to my house and bribed me." The woman lifted her head and the room watched her hand tremble. "She paid me to keep quiet. I kept the money in my chest. I can show you."
"Do it," I told her.
A younger man rose with a phone. He streamed live. The screen on every device showed the ledger we had photographed, the hotel stamp, the boat ticket to the city on the same date. Enzo's handwriting on the ledger looked like a man's fingerprints—clear and sharp.
"You can't do this," Alejandra cried. "You are a liar."
"Sit down," Barrett said, and the word was a blade. "You plotted to move a man into a hotel and you took part in dealing with his death. You hid his sister and lied about it. You made us all look away."
Enzo snapped. "You have no proof."
"I do," I said. "Listen."
We played more audio—her threatening calls, his deal-making, a payment to a villager. We rolled video: the village well with the hidden bag of money, the night Enzo had been seen around the hotel — a photo taken by a delivery boy. The room buzzed.
Alejandra went pale. Enzo's jaw trembled. "This is fake," he said. "You can't—"
"You did," Barrett said, and his voice cleared the room like a bell. "You killed a man who was my brother's friend. You let his mother die by telling no one. You lied and you burned people."
"Stop," Alejandra begged. Her hands moved like a caged bird. "I—no—"
"Tell them what you did," I said. "Tell them why you burned that house, why you bribed the guard, why you offered the man money."
The crowd leaned in. Phones were out. Cameras turned. People who had once smiled at their plates looked at each other with new faces.
Alejandra's knees gave. She sank to the chair and then onto the floor, hands at her throat.
"How dare you," she sobbed. "How dare you ruin me. I did what I had to do. He hurt me. He—"
"You set a trap," said one of the village women from the corner, voice hard. "You put poison in a cup. You sent him away. You made the car stop when he called. You thought no one would ever know."
"You thought wrong," I said.
Enzo tried to storm the stage. Security moved in, but the audience had already moved. People gathered around like a tide. Phones recorded everything.
"Please," Alejandra said. "Please. I didn't mean for them to die. I didn't—"
"You meant them to stop living different lives than you," Barrett said. "You killed to buy comfort. And now your price is paid in public."
Someone in the crowd started to clap. Soft at first. Then louder. A mess of clapping and shouting and the sound of a city waking. Alejandra's face collapsed into a new color—a gray that dripped.
"I will call the police," Enzo snarled, but he sounded broken even to himself.
"They will come," Barrett said. "They will watch the footage. They will see the ledger. They will see the payments. The world sees now."
Alejandra looked up at me. Tears wet her mascara. "Please," she begged in a voice that had once dripped poison. "I will give you everything. I will return it all."
I felt a small, cold part of me listen like a judge.
"Get on your knees," I said.
Enzo and Alejandra looked at me like a man looks at thunder. They hesitated, then dropped to their knees on the marble like two small children who had been found guilty by a lighter. Their suits wrinkled, their hair fell, mascara smudged. The hall held its breath.
"Get up," Alejandra cried. "Get up and stop this."
"Shut up," an old farmer yelled from the back. "You made a life into a game."
"Do you remember the boy who fed my chickens?" another voice called. "He died because you wanted a place in the city."
Someone else shouted, "Shame!"
People started to chant. Their voices rose. "Shame! Shame! Shame!"
Alejandra started to scream. "No, no, no— I will give you money. I will pay you. I will beg you. Please—"
She crawled to the stage and grabbed the edge with hands that shook.
"Stop," Enzo cried. "Please. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'll do anything."
"Say their names," I told them. "Say what you did."
"I didn't mean to—" Alejandra started.
"Say it," I pushed.
Enzo's voice broke. "We sent him— we sent him to the hotel. We paid the driver to take another road. We thought he would leave. We didn't mean the fall. We didn't say stop."
The words fell like stones. People wept. Flashbulbs popped. Someone took a live video of their begging. It spread online inside minutes. The police arrived, and it was not a simple arrest. It was a public stripping: social status peeled away, witnesses lined up, old lies unrolled like maps.
Alejandra sank to the floor and then she began to beg properly—knee to floor, palms up, voice high and small.
"Please," she cried. "Please don't let them take everything. Please. I will do anything."
The crowd hissed. People filmed with shaking hands. One young woman walked up and spat. Another slapped Alejandra hard enough to make a sound in the hall. The slap echoed like a bell. Alejandra sagged.
"You're going to pay," Barrett said, cold.
Enzo tried to stand and protect her. He was pushed down, hands bleeding from his fingernails scraping the stage edge. He fell into a seat and began to sob in a way that had no dignity.
The police pulled Alejandra and Enzo up. They cuffed them. When the cuffs clicked, a dozen phones shouted into the sky like small suns. The livestream trended. The village woman who had spoken earlier climbed the stage and sat with me, head high.
"It took a city," she said, "for them to fall. But now we know."
When they took them away, Alejandra screamed and fell silent. Enzo begged for mercy but found none. The cameras kept rolling. The crowd followed. Justice, for once, did not move like a slow river but like fire.
Afterwards, Barrett wrapped his arm around me and we walked off the stage. People shouted at us—some thanks, some condemnations, some old love. The world had changed.
Later, in the quiet that night, Barrett kissed my forehead.
"You did that," he said. "You took a book's ending and made it real."
"I did not want blood," I said. "But I wanted truth."
He held me like he had protected me from the hill snake. "No more lies."
We put the pendant back in the well once the world had settled. Not because I gave up the space but because I decided to live in the place I chose, not the one the book wrote for me.
"Will you stay?" Barrett asked, and I could hear the future in his voice.
"I will," I said. "But only because I choose you, not because a plot says so."
He laughed. "Good. I want no plot telling me when to love you."
"Then don't let the book end us," I said.
"I won't," he said. "I will make a life we both choose."
I looked at my hand where the pendant had left a pale ring. The jade sat on his palm now, small and bright.
"I am not a tool," I said.
"No," he said. "You are not. You are the author."
We wrote the rest together.
The End
— Thank you for reading —