Sweet Romance16 min read
My Ticket Back: Bloodlines, Bite-Backs, and a Billionaire Who Won't Let Go
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I knelt in the rain before two glossy photos placed on a low table, and the world narrowed to the soft, smiling faces of my mother and father. My knees burned from the cold stone, my throat was a dry well, and the funeral crowd passed like a river around me.
"Susana, you're going to faint," Zhang, the housekeeper, whispered, her hand trembling near my elbow.
"Let me be," I said, but my voice was a paper thing. "Just... one more minute."
People came and went to speak polite words at the photos. Their faces were faces of advantage — collars neat, palms ready to shake mine where it mattered. No one touched my shoulders in genuine grief. I learned a new kind of loneliness that day: how a family house emptied of warmth filled with measuring eyes.
"She's a curse," someone muttered beyond the curtains. "How could their car — their money — leave it all to this girl? Dangerous. We can't let a scandal stay in the house."
I tried to place the voice, but words blurred into the humid air.
"Miss Susana, you need to eat. Two days, no water — please," Zhang begged, voice low.
"I'll eat later," I told her. "Please stay here."
Zhang left with a bowl of rice porridge on a tray and a look like a woman who had been made to carry too many burdens for too long. I watched my cousins move like sharks among the mourners, offering scores and smiles to anyone who would hold their wine glass. That is how grief was used in my family: as a currency for closeness.
"Sign here," said my Aunt Kristina, voice buttery sweet when she wanted to coax me. "For everyone's convenience. For your future's convenience."
"I don't sign," I said.
"Susana," she softened, almost maternal, "you're eighteen. You know what I mean. The estate isn't endless. We'll do what's best for you."
She slid a document across the table: a bright, official-looking page labeled VOLUNTARY WAIVER OF INHERITANCE. The word INHERITANCE burned my eyes.
"Sign it and we'll take you to your parents' graves," Aunt Kristina said. "We buried them with dignity. We did this for you."
My hands shook as if with fever. I picked up a pen, made a shaky mark like the last thing I could control, and then the world rearranged. They packed me a small suitcase of old clothes and drove me to the cemetery. They left me at my parents' tombstone like a broken thing. When the cemetery staff kicked me out at dusk, they had already started to shut the gates.
I walked, dragging a cheap suitcase that smelled faintly of my childhood. The night was fat with the metallic tang of blood. I hesitated, then turned away, and the moon carved sharp shadows where nothing should live.
A man stepped out of the black like a cut in the air — tall, masked, a rifle slung under his coat. His eyes were the color of a hawk's, and he looked at me like I was something he had been searching for.
"Don't scream. Don't move," he said, voice flat.
"I wasn't —" I began. My throat closed. "Who are you?"
"Stop talking," he rasped. Behind him more men emerged from the dark. Confusion overwhelmed me until one of them collapsed. He had been shot; his shirt had soaked a dark pool across his stomach.
"Help me," he moaned.
I didn't know how to refuse a thing like survival. My fingers moved before my head caught up; I tore the collar of a white shirt into strips, wrapped one around the wound, knotted it hard. The masked men bundled the injured man into a van. They tossed me a thin wad of cash and some instructions: don't tell anyone. If I talked, they'd come back.
I stood on the old path, hands numb, and I realized then I had no one and only myself to lean on.
Two years later I had learned survival in small, steady wages. I earned money in part thanks to the cash the masked men left me that night. I lived on small honest shifts and long nights of study. I learned not to trust smiles with sharp teeth.
On the morning the internship postings went up, my roommate Lacey pounded on our dorm door. "Susana, are you coming? We're late!"
"Wait a sec," I said, tying my hair. My stomach flipped as if with a memory. The photograph of that night — the man, the hawk eyes — kept surfacing. I shook it off and followed Lacey to the hotel.
The Emperor Hotel was everything Kyoto wasn't: bright lights, glass like water, and a lobby that felt like an expensive promise. We wore the hotel vests and stepped into the glittering current of guests. I kept my head down. Money had a scent to it, and tonight it made the air thick.
"Susana," Lacey whispered. "Look."
A boom of silence washed through the dining hall as a man walked in. He was tall, almost 1.9 meters, in a tailored suit that looked like it had been drawn on his shoulders. He carried himself as if the world listened when he turned his head. He had a small mole, a tiny red mark near his left eye.
My heart shoved a question up my throat.
"Is that — ?" Lacey's whisper died under the weight of the room.
People clapped when he entered, tentative like worshipers. He moved without arrogance and without haste. He was Ethan Christensen, the heir to the Christensen conglomerate. Rumor had it the family towered over businesses and lives like a carved mountain.
He smiled once, a small thing that made the room refocus. A man shot forward — boisterous, lithe, arms wide — greeting Ethan like a younger brother gone long missing. He called him "big brother" and clapped him on the shoulder. Others clustered behind with practiced familiarity.
I felt the room tilt. I had seen Ethan's kind of world only through borrowed images: glossy magazine covers, a niece's movie credit. It was a plane with its own weather.
Later, while placing glasses in the back hall, I saw my cousin Mae Morin sweep through in white, every bit the pop-star face people paid to adore. She looked at me with a glare like a slatted shade. She'd always wanted what I had, I suppose: the easy skin, the effortless favor.
"Susana," she purred, "you look...ordinary in that vest. How quaint."
"Mae," I said. I kept my hands steady. "What a surprise to see you working tonight."
She laughed and pushed a finger into my palm, dumping a half-filled glass of red wine onto my shirt. "Clumsy. Clean it."
"I'm fine," I said, though I felt the hot sting of humiliation like salt in a wound.
Back in the service corridor, Mae's assistant Brody Hanson cornered me. "Your cousin wanted to say hello," he said. He looked hungry in a way that made my skin crawl.
"Don't," I told him.
Mae's smile turned dangerous when she spotted the chance to humiliate me further. She followed me into a hallway and handed me a glass with a sweetness like a trap. "Drink," she said. "A toast."
I had a flash of the cemetery at night, of being handed control in exchange for acceptance. I refused to look weak. I took the cup. For a handful of seconds, I felt warmth and the wash of something else, and then the world blurred.
I remember a hand on my wrist and then nothing sharp, and then pain and flight — and then a hand I had seen once before, enormous and kind, who pulled me into the stairwell and carried me to a private floor.
"You shouldn't be here," he said, almost to himself. "Who did this?"
I couldn't speak. The smell of cedar and smoke and money filled the elevator. He looked down at me like he was trying to remember how all the light in the world once fit him.
"Ethan?" The man at his side, broad and solemn, narrowed his eyes. "You found her."
He did not need to say the word. I had a mark — a small red heart-shaped birthmark on my left shoulder blade. Ethan's expression changed when he saw it, like a key finally turning in a lock. The war in his eyes — relief, terror, and something soft — made the room tilt sideways.
"Ten years," he whispered. "Ten years I searched for you."
I didn't know the word for the flood that came then. Memory fluttered in fragments: a hospital bed, a younger version of myself, a boy with a voice like winter avoiding the sun, a promise made when both of us were too young.
He fed me porridge like a father and then kissed my hair like someone who had found something sacred. He asked me my name and then repeated it like prayer: "Susana."
That night, the hotel became a shelter. He watched me sleep like a man holding light in hands he feared to drop.
The next morning my head healed enough to realize there were consequences to being in a rich man's room. I dressed in panic in the hotel bathroom in a scented robe and slipped out. Ethan watched me from the bed.
"Do you remember anything?" he asked softly.
"No," I said. "I remember being handed a glass. I remember the world closing in. I remember fear."
"Did you drink enough?" he asked.
"I don't know." The tiny portion of memory that named Mae as the one who had offered the drink was a blade.
"You shouldn't be alone," Ethan said. "Come with me."
"I can't — I have classes. I have work. I —"
"You signed a contact with Christensen Group," he said, matter-of-fact. "You are to start as an intern tomorrow."
"What?" The word sounded absurd and like a knot tightening.
"Come in at nine. We'll sort out the rest."
The next day I walked into the Christensen Tower with my head high and my palms sweating. The human resources woman smileoed with the practiced kindness of a gatekeeper.
"Susana McDonald?" she asked. "This is your desk."
"A desk?" I echoed.
"Yes. Private assistant to Mr. Christensen. He insisted."
I tried to voice protest — I wasn't trained for clerical minutiae. I wanted to be with the design department. But his insistence had weight. Also, it made some small part of me feel safer. I swallowed my pride and sat at the desk he had ordered placed in his office: a tiny island of wood and personal items in the expanse of his domain.
Ethan's presence filled the room like steady sunlight. He came and went like he was moving gravity.
"Sit," he told me once, and I sat.
"Your family," he asked one afternoon when we were alone, "is everything alright?"
I told him the truth in a few measured sentences: a signed paper, a suitcase, a grave. He read the file he had had his people pull: records, legal papers, the small cruel details. When he raised his eyes to me they were temples of resolve.
"They should not have done that," he said. "We will fix it."
"You can't buy my father's memory," I said.
"Not even trying," he replied. "But I can buy you back what was taken. I can make sure they can't touch you again."
We built a private world between his meetings. He taught me about running a company and how to read a balance sheet like a human being rather than a rectangle of numbers. I taught him how to thread a needle and where the best porridge stand in the city hid on rainy nights. There were small things that were ours: a joke, a glance, a look that turned his face warm as embers.
There were also things I could never let go: the humiliation Mae had orchestrated, the people who left me at a grave with an offered pen.
When the market rumble of a purchase put the Christensen legal team on the same path as mine, Ethan smiled and pointed to a court of business moves only big men played.
"We'll buy your family company," he said. "Not because I need it, because I want to give you back a throne no one should have stolen."
I argued. "I don't want charity."
"It won't be charity," he said. "You will run it. You will take it. You will decide what to do with it."
He taught me a bitter lesson in leverage. The deal was clean and clever. Ethan's people found a small, unlisted advantage in the family's holdings. They bought shares quietly. They moved quietly. By the time the family noticed, the bottom had already shifted under their feet. Stock whispers turned to shareholder meetings, and those who once debated my usefulness as if I were a kitchen appliance found themselves answerable to me.
I learned how to stitch revenge into the seams of industry. I learned how to speak in numbers while my soul hummed with a quiet flame.
And then came the public falling.
Mae Morin had been the face of an industry for years, the kind of starlets who make careers out of opinion pieces and clever Instagram stories. She thought she could take me and discard me on a hotel floor without paying a cost. She thought the world loved her more than it did truth.
I don't like seeing people suffer. I like seeing justice done.
So Ethan and I planned a night at the Emperor Hotel. We let it look like luck and chance and then turned the cogs until the engine purred just so. He briefed a few of us — his security, his PR team, and two investigative journalists who owed him a favor. There was a rhythm to it, like a dance performed by men who had never been allowed to slip on stage.
The cameras were ready when Mae arrived to give an interview — she thought she owned the room. We arranged for the hotel's monitoring system to create a single, undeniable narrative. The footage from the suite would be released, but only the parts that mattered.
We did not broadcast the worst. We did not make a spectacle of private humiliation. We used what was necessary: the lead-up, the evidence of her scheming, the messages, the receipts. We assembled the proof into a public dossier, then called a press conference.
"Ethan," I heard someone murmur in the lobby as we entered. "Is this true? Is she—"
Ethan's hand found mine and squeezed. "Stay with me," he said.
The conference room had been filled with reporters hungry for drama and the rest of the city with their phones ready. I stood at a podium with Ethan by my side and swallowed.
"Ethan?" a reporter blurted, "Is this about Mae Morin?"
"Yes," he said. "And no. This is about something worse. It's about the way the entertainment machine chews people up and spits them out. It's about how money and power create a system where the vulnerable are preyed upon, and how that system is built on silence."
He turned and handed me the folder. I felt the weight of it like a stone.
"Ethan likes drama," someone muttered off to the side, but he didn't smile. He wanted truth.
"I am Susana McDonald," I said into the microphones. "Two years ago I was a target. I was drugged on a hotel floor. The person who offered me that drink would later boast to friends. She thought it was clever."
"You mean Mae Morin?" a camera clicked.
Mae stood at the back, surrounded by handlers and lawyers, all of them in expensive suits and perfect makeup. She looked at me like a queen who'd been asked to relinquish her crown. Her smile did not reach her eyes. She was blushing, but not with shame.
"I came forward," I said. "I won't be silent. Here is the proof."
We played the recordings. We showed the texts from Mae's assistant arranging her tactics. We showed witness statements from staff. The room listened and then roared: questions, camera shutters, the scrape of notepads. Mae's world shrank to the size of those recorded minutes.
At first she looked almost amused, as if the cameras were a prank. Fingers flew from the crowd: "She set me up," she told a reporter. "It's not true. Why target me? I am a victim too." Her voice was the voice of the unaccustomed. She moved from cool to shaky.
Her lawyer tried to cut in. "These are defamatory accusations—"
"Defamation is what we call the truth when it suits you," Ethan said calmly.
Then the shift happened. It was visible. Mae's smile thinned. Her lips trembled. The handlers who had circled like satellites began to drift away. A crowd of fans who had once thrown bouquets at her now pressed forward with cameras and questions. Phones flashed. Voices cried out: "You did this!" "Why?" "How could you?"
I watched Mae's face as her armor fell. The stages had trained her to be untouchable, but the world had become hands. She went from flippant to incredulous, denial to outrage, then to desperation. "You're lying," she hissed. "I didn't—"
"Do you remember offering Susana the drink?" a reporter pressed.
"No!" she shouted. "No, I didn't. I was at dinner. I left. They are lying, lying—"
The cameras recorded her panic; the lawyers whispered. A woman in the front row murmured under her breath: "I met Maes once; she was cruel to my sister." Others chimed in, and the tide turned.
Mae began to shout through the clip with more verbosity than content. She accused everyone of conspiring. Her voice cracked. People started to push forward. A man in the back, a tabloid reporter who had once written flattering columns about Mae, stood up and said, "We have emails. Her assistant wrote them. They have receipts."
That was the turning point.
Mae's face, once composed and practiced, broke into a mask of horror as the world closed in on her. At first she tried to laugh it off. Then she tried to plead. Her storm of denials became shorter and thinner, like paper burning.
"Please," she begged at one point, hands clasped, "please stop. I'm sorry. I didn't mean for—"
"Sorry?" someone in the crowd shouted. "Sorry doesn't fix broken lives."
There were noises now like knives unsheathing: footsteps running, people murmuring, someone shouting for the police. Mae fell to her knees as photographers cheered like executioners. Her business manager shoved a trash can aside and for a second Mae's hair caught the light like a small pale thing. She had always expected this to be for someone else.
"Get away!" she screamed to no one in particular. "Get away, you traitors!"
A woman who had been a minor actress stood and pointed at Mae. "You ruined me!" she said. "You stole roles. You spread lies so you could look clean!"
Then the handlers filed out, leaving Mae alone and small on the floor under the glare of cellphones. The room was loud now with the sound of history being rewritten. People recorded, people shouted, people picked sides.
Mae's reaction had run a gamut: arrogant, sly, defiant, then pleading, then rage, then implosion. Around her, those who had once used her for their headlines now turned to other faces. She tried to reach for pity; it slid off like oil.
When the police arrived finally — called not by me but by the hotel's own PR manager who saw a liability — they interviewed witnesses. The assistant who had helped set the plan, Brody, was called to the stand. He tried to bluff his way through. His arrogance collapsed when staff produced CCTV footage showing his texts to Mae's team arranging an "incident" in exchange for money and favors.
It was not a courtroom, but it felt like one. Mae was condemned in the court of public opinion and by the weight of evidence. She had cultivated pity and public love; she had traded it for cruelty, expecting to be rewarded for villainy. Instead the ledger balanced.
In the days that followed the headlines exploded. Mae's carefully curated image dissolved. Sponsors dropped her. The film bank pulled its offers. Agents cut ties. She became, overnight, what she had always been to many behind closed doors — a person who used power to wound without regard for consequence.
I felt nothing like triumph. I felt a hollow relief that the ledger had been balanced and a deep tiredness.
But other punishments needed to be considered. The director, Carmine Barry, who had preyed upon young hopefuls and had a conspiracy of convenient silence around him, found his email flooded with testimonies. A dozen young women came forward with similar stories. The press ran pieces that wove together his patterns: late-night invitations, a hotel suite, promises of casting in exchange for compliance. Carmine's producers froze his projects. Public ostracism is often kinder than imprisonment for men who rely on reputation. No longer could he book a table without whispers. A lifetime of whispered power lost its echo.
Brody Hanson, Mae's assistant, watched his bank account emptied by legal fees and lost jobs. His name was attached to the messages and his text log. A staff meeting leaked where he tried to blame others. He found himself cut off from the industry that had taught him how to look the other way. He became the cautionary tale junior publicists told their interns.
As for my family — my Aunt Kristina and my uncle Fergus Abdullah — the exposure of payment transfers and the forged documents that had forced me to sign were humiliatingly simple to trace. Ethan's legal team was patient and coldly precise. The papers showed coercion, and the court of business ownership doesn't care for sentiment. Within weeks the property holdings were transferred back into a trust with my name on it and directors installed to prune the rot. My uncle and aunt were left with the hollow sound of doors closing behind them, their private fortunes pinned and their delicious invitations rescinded. Their social calendars collapsed as former friends counted reputations. They were not physically punished, but their fall was a table knocked aside in the middle of the banquet: loud, public, irreversible.
The punishments varied because the crimes varied: Mae got public ruin, Carmine lost his platform, Brody lost his network, my uncle and aunt lost everything they had tried to buy. Each fall had its set of consequences appropriate to the offense. I didn't cheer at any of it. That would have made me small. But I watched it with a cold kind of satisfaction like someone who saw a leaky pipe finally fixed.
Ethan never let the victories define him. He never used his power to humiliate; he built structures to protect. "You should never be at the mercy of people like them," he told me once, fingers tracing the line of my jaw. "I will not let anyone break you."
"Then don't," I said.
He smiled, like the sun folding into a room. "I won't."
In quiet hours before major meetings he taught me how to read contracts, how to notice missing clauses, how to hold a pen as if it were a sword. I taught him where the best porridge stalls hid in the mornings.
We told each other things we had never said elsewhere. On cold nights we shared a blanket and secrets: he told me of a boy in a hospital who had once wanted the world but had been given darkness instead. I told him how it felt to be left on a grave with a paper for a signature and nothing to keep me warm.
"Do you think this will last?" I asked once, in the kind of fragile hour when fear becomes bold.
Ethan laughed, the sound softening his face. "We will find out. But I can promise you this: I will keep trying."
He kept trying. Sometimes it was awkward — he didn't always know how to love me without making everything around us shift into gold and blinding obligation. But he learned. I clung to my independence. I insisted on nights alone. I insisted on working. He insisted on my safety. We found a balance like a seesaw that never tipped fully in one direction.
Months later I stood in the renovated house that once belonged to my parents. It smelled of lemon and new paint, and the portraits of those smiling faces were placed back where they had been. People came with slow, careful hands to apologize. Some were sincere; others wanted to be fit into a new order. I listened and gave small nods.
"Ethan arranged it," I told one cousin when she asked.
"You deserve it," she said. "You handled it well."
I nodded. I had not felt like I had handled anything particularly well. I had been lucky, and brave, and sometimes cowardly. I had made a life out of small things. But I had also taken hold of what had been stolen, piece by piece.
At times, when the city had learned to accept the new balance, I would walk and Ethan would watch me the way a man watches the one bright thing he is allowed to keep. Once — and only once — he surprised me in the night and said, "You know, you were always more than an heir. You were a person who made her own luck."
"I made mistakes," I said.
"So did I," he answered. "But we fixed it."
We did not end with a perfect promise. We ended with a key that only we held. I kept my family business. I kept my apartment. I kept my stubborn heart, and with Ethan at my side, I learned how to wield the world's sharp things without blood on my palms.
Once, walking back from a small dinner where we had argued about nothing at all, I stopped on the sidewalk and pulled from my bag a tiny paperback I had loved as a child. I let Ethan read a passage aloud in a voice that made the words feel like the home he had promised.
"Sometimes," he said, closing the book, "we hold what keeps us warm. Not everything that's warm is good, and not everything that's good keeps you warm. But we can choose."
"Do you still look for that girl from the hospital?" I asked because sometimes I needed to know the shape of his memory.
He kissed the corner of my forehead and hummed, "Every day."
I laughed, because I had been a child in a hospital once, and because he had found me among graves and debts and a small room, and had carried me so that I could stand.
When we passed old crossroads where a night had almost become everything else, I did not run. I walked straight through the memory like a room with glass windows. The past was where it belonged: visible, barred, and made reasonable.
In the end, the house was not the thing that mattered most. It never had been. It was the place we could anchor the new days. It was the place where the porridge steam smelled like the morning my father taught me patience.
Now, when someone asked what happened to Mae, I said simply: she learned what happens to people who break others for sport. When someone asked what happened to Carmine or Brody, I said: wrong deeds have costs.
And when someone asked what I wanted next, I said: "To keep my hands clean. To keep my head. To keep the people I love."
Ethan squeezed my hand and said, "We will keep all of that. And if the world gets too loud, I'll quiet it."
I smiled. "Promise?"
"Promise," he said.
We did not say "Always." We said a promise that smelled like porridge and desk lamps and the quiet click of a pen closing a contract. It was specific. It was ours.
And as the city breathed around us, as news cycles moved on and new storms arrived for other people, I learned to be careful with my heart, but not afraid to give it. It was, as it turns out, a better way to keep what mattered.
The End
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