So I said yes.

That was my first mistake.

By the time Chloe reached eight, I understood exactly what kind of game she had been playing.

She took my bedroom first, because Chloe “had anxiety” and couldn’t sleep in the east wing. Then she took my grandmother’s heirloom necklace because it “matched her skin tone better.” Then my parents’ attention, my brother’s loyalty, every holiday, every celebration, every quiet chance to belong. All Chloe had to do was let her lower lip tremble or squeeze out a few tears, and suddenly I was the difficult one again.

By the eighth loss, I stopped pretending it hurt less.

Then Chloe set her sights on the ninth thing.

My fiancé.

His name was Damian Frost.

At least, that was the name he gave me.

Three years earlier, I had found him bleeding out in an alley during a summer storm, his legs crushed, his pulse weak, his face pale with pain. I still remember kneeling beside him in the rain while he grabbed my wrist and whispered, “Help me.”

That was the night the system appeared.

A cold voice in my mind had said: Target detected. Save him, and you may bind his fate to yours. Heal him, and you will earn three wishes.

It sounded insane.

But he was dying, and I had spent too much of my life being abandoned to leave someone else on the ground.

So I said yes.

The system healed his legs. I gave up something of myself to do it, though I never understood exactly what. From that day on, Damian followed me like the kind of man women write poems about and regret later. He was poor, proud, handsome in a rough-edged way, and fiercely protective whenever anyone insulted me.

I mistook gratitude for love.

I mistook loyalty for truth.

What I didn’t know was that Damian had a secret life far bigger than the one he showed me. The world thought he was a struggling law student and sometimes actor. In reality, he was the hidden heir to one of the most dangerous private empires in the city. Men called him “Mr. Frost” behind closed doors. People with real money and real weapons moved when he spoke.

And instead of loving me honestly, he used me.

Not for my money.

For Chloe.

He thought making Chloe jealous would make her choose him.

So he gave me devotion with one hand while watching her with the other.

I didn’t realize it until the day Chloe laughed in my face and said, “The ninth thing is Damian. You can keep pretending he’s yours if you want, but he’s only ever been looking at me.”

I wanted to call her a liar.

Then I saw the way he looked at her when he thought I wasn’t watching.

That was when something inside me went cold.

Not broken.

Cold.

And once that happened, it didn’t matter how many excuses he had. A lie that deep doesn’t leave room for misunderstanding.

But my family still wasn’t done with me.

Because Chloe had another crisis waiting.

She had been promised in marriage to the Bennett family, one of the oldest and most powerful military families in the country. Their only son, Captain Lucas Bennett, had been critically injured during a classified border operation and left in a coma. The Bennetts believed an old family custom might bring him luck if the wedding ceremony was completed. Chloe, who loved wealth but hated sacrifice, refused to marry a man she thought was halfway to the grave.

So my family offered me instead.

My grandmother called it a duty.
My father called it a solution.
My brother called it practical.

Only my mother had the decency to look ashamed.

“If someone has to go,” Chloe said, eyes bright with victory, “it may as well be Ivy. We all know she’s good at being unlucky.”

That was when I understood something I should have understood years earlier.

They were never going to choose me.

Not once.
Not ever.

So I looked at the contract, then at Chloe, and said, “Fine. I’ll marry him. But I want the two townhouses in Beacon Square signed over to me first.”

The room went silent.

Chloe blinked, surprised I had asked for anything at all.

My grandmother sneered, “So in the end, you really are just greedy.”

I almost laughed.

When they deny you love, they always act shocked when you ask for property.

The next morning, before I left for the Bennett estate, I stood alone in my room and called the system back.

“I want to sever my bond with Damian Frost.”

The voice replied immediately.

If you transfer your final healing bond to a new target, Damian’s body will return to the condition he was in before you saved him. You will also suffer serious backlash. Are you sure?

I thought of Damian lying to me.
I thought of Chloe taking everything.
I thought of myself spending years loving people who only wanted to use me.

“Yes,” I said. “Transfer it.”

New target detected: Captain Lucas Bennett.

So that was how I arrived at the Bennett estate.

Not as a bride in love.
Not as a victim dragged to slaughter.
But as a woman who had finally decided to stop bleeding for people who never noticed the cost.

Lucas Bennett lay motionless when I first saw him, his face too handsome for death, his body marked by wounds earned in service to a country that would never fully understand what he had given it. His mother, Margaret Bennett, greeted me with tired eyes and unexpected kindness. His father treated me with more respect in five minutes than the Hayes family had in five years.

That alone nearly undid me.

After the ceremony, I stood beside Lucas’s bed and whispered, “I didn’t come here for your name. I didn’t come here for your family. I came because I know what it feels like to be treated like a sacrifice.”

Then the system finished its work.

Lucas woke up.

And I collapsed.

The next two days were fever, weakness, and darkness. When I opened my eyes again, Margaret Bennett was sitting beside me with tears in hers.

“You saved my son,” she said. “Whatever happens next, you’re family now.”

I didn’t know what to do with kindness that came without conditions.

So I cried.

That was the beginning.

Lucas recovered fast, faster than his doctors believed possible. He was quiet, disciplined, and almost painfully sincere. Unlike Damian, he never made promises he didn’t mean. Unlike my family, he never treated affection like a reward for obedience.

When I told him I only wanted honesty, he said, “Then honesty is what you’ll have.”

When I said I didn’t know how to trust people anymore, he said, “Then don’t rush. I’ll stay.”

That was the thing about Lucas Bennett.

He never chased.
He never manipulated.
He never played games.

He simply stood where he said he would stand and let me decide whether I wanted to move closer.

For the first time in my life, love didn’t feel like a test I was failing.

Meanwhile, back in the ashes I had left behind, everything started cracking.

Damian’s legs began failing again.

Doctors couldn’t explain it. He could.

He knew exactly who had once healed him, and exactly what her absence meant.

At almost the same time, he overheard Chloe talking to my brother. She laughed about how easy it had been to use him, how she never actually wanted “poor Damian,” only the hidden Mr. Frost with the empire, the power, and the influence. She said I had been a convenient prop, nothing more.

That was the day Damian learned what I had learned long before:

Being chosen by Chloe was not a victory.
It was humiliation disguised as desire.

By then, it was too late.

Lucas and I had already built something real.

He took me to register our marriage properly. He stood in a bridal salon for three hours while I tried on gowns I never thought I’d have the right to wear. He looked at me like the whole room had stopped the second I walked out in white. He kissed me in front of his mother and didn’t apologize for it later. He told the press, when the story finally leaked, “My wife does not need to hide.”

My wife.

The words settled somewhere deep in me and stayed.

Of course Chloe couldn’t tolerate that.

She showed up at a boutique one afternoon and threw herself at Lucas, insisting she had been the one meant to marry him, that I had stolen her life, that she could still “take the tenth thing” if she wanted to.

Lucas looked at her once and said, “The original engagement contract was for the biological Hayes daughter. That was Ivy. It was always Ivy.”

Her face went white.

Mine probably did too.

When I went home that night, I stared at the ceiling for a long time.

All those years.
All those humiliations.
And even the marriage they had used to get rid of me had, from the start, been mine.

No wonder fate had laughed.

Then Damian came back.

Not with flowers.
Not with apologies.
But with obsession.

He cornered me outside the Bennetts’ lake house and said, “Come back to me. I know I was late, but I know now. I love you.”

I looked at him and felt… nothing.

Not hate.
Not longing.
Not revenge.

Just the emptiness that comes after a door has already closed.

“You don’t love me,” I said. “You miss being worshiped.”

That should have ended it.

It didn’t.

Because men like Damian do not handle rejection like ordinary people.

He kidnapped me three nights later.

He locked me in a house outside the city and told me if Lucas Bennett didn’t exist, then I would remember who I belonged to.

That was the first time I laughed in his face.

“Belonged?” I said. “Damian, that was always your problem. You never wanted a woman. You wanted ownership.”

He didn’t take that well.

Lucas found us before dawn.

The fight that followed was brutal, fast, and ugly in the way real violence always is. Damian screamed that Lucas had stolen me. Lucas hit him hard enough to split the fantasy in half. I broke free just in time to see Damian pull a gun.

The shot went off.

Lucas fell.

And for one heartbeat, the world ended.

I dropped beside him, my hands covered in blood, my whole body shaking. Damian was still shouting, still talking, still insisting we could start over if I would just listen.

I didn’t hear a word.

I only heard the system.

Two wishes remain.

“Save him,” I whispered. “I want Lucas alive. I want him safe.”

Wish granted.

Lucas’s bleeding slowed beneath my hands.

Damian stared at me like he was seeing the truth of me for the first time.

Then I looked up and told him the words I should have said much earlier.

“Even if time reset itself a thousand times, I would still choose him. Never you.”

Something in his face broke then.

Really broke.

By the time the authorities arrived, he was no longer fighting, only staring at nothing, like a man finally forced to meet the ruins of his own making.

After that, everything moved quickly.

The Hayes family’s financial games collapsed. My brother lost the money he’d hidden. My grandmother’s influence evaporated. Chloe, spiraling after Damian publicly exposed her and ruined the marriage arrangement she had clawed for, ended up under psychiatric care after trying to kill us both in one last fit of envy.

People later called it tragic.

Maybe it was.

But tragedy requires innocence, and by then, nobody in that family had much left.

Months later, standing in the Bennetts’ garden with Lucas’s hand warm around mine and his mother arguing cheerfully with wedding planners nearby, I rested my palm on the small curve of my stomach and let myself breathe.

Lucas noticed at once.

He smiled. “You okay?”

I nodded.

Then I said, “We’re going to have a baby.”

He went utterly still.

Then he laughed, cried, kissed me, and somehow managed to do all three like a soldier finally learning there were victories gentler than war.

For years, I had believed I was the girl people sacrificed.

The one they traded.
The one they used.
The one they expected to lose quietly.

But in the end, the sister who tried to steal nine things from me failed.

Because she never understood the one thing she could not take.

A life rebuilt by someone who finally chose herself.

And once I did that, love found me on its own.

Not the kind that begs.
Not the kind that lies.
Not the kind that uses pain as proof.

The real kind.

The kind that stays.