"Ryan?" I choked out his name, my balance entirely gone as I swayed on my feet.
Jenna stepped in front of me with a mocking laugh, pulling out her phone and searching up a clip to show the entire room.
"Wow, I was wondering why this performance looked so convincing," she sneered. "Turns out our drama queen starred in an indie medical short film last year, playing a patient with a severe allergic reaction. Talk about a masterclass in acting, sweetie."
Ryan’s face darkened instantly.
He shot me a piercing, furious glare, slamming his hand onto the table. "Isabella, enough! Are you ever going to stop? Everyone gathered here tonight to celebrate me making junior partner at the city’s top firm. Can you show some damn respect for once?"
I lay on the floor, my entire face contorting in sheer agony. I didn't even have the breath to answer him as my consciousness began to drift.
"Get up!" Ryan barked, his pride clearly wounded. He grabbed a plate with a slice of the heavy, walnut-and-peanut-crusted celebration cake from the table and shoved it right in front of my face. "Get off the floor, apologize to Jenna, and eat this. Show everyone you can be a team player. Now."
Jenna smiled beautifully, her voice dripping with artificial pity as she squatted down beside me. "Look, Isabella, Ryan went out of his way to offer you a piece of his success. If you don't eat it, you're just being petty. Be a grown-up."
She paused, looking at me with a dangerous, knowing glint in her eyes. "Oh, I get it. You're too busy commitment-acting to feed yourself, right? Don't worry, darling. Let me help you."
She signaled to Ryan’s sycophantic colleagues from the law firm. They caught on instantly, pinning my arms to the floor and forcing my jaw open.
"Mph... no!"
I thrashed in pure terror, but it was useless. I could only watch through blurred eyes as she broke off a massive, nut-heavy chunk of the cake and forcefully shoved it down my throat.
The contaminated crumbs hit my hyper-sensitive system like gasoline on a wildfire. Within seconds, my limbs went completely numb. My heart rate spiked into a chaotic, lethal rhythm, and my chest seized so violently that I tasted the terrifying reality of true suffocation.
I stared up at Ryan, my eyes wide with a desperate, silent plea. Save me... please...
He gave me a look of pure disgust and scoffed. "It's just a piece of cake, Isabella. Stop being so dramatic. Do you really think I’d let things go too far if you were actually dying?"
He turned away from me, lifting a fresh glass of champagne to toast his colleagues. "Ignore her, guys. She doesn't know how to behave in civilized company. This night is about us."
One of the junior associates laughed, looking at the tier-cake on the counter. "Come on, Ryan, a man of your status shouldn't let a gorgeous girl like Jenna celebrate without a proper bite. Why don't you two share the cake?"
Everyone's eyes turned to Ryan and Jenna. To them, my life-or-death struggle on the floor was nothing but a pathetic background performance.
Ryan smiled, breaking off a piece of the rich, frosted cake and feeding it directly to Jenna. "Honestly, Isabella is committed so hard to this little death-scene act that if I try to give her another bite, she might actually pretend to faint. Let's not waste the mood. Jenna, open up."
He fed her with sickening intimacy. A bit of the white frosting smeared at the corner of Jenna's lips. Blushing under the attention, she giggled. Ryan leaned down, his thumb gently wiping the sweet cream away before licking it off his own finger, his eyes locking onto hers.
Jenna closed her eyes, leaning into him completely as the crowd erupted into cheers. "Get a room, you two!"
Looking at them, my heart went utterly dead.
My throat was closing up rapidly, burning like fire from the peanuts. Desperate for anything to wash the poison down, I crawled toward a stray glass of water on the lower shelf of a nearby cart. My fingers trembled as I reached for it, a pathetic, silent plea for survival.
Just a sip... please...
Before my hand could touch the glass, Jenna’s foot shot out, kicking the glass away. It shattered across the floor, the water soaking into the carpet just inches out of my reach.
"Oops, my bad," she scoffed, looking down at my miserable, soaking wet form with absolute disdain.
Through my hazy vision, I noticed the allergy spray bottle near her feet. Driven by a primal urge to survive, I dragged my agonizing body toward it.
But just as my fingers touched the plastic, Jenna’s stiletto heel came down hard, grinding the packet into the floorboards.
"Oh look, she’s finally breaking character because she can't stand seeing us together," Jenna yelled, making sure her voice carried across the room.
"Isabella, you are an absolute embarrassment," Ryan snapped, turning his back on me in disgust.
Jenna reached down and grabbed a handful of my hair, violently ripping my head back to force me to look at her. Her face twisted into a vicious, unhinged smile as she hissed in a low, threatening whisper:
"Stop the act, Isabella. Admit it. Tell everyone right now that you're just faking it for attention, or I'll make sure you really regret tonight."
Her eyes turned viciously calculated as she grabbed a steaming kettle of boiling water from the lounge's tea station. Lunging forward, she sneered, "Oh, you want a drink? Here, let me help you wash that down." With a sadistic smile, she aimed the scalding water directly at my face, trying to force it down my throat.
Panic flared through my fading consciousness. I knew she was trying to disfigure me.
Using the absolute last of my adrenaline, I reached out and desperately pushed the kettle away. The boiling water splashed everywhere, mostly over my own chest and arms, but Jenna used the momentum to trip backward, intentionally spilling a few drops on her own wrist. She let out a piercing, theatrical shriek.
"My hand! Isabella, how could you!"
The sudden chaos instantly drew everyone's attention. Before Ryan and his friends could fully process what was happening, Jenna lunged back down, grabbing a sharp cocktail fork from the table. As she shoved me violently onto the floor, she aimed straight for my face, slashing the sharp tines across my eye and cheek.
The impact exploded through my skull. The sharp metal sliced deep into my flesh, tearing a jagged line from my brow down to my cheekbone, narrowly missing my eye but leaving a horrific, open wound.
"Ah!" I screamed out, a wave of blinding, white-hot agony radiating from my face down to my toes as blood cascaded down my neck.
"Isabella, have you completely lost your mind?" Ryan shouted, pushing through the crowd. But when he saw my face drenched in thick, pouring blood, his pupils dilated in sudden horror. "Isabella... Oh my god, I need to get you to a hospital!"
He reached for his car keys on the table, his face turning pale.
But Jenna was faster. She cradled her slightly reddened wrist, tears squeezing out of her eyes as she pointed at me.
"Ryan, don't let her trick you! She attacked me first because she was jealous! That blood on her face? It’s just fake movie makeup. Every low-tier actress keeps blood capsules in her purse for attention. She probably popped one and scratched herself with a prop just to frame me because we were sharing the cake!"
Ryan stopped. He stared at my bleeding face, then at the kettle. The brief flash of worry in his eyes vanished, replaced by an icy, terrifying coldness. Every ounce of concern he had for me instantly withered away.
"Don't worry, I'll clean her up," Jenna purred maliciously, her tearful expression melting into a competitor's grin.
She grabbed me by my collar, dragging my limp, choking body out toward the VIP suite’s private outdoor patio, violently throwing me straight into the deep end of the lounge’s luxury swimming pool.
The moment my open facial wounds and fresh burns hit the chlorinated water, it felt like liquid fire dissolving my skin. The pain was so intense I could barely breathe. To make matters worse, I couldn't swim. The heavy water rushed into my nose and lungs, triggering a massive, hyper-accelerated anaphylactic surge in my heart rate.
I thrashed violently inside the water, splashing frantically, genuinely feeling like my life was ending.
"Look at that. She was playing dead a second ago, and now she’s got plenty of energy to splash around," Jenna’s mocking voice echoed from the pool deck above.
Before I could clear my eyes to break the surface, a hand slammed onto the back of my head, brutally shoving my face back under the water.
"Let's sober you up, brat. We wouldn't want you ruining Ryan's big night out here."
Through the rippling, distorted water, I could faintly see Ryan standing on the deck, his arms crossed over his chest, his eyes filled with absolute disgust. He looked at me as if my very existence was a stain on his perfect evening.
My heart felt like it was going to explode. Terrified and desperate, I clawed at the slick tiles of the pool edge, trying to scream. But my lungs were filled with water and my throat was swollen shut. All that came out was a thick, metallic taste of blood.
I choked, coughing up a dark cloud of crimson into the water before I could manage a weak, rasping whisper.
"Ryan... my father... he is the head of the Moretti crime syndicate... if you don't stop this... he will destroy you..."
Hearing this, Ryan let out a cruel, mocking laugh that echoed underwater.
"The delusions are finally kicking in, huh? Let me educate you, Isabella. Don Vittorio Moretti is a billionaire mafia kingpin who could erase anyone in this city with a single phone call. I’m the only attorney in my firm who even has clearance to touch his legal files. You just happen to share a last name because you got lucky."
He leaned closer to the water's edge, his smile venomous. "Wake up. If you were actually the daughter of the Don, I’d cut my own head off and let you kick it like a soccer ball."
The entire room of corporate sycophants erupted into cruel laughter at his joke.
Ryan’s face remained twisted in absolute contempt. He crossed his arms, looking down at my drowning form like I was garbage. "Isabella, have some goddamn dignity. If you keep embarrassing me like this, we are finished."
My limbs were growing stiff, the oxygen completely leaving my brain. But as I looked through the glass pool fencing toward the doors of the VIP lounge, I caught sight of a familiar, towering silhouette marching through the hallway, flanked by heavily armed men.
My eyes turned blood-red with tears. I thrashed wildly against the hands holding me down, throwing every ounce of my remaining soul into one final, muffled cry.
"HELP!"
Ryan laughed out loud, looking down at me like a supreme ruler. "Who’s going to save you? Your fake mafia daddy? Or your pathetic little social media followers?"
The crowd laughed so hard tears came to their eyes. Egged on by the arrogance of the night, several of Ryan's friends stepped forward, their hands joining Jenna's to shove my head back down, pinning me deep under the surface.
My entire world went silent.
My blood pressure spiked to a lethal high. My mind went completely blank, and my muscles lost all strength to resist, going entirely limp beneath the water.
Just as my vision began to fade to black, the heavy double glass doors of the patio didn't just open—they exploded inward, splintering into a million pieces.
A roaring, blood-curdling shout echoed across the pool deck, shaking the very foundation of the building:
"YOU ARE ALL DEAD MEN!"
