I meant the promise. I want that on record, even now, even knowing everything that came after it. Sitting across from Alex that day, crying, ashamed, I meant every word about stopping.
It lasted about three weeks.
The unraveling started small, the way these things always seem to. A wedding invitation arrived for some cousin's ceremony I barely cared about, and Alex mentioned, casually, that he and Law had been talking about what their own real wedding might look like someday, once the contract technically ended and they could do it for themselves instead of for his parents.
Their own real wedding. The phrase lodged in my chest like a splinter I couldn't stop pressing against. They already had a wedding. A fake one, built on blackmail and a stolen ninety thousand dollars, and somehow it had turned into the realest thing either of them had ever had — while I sat in my apartment with nothing, having spent my one shot at wanting someone on a rejection I still replayed most nights before falling asleep.
I told myself, that night, that I'd kept my promise long enough. That three weeks of genuine restraint had earned me the right to want something again, as long as I was smarter about it this time — no overt moves, no held hands, nothing that could be reported back to Alex and turned into another confrontation I'd have to apologize my way through.
I started small. A text to Law, asking how he was doing, framed carefully enough that refusing to answer would have looked unnecessarily cold. A comment to Alex about how stressed Law had seemed lately, planting doubt the same way I had with our mother, except aimed more precisely this time at the relationship itself rather than just its foundations.
I researched the casino's finances, quietly, late at night, looking for anything that might give me leverage if I ever needed it — not with a clear plan yet, just the dawning, ugly awareness that information was power, and power was the one thing I'd never had enough of to actually get what I wanted.
I found something, eventually. Small, easy to overlook unless you were looking specifically for it: a discrepancy in the casino's books from around the time of the heist, an internal note about an unresolved $90,000 token loss that had never been formally reported to the authorities, quietly absorbed instead of investigated. Proof, if anyone ever asked the right questions, that Law had not only known about the theft, but had actively concealed it — obstruction, maybe, or at minimum the kind of scandal his parents would never forgive if it became public before the casino formally transferred into his name.
I didn't know exactly what I'd do with it yet. I told myself I was just gathering options, the way you gather supplies before a storm without necessarily knowing which one you'll need. But some part of me, the part I was getting better and better at not listening to, already understood that I'd just found the exact lever that could pull Alex and Law apart if I ever needed it to.
I want to be honest about something, looking back at this version of myself: I don't think I was evil, not yet, not in the way the rest of this story might eventually make me look. I think I was someone who had been starved of being wanted for so long that I'd stopped being able to tell the difference between deserving something and simply needing it badly enough to take it anyway.
That distinction matters less than I wish it did, in the end. Intent doesn't undo damage. I learned that the hard way, the same way I learned almost everything else that year — slowly, painfully, and far too late to spare anyone the cost of it, myself included.