The invoice was a serpent coiled on Yanna's small, rickety table. For the first twenty-four hours, she refused to look at it. She slid it under her thin mattress, the thick, expensive cardstock a lump of poison beneath her, a princess-and-the-pea fairytale twisted into a nightmare of debt. She didn't touch it, but she could feel its presence, a cold spot radiating through the foam. Denial was a fever. It had to be a joke. A spectacularly cruel, impossibly wealthy person's idea of a scare tactic. She pictured Camille Navarro in her palatial home, laughing with her friends over the thought of some clumsy little waitress hyperventilating over a piece of paper. The thought ignited a brief, hot flare of rage. Yanna grabbed her phone, her thumbs flying over the screen in a furious, unsent text to Ria. This is your fault. A great payday, you said. You threw me to the wolves. She deleted it, her anger collapsing into a black hole of shame. The fury was a flimsy shield, and it was already beginning to crumble.
By the third day, the shield was gone, replaced by a cold, creeping dread that felt like ice water flooding her veins. She couldn't eat. Sleep was a series of falling nightmares that ended with the crash of glass. The number, ₱850,000, was no longer a joke. It was a brand on her mind. She retrieved the invoice from under the mattress, her fingers trembling. She took it to a dim, humming internet café two blocks away, a place that smelled of stale coffee and desperation. She paid for an hour of computer time and, with a sense of profound doom, began to type. Debt collection laws Philippines. Suing for civil damages. Wage garnishment. The screen filled with dense, incomprehensible legalese. Phrases like "writ of execution" and "attachment of property" leaped out at her. Property. What property? Her second-hand textbooks? Her two changes of clothes? Her mother's cracked ceramic saints on the shelf back home? The law was not for people like her. It was a weapon for people like them.
She opened a spreadsheet program, the empty white cells staring back at her like a field of tombstones. She typed in her weekly earnings from the canteen job she'd have to beg to get back. She multiplied it by months, by years. She factored in what she might make after graduation, if she was lucky, if she got a good job. Even with the most optimistic, delusional projections, the number on the invoice was a mountain. Not a mountain she could climb, but a mountain that would crush her, bury her, and the generations that came after her. The weight of it was physical. Her chest was tight, her breath shallow. She felt a phantom tingle in her right arm, the ghost of her own secret, sharp-edged pain, but she knew, with sickening certainty, that it wouldn't be enough to cut through this. This was a pain too vast to be grounded.
On the fifth day, her phone rang. It was her mother. Yanna's first instinct was to ignore it, to throw the phone against the wall. But the call persisted, a cheerful, tinny ringtone that was a mockery of Yanna's current reality. She answered, forcing a brightness into her voice that felt like swallowing glass.
"'Nay?"
"Anak! How are you? Are you eating properly?" Her mother's voice was a balm and a torture, warm and familiar and from a world that no longer existed for Yanna.
"I'm fine, 'Nay. Just studying hard. Big exams coming up." A lie. She hadn't opened a book in days.
"That's my girl. Don't worry about us here, anak," her mother said, and Yanna could hear the tired pride in her voice, the bedrock of hope on which their entire family was built. "Your sister is asking when you're coming home for a visit. She misses her brilliant Ate. Just study hard. You are our hope. Our only way out."
The words were a hammer blow to Yanna's chest. Our hope. She closed her eyes, biting her lip so hard she tasted blood. She had wanted to confess, to tell her mother everything, to let the burden be shared. But how could she? How could she tell this tired, hopeful woman that their only hope had just incurred a debt that would enslave them all?
"I know, 'Nay," Yanna whispered, her voice cracking on the final word. "I'm trying. I promise, I'm trying."
She ended the call and fell back onto her bed, the full weight of her failure pressing down, stealing the air from her lungs. She was not their hope. She was their anchor, dragging them down into the abyss.
For weeks, the cycle continued, a slow, grinding erosion of her soul. She became a ghost in her own life, a wraith haunting the cramped space of her room. Finally, on the twenty-ninth day, the night before the deadline, the fight went out of her. There was no more anger, no more denial, no more hope. There was only a vast, empty landscape of resignation. She sat on the edge of her bed in the dark, the black invoice held in her limp hands. The number glowed in her mind's eye. ₱850,000. It wasn't a debt. It was a leash.
There is no choice. The thought was quiet, calm, and utterly final. There was never a choice. There is only the number.
Her movements were slow, robotic. She picked up her phone, her thumb hovering over the keypad. She looked at the number printed at the bottom of the invoice. It felt like staring down the barrel of a loaded gun. With a final, shuddering breath, she pressed the trigger. She dialed.
The phone only rang once before it was answered. The voice that came through was not Camille Navarro's deep, growling timber. It was female, crisp, and so perfectly modulated it sounded synthetic. It was the voice of merciless efficiency.
"Office of Ms. Navarro."
Yanna's own voice was a dry, cracking whisper. "Hello… I… My name is Yanna Rivera. I'm calling about… an invoice."
There was a brief, terrifying silence, followed by the soft, nearly inaudible click of a keyboard. The woman on the other end didn't ask for an invoice number. She already knew.
"One moment," the voice said, cool and dispassionate. Yanna held her breath, her knuckles white where she gripped the phone. The woman came back on the line a few seconds later. "Ms. Navarro is available to meet with you tomorrow at ten in the morning. Will that be acceptable?"
"Yes," Yanna breathed. "Yes, that's fine."
"The address is the Navarro Tower in BGC. The penthouse. Present your identification at the front desk. A car will not be provided." The subtle cruelty of that last line was not lost on Yanna. "The dress code is simple and clean."
The line went dead.
The next morning, Yanna stood before the cracked mirror in her room, dressed in her best clothes, which were, in reality, her only non-uniform clothes that weren't faded or frayed. A simple white blouse, carefully ironed, and a pair of plain black trousers. Simple and clean. It was the uniform of the working poor, an outfit designed to be invisible. She felt a bitter irony curl in her stomach. She had tried to be invisible once before, and it had ended in catastrophe. Now, she was being summoned to the very place where her invisibility had failed.
The journey back to Bonifacio Global City was a surreal torture. The city's gleaming, futuristic towers, which had once seemed merely intimidating, now felt accusatory. They were monuments to a world she had trespassed in, monuments to her failure. The air itself seemed different here, thinner, cleaner, charged with the hum of money she would never have.
The Navarro Tower was not a building; it was a statement. A shard of smoked glass and black steel that clawed at the sky, designed to make anyone standing at its base feel small and insignificant. It worked. Yanna's heart hammered against her ribs as she pushed through the heavy glass doors into the lobby. The space was a cathedral of wealth. The ceiling soared three stories high. The floors were polished black granite that reflected the cold, recessed lighting. There was no art, no furniture, just a vast, echoing space and a single, monolithic black desk. The silence was absolute, broken only by the whisper of the air conditioning. Two security guards in severe black suits stood motionless, their presence more menacing than any overt threat.
Yanna's threadbare blouse and worn-out shoes felt like a beggar's rags. She approached the desk, her footsteps seeming to thunder in the oppressive quiet. The receptionist was a woman who looked like she'd been carved from ice, her hair pulled back in a severe chignon, her expression one of bored contempt.
"Can I help you?" she asked, her voice dripping with disdain before Yanna had even spoken.
"I… I have an appointment. With Ms. Navarro," Yanna stammered, hating the weakness in her voice. "My name is Yanna Rivera."
The receptionist's eyes flickered over Yanna, a slow, dismissive appraisal from head to toe that made Yanna feel like a piece of filth that had been tracked in on someone's shoe. Without a word, the woman typed something into her computer. Her perfectly sculpted eyebrow arched a fraction of a millimeter.
"The private elevator. To your left."
Yanna turned and saw it. A single, seamless black door, with no buttons or floor numbers. As she approached, it slid open with a soft, expensive hiss. She stepped inside. The interior was lined with dark, polished wood. The door slid shut, encasing her in a silent, luxurious coffin. There were no buttons to press. A moment later, she felt a lurch in her stomach as the elevator began to ascend, moving with a silent, terrifying speed. It was a journey into the sky, a final, definitive departure from the dirt and noise of the city below, from everything she had ever known.
The ascent ended as smoothly as it had begun. The doors hissed open, not into a hallway, but directly into the penthouse itself. The transition was seamless, disorienting. She had arrived.
The world inside was one of cold, minimalist control. The living space was vast, an ocean of polished concrete floors and stark white walls that stretched up to a ceiling two stories high. One entire wall was a floor-to-ceiling window, a god's-eye view of Manila sprawling beneath them like a circuit board. The city looked silent and orderly from up here, its chaos rendered insignificant. The only color in the immense room came from three enormous canvases—violent, abstract explosions of black and crimson that looked like beautiful wounds.
A woman stood waiting for her. It was the voice from the phone, Yanna knew instantly. She was tall, rail-thin, dressed in a severe grey dress, her expression as sterile as the room around her.
"Ms. Rivera," the assistant said, her voice even colder in person. "Ms. Navarro will be with you shortly. Please wait here."
And then, she was gone, disappearing silently down a white hallway, leaving Yanna standing alone in the center of the vast, empty space. The silence was heavier here than in the lobby. It was the silence of absolute power, of a space so far removed from the world it no longer had to hear it. Yanna's own breathing sounded like a storm. She stood frozen for a full minute, her terror a physical weight pinning her to the floor.
Then, her ears picked up a sound.
It was quiet, rhythmic, almost lost in the vastness of the room. A soft, controlled grunt of exertion. A faint, slick sound, like skin on metal. It was coming from an alcove set into the far wall, a space she hadn't even noticed, partially obscured by a structural pillar. Her terror was a screaming instinct telling her to stay put, to not move, to make herself as small as possible. But a darker, more powerful curiosity was pulling her forward. The same morbid fascination that had made her touch the red marks on her wrist.
She took a hesitant step, then another, her cheap shoes making no sound on the polished concrete. She peered around the edge of the pillar.
And her breath caught in her throat.
It was Camille Navarro. This was the first time Yanna had seen her in her private domain, and she was nothing like the perfectly composed predator in the silk suit. She was something far more raw, more primal.
She was performing pull-ups on a simple steel bar that had been installed, with audacious confidence, right in the main living area. She was wearing only a pair of black compression shorts and a simple black sports bra. Her body, lean and powerful, glistened with a thin sheen of sweat under the recessed lights. Yanna was frozen, her mind unable to process anything but the raw, shocking display of physical power.
She saw the impossible width of Camille's back and shoulders, the sharp V-taper to her waist. With each pull, a complex, living sculpture of muscle rippled and contracted under her skin. The lats flared like wings, the traps bunched into hard knots of power, the rhomboids shifted and slid with a terrifying, beautiful grace. The intricate black tattoos that coiled around her powerful biceps and across her sculpted back seemed to writhe and come alive with the movement. Yanna watched, mesmerized, as Camille pulled her chin over the bar again and again, her movements impossibly smooth and controlled. She wasn't struggling. She wasn't gasping. She was simply working, her body a perfectly calibrated machine of strength and discipline.
Yanna had never seen a woman like this. She had never known a woman like this could exist. This was power stripped of all artifice, all silk suits and silver watches. This was the engine that drove the machine.
Camille finished a final, perfect repetition and dropped lightly to the floor, her feet making barely a sound. She didn't seem surprised or startled to see Yanna standing there, transfixed. Her chest rose and fell with deep, even breaths, but she wasn't winded. She reached for a small black towel on a nearby leather bench, her movements economical and deliberate. She slowly wiped the sweat from her face, her throat, her neck, her dark amber eyes never once leaving Yanna's.
The silence stretched, thick with unspoken meaning. Yanna felt like a mouse that had stumbled upon a python digesting its last meal—a moment of quiet that was more terrifying than any overt threat.
Camille tossed the towel onto the bench. She took a single, deliberate step closer, her presence overwhelming in the stark, silent room. She stopped a few feet away, her gaze intense, appraising, as if she were examining a curious new specimen. Her voice, when she finally spoke, was a low murmur, completely devoid of the icy anger from the gallery. It had been replaced by something far more chilling: a quiet, predatory curiosity.
"So. The little mouse decided to walk into the snake's nest after all. Did you bring the money… or did you come here to beg?"