The sound Sarah made when Marcus thrust into her was the same sound that used to be mine, and that's when my heart decided to stop beating.
But let me back up, because dying at thirty-two from a broken heart isn't something that just happens. It's something that builds over years, one betrayal at a time.
I was fourteen when my parents died in that car accident on Highway 95. Black ice, they said. Dad swerved to miss another car and hit the guardrail. Mom died instantly. Dad held on for three days in the ICU before his heart gave out.
I was the only one who walked away from that wreck.
You'd think family would step up, right? Take care of the orphaned kid? My father's older brother, Uncle Richard, and his wife showed up to the funeral wearing expensive suits and crocodile tears. They hugged me, told me everything would be okay, that family takes care of family.
Then they took everything.
The farm my parents had built from nothing. Three hundred acres of prime Connecticut farmland that had been in our family for generations. The house where I learned to ride a bike and help Dad fix tractors. All of it gone within six months.
"Legal complications," Uncle Richard explained while signing papers in some lawyer's office. "The mortgage was bigger than we thought. We're doing you a favor, Dylan. This burden would have crushed you."
I was eighteen and living in a studio apartment above a pizza shop, working weekends to pay rent after finishing high school..
But here's the thing about hitting rock bottom when you're young. It either breaks you or it forges you into something harder.
I chose harder.
It was me, a second-hand PC that sounded like a jet engine, and a chat window that never slept. I streamed because I couldn't stand the silence. I learned to talk less on camera. Show the run. Tag the mistakes. Fix them tomorrow. Night after night the numbers crawled up—ten viewers, a hundred, a thousand—until the stream paid the light bill and then the rent and then everything else.
You grind long enough, you get good. You get good enough, and people start calling you the best.
Scrims. Ladder rushes. Tournament brackets where the only thing that mattered was the last five seconds and whether your hands could outthink your heart. Charity marathons that ran for thirty-six hours straight and left me sleeping on a floor wrapped in cables. Sponsors came calling. Not the ones that make you a billboard. The ones that say, "Keep doing exactly what you do. We'll just put our name in the corner."
I bought a better apartment with soundproofing and a door that actually locked. I replaced the dying PC with a rig that didn't glitch when I breathed near it. I started waking up to headlines using my name like a verb.
Then I met Sarah at a tiny gallery opening a friend dragged me to because "you need to see something other than your monitor."
She was standing in front of a painting that looked like a storm caught in amber, and I swear the first thing I noticed wasn't her face. It was the way she tilted her head when she was thinking, like she was listening to something the rest of us couldn't hear. Dark hair that caught the gallery lights and made me forget what I was supposed to be looking at. When she turned toward me, her eyes were this deep brown that reminded me of coffee at three in the morning—warm and necessary.
Her laugh hit me in places that had been cold for years. Not the polite social laugh people do at these things, but something real that bubbled up from wherever she kept the parts of herself that mattered. When she smiled, there was this tiny gap between her front teeth that made her look slightly imperfect in a way that was somehow more beautiful than anything I'd seen in magazines or streams.
She didn't care about my channel at first. Didn't even know what I did for a living until someone mentioned it an hour into our conversation. She cared that I wasn't lying when I said I loved the grind. That when I talked about building something from nothing, my voice changed in a way that meant I was telling the truth.
She moved into the apartment, and suddenly six hundred square feet felt like a palace because she was there. We ate noodles at two in the morning and split dollar slices and fell asleep to the hum of fans. I streamed. She worked on campaigns and layouts and said I was her favorite background noise.
On Thursdays I still hit a cheap dojo in Queens. The instructor kept handing me a staff instead of gloves. "Your hands think in straight lines," he said. "You're a spear, not a brawler." I laughed and kept coming back. Habit, I guess.
The channel grew. We stopped counting followers and started measuring concurrent hearts beating on the other side of the glass. We moved again—this time to a place with sunlight and a kitchen that didn't pretend. I bought a ring that felt like three months of breath held in my chest and proposed in the middle of a city park with a livestream turned off for once. She said yes, crying into my shoulder while the world kept moving around us.
A house. Not because I was supposed to want one, but because I could actually afford it with money my hands had earned tapping keys and learning maps by muscle memory. A yard. A second bedroom we called a studio. Photos on the mantle that made the kid in the pizza-shop apartment feel like he'd cheated the universe.
You think that's the happy ending. That's where the story fades out with soft music and a drone shot over a quiet neighborhood.
Except endings lie.
That morning I went live one last time as a competitor. Chat was moving so fast the messages blurred into white noise, but I could feel the weight of a million people watching. I leaned back in my chair and looked directly into the camera.
"Alright, everyone. Listen up." The chat slowed. They knew this tone. "This is it for competitive play. The tournament run starting next week will be my last with the team. After that, I'm done with pro gaming."
The chat exploded instantly:
NightOwl92: WHAT NO WAY
xXProGamerXx: dylan dont do this to us
StreamQueen: 💔💔💔💔💔
TacticalBeast: why now?? you're at your peak
ChatModerator: [Subscriber-only mode enabled]
GG_4Life: $100 donation - "Please don't retire, you're the GOAT"
Sarah_IRL: so proud of you babe ❤️
VoidWalker2003: NOOOOOOOO
EliteSniper77: respect the decision but this sucks
"Thank you," I said, watching the donations roll in. "For everything. For real. You made this possible."
Sarah walked by behind me, coffee in hand, and blew me a kiss just out of frame.
ChatModerator: Chat is going INSANE
HeartBreaker99: SARAH!! 💕💕💕
StreamQueen: power couple goals
NightOwl92: at least we still have sarah supporting our boy
"I'll see you all next week for the final run. Take care of yourselves."
I closed OBS, ended the stream, and watched the red "LIVE" indicator die. Six years of competitive streaming, over in thirty seconds.
Two weeks later, after the final tournament ended and the team said their goodbyes, I flew to Boston for the sponsor meeting. It was supposed to be about what came next—maybe coaching, maybe content creation, maybe something completely different. The deal was bigger than I'd expected, but it meant relocating to California and starting over again.
I came home early. The meeting ended faster. I caught a flight home that same afternoon, planning to surprise Sarah with the news and maybe dinner at that Italian place she kept circling in magazines. The airport chime kept pinging gate changes, a bright sterile tone that wouldn't stop. Funny the things you remember later when a different kind of notice starts lighting up the sky.
Then i arrived and took a taxi home.
The front door was unlocked. Sarah's car was in the driveway next to a BMW I knew too well.
Marcus. My oldest friend. The first mod I ever had. The guy who banned trolls before I even saw them and slept on my couch the week I hit a million.
I smiled seeing his car there. It was nice that he'd come by to keep Sarah company while I was gone.
"Sarah? Marcus? I'm home!" I called out as I dropped my keys on the kitchen counter.
No answer.
I kicked off my shoes and noticed another pair by the door—Marcus's expensive sneakers, the ones he'd bought after his own streaming career took off. Next to them, Sarah's heels from this morning, tossed carelessly to the side.
That's when I heard it. A soft sound from upstairs. Muffled voices.
I climbed the stairs thinking about how lucky I was, how far I'd come from that scared fourteen-year-old who lost everything. Maybe I could convince them both to come to dinner, celebrate the Boston deal together.
The bedroom door was cracked open.
Sarah was on top of Marcus, her back arched, her head thrown back in a way I hadn't seen in months. She was moaning his name, telling him how good he felt, how she'd been waiting for this all week.
They saw me standing in the doorway.
Marcus scrambled for the sheets, his face going white. Sarah froze on top of him, then slowly climbed off, reaching for her robe.
For about ten seconds, nobody said anything. The only sound was their heavy breathing.
"Dylan," Sarah started, her voice barely a whisper. "I can explain."
"Explain?" The word came out strangled. "Explain what exactly? How long?"
"It's not what you think," Marcus said, pulling the sheet around himself. "We were just—"
"Just what?" My voice cracked. "Just fucking in my bed? In my house? How long, Sarah?"
She wrapped the robe tighter around herself, tears starting to flow. "Dylan, please, let me—"
"HOW LONG?" I shouted.
"Three months," she whispered.
Three months. While I was planning our future. While she was in chat calling me babe in front of a million people.
"Jesus Christ, Sarah. Three months?" I could taste something metallic in my mouth. "Marcus, you piece of shit, I gave you everything. You lived on my couch. I got you your first sponsorship deal."
"Dylan, calm down," Marcus said, standing up with the sheet around his waist. "You don't understand the pressure you put on people. Always perfect Dylan, always successful Dylan—"
"So you fuck my wife? That's your solution?"
"She's not happy!" Marcus shouted back. "She hasn't been happy for months! You're never here, always streaming, always traveling—"
"I was building our life!" The room started spinning slightly. "I was doing this for us!"
Sarah was sobbing now. "I'm sorry, Dylan. I'm so sorry. It just happened, and then it kept happening, and I didn't know how to stop—"
"You didn't want to stop," I said, and the words felt like swallowing glass. "You wanted this. You chose this."
The chest pain hit me like a sledgehammer right then. My left arm went completely numb. I couldn't breathe.
I grabbed at my chest, gasping. "I can't—I can't—"
"Dylan?" Sarah's voice shot up three octaves. "Dylan, what's wrong?"
I collapsed right there in the doorway, my knees slamming against the hardwood. The room tilted sideways.
"Oh shit, oh shit!" Marcus was shouting. "Call 911! Sarah, call 911!"
"Dylan! Dylan, stay with me!" Sarah was next to me now, her hands on my shoulders. "Baby, look at me!"
But I couldn't focus on her face. Everything was going dark around the edges. My chest felt like someone was standing on it.
"He's not breathing right!" Marcus was yelling. "Where's your phone? Where's your fucking phone, Sarah?"
"I don't know! I don't know where—Dylan, please!"
The last thing I heard was Sarah screaming my name over and over, her voice getting farther and farther away, and Marcus shouting something about CPR.
That's how Dylan Wesley died at thirty-two. Not from the heart attack that killed my body.
I died from finally understanding that I'd spent eighteen years building a life for someone who was never really mine.
Just like Uncle Richard taught me when I was fourteen.
Some people take everything from you with lawyers and contracts.
Others do it with lies and promises they never meant to keep.
But the result is always the same.
You lose everything, and you die alone.
At least, that's how it's supposed to end.
Except I opened my eyes again.
A/N
Hey everyone! Just wanted to give you a heads up about the story structure:
Only Chapter 1 is written in first person POV. From Chapter 2 onward, the story will shift to third person as we follow our MC in his new life in Flordom.
Chapter 2 will pick up the story 3 weeks later as our protagonist begins to adapt to his new reality and discovers the Tower system.
If you're enjoying the story so far, please consider supporting me with power stones! Your support really helps keep me motivated to continue writing and updating regularly.
Also, if you like what you've read, please add this story to your library so you don't miss future updates!
Thanks for reading, and I hope you're excited to see where Dylan's journey takes him in this new world!