Baiting the Billionaire

The hungriest year of my life, I blackmailed a billionaire heir for fifty dollars.

I had the photos. I named my price, fifty bucks, enough for one hot meal, and I hit send.

Then the comments showed up.

Floating in the air. Scrolling. Visible to no one but me, like my whole life had a live chat and somebody had just handed me the feed.

The Audience: [...lowballing the lion. Fifty bucks? That's the whole ask?]

The Audience: [Is she slow? That's Jericho Vane. His family's been rich since before money was invented. ASK FOR MORE.]

The Audience: [She's still so sweet and clueless right now. Baby. BABY. Get away from that man before he wrecks your entire life.]

Chapter 1

Three nights ago, I slept with Jericho Vane.

Tonight I was going to blackmail him for fifty dollars, because I hadn't eaten since yesterday and fifty dollars was dinner.

My name is Sabine Cole, and I was fairly sure hunger had finally made me stupid.

The evidence ran to two counts.

The first.

That night, I took photos. For insurance, so he couldn't flip it around and pin the whole thing on me. And now, broke and starving, I was going to cash them in.

His TikTok had exactly one video on it. A night-run clip, filmed like the act of filming offended him. White tank, gray sweats, a thin shine of sweat catching the streetlight. His jaw was on screen for maybe a second. It was enough.

Handle: one letter. "J."

He followed exactly one account. Seraphina Whitlock. My roommate. Also the girl he'd grown up with, the one the entire world had already married him off to in their heads.

The account was a class assignment. Hit ten thousand followers, the professor had said. Jericho had clearly decided that was beneath him and posted once.

My stomach growled, loud, no help at all.

I picked the tamest photo I had. His profile, irritatingly pretty. One arm thrown across me, an inch of collarbone, the angle cropping my face clean out of frame.

Suggestive. Almost tasteful.

I sent it. The app let me fire off exactly one message before it locked me out.

So I waited.

Ten minutes.

His little black icon finally lit up.

A question mark.

That was all. One question mark, cold and smug, like answering me had cost him something.

So I leaned on it.

Me: [You wouldn't want this photo getting out, would you?]

Everyone knew Jericho and Seraphina were endgame. Childhood sweethearts. Written in the stars. The whole production.

This time he answered fast.

Him: [What do you want?]

Me: [Money.]

Him: [How much?]

Me: [A hundred.]

Fast, fast, hurry up. It was fast-food Thursday and I had a standing date with a discount value box.

He was not impressed.

Him: [A hundred a photo. You really know how to run a business.]

First-time blackmailer. My nerve buckled.

Me: [Would fifty work?]

Him: [Card number.]

I let out a breath. A clean, beautiful little negotiation. I sent over my payment code like a seasoned professional.

That was when the text bloomed in the air in front of me.

Rows of it. Floating, scrolling, there for no one but me.

The Audience: [...lowballing the lion. Fifty. She actually said fifty.]

The Audience: [Is the side character slow?? That is JERICHO VANE. Ask for MORE.]

The Audience: [She's still so sweet right now. Run, baby. Get away from him before he ruins your whole life.]

The Audience: [This girl. Mouth full of fried chicken. And you're telling me she turns into the big villain? Who is buying that.]

The Audience: [Even a femme fatale has to start somewhere.]

I sat very still on my floor, grease on my fingers, a swarm of strangers I couldn't see narrating my own life back at me.

It was hunger. It had to be hunger. I was hallucinating a comment section.

Then the robotic voice cut through the apartment, flat and certain.

Venmo. Payment received. Five hundred thousand dollars.

The grease on my fingers went cold.

I had asked for fifty.

Chapter 2

It wasn't until I'd dragged my half-dead body home, stood guard over my fortune, and demolished a whole box of fried chicken that it finally landed.

I hadn't starved myself stupid.

It was all real.

The five hundred thousand dollars was real.

The comments were real.

I spent the whole afternoon piecing it together from what they said, and the picture that came up was this.

I was inside a book.

A romance. The kind where the heroine ends up with the second lead, the male lead spends the rest of his life regretting he didn't fight harder, and everyone calls it fate and cries.

Jericho was the male lead. Seraphina was the heroine. Childhood sweethearts, soulmates, written in ink before either of them could walk.

And me?

I was the villainess.

Who. Me?

You're telling me that girl. The one down to a single nickel. Who'd hand over a kidney for a cold cream soda. Top of her class and stuck with a gambling father, a dead mother, a grandmother who lived half her life in a hospital, and a home held together with tape. The prettiest girl on a campus she'd clawed into on grades and nothing else. You're telling me she snaps one day, loses her mind with jealousy, and kidnaps Seraphina.

...Yeah. Okay. Checks out.

I wiped the fog off the bathroom mirror.

Faint marks still on my waist. The ghost of his fingers.

Not that he'd walked away clean. I'd bitten down on his shoulder hard enough to leave a full ring of teeth, and three nights later it was probably still there.

"What are you, part dog?" he'd slurred, half-drunk.

Then he'd gripped harder.

He didn't know the bite was a receipt. Payback. For not remembering me.

Back in my cramped little rental, I'd carved out one warm corner. A lamp the color of weak tea. And on the table, a single red can of cream soda.

I popped the tab one-handed and drank.

Sweet, all the way down.

I'd loved it since I was ten, working the gutters for cans I could sell.

Jericho was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.

The more beautiful thing was the soda can in his hand.

An aluminum can was worth a nickel more than flattened cardboard, and I was doing the math on his trash before I'd finished looking at his face.

He caught me staring. Raised an eyebrow. "You want it?"

I nodded hard enough to hurt my neck.

He'd never gone without anything in his life, so he just tossed it to me.

And I, half the size I should have been from years of not enough, couldn't catch it.

The can hit the curb and split. Pale soda bled out into the wet mud.

He clicked his tongue and stood up, annoyed. "Hang on."

He walked off toward the corner store.

I picked the can up, wiped the mud on my sleeve, and sucked the soda off the split rim before it could drain.

Sweet.

Not as sweet as the candy in the bowl at the bank. But sweet.

When he came back out and saw me doing it, he stopped. Then he turned around and went back inside.

That day I walked home with a whole case.

I drank and drank and never once got to the bottom of wanting it.

Afterward I topped every empty can with a splash of water so it would weigh more, and sold the lot to the recycler.

Nineteen dollars and thirty-one cents. My take for the day.

So three nights ago, when I found him drunk, I sent Seraphina away and let myself lean into the heat of him on purpose.

Thinking about it now, this entire arc reads like one long soda commercial.

The Audience: [And here we go. The villain's getting her hooks into Jericho.]

The Audience: [The male lead's got no backbone either. Realizes too late he should've picked the heroine.]

The Audience: [...okay but what if Jericho actually loves Sabine? The man was blackout drunk and still showed up.]

The Audience: [RIGHT?? The whole "he loved the heroine all along" twist always felt forced to me.]

The Audience: [Sometimes I think Sabine's thing for him is, like, purely physical.]

Screw all of you.

Chapter 3

I pulled the chat back up.

Five hundred thousand was too much.

I'd wanted fifty. Fifty. The math was not complicated.

But apparently rich people and I measured money in different units, so I sent him a second photo. A tamer one. The app bans you for the spicy stuff.

He answered fast.

Him: [Stop.]

Him: [How much this time?]

I had my pride.

Me: [Not money this time.]

Him: [Two for one?]

The contempt came off the words. So I let my inner villain off the leash. One percent of her.

Me: [No. I want you to take me back to that night. With me. The whole thing~]

I even added the little tilde.

So snake. So very snake of me.

Except Jericho knew how to volley.

Him: [That's all? You can relive it whenever you want.]

Him: [Here. Look.]

Him: [photo]

I opened it and my face did exactly the thing I'd told it not to.

A mirror selfie. Long fingers dragging the hem of a black shirt up, the cut of him laid out, a vein roping down one forearm, the line of his hips vanishing into his waistband.

I went quiet for twenty minutes.

I was at the sink, still red, splashing water on my face, when I finally opened the DM again.

He'd sent one more.

Him: [Hello? No feedback?]

I shut my eyes. Face on fire.

And with great sincerity, I typed:

Me: [I'm sorry.]

On his end, the man was gone. He didn't even text back. He sent a voice note.

"Only human," he said, and you could hear the grin in it.

The chat went down with him.

The Audience: [PUT "I'm sorry" UP ON THE BOARD. Frame it.]

The Audience: [Jericho. JERICHO. Stop reeling us in.]

The Audience: [Forget the villain not holding up, I'm not holding up, I'm sorry???]

The Audience: [This is Jericho's fault, actually. (crying)]

The Audience: [I'm sorry.]

The Audience: [I'm sorry.]

Half the chat was apologizing to no one.

I backed out of the conversation. This was going to get me killed if I kept it up.

The next second, Seraphina texted.

Seraphina: [Bee, I think Jericho likes someone else.]

...

The famous love-triangle bloodbath?

My feelings about Seraphina were complicated.

On one hand, I'd only befriended her to get close to Jericho, and helped myself to whatever wasn't nailed down while I was at it.

On the other, I just didn't like her.

Every morning she sat straight up in bed, threw her fists in the air, and announced, "Okay! You've got this, Sera!" Then went off to live another flawless, sunlit day.

It made my own crawling-around-in-the-dark look very tacky.

Someone like me, clinically alive at best, with a back that finally gave out the second I got home from a day of shifts, cannot be around that much sunshine.

I hated her.

But she was clearly heartbroken, so.

Seraphina: [He was playing basketball yesterday. I saw marks on his neck.]

Me: [Oh?]

Marks.

That night had been chaos, and his technique, at the start, had been reassuringly amateur. When it hurt, my fingers had, in fact, left a few scratches on his neck.

She typed back fast.

Seraphina: [Yeah. I asked him what happened and he just shrugged and said a cat got him.]

...

I pressed my lips together and quietly changed my profile picture to a fat, smug golden cat.

That was obvious enough. Surely.

Seraphina: [Bee, do you think there's actually someone? When he bent down I swear I saw a hickey on his collarbone...]

Then came the voice notes. A whole string of them. Sixty seconds each.

Chapter 4

I couldn't be bothered to open them.

I phoned it in.

Me: [Wow. Crazy.]

Me: [No way.]

Me: [Nothing you can really do.]

It worked. Seraphina leveled out and rewarded me with an e-vite.

Seraphina: [It's my birthday Saturday. You HAVE to come.]

The birthday party.

Thrown at the Whitlock estate, around a pool the size of a small country. Beautiful people in very little clothing. Girls baking on a giant inflatable swan, a few guys knifing through the water like it was being graded.

I'd wandered into a nature documentary. Mating season.

Seraphina wore a pink bikini, skin like cream, hair to her waist, wet strands clinging to her in a way that said innocent and meant the opposite.

I wore denim shorts and a white tank.

The Audience: [Wait. The villain's not in a slutty red bikini stealing the spotlight? Who is she.]

The Audience: [Honestly though, Sabine's built like that, let me live in her cleavage.]

The Audience: [Jericho hit the JACKPOT.]

The Audience: [She's dumb but she's gorgeous, queen let me love you.]

I'd been in a mood lately.

My whole life I'd gone hungry. The recycling money got lifted by my father the second I earned it, funneled straight into whatever filth he was into that week. Half-starved from birth, and somehow I'd still ended up with the waist and the legs and the rest of it.

So I'd assumed I was the main character. The emperor of my own story.

Turns out I was the villain.

It does a number on the worldview. I'd lost interest in bikinis entirely.

Seraphina, meanwhile, was perched on a flamingo float, splashing and laughing with August beside her, pretty as a postcard.

Except her round eyes kept flicking up to the second-floor balcony.

I followed them.

Jericho. Black on black, the sleeveless cut leaving nothing of his arms to the imagination, a glass of champagne hooked on two fingers, looking down at all of us like the party was a chore someone had assigned him.

Maybe he felt me staring.

He tipped his head. Met my eyes.

I looked down and got very busy with my hands. People are always so busy when they're embarrassed.

Huh. Would you look at that. A chair. Really committing to being a chair.

Then a scream split the air.

Seraphina had gone into the pool.

August was in after her before the splash finished. "Sera! Are you okay?"

She surfaced coughing, eyes rimmed red, like she'd swallowed half the deep end.

The Audience: [...she's in the shallow end. She could stand up.]

The Audience: [You CAN drown in three feet of water, thank you, do your research.]

Jericho got there a beat later and crouched.

Seraphina's arms shot straight for his neck.

He leaned out of reach. Clean. Unhurried. Like stepping around a puddle.

She closed on empty air.

"Jericho." Soft, trembling, pitched to the back row. "I was so scared. I thought I'd never see you again."

August laughed, short and wrong, and made himself breezy. "About time you showed up, man."

Where no one was looking, his fingers curled into his palm.

Top marks in Simp 101. Every single time.

The Audience: [okay that's enough, now I'm sad for the second lead.]

The Audience: [baby August looks like a puppy left out in the rain.]

The Audience: [The second lead belongs to all of us and Seraphina wants BOTH leads?? Greedy girl eats well.]

And there it was.

The whole party gone quiet around one held breath. The most beautiful boy in the book had just stepped around the girl he was written to love like she was something spilled on the floor.

Nobody said the obvious thing out loud.

Then who?

Chapter 5

By nightfall the party had its teeth in everyone. Somebody had started Truth or Dare.

Jericho and August bookended Seraphina, one on each side.

Which left me. Last to arrive, and nobody volunteers to sit beside Jericho, so the only open seat was beside Jericho.

I grabbed a cream soda off the table.

The tab would not budge. I worked at it, got nowhere, and was about to give up and pretend I'd never wanted it.

Jericho, not even looking up from his phone, took the can out of my hands one-handed. His fingertip dragged across my skin. Warm.

The tab cracked open with a hiss.

He cut me a sideways look and handed it back.

It dropped me straight into the first time I ever met him.

A boy who looked like money, who couldn't stand watching me suck soda off a busted rim, crouching down to show me, himself, how you open a can.

The pop of a tab. The only music my gray little life ever had.

And then the part where you stomp the empty flat and bag it for the recycler, which always hauled me back to reality.

The chat noticed us. The chat multiplied.

The Audience: [drink up or go sit at the kids' table.]

The Audience: [the villain and Jericho keep looking at each other like the table's on fire. GET. A. ROOM.]

The Audience: [take the rose-tinted glasses off. Did you forget how hard he chases the HEROINE later?]

The Audience: [Jericho could never like the villain. He can't stand her. What is there to like about a selfish little user.]

The Audience: [oh right, and THEN he and the villain hate-bang in every location known to man. The bed. The car. The rug. Against the floor-to-ceiling windows. The beach