EVENT SUMMARY & YOUR CHOICE:
At the end of Chapter 10, after undergoing a suffocating flight in the rainy night to bring Mark to the safe castle in the suburbs, Maya received a grave warning from Travis. Knowing that the hitman had seen her face and her life was in danger, Travis offered her to stay at the castle under the family's protection.
You chose [BRANCH 1]: Refuse Travis's offer out of fear of being dragged deep into a bloody and dangerous family war, deciding to return to school to continue her teaching job and face reality on her own.
The warm, luxurious sandalwood scent emanating from Travis's expensive woolen coat still enveloped Maya's body, but that luxurious warmth could not dispel the chill running along her spine. She raised her eyes to look into the deep ash-grey eyes of the tycoon. In the depths of the man's quiet eyes lay both absolute authority and a magically seductive invitation to a secure shelter.
In a brief moment, Maya felt as though she had wanted to nod, wanting to shed the entire burden and panic to surrender to the protection of this powerful family. However, a wave of harsh, realistic thoughts immediately pulled her back to reality. The magnificent Gothic castle hidden amidst the pine forest, the bodyguards quietly carrying handguns, and the bloody underworld war tossing human lives aside... all belonged to a completely foreign world to a poor girl raised in the slums. She understood all too well that once she stepped through those gold-plated doors, she would forever lose her own minimal freedom and be swept into the inescapable vortex of life and death of the ultra-rich.
Maya bit tightly onto her thin lips, pale from the cold. She raised both hands to remove the thick woolen coat from her shoulders, folded it carefully, and returned it to Travis. Her voice trembled lightly beneath the storm wind, but her eyes held the strange firmness of someone long accustomed to self-reliance:
"I cannot stay here, Mr. Travis. They... they wouldn't dare act in broad daylight in a crowded place, right? I still have my internship job at St. Jude School, and my own normal life. I cannot just leave everything behind to run away forever."
Travis quietly accepted the woolen coat from her hands. His chiseled face darkened, his ash-grey eyes flashing a cold flicker of disappointment mixed with veiled anxiety. He did not threaten, nor did he use power to force the stubborn girl before him; he merely lowered his voice, speaking in an oppressively deep tone:
"You are being too stubborn and underestimating the ruthlessness of the enemy, Maya. But if that is already your choice... I will have someone take you back safely."
That night, the family's black Sedan with dark-tinted glass quietly brought Maya back to her small rented apartment in the poor suburbs of San Francisco. Stepping through the dilapidated wooden door, Maya collapsed onto the edge of her bed, using cotton balls to disinfect and meticulously bandage the bleeding slashed cuts beneath the soles of her feet with her own hands.
When she had finished tidying up, she dropped her head onto her old, worn cloth pillow. Strangely enough, after a night of flight through the suffocating storm, Maya slept a good, deep sleep to the point of having no dreams at all. Perhaps extreme exhaustion, both physical and mental, had forced her body to halt all panic, falling into a dead sleep to recover the tiny bit of her remaining strength.
The next morning, the diminished autumn sun cast pale streaks of light through the dense fog covering San Francisco. Maya tried to suppress the dull pain flaring up with every stride of her feet, meticulously putting on her neatly pressed intern teacher outfit to head to St. Jude School.
She tried to reassure herself that everything had passed, and that daylight and the crowd at school would be the safest shield. However, what awaited her at St. Jude today was not a normal teaching day, but a storm of reputation pouring down upon her head.
The moment she stepped through the school's artistic wrought-iron gate, Maya felt countless scrutinizing gazes and hushed whispering from teacher colleagues and parents dropping off their children. Discrimination-filled whispers spread throughout the hallways. The moment she set her lesson plan bag down on the desk in the Purple Sprout room, a cold announcement was immediately delivered: she was summoned to the principal's office urgently.
Click!
The principal of St. Jude — an elderly woman dressed luxuriously with gold-rimmed glasses sitting proudly on the bridge of her nose — slammed a stack of files and security reports heavily onto the expensive red rosewood desk. She glared up at Maya with eyes full of deep hostility and ultimate contempt:
"Ms. Maya! Do you know what kind of farce you pulled at this school last night?!" The principal gritted her teeth, each word uttered as if wanting to tear the young intern teacher apart. "Triggering the underground fire alarm system, throwing the entire school into chaos, and then madly inventing a story about a gunman kidnapper bursting into the class! Do you know how your stupid, baseless, and absurd panic has severely damaged the hundreds-of-years-old prestige and reputation of St. Jude?!"
"Principal, that was absolutely not baseless panic!" Maya responded indignantly, her chest heaving with anger, her two hands clutching her skirt hem tightly. "There was an unfamiliar man posing as family who burst in and locked the classroom door latch! Uncle Henry the guard had to courageously rush in to wrestle with him to save us! If not for him—"
"Enough! Shut your mouth right now!" The principal waved her hand, cutting her off ruthlessly and cruelly. "Old Henry is old; working the night shift last night he secretly drank alcohol, slipped and fell, hitting his head against the door ledge causing injuries, and is currently lying in the district hospital! The police extracted all hallway camera footage and didn't see a single trace of any kidnapper — of course not, because how could such a thing be real!"
Maya froze, her whole body turning to ice before that ruthless turncoat behavior. The kidnapper had been too sophisticated, avoiding every camera angle of the old camera system, while the school preferred twisting the truth over admitting the school had suffered a dangerous intrusion.
The principal raised her chin, coldly declaring: "The school will not pay a single penny of medical fees for Henry's carelessness and drunkenness. As for you... if you continue to weave these ridiculous stories to cause panic among parents, I will immediately revoke your internship and fire you at once! Is that clear?!"
Those harsh words were like a bucket of icy water splashed directly into Maya's face. The truth was blatantly twisted, and Uncle Henry's selfless courage was tossed aside as the carelessness of a drunkard.
That afternoon, after finishing her teaching session with a heavy heart, Maya quietly caught a bus to the district hospital. Uncle Henry was lying on a narrow hospital bed, his head bandaged in stark white, his old face covered in severe dark bruises. Seeing Maya walk in, the old veteran tried to squeeze out a gentle smile, stroking her head upon learning that she and little Mark were completely safe.
Looking at the expensive hospital bill placed on his bedside table — where the school had just washed its hands and refused to pay — Maya could not hold back her tears. She quietly pulled out half of the meager internship salary she had just received this month, secretly hiding it beneath Uncle Henry's pillow before leaving the hospital room choked with emotion.
In the days that followed, the atmosphere surrounding Maya's daily reality became suffocating and gloomily terrifying.
Every afternoon when walking out of St. Jude's gate or when walking alone back to her dilapidated rented lodging house, Maya acutely noticed strange black silhouettes constantly appearing around her.
They were tall, muscular men wearing dark coats and black sunglasses stationed at street corners. At times they sat quietly inside black Sedan cars with dark-tinted glass stopped along the curb, and at times they quietly walked behind her at a safe distance of about fifteen meters. Whenever she turned her head back, those black silhouettes nonchalantly avoided her gaze or pretended to look elsewhere.
Maya's heart was perpetually constricted with panic. Every footstep thumping evenly behind her, every staring gaze emanating from the tightly tinted car windows made her shudder and tremble. She was positive that those were the henchmen of the hitman from that night — the kidnappers lurking around her to seek an opportunity to eliminate the sole person who had seen their faces and ruined their plan.
However, what the naive intern teacher did not know in the slightest... was that those quiet and terrifying men in black were absolutely not the enemy. They were the most elite bodyguard force dispatched covertly by Travis himself, following day and night to weave an absolute, invisible protective net around this stubborn and unyielding girl.
