Sweet Romance10 min read
I Was Hired to Break a Heart — And Broke More Than One
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I remember the night like a bruise under my skin.
"It was just fate," the note had said. "We are partners."
"I can help your brother," the deal had promised.
I stood under the streetlight while the rain tried to erase me. The city wind turned the trees into ragged soldiers. I hugged my thin coat and watched cars pass like indifferent whales.
"You're soaked," a driver in a black suit said, but he drove on.
"A real man helps," I muttered into my voice memo, and saved a line: Felix Jackson is heartless. Do not beg for pity.
I limped into the H·T Group lobby the next morning because I had a plan B and nothing else. My plan B was terrible, impossible, and all I had. Lie. Flatter. Stay close.
"Excuse me, where is human resources?" I mouthed the line I had rehearsed.
He was standing there like a cliff. "You know who I am?" he asked.
"I thought you were the janitor," I said, and the lie landed like a stone.
He didn't laugh. He held my arm so hard I thought he'd break my wrist. "Who sent you?"
"I'm here to... interview?" I lied again.
Felix Jackson's eyes were cold. "You shouldn't be in my elevator."
"I didn't know which floor—" I started.
"You know how to sing?" he asked out of nowhere.
"Just a little," I lied, then hummed a nonsense line to keep him entertained. He cut me off with one word.
"Stop."
Later he tossed my crumpled resume into the trash and said, "Tomorrow, show up." I was stunned, ecstatic, and terrified all at once.
"Why me?" I asked, when my heart could breathe again.
"You look presentable," he said. "Get here at nine."
I left feeling like I'd won a lottery I hadn't bought a ticket for. I added a note to my list: Felix Jackson thinks I'm a pretty face. Use it.
On my first day I learned three things: the company had no patience for mistakes, I had no papers that looked good on file, and Felix Jackson hated cilantro.
"Get rid of that smell," he told me, nose wrinkled, when I microwaved my lunch.
"You're picky," I replied.
"Clean the office," he said.
"Yes, sir," I said. I cleaned. I looked for the thin seams of him, the human places. Sometimes I found them—a tired blink, a hand that hesitated over a door.
"Read this aloud," he said one afternoon, handing me a printed dossier about myself.
"You had me investigated?" I asked.
"We check everyone," Penn Gordon said from the doorway, too calm.
"I have a brother," I said. "He needs medicine." I let the truth sit on the table like a plate between us. They watched me flinch and lie in equal measure.
"You're here to distract him," Penn said eventually. "To get him to love you and then break him."
"I—" I couldn't say I was hired to hurt anyone. I was hired to save a life.
"Who's behind you?" Felix demanded.
"No one," I said. "I just needed a job."
He didn't trust me. He watched me. He put me on the schedule for meetings I couldn't possibly understand and told me to take notes on things I couldn't pronounce. I scribbled what I could, then learned.
"You're terrible at minutes," he said once, and I almost cried. I scrubbed the word "incompetent" from inside my skull and kept going.
Then came the night with Andres Bruno.
"Tonight, you drink for me," Felix said that morning, without warmth.
"Who, me?" I blinked. "Why—"
"You're my shield," he said. "Don't ruin this."
Andres Bruno smiled like a shark with expensive shoes. "You're pretty," he told me. "Stay." His hand hovered over the table.
"I'm Felix's secretary," I said.
"Felix sent you to me," Andres slurred. "He can't always stand on both sides. Help him."
I tried to be clever. "You should be careful. There are cameras." I meant it to be a lie but it lodged in my chest and became a truth, because Felix left and I was alone.
He wasn't alone for long. Andres cornered me, hand sliding where hands should never go.
"Get your hands off her," a voice cut the room.
Felix came back, his jacket unbuttoned, a different beast at the corners of his mouth. He didn't ask what happened. He made sure I was protected. He told the man to leave.
"You think I'm a toy?" he asked the man, quiet at first, then louder. "Who made you think you could touch her?"
The man left with an apology that tasted like vomit. Felix leaned against the wall and said, "You're supposed to protect me."
"I'm protecting my brother," I said.
He stared at me for a long time, and for the first time I saw something that looked like guilt mixed with rage.
The threats escalated. The envelope with the sea-green seal: "We can help. We can also take your brother." Jacob Arnold, the man who'd been shadowing me, had the kind of phone call that carried a country's worth of cruelty.
"Go to the bridge tomorrow night," the note said. "Come alone."
"Are we partners now?" I asked Jacob when I met him. He smiled. "Yes." He didn't smile kindly.
Then my worst fear came true in a place I never wanted: the H·T Group offices, where truth and lies smelled just about the same. Felix had an interview with a glossy magazine and a charity gala the next week. I had a plan to play matchmaker to his grandfather's choice, Hadley Karim, while also faking devotion so that Jacob's people would be satisfied. I was trying to sit on two burning coals at once.
"Switch seats. Sit next to her," Hadley told me on the plane. Her laugh was like glass.
"Of course," I said, and the small lie curled warm in my mouth.
"You're such a good sport," she said later, but when she saw me by Felix's side she hissed, "You are nothing."
"You're rich and I have a brother with a blood disease," I told her. "Guess which matters."
Hadley looked at me as if I were a stain. She wasn't subtle. She'd been picked, my employer's old wound called the family, and she expected me to do the rest.
I did. I switched seats. I smiled. I tried to make a bridge between Hadley and Felix and forgot that every time I smiled I was giving him a piece of the life I had planned to fake.
When he kissed me on a bridge under storm clouds—no, he forced his mouth on mine; the city jangling like a distant bell—I shut down. He tasted like deceit and rain.
"Who told you to leave without telling me?" he demanded after, in the dark, when I'd tried to leave.
"Grandfather told me to," I lied. "I had to fix something for my brother."
He looked away, and I saw the shadow of Ludmila Cuevas in his face. She was the ghost who had taken his softer hours. Everyone called her a story. I learned later she had been everything to him.
"Go home," he said. "Tomorrow, come back."
That was the thing Jake's people needed to hear. That was the thing Hadley wanted. That was the thing I wanted, in some strange way, too.
I learned something about power: people use you as a proof of things they believe. Felix believed that a face like Ludmila's could mean ruin. His grandfather, Giovanni Saleh, believed that family honor could be fixed by a well-placed marriage. Jacob and his crew believed blackmail could be carved into a life.
Andres Bruno believed he could buy people when lust had a price.
They were wrong. They were so, so wrong.
The turning point happened because I stopped being the puppet who obeyed.
"Why do you work for them?" I asked Penn one night, finally brave enough to say it.
"Who? The ones who threatened you?" he asked, surprised.
"Yes."
"They hold your brother," he said.
"But you could tell Felix."
"He would have had you killed first, then asked questions later," Penn said.
"Then we shame them," I said.
Penn didn't smile, but he listened. He slid an envelope across his desk and said, "If we expose them at the gala, everyone will see. We can make them implode."
I had nothing to lose but the plan I'd been given. I had to save my brother.
The charity gala was a glass-and-light cathedral of eyes. Cameras flashed like nervous fireflies. The board of H·T sat like judges. The donors preened.
Giovanni Saleh sat at the head table, larger than life, older than regret. Hadley sat next to Felix like a trophy on an arm. Jacob Arnold smiled in a corner, slick as a shadow. Andres Bruno arrived with a swagger that smelled of bad intentions.
"You're with me tonight," Felix said to me in a hush, and then, more softly, "If they hurt you again, I will break them."
"I know," I said, and rehearsed my lines like a woman who had been taught to be brave.
We stood up when the auction began. Penn signaled me. Daxton Dean, Felix's old friend and the owner of the private restaurant where we had met earlier, slid closer and said, "Are you sure?"
"Be ready," I told him.
On Felix's cue I went to the mic as the last lot was wheeled out—an overnight stay at a private island. I spoke, then handed the mic back. It was an ordinary thing; it was a trap.
"Felix," I said, and felt every eye fall like weight on my shoulders. "I have something to say."
He gave me a look: you said you'd do this.
"I was hired to break a heart," I said. "I was hired to make a man fall and then make him hurt. I did not choose this work. I chose my brother's life. But I will not be a weapon for other people's revenge."
There was a rustle. The cameras hungrily pivoted.
"You threatened me and my family," I said, and pointed to Jacob Arnold. "You told me you had what I needed. You tried to sell my brother's life."
Jacob's smile slipped. "You have no proof," he said.
"Phones," Penn said from behind me, and suddenly the room was a waterfall of recorded voices.
Penn played one call—Jacob's voice, clear and casual, negotiating terms; then another—Andres arranging a "private meeting," his voice oily. The room inhaled.
"You tried to pressure me into carrying out a lie," I said, and I handed a stack of files to the event host. Photos, messages, bank transfers. "You named the men who threatened me. You named the ones who tried to sell me. You used a sick boy's life as currency."
A man from the finance committee rose. "This is illegal evidence," he said weakly. Everyone's whisper folded into itself.
Felix stood, his face a mask. "Go on," he said.
I read, slow and calm, the words Andres had said in that motel bar, the details of Jacob's threats, and the bank accounts that funneled money for blackmail. The room reacted like people seeing a window smashed. Gasps. Phones recording. Someone started videotaping. Members of the board turned pale.
"Giovanni," I said, looking at his face. "Your people were involved in this. You threatened me. You told me to spy. You tried to use me."
Silence for a full, hot beat. Giovanni's jaw tightened. He had made a judgment that he thought would save honor; instead the lights burned him as bright as a moth.
"Traitor," someone in the back hissed. "Scandal," whispered another. A woman slapped her hand over her mouth. A man took a photo. The event host, pale and plastic, tried to close the microphones but the cameras had already begun to stream.
Jacob stood, his face falling as the dominoes aligned. For the first time since he'd started his blackmail, he looked small.
"Andres," I said. "You assaulted me. You used your money and your influence to try to own me."
He waddled, white-faced, like a man who had never expected consequences. Someone from the audience shouted, "Call the police!"
"Everyone, remain calm," the host said, but his voice was cardboard.
Felix did not scream. He did not shout. He walked to the front table like a man walking to a verdict and he put his hand on my shoulder. It was the lightest touch in a room that felt like drowning.
"You're finished," he said to Jacob, voice like steel. "We have everything. Penn—alert security. Call the authorities. Daxton—call PR."
The punishment was not mine to dish in a private corner. It was public, right at the altar of reputations. The board members, the donors, the city newspeople—they watched as Felix methodically handed the evidence over to the right people.
Jacob's expression changed—first denial, then incredulous bargaining, then the flinty collapse of a man who realized every door had been closed. "You can't—"
"Oh, you can," Felix said quietly. "And people will remember how you chose to treat a woman who had nothing but a brother."
The cameras recorded the rest: Jacob being escorted out by security while guests murmured like a wave, Andres being questioned and then arrested after an anonymous victim from a news tip came forward, Giovanni trying to speak and only making his situation worse by arguing with the board. People pointed. Phones filmed. The charity gala turned into a courtroom-lite in a grand ballroom.
"You should have thought about that before you made threats," I heard a woman say. Someone who had once been a minor third in a life I never expected to have now clapped.
The impact was loud and long. Social feeds erupted. Headlines ran: "H·T Gala Scandal: Blackmail Ring Exposed." "CEO's Secretary Brings Down Blackmailers." Overnight the men were not just villains—they were a public cautionary tale. Jacob's company lost clients. Andres's board distanced themselves. Giovanni was forced into a humiliating apology that read like a confession.
I watched them fall and felt a surprising, guilty victory. They had tried to bend me into an instrument; instead I made them instruments of their own demise.
The police report was long; the confession videos were longer. At a press conference a week later I stood beside Felix as he announced the company's internal sweep and apologized for the complicity of certain family members. His face was unreadable.
"You did this," he said softly to me afterward, away from cameras.
"I did what I had to do," I said.
He reached out and took my hand in front of everyone. Not possessively; not necessarily tenderly. He put his palm in mine like an anchor.
"You could have walked away," he said.
"I couldn't," I said. "He is my brother."
From that night on, the world changed a little around us. Penn kept me in meetings where my voice mattered. Daxton sent me messages like small bouquets. Hadley—Hadley remained polite and distant, spiraling into a scandal-free retreat.
Felix treated me differently. He stopped calling me "you" like an object and started calling me by my name.
"Emily," he said once, in the quiet of a conference room in the middle of a long night, "I still don't trust you."
"Trust has to be earned," I answered.
"Then earn it," he said, and for the first time in my life I felt a very small and dangerous hope.
Weeks passed. I learned to take minutes properly. I bought a better phone and a better set of shoes. I met my brother at the train station when he came to the city and watched him stand under fluorescent lights and look at me like I had pulled a miracle from the air.
"You did it," he said.
"I had to," I said.
Felix watched from across the platform, hands in his pockets, and then he made a move that surprised me.
"Come," he said. "Let's get you home."
We didn't say "always" or "together." We didn't make promises that could be placed in a jar and broken. We walked toward the exit with my brother between us, and in that small motion the city didn't feel quite so sharp.
I learned that being brave doesn't mean you stop being scared. It means you scare yourself into moving anyway.
The End
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