"My Boyfriend Cheated With My Sister and Laughed. So I Showed Up at the Gala With His Father."

"I am going to castrate him," Maya muttered for the fourth time in ten minutes, her knuckles white around her ceramic mug. "I swear to God, Luna, give me thirty minutes and a baseball bat."

"Get in line," I answered, my voice steady, though my eyes were hollow and rimmed with dark shadows. "I'm first."

I hadn't slept a single wink. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw Amber’s smirk and Liam’s cowardly panic. But somewhere around 4:00 AM, as I sat staring at the kitchen wall, my heartbreak had undergone a terrifying chemical transformation. It had hardened, freezing into something dark, cold, and razor-sharp.

"I don't want revenge because I'm hurt anymore," I admitted, taking a slow sip of my coffee. "Hurt implies I still care about what we had. I don't. I want them to regret every single breath they take from this moment forward."

Maya leaned forward across the island, her expression shifting from anger to intense curiosity. "What are you planning?"

"I'm going to make Liam realize exactly what he threw away."

"How? By throwing another lamp?"

I smiled for the first time in twenty-four hours. It wasn't a warm smile. It was the smile of a woman who had just calculated the exact trajectory of a falling anvil.

"I'm going to show up to the Grandon Foundation Charity Gala tomorrow night with someone better."

Maya raised an eyebrow. "Define better."

"Older."

"Okay..."

"Richer."

Maya stared at me. "Luna, New York is full of rich old men. Who are you going to charm on twenty-four hours' notice? A hedge fund manager with a midlife crisis?"

I took another slow sip of coffee before dropping the words that nearly made her choke on her caffeine.

"I'm borrowing Liam's father."

Maya spat half her coffee across the kitchen counter, coughing violently and beating her chest with her fist. "Your what?! Have you completely lost your mind?!"

"Nico Rossi," I said calmly, pulling a napkin toward me to wipe up the spill.

"Nico Rossi?!" Maya shrieked, her voice echoing off the apartment walls. "The real estate tycoon? The man who owns half of Manhattan commercial property and treats the Forbes list like a weekend reading assignment? Luna, he's Liam’s father!"

"Exactly," I said, my voice dropping into a cool, lethal register. "If you're going to strike a blow, you don't aim for the branches. You strike the root."

"Luna, this is insane," Maya stammered, pacing back and forth across the kitchen floor. "You met him once at that stiff Rossi family Christmas dinner six months ago! He's powerful, intimidating, divorced, notoriously private, and completely untouchable. He's not going to show up to a high-society charity gala with his son's humiliated ex-girlfriend just to help you execute a petty revenge plot!"

"You're right," I replied, standing up and walking toward my bedroom closet. "He won't do it if I ask him as a victim. But what if I ask him as an equal?"

Maya stopped pacing and stared at me as if I had grown a second head. "An equal? Luna, what does that even mean?"

"It means," I said, pulling open my closet door to reveal the dark, quiet sanctuary of my wardrobe, "that Nico Rossi has spent the last ten years publicly trying to steer his company away from toxic family scandals, while his eldest son—Liam—has been quietly embezzling minor developmental funds and running up high-stakes gambling debts behind his back. Debts I happened to stumble across while helping Liam manage his personal taxes last month."

Maya’s jaw dropped. "You have dirt on Liam?"

"A mountain of it," I said quietly, running my hand along the fabric of a coat. "And I have a feeling that Nico Rossi would pay a very high price to keep his family name out of the tabloids. Accompanying a brilliant, wrongfully discarded woman to a charity gala? That’s not a favor. That's a PR masterclass."