The New Year's Eve Betrayal

A viral callout post on my feed just destroyed my perfect relationship.

The caption grabbed me instantly: [To the physics major at A University waiting for her boyfriend for the New Year's Eve countdown party—he's cheating on you.] I tapped the screen.

An audio clip started playing.

The girl's voice was slightly muffled, like she was speaking into the collar of a heavy winter coat. "If you dare ditch me on New Year's Eve for that boring little nerd of yours, you're never seeing that limitededition Victoria's Secret lace set." The guy's reply was husky, thick with helpless surrender and raw desire. "I'm staying with you.

Happy now?" The recording kept going, but my fingers went numb against the cold glass of my phone. The university. The major. A flawless match.

And that voice—I knew its every cadence. My boyfriend was sleeping with someone else. Chapter 1 The air hitched in my throat when I heard his voice.

The blood drained from my face, my fingers gripping the edge of the desk so hard my knuckles turned white. No. Absolutely not. Silas wouldn't cheat on me. We were solid.

We promised we'd kiss under the New Year's Eve fireworks together every single year.

I could still hear his voice from our call last night. "Sloane, couples who ring in the New Year together stay together forever." "Make sure you wear that matching jacket I bought you tomorrow.

I want to take a picture of my baby looking gorgeous under the fireworks." "I can't even sleep tonight. I just want tomorrow to get here." My stomach plummeted.

Was this really just some sick coincidence? Another girl waiting for her boyfriend for the countdown party. And I just happened to be a junior physics major at A University.

Even if I could somehow wave all that off, could I really mistake Silas's voice?

A new text from Silas lit up the screen, shattering whatever pathetic denial I had left. [Sloane, I am so sorry.

Something just came up with the department, and I can't make it tomorrow.] [I promise I'll make it up to you in a few days. Be a good girl!] Two sentences.

The words hit like a bucket of ice water, snapping me awake. I didn't need to feed myself any more stupid excuses. The guy in that audio clip was Silas.

I forced air into my burning lungs, steadying my shaking hands. I tapped play and listened to the recording one more time.

The girl's voice was muffled, but there was a grating familiarity to her pitch. I opened the poster's profile and shot her a direct message.

I typed out my major, confirming I was the pathetic girl getting cheated on. I asked her to give me every single detail she could remember from that moment.

Her reply popped up seconds later. [Girl!

I was so worried I wouldn't find you.] [Those two looked puttogether, but they had absolutely zero shame in public.] I scanned her description of the guy. It was definitely Silas.

And the girl— [About fivefootfive, heavy glam makeup, squeezing into a skintight bodycon dress.

Your classic bitchy cheerleader type…] The poster kept typing, furious on my behalf, swearing she would have snapped a picture if they hadn't been standing so close.

But I didn't need a picture. Those words painted a visceral image in my head. Brooke. A girl from the high school Silas and I went to. I gritted my teeth. Why her?

I had spent the last five minutes imagining every possible scenario—some freshman hitting on him, a girl from his study group, maybe someone he met at a party in the city.

But Brooke? Brooke despised me and Silas back in high school. I thought I would never have to look at her face again after graduation.

But out of all the girls in the world, it was her. Chapter 2 There was no time to sit around confused. I thanked the poster and tracked down Brooke's Instagram account.

We hadn't spoken in two years, but finding a high school classmate's profile took barely five minutes. I tapped her icon. The surprises rolled right in.

Her PFP was identical to mine. Silas and I had used matching icons forever, but a month ago, he texted me a new design. He claimed he paid an artist specifically for us.

I didn't question it. I just changed it. Looking at the screen now, the math was sickeningly simple.

He wanted matching icons with his new girlfriend, but to avoid slipping up, he just made us both use the exact same picture. Next, I checked her location tags. Same city as Silas.

Brooke went to college in the exact same city.

Whenever her name briefly came up over the years, Silas would wave it off, acting like he hadn't heard from her and couldn't care less. Flawless execution.

Finally, her latest story, posted fifteen minutes ago. [Expecting New Year's Eve, premium champagne, and fine French dining.

And of course, my perfect boyfriend who dropped everything just to be with me!] Someone commented below: [Ooh, smell the romance!

Where are you guys celebrating?] Brooke replied with the name of a ridiculously expensive, reservationsonly French restaurant downtown.

She soaked up the jealous replies, topping it off with a winking tongueout emoji. When the absolute truth slaps you across the face, you don't cry.

A dry laugh scraped its way out of my throat. I rented a car and hit the interstate. The drive took just over an hour. I secured a table at that exact restaurant.

The next night, stepping out into the biting winter wind, I watched Silas and his new girlfriend walking toward their countdown date.

Brooke whined, making him carry her designer purse.

Silas hooked a possessive arm around her waist, flashing that cocky grin of his as he leaned in to whisper something dirty in her ear, steering her toward the restaurant doors.

Oh, right. The jackets they were wearing looked extremely familiar. It was the exact matching jacket Silas had bought for me. Two matching profiles. Two matching jackets.

He really bought everything in bulk. As for me, to avoid being spotted, I threw on an oversized gray hoodie and pulled a baseball cap down low over my eyes.

I faded into the background of their little romantic comedy. I slipped into the booth directly behind them.

The guy I grew up with, the guy who swore he loved me to death, was separated from me by a single leather seat back, holding another girl and feeding her sweet nothings.

Between their flirting, I even heard the distinct clink of an expensive Tiffany necklace.

That was the exact necklace he pointed out in a catalog and promised to give me for my graduation. My phone screen lit up on silent mode. A new text. [Baby, what are you doing?

Are you heading out for the countdown?] Even with his hands full of another girl, he still managed to squeeze in the time to check on me.

Chapter 3 Brooke frowned, clearly annoyed that his attention was elsewhere.

She made a grab for his phone. "Eyes on me tonight, got it?" Silas clicked his tongue, a flash of irritation crossing his face.

But he didn't push away the girl practically glued to his side.

He just held the phone higher, out of her reach, his eyes fixed on the screen waiting for my text, while his other hand rubbed her arm. "Be good, quit messing around." "I'm doing the New Year's countdown with you, aren't I?

Play nice." I lifted my coffee cup. The rich, bitter liquid slid down my throat, but it did nothing to wash away the bile rising in my stomach.

A mocking smirk twisted my lips as my fingers tapped the keyboard. [No.

The countdown is only fun when you're with the person you love, right?] Silas's reply was instant. [It's all my fault.

The department wouldn't let me go.] People overcompensate when they're guilty.

He snapped a picture of the street outside the restaurant window and sent it. [The view from my city.] [Don't worry, baby.

I'm going to study my ass off and get into your grad school.] [Then we can spend every New Year's Eve together.] Brooke pouted.

She leaned up and bit down lightly on Silas's Adam's apple. He let out a low, muffled groan.

Seizing the opening, Brooke snatched the phone right out of his hand and slammed the screen dark. "What's the point of dating a boring little nerd like Sloane anyway?" Brooke scoffed. "We're in college, and all she does is rot in the lab. "She doesn't even know how to survive a frat party.

She's basically a nun. It's hilarious." Silas's tone dropped, turning cold. "Shut up.

You have no right to talk about her like that." "Aww, did I make you mad?" Brooke studied his face, wrapping both arms around his bicep and giving it a shake. "You defending her makes me jealous!" The tension drained out of Silas.

He tapped the tip of her nose. "You're calling her boring, but didn't you drag me out for the countdown too?" "Hmph, wrong." Brooke pressed her lips right against Silas's ear, her breath warm against his skin. "I didn't drag you out to watch some stupid countdown.

I wanted you to see…" The rest of her words dissolved into a breathless whisper, but I caught the distinct, sharp syllables of lace lingerie. Silas's breathing hitched instantly.

He let out a dark, low laugh. "Then why the hell are we still sitting here?" He gripped her hand, pulling her to her feet.

Brooke giggled, playing hard to get, anchoring herself to the booth. "Tell me first. Who's more fun to be with? Me or Sloane?" "You, you, you!

It's you, alright?" Silas surrendered, raising his hands in defeat. Only then did Brooke let him pull her up, leaning heavily against his side.

My thumb hit stop on the voice memo app. Using the dense, partying crowd as a shield, I trailed them, keeping a safe distance. Two blocks later, I raised my phone.

I captured the exact second they stumbled, arms wrapped around each other, through the sliding glass doors of a luxury hotel.

The biting wind of a strange city ripped through my clothes, chilling me down to the marrow, but it was nothing compared to the absolute wreckage inside me.

Knowing the truth was one thing, but standing on the pavement watching the boy I loved drag another girl into a hotel room tore through the last thread of my composure.

My stomach convulsed.

The pain didn't feel like a broken heart; it felt like a serrated blade twisting directly under my ribs, punching the oxygen straight out of my lungs until I was gasping for air against the brick wall of an alleyway.

Staring at the back of Silas's head, I realized I was looking at a complete stranger. I could have screamed his name right then and there.

I could have stormed the lobby, cursed him out in front of everyone, slapped that cocky grin off his face, and burned our entire relationship to the ground on the spot.

Chapter 4 Did he forget? Back when Brooke relentlessly mocked him, calling him trash who was only using me to climb the social ladder. It was me who stood in front of him.

Me, who risked getting suspended, throwing myself at Brooke and ripping her hair out in the middle of the hallway just to defend his name.

Yet tonight, I stood in the freezing wind, listening to them use me as their personal punchline, turning my existence into foreplay for their hotel hookup.

Every time I protected him, I had handed him the knife he just drove into my back. Every ounce of my loyalty was nothing but a sick joke.

I stared at their intertwined hands as the elevator doors slid shut. My boots crunched against the icy pavement. I turned my back on the hotel and walked away.

Silas didn't deserve a clean break. He didn't deserve a messy, tearful confrontation where he could beg for forgiveness. If I had one wish for this New Year's Eve, it was simple.

Silas was going to swallow the exact same agony he just fed me—multiplied tenfold. The drive back home was a blur.

Highway lights streaked past the rental car windows, bleeding into endless yellow lines. My eyes locked onto the empty asphalt ahead. Silas moved in next door during eighth grade.

The second he transferred in, he became the center of gravity at our school.

There were three reasons: he had that devastatingly gorgeous badboy face, his mom was an emotionally unstable drunk, and they came from a rundown trailer park on the edge of town.

I remember the whispers from the girls in the locker room—they called him a fallen angel dripping with dangerous temptation. It was just him and his mom. Nobody ever saw his dad.

On most nights, through the thin walls of our houses, I could hear his mother's shrill, slurred screaming tearing through the neighborhood. "You're a useless disappointment!" "If you weren't such a screwup, your father never would have abandoned us!" Soon enough, the rumors started spreading like wildfire.

Everyone said Silas's mother used to be the dirty little secret mistress of some billionaire.

When the billionaire's actual wife found out, she stripped them of every dime and threw them out onto the streets.

Carrying the label of a homewrecker's bastard made him a massive target in the hallways.

And at home, he was constantly suffocated by his mother's drunken rage, blaming him for not being good enough to win over the biological father who threw him away.

Silas's response was to completely selfdestruct.

One afternoon, he got into a brutal brawl in the alley behind the school with the guys who made the mistake of mocking his bloodline.

By the time I found him, he was lying alone on the concrete, blood pouring from his forehead, covered in purple bruises.

I grabbed an ice pack and a firstaid kit from the nurse's office.

He peeled his eyes open to look at me, those deep eyes full of wild defiance and absolute ice. "Don't you know I'm a bastard even my own father won't claim?

Why the hell are you meddling in my business?" I pressed an alcohol swab against his split eyebrow, wiping away the blood. "You don't get to choose who your parents are.

Or where you come from." His eyelashes fluttered. The ice in his stare cracked. After his wounds healed, he told me the truth. His mother wasn't the mistress.

His father had simply climbed into bed with a wealthy heiress who could skyrocket his career, kicking his original family to the curb without a second thought. "Do you actually believe a word I just said?" he asked.

I nodded. A spark lit up in his eyes before instantly dying out into a dark, selfdeprecating smirk. "A deadbeat dad and a psycho, alcoholic mom. You think I'm pathetic, don't you?

If I had a choice, I wish I was never born." I stayed quiet for a few seconds, letting the words sit between us. "You do have a choice," I finally said. "Your dad is your dad.

But you are you. You can grind, fight your way out of here, and build whatever life you want." I never forgot the bloodorange sunset painting the sky that evening.

It mirrored the exact spark of hope reigniting in the bruised boy's eyes. Chapter 5 From that day on, I became Silas's best—and probably only—friend.

His mother drowned herself in the tragedy of being abandoned, clinging to the delusional fantasy that the billionaire would magically soften his heart and come back for her.

Because of that, Silas's life was a living hell, both financially and mentally.

But even so, whenever he scraped together enough cash for a decent snack, he'd always save half of it for me.

When my parents found out, they started frequently inviting Silas over for our weekend backyard barbecues, even saving him a permanent seat at the table for Thanksgiving.

Rain or shine, Silas always had an umbrella and a heavy winter coat ready for me. He paid more attention to my needs than my own parents did.

My walk home from latenight study sessions cut through a sketchy alleyway. Every single night, without fail, he walked me right up to my front steps.

At the same time, Silas stopped his selfdestruction. He actually started hitting the books. And that was exactly when Brooke transferred to our school.

She was undeniably gorgeous and knew exactly how to style herself. While the rest of us were buried in textbooks looking like sleepdeprived zombies, she stood out like a beacon.

She was instantly crowned the unofficial queen bee of the school. But some kids whispered that Sloane was actually pretty too, that if you looked close enough, I could rival Brooke.

I never gave a damn about that kind of high school garbage. I just brushed it off. But Brooke clearly cared. She unilaterally declared me her mortal enemy.

The more I ignored her, the more unhinged she got. Since I came from a solid family and pulled straight A's, all her passiveaggressive meangirl tactics bounced right off me.

I simply didn't care. So, she targeted Silas to get to me. "So what if you get good grades, Sloane?" "I heard you're best friends with Silas? Birds of a feather flock together.

That just proves you're absolute trash too." "Everyone knows he's a bastard his own dad threw out.

He's poor, his grades are garbage… it's pathetic." Something inside me just snapped.

I, the girl who barely ever raised her voice, lunged forward and kicked her right in the back of the knee.

Amid the screaming of the other students, we tackled each other to the floor, tearing at hair and clothes until we were both bruised and bleeding.

That was not only my first time getting into a fight, it was also the first time I got slammed with detention by the principal.

But if I had to do it all over again, I wouldn't change a thing.

Silas pulled me aside, gently pressing an ice pack he stole from the nurse's office against the bruise on my jaw. "Don't pay attention to someone like Brooke.

She's just a clown desperate for an audience." I hissed as the cold stung my broken skin. "But I can't stand hearing her talk about you like that." A boomerang thrown over three years ago had just whipped back around and struck me right between the eyes.

The boy I fought so hard to protect had teamed up with the girl who humiliated him, and together, they shoved a knife right into my ribs. Turns out. I was the clown all along.

When exactly Silas and Brooke started hooking up behind my back, I had no clue. But his transformation wasn't completely lost on me. He was smart.

Even after selfdestructing for so long and falling hopelessly behind, once he actually focused, his grades skyrocketed at a terrifying pace.

Driven by the goal of getting into the exact same college as me, his relentless grind and massive improvements shocked even the teachers. Too bad.

Chapter 6 Right before the SATs, the father who had been a ghost for years suddenly reappeared. The fallout was nuclear.

For days, the neighborhood echoed with Silas’s mother’s hysterical sobbing late into the night. "I don’t want his blood money!

I’m not his son, and I am never going back to that house!" Silas would roar. "Not going back?

You’ve lost your damn mind!" his mother would shriek. "We finally waited long enough for your father to come crawling back.

I want to see who dares call me a mistress or you a bastard now!" "Silas, are you trying to kill me?!" The stress totaled Silas’s focus.

His SAT scores tanked—thirty points lower than his last mock exam. There was no way he was getting into A University with me.

He fought to pick a random safety school in my city just to stay close, but I wouldn't let him throw his future away.

Eventually, after talking to a counselor, he chose a toptier university in N City, just a short drive from me.

Shortly after, he and his mother were officially moved into his father's estate. I teased him once about how it felt to suddenly become a billionaire's heir.

He just shook his head, his jaw tightening until a muscle leaped in his cheek. "You really think he had a sudden awakening of fatherly love?

His wife died and left him with a daughter who can’t inherit his business empire.

That’s the only reason he remembered he has a male heir with his genes out there." Living with his father was a constant battle of wills.

His father made it clear that even at sixty, he could still sire another child, so Silas shouldn't assume the inheritance was a birthright.

Silas just scoffed at the threat. "As if I actually give a damn about his money." "Sloane, don't worry. I’m going to grind my way into A University for grad school.

We’ll build our own future together." He remembered the promise back then. I believed every word. But he was the one who turned it into a lie. At first, he was a textbook boyfriend.

He checked in every three days and gave me a deep dive into his life every five. Every tiny detail was shared the second it happened.

The shape of the clouds, a stray cat near the library, the way the light hit the quad… But slowly, the party photos started outnumbering the study notes.

The frequency of his texts flatlined. It made sense, though. He was a wealthy heir now with a new girl in his bed.

Expecting him to play the role of the devoted, hardworking scholar was probably a stretch.

The next morning, Silas’s name lit up my phone at his usual time. [Morning, baby!] Five minutes passed. I didn't touch the screen.

He followed up immediately. [Did you see the picture of the snow I sent last night?] [I'm so sorry I couldn't be there to see it with you. It’s all my fault.

Don’t be mad, okay?] I pulled up the photo and zoomed in, a dry, hollow laugh catching in my throat. He had taken the shot against the restaurant's floortoceiling window.

He had positioned his shoulders perfectly to block Brooke's reflection, desperate to scrub her out of the frame. But he missed one thing.

There was a blurred, inconspicuous silhouette in the bottom right corner of the glass. It was me, in my oversized gray hoodie and baseball cap.

The new flame and the old love, both captured in a single frame. The irony was suffocating