Wrong Novel, Right Fists

I'd just transmigrated out of an apocalypse novel into a billionairefamily romance, and I took a slap to the face.

A dollfaced little boy glared up at me. "Why do I have to have a mother who can't be taken anywhere?" "I told you, I don't want it.

Your soup isn't even close to what a Michelinstarred chef makes!" Warm, thick lobster bisque went all down my front.

The man beside him, in a suit and tie, only said mildly, "Landon. Don't be rude.

She's your mother." The boy was still seething. "If I'd had a choice, I never would have been born to someone this low!" I slapped him hard enough to send him flying. "I'm low?

What's so high about you? You ungrateful little rat who won't even claim your own mother!" Chapter 1 Landon flew backward and slammed down on the marble floor.

For one second the room was silent. Then it went off all at once— "WAAAAAAAH! It hurts!

Daddy!" "Nell, have you lost your mind?" The one sobbing was Landon, the biological son of the original Nell, the woman whose body I was now in.

The one barking at me was her son's biological father, Tristan Everhart. As for me, I was Reva Kemp, the woman who saved the world in a zombie apocalypse novel.

The skill and the strength I'd built in a world where everything was trying to kill me were carved into my soul.

A new body didn't slow me down at all. "What did Landon do that you'd hit him like that?" Tristan had already gathered the boy, crying in pain, against his chest.

He snapped at the staff to get the family's oncall physician here immediately, and the whole enormous house went into motion. "He's your son.

Are you really going to hold something against a child?" "And was he wrong? With a mother like you, God knows how many people laugh at him when he walks out that door.

You owe him." He didn't bother hiding the disgust and the contempt on his face.

The little whelp in his arms, the one who looked almost exactly like him, ground out through his teeth, "You don't deserve to be my mother!" "You're not worth a fraction of Aunt Vivian!

She's my real mom!" I frowned, shook the lobster bisque off my apron, and shot him a cold look. "I gave birth to you." Landon's face was smeared with tears and flushed dark red.

He clung to Tristan's neck. "I'm Daddy's! Daddy had me!" "Ha. Go ask your father if he can give birth." I snorted. "Or did you crawl out of his asshole?" Landon froze.

He'd been cradled and doted on by the original Nell for seven years.

Between the money he'd been born into and the way the Everharts raised him, he had probably never once heard language that filthy. His lips trembled and his eyes filled.

He stared at me, shocked, unable to believe it.

Tristan turned and set Landon down, his face dark, and came at me in long strides. "Nell, what the hell did you just say?" "Done playing the perfect wife and mother?

Done playing the wounded innocent? Nell, I always knew it. You're exactly like that dead mother of yours. Cheap. Vile. You'd even do that to a child—" Crack.

One slap put him on the floor. Landon stopped sobbing. The staff's footsteps stopped. The whole house went quiet enough to hear a pin drop.

Tristan looked up from the floor, dazed, as if he couldn't work out how any of this had happened. "You call a woman cheap and vile when she was your innocent victim and bore your child?

Then you, the rapist, should be physically castrated, and then just get it over with and die." Chapter 2 Then I looked at Landon, who was still frozen in shock. "Oh, sorry to disappoint you.

You didn't crawl out of your father's asshole. You're what I was left carrying after he raped me." "To put it simply, you're a rapist's bastard." The concierge doctor arrived.

Tristan dragged himself up off the floor and shouted, furious enough to burn the place down. "Nell—" I kept walking, straight toward the maid's room off the kitchen where the original Nell lived.

Wet, sticky soup soaking through a shirt is a genuinely terrible feeling. Tristan came after me. "Nell, stop right there! How dare you hit me?

You…" I slammed the door and locked it. Thinking about all the times Tristan had unlocked this door with his own key and done what he did to her, I felt a vein jump at my temple.

I dragged the bed and the wardrobe over and barricaded the door. Only then did I go shower and change. "System. Don't you owe me an explanation?" "Heh heh.

Sorry about that, Host." The mechanical voice I hadn't heard in so long popped up in my head. "It's been ages since I ran anything that needs computing power as precise as a crosstime transfer, so there was a teeny little error." I shut my eyes hard. "You call this a little error?" I'm Reva.

I saved the world in a zombie apocalypse novel, piled up more merit than anyone could count, and got bound to the Wish System. The original plan had been this.

I would cross over into an ordinary world with no zombies and no apocalypse, in a healthy body, with more money than I could spend.

That was the Main System's reward for saving a world. But now the problem was a big one. I hadn't gotten a healthy body built for me by the System.

I'd landed inside somebody else's. The original Nell.

Her mother was a livein housekeeper for the Everharts, and from the time Nell was small she'd been in that house as a playmate for the heir, Tristan. Playmate, supposedly.

Tristan had looked down on Nell from the day he met her and had her running in circles for him from the time they were children.

From elementary school through high school, Nell lived under constant bullying from Tristan and his circle.

On the day of Tristan's high school graduation party, he unknowingly drank something that had been spiked.

Everyone who got to be at that party came from a family with a name and money behind it. Except the original Nell. A housekeeper's daughter. Mrs.

Everhart didn't hesitate for a second. She pushed the original Nell into the room to get the drug out of Tristan's system.

There was nowhere for her to run, and that was the night she conceived Landon, a rapist's bastard.

The Everharts considered it a gift to her. "You've eaten and slept under our roof for free all these years. Being able to help Tris is good fortune for you." Mrs.

Everhart said, "All right, don't be dramatic. I'll give you a few days off.

Get some rest, and stop moping around like the sky has fallen." "If it weren't for that drug, I would never have slept with someone like you!" Tristan said, "Did you plan it?

Have you been wanting this all along? Nell, you're such a bitch." The original Nell never made it to college. Eight months pregnant, she was still on her feet cooking Mrs.

Everhart's meals. After Landon was born, she raised him until he was three, and then Mrs.

Everhart took him up to the family's old estate on the North Shore and handed him to his grandparents. She said, "He is the oldest grandson of this family, after all.

It isn't right for someone like you to keep raising him." Someone like what? She was that child's own mother!

She'd gotten through the hardest part, and right at the age when a child starts to know faces, they took him away and wouldn't let her see him even once a month.

And there was nothing she could do.

Chapter 3 Her mother had worked herself sick and died the year Nell turned fourteen, leaving a hundred and forty thousand dollars in medical bills owed to the Everharts.

All she could do was stay in that big empty house and do what she had always done. Cleaning, tidying, cooking, staring at nothing.

Then she hoped for a chance to see her son, and shook as she waited for the day Tristan would break through her bedroom door and tear the clothes off her. "Was she really just going to stand there and wait for the Everharts to keep hurting her?" The System couldn't compute it. "She has two arms and two legs.

Why didn't she run?" I sighed. "You can't ask someone who's been broken in that completely to suddenly find the nerve to fight back." "Nobody ever taught her how." She was only eighteen when he raped her.

She was only eight when she came to the Everhart house. A child that small had no way to hold off everything that family aimed at her. But now I was here. Nell.

I'm going to help you. The tight, sour ache in my chest dissolved.

I settled all the way into the body. "But, System." I looked in the mirror and smiled without any warmth. "You don't actually think I'm going to have it good in the situation this body is in, do you?" "I'll figure something out!" The System snapped to attention. "Don't worry, Host, I have experience now.

I'll build you a new body and a new identity as fast as I can, get enough money lined up for you to burn through for a lifetime, and then we'll do the transfer!" Good.

The System started collecting evidence on the Everharts. The original Nell's mother had worked herself to death.

Being a maid in the Everhart house wore out your body and your mind, and came with not one scrap of protection. Mrs.

Everhart could shove a girl barely eighteen at her drugged son to work it out of him and not think twice.

Tristan could rape and grind Nell down without a pause for seven years and never once worry about it.

Landon was seven and had already picked up every rotten habit the Everharts had, and turned vicious and cold, and wouldn't claim his own mother.

A family like that would never survive an investigation. When I came out of the room, Tristan and Landon were gone. The staff had already cleaned everything up.

The house was empty, not a person in sight. I bought flowers and went to the cemetery to see the original Nell's mother. By the time I got back to the house, Tristan and Mrs.

Everhart were both there. Landon was tucked against a woman in a white dress, tears rolling down his face over how badly he'd been treated.

The woman in the white dress soothing him was Vivian. The girl Tristan had put on a pedestal.

After he raped the original Nell, she'd left the country heartbroken, and she'd only come back because her family's company had a hole in its books and needed a marriage to unlock Everhart money.

At the moment she and Tristan were still pulling back and forth. The second I walked in, all four of them looked at me. Mrs.

Everhart glared at me with her teeth bared. "Nell Kemp!" "I knew it. Trash like you never learns what decency is, or what the rules are.

You eat, you sleep, you live off this family, and you dare put your hands on my son and my grandson!" "Look at what you've done to Tristan and Landon!" "If it weren't for the Everharts, you and that mother of yours would have been out on the street years ago!

How dare you?" The more she said, the angrier she got, and she came at me. "Trash is trash. And you actually dared to come back?

What did you come back for?" Tristan had been sitting there perfectly fine, watching me with a heavy face, when the pain in his own cheek reminded him of something and his expression changed. "Mom—" Too late.

Mrs. Everhart was already in front of me, her arm raised high, loaded with bracelets and rings. She had hit the original Nell many times.

Chapter 4 The diamondcrusted bracelets and the sharpedged rings would rake across her face with all that force behind them, and there is no describing that kind of pain, or that kind of humiliation.

Every time, all Tristan would say was, "Well, you made my mother angry again." "You did something wrong. She's only trying to teach you." I caught Mrs.

Everhart's arm and backhanded her hard across the face. The force of it nearly sent her flying, but I had her arm, so she couldn't go anywhere.

She didn't even get her scream out before a dozen more slaps landed and left her unable to speak. Vivian was too stunned to react.

Landon burrowed into her arms, his whole back shaking. "Stop! Stop it!" Tristan was out of his mind with rage.

He rushed in to save his mother, and I brought my foot up in a hard kick. Mrs.

Everhart flew back into Tristan, and mother and son went down in a tangle. "When your mother was hitting me, where was 'stop'?" "When you broke into my room and raped me, you didn't know the word?" "That's a hell of a double standard, Tristan." "Insane.

You're actually insane