The Day My Survival Score Reached Zero Chapter 11
When the Program told me I could return, I felt no joy.
Only emptiness.
The next time I opened my eyes, I was staring at a white hospital ceiling. Machines beeped beside me, and my throat burned as if I had been asleep for years.
A nurse saw me wake and rushed over.
“You’re safe,” she said. “You were caught in a dockside explosion. Sophia Lane didn’t survive.”
My fingers tightened against the sheet.
Sophia was dead.
Before I could speak, the nurse added, “There was another survivor. A young man named Luca. He woke up this morning.”
The door opened then.
Luca stood there with a cane, pale and thinner than before, but alive. When our eyes met, he smiled faintly.
“This time,” he said, “maybe we really are the leads.”
I stared at him for one second, then reached for him with trembling hands.
He came to me at once.
I held him tightly, and the tears I had not been able to shed in that world finally fell.
Later, Luca told me everything.
In the real world, he had been my university classmate. He had loved me for years, quietly, from a distance. On the night of the dockside explosion, he had followed Sophia because he knew she hated me and suspected she was planning something.
He tried to stop her.
He failed.
The explosion took us both.
While unconscious, he also met the Program. His contract was different from mine. I had four targets, but he had only one.
Me.
“If I made you choose me before your own mission was complete,” he said, “the result would be counted under my contract I would wake up, and you would stay trapped.”
So he ran from me in that world.
Every time I got close, he disappeared. Every time I thought he hated me, he was only trying not to steal my last chance to live.
“And Sophia?” I asked.
“I stayed near her because she was the danger,” Luca said. “I needed proof. The closer I stayed, the less she suspected me.”
So the distance, the silence, the times I saw him with Sophia-none of it had been betrayal.
He had been protecting me in the only way the rules allowed.
He was also the one who sent anonymous messages when the whole city turned against me. The one who collected the original footage. The one who found out I had been sent to the recovery residence and broke me out.
“When I took you away, I knew your mission had failed,” he said quietly. “I knew you had to leave. I didn’t want to watch you suffer anymore.”
After I died in his arms, he begged the Program for one thing.
A little more time.
He wanted me to see the truth revealed. He wanted me to see them regret it. He did not want me to leave that world believing I had been hated for nothing.
“And at the cemetery?” I asked.
Luca lowered his eyes.
“The moment your mission completed, mine did too.”
“But once your own mission completed first,” Luca said, “my score no longer stole the result from you. It completed mine too”
The Program had counted his Love Score.
And mine.
Because by then, I had finally chosen him.
I looked at him for a long time, then leaned forward and kissed him.
“Thank you,” I whispered. “For protecting me in every world.”
Luca held me carefully, as if I might still vanish.
“I love you,” I said.
His arms tightened around me.
“I love you too.”
This time, there was no heroine stealing the ending, no Program forcing a mission, no world pulling us apart.
Only us.
Alive.
Together.
