Cixi woke up around ten in the morning.
The first thing she did was reach for her phone. She tapped the dark screen, searching for any new notifications, specifically a reply from Cassian regarding her text. The screen remained blank.
A sharp pang of disappointment hit her chest.
She berated herself in her head. Why was she thinking about him first? The rules were clear. She needed to make him fall in love. She needed to manipulate his mind so that she would become the first thing he thought of when he woke up and the very last thing he thought of before he closed his eyes, not the other way around.
She had never been in a relationship. Her practical knowledge of romance was zero. After watching a trafficking documentary, the algorithm had fed her true crime videos, detailing how many women had been murdered by their ex-boyfriends or husbands simply because they had broken up with them.
