Scars

The Tatsu family doesn't do love. They do leverage.
Mr. Tatsu runs an empire built on dirty money and clean-looking storefronts, strip clubs, nail salons, warehouses that ship more than product. He has three sons he's grooming to inherit it all, and a fourth "asset" he picked up as collateral: a baby girl, traded away by a mother who couldn't afford to keep her.
Xanthus has been raising his little brothers since he was eight, after their mother died having them. He knows how to be a parent before he knows how to be a kid. So when he finds a starving toddler curled up on a bucket in one of his dad's warehouses at twelve, taking her in isn't even really a decision, it's just what he does. No matter how many times his father tries to send her back.
She grows up half-raised by three boys who were never supposed to be her family and half-owned by a man who never let her forget what she was bought for. She learns to cook, to clean, to smile the right way at the right clients, to disappear when it's easier than being seen. And somewhere in all of it, she falls for Xantara, has, maybe, since the day he gave her his jacket.
She never says so. Convinced he only sees a sister. Convinced she's one more burden on a boy who already carries too many. He never says so either, for reasons of his own, reasons she'll never let herself ask about.
By sixteen, she's out of the only house that ever felt safe and into the arms of a boy who says he loves her first.
It will be the first thing about him that's a lie.
A story about the families we're sold into, the ones we build anyway, and how far a girl has to fall before someone catches her.
TW: abuse, addiction, self-harm, organized crime, mature themes