Sweet CEO's First Love

Saint gasped as his heart lept inside him from the pit of his stomach to the top of his throat.

'No… Don't do this to me, Heart.' He ached inside.

'We can't be together, we can't love.'

'Because I can't watch you die. I have never felt so strongly for anyone ever the way I do for you.'

'Don't make my heart stop functioning normally.'

'Don't make me addicted.'

'I was safe alone in my bubble. I couldn't hurt like this again because I had already lost everything.'

'Don't give me something to lose.'

'I can't let you in.' Saint repeated the words in his own mind, even though he knew they were a broken mantra. That his heart was already so far gone there was no coming back.

He repeated them even though the very thought was numbing and excruciating, setting his whole world on fire.

"My dad is returning to Bangkok tomorrow." The words hung in the air between them. A knife in his gut, but Heart stood there unaware of their weight.

"The last two times he was here I feared for my life," Saint spoke softly into the darkness, still too nervous and weak to turn around.

'He was so affected, this was his breaking point. He knew that if he told Heart this story aloud face to face that he never would recover from the look on Hearts face. The horror, as he told him how he left his first love to die.'

"All the unexplainable things you have seen me do, all the secret files, the trips. Why I needed you and Kit in the first place."

"All of that is because of him."

"Ngeun wants to take away anything that is mine, anything that brings me happiness and joy."

"He used my own best friend Ben to kill my first love Win."

"He used Ben to make me want to die too." Saint turned around and held up his wrists into the light."

"Do you know why no matter the weather you always see me in a long-sleeved shirt?"

"It's because of these." Saint stepped into the little bit of light there was and pointed at his scars.

"These are the wounds he inflicted on me, these are the wounds I deserved after he made me watch the only person I had ever romantically loved die in front of me."

"He turned my childhood best friend Ben into a monster for money. And Win, they drove him mad."

"The whispering of self-doubt. The whispering of money and power. That love wasn't real."

"And they kidnapped him from me. Held him in a warehouse for weeks, without sunlight, without any sound but his own breathing. With barely enough water to survive. Beating him, offering him drugs for the pain, but giving him only enough to take away the edge, so that he would become addicted to the small release."

"They told him I had forgotten about him. They told him I had moved on. Because he was just a toy to me."

"And I got there in time to watch his eyes go dull, to Have the last words on his lips be my name as his body swung from the steel beams of the ceiling."

"He rocked like a pendulum in front of me. His frail body, scared and beaten."

"Then they locked me in there too."

"I wasn't strong back then. I was powerless. And four against one was barely a fight."

"Yet, I still managed to take down Win's broken, beaten body and lay it to rest on the floor, before they beat me to a pulp while I clung to his lifeless heap."

"I have seen my father three times since I was five years old, once when I was fifteen and that night. I took the bowl they gave him to drink from and I smashed it on Ngeun's head."

"I wanted to kill him, Heart."

"If I had been strong enough, maybe I would have."

"But instead he took those shattered shards, the only pieces I had left of Win and with those pieces, he slashed away at my body. Ripping me to shreds."

"These scars were created the night he left me for dead. He slit my wrists and killed my first love."

"I ran from that warehouse bleeding begging for help. I was so weak I left Win's body behind."

"I abandoned him, in the dirt and filth."

'By the time I got help I passed out and when I came to lying in a hospital bed. My grandpa and Kit beside me, their worried faces, ghostly pale. I was a groggy mess, barely making any sense. I was on death's door, I had lost so much blood and I couldn't even put out a single sentence, not even one begging for someone to save Win.'

"I found out later that Win's body was discovered a week later ravaged by animals, his death ruled a suicide by overdose."

Saint walked away and stopped at his office door.

"You want to know why I have to fire you. Why I push people away and never let them close."

"Because these scars remind me every day what little right I have to love."

"And also remind me what I am fighting for."

"This company, this life. I won't let that asshole take it from me or anyone else I care about."

"I can't love anyone Heart, it's impossible, I am too broken inside to ever feel that way again. You want some big confession from me."

"It is never going to happen."

"Because in the end, I am willing to do anything to secure this empire from that monster."

"I will trample the bodies of a hundred thousand people if it means taking him down."

"I don't love, I don't trust, and I don't let people in."

"You thought I was joking the other day, but I am not."

"My father is a murderer."

"He killed Win."

"He killed my uncle, my aunt, and my mom, I know it even though I don't have proof."

"He tried to kill me."

"And he will try to kill you too."

"So stay away Heart."

"I never should have let you get this close in the first place."

Saint walked towards the door when he heard Heart's running footsteps and his smaller arms encircled his waist tightly refusing to let him go.

"I refuse to let you walk away from me."

"Because I love you." His sad voice filled with so much heartbreak and emotion echoed into Saint's back the words he had never heard before in his life from anyone but his grandma and Kit.

'I love you.'