Sammantha`s Life (precuel)

Chapter 1 - The Price of Perfection

Hello to everyone reading this short introduction to my third story!

Although the adventure of Seraphina, Cael, and Elara is still being published at the time of this message, I just want to announce that I have decided to begin a new adventure.

To avoid boring those of you looking for quick 'action,' this will serve as an introduction to one of the main characters.

The upload schedule will be Monday, Wednesday, and Friday so I can stay consistent without disrupting the updates for my other story. I really hope you enjoy it!

For Samantha, excellence was never a goal; it was a life sentence.

For as long as she could remember, her life had been sculpted by the expectations of one of the country's wealthiest and most influential families. While other girls played in the park and scraped their knees, Samantha's days were measured in strictly counted calories, piano lessons, language tutoring, and etiquette rules. They had molded her to be the perfect heiress: slender, modest, brilliant, and above all, docile. Throughout elementary school, this rigidity completely isolated her. Samantha accepted the loneliness and followed every rule with a false, childish hope: she believed that if she was the perfect girl, adulthood would finally hand her the keys to her own life.

But that illusion shattered in middle school, and curiously enough, it was thanks to the most unexpected person.

He didn't fit into the world of tailored suits and flawless lineages. He was a bit short, somewhat chubby, and possessed no physical traits that would make him stand out in the hallways. He also couldn't care less about grades or prestige. Yet, he had something Samantha had never seen: he lived his life with pure, shameless joy. At first, to the highly structured Samantha, he seemed irresponsible, but he never treated her like the "untouchable heiress." To him, she was just Samantha. He wanted to make her laugh, hang out, and share lunch without counting portions.

That secret friendship became Samantha's sole refuge during middle school and most of high school. He taught her how to breathe above water; she developed a deep admiration for him. But secrets in powerful families have an expiration date.

In her senior year, the bubble burst. When her parents discovered that the jewel of the family was spending her time with someone who fell so far below their elitist standards, their response was swift and merciless. Disregarding Samantha's tears, screams, or protests, they pulled her out of school and sent her abroad. They cleanly severed the only root of genuine happiness she had ever known.

Fourteen years later, at the age of 32, her family's strategy seemed to have worked perfectly. Samantha was a business titan, running the family empire with cold, calculating precision. She rejected the "suitable" suitors her family presented without a second thought, focusing solely on corporate success. She had the perfect body, the perfect bank account, and the emptiest life in the world.

Until one Tuesday morning, when the routine broke.

Samantha had gone down to the company's warehouses for a surprise inspection of the supplies. Amidst the deafening roar of forklifts and the smell of industrial dust, a man was checking a delivery inventory. He wasn't the boy from high school anymore; the years had passed. Now, he was a clearly overweight man whose physical condition betrayed a life of hard labor and zero gym time.

But when he looked up and smiled, apologizing for a paperwork error, Samantha's heart-frozen for over a decade-began to beat violently once more.

It was him.

And in that instant, standing in the middle of the warehouse in her designer suit, Samantha knew that the true test of her life wasn't running an international company. The real test would be discovering if she had the courage to tell the empire, the diets, and the image of the "perfect woman" they had forced upon her to go to hell, so she could finally dare to be happy.