How to Get Revenge on Your Toxic Ex (A Guide)

The day Seraphina Vance succumbed to the final stages of AIDS was the very day Percival Hart tied the knot.

She lay in her squalid apartment, the fading light of a cracked smartphone screen illuminating her gaunt face. On Instagram Live, the headlines blazed with a cruel brilliance:

*“Percival Hart, CEO of Hart Conglomerate, marries his high school sweetheart, Mona Caldwell, after a fifteen-year romance!”*

Seraphina let out a rattling breath. The room around her was a far cry from the mansion she grew up in; it was a twenty-square-meter dump in the roughest part of the city. The walls were stained with mildew, the air thick with the scent of damp rot.

Destitute and dying, she had been discarded by society. No employer would touch her. She survived by collecting plastic bottles and cardboard from the gutters. Though hope had long since evaporated, a desperate, foolish instinct seized her. With trembling fingers, she dialed the number she knew by heart.

“Hello?”

It wasn’t Percival. It was Mona.

Seraphina swallowed her pride, her voice barely a whisper. “Mona… it’s me. Could you let Percival know I’m calling? I just need to borrow some money…”

Her immune system had been ravaged. Infections plagued her constantly. At thirty-one, she looked like a woman in her forties, withered and gray.

Hearing Seraphina’s voice, Mona’s tone sharpened with disdain. “Money again? How much more do you need? Haven’t you bled us dry yet?”

“I’m sick… I need to go to the hospital. Please.”

“You caught AIDS from your own reckless behavior. What does that have to do with us? Does Percival owe you a life debt?” Mona scoffed.

“I didn’t… I wasn’t reckless with strangers!” Seraphina pleaded, tears stinging her eyes. “Mona, please. I know he loves you. I promise I won’t bother him again. I just want to survive…”

She knew she had been a fool. She had been Percival’s lapdog for years, transferring her late father’s company to him just to secure a marriage proposal. Now, she was paying the price.

Mona laughed lightly. “All these years, Percival has given you plenty. You’re just incompetent. Do you expect him to support you forever?”

“He gave me scraps!” Seraphina choked out. “Thousands, barely enough for rent. It was less than what I gave him in a month back then. His company was built on my family’s ruins! When I met him, he was nothing. His father was our driver. I raised him!”

“I raised him?”

The voice on the other end shifted, deep and cold. Percival had taken the phone.

“Miss Vance,” he sneered. “Your father has been dead for years. Stop living in a fantasy.”

“You were useless in school, the bottom of the class. I tutored you. That money wasn’t a handout; it was a fee for my patience. You were too stupid to learn anything, anyway.”

His words cut deep. He had been her tutor, a job she forced her father to give him despite his lack of qualifications. He had taken the money and resented her for it, belittling her intelligence every chance he got.

“And the company?” Seraphina whispered. “You said if I signed it over, you’d marry me. Now you’re marrying her, and I’m begging for change…”

“The company?” Percival scoffed. “If I hadn’t taken over, your incompetence would have bankrupted the Vances within a year. And regarding the marriage… if you hadn’t been diagnosed with HIV right before the wedding, do you think I would have backed out?”

He used her illness as a weapon, as he always did. Seraphina stared at the ceiling, her vision blurring. If she hadn’t given him everything, she would still be wealthy, safe, and alive.

But it was too late.

“Tell me, Percival,” she asked, her voice barely audible. “Did you ever love me? Even for a second?”

“Love you?” The disdain was palpable. “Who could love a woman as dense as a brick wall? Seraphina, you insult me by asking. These past years have been a nightmare.”

“I’m dying,” she begged one last time. “Can you just come see me?”

“Absolutely not. You’re filthy. You don’t even deserve for me to arrange your funeral.”

The line went dead.

Seraphina’s consciousness began to drift. The phone rang again. It was Mona.

“Still breathing?” Mona’s voice dripped with false sympathy.

Seraphina’s heart fluttered with a momentary spark of hope. “Did Percival send you?”

“Hardly. I have a pathological hatred for stupidity,” Mona said, her tone turning vicious. “I couldn’t stand watching you delude yourself any longer. You really think he ever cared? And you never figured out how you got sick, did you?”

Seraphina froze. “What do you mean?”

“Think about it,” Mona whispered. “A contaminated needle. Percival arranged it. It was the only way to get rid of you without a messy legal battle. And you were too thick to realize it. You really are pathetic.”

The cheap smartphone slipped from Seraphina’s hand, clattering onto the damp floorboards.

Seraphina lay back, the darkness closing in. She had given everything, and received nothing but a cruel, calculated death.

Her final memory was of a sterile hospital room. A man in military uniform stood by the door.

Since her diagnosis, kindness had been a stranger. She looked at him, confused. “Who are you?”

“The Commander sent me,” the soldier said solemnly. “He’s on his way.”

*Commander.* The title triggered a memory. Julian Thorne. The man her father had arranged for her to marry years ago. The man she had rejected and insulted because she was so blinded by Percival.

“How… how is he?” she rasped.

“Busy. Distinguished,” the soldier replied. “He never married. He always said he was waiting for his fiancée.”

Regret, sharper than any pain, pierced her heart. She had thrown away a diamond for a piece of glass.

But the clock struck midnight. Seraphina Vance took her last breath.

Beep. Beep. Beep.

Seraphina’s eyes snapped open. The smell of mildew was gone, replaced by the scent of floor wax and cheap cologne.

She was sitting at a desk. A textbook lay open in front of her.

“Seraphina! Are you deaf?”

The voice was familiar, young and arrogant. She looked up to see Percival Hart, but not the cold, suited CEO. This was Percival at eighteen, looking at her with impatience.

“Mona has a stomachache,” Percival snapped. “Go to the pharmacy and buy her some meds. Then go to the cafeteria and get her lunch. And buy her something decent—she’s too skinny, she needs meat.”

Seraphina stared at him, the memory of her death still fresh in her mind.

It was senior year. She was back.

Mona Caldwell lay sprawled across her desk, the center of attention in the crowded homeroom. A cluster of students surrounded her, cooing with concern about her stomach ache.

At the center of this circus was Percival Hart, the ever-doting boyfriend. In the rigid hierarchy of high school, they were the power couple—Percival and Mona, always ranking first and second in exams. To the outside world, they were the Golden Couple, a match made in heaven.

And then there was Seraphina Vance. The lapdog. The joke.

She spent her classes dozing and her breaks running errands—fetching food, buying water, doing whatever Percival demanded.

Now, watching Percival bark orders with such entitled arrogance, Seraphina felt a wave of dark amusement wash over her.

*How did I not see it before?*

She had actually enjoyed being ordered around, deluding herself into thinking it was a sign of intimacy. *He only orders me around because we’re close, right?*

But having