Chapter 2: The Forgotten Weapon

Chapter 2: The Forgotten Weapon

The move was a blur of shame and frantic packing. Elara had abandoned the apartment, unable to bear the ghost of Julian in every room, the phantom weight of his betrayal pressing down on her. Her friend, Chloe, had taken one look at her ashen face and cleared out a corner of her own small dorm room without a word of judgement, just a fierce, protective glare that promised retribution.

Now, Elara sat on a temporary mattress on the floor, surrounded by the boxed-up fragments of a life she no longer recognised. For three days, she’d been sinking. Sleep offered no escape, her dreams filled with the endlessly scrolling image of Julian’s smug, triumphant face and that god-awful hashtag: #investment. The word echoed in her mind, a mocking testament to his cruelty. He hadn't just stolen her money; he'd reframed his theft as a savvy business move.

The voices of the bank and the police were a constant, dispassionate chorus in her head. A civil matter. Nothing we can do. The system, the one she believed in, the one she was studying law to be a part of, had failed her utterly. Julian had found a loophole in their relationship, a flaw in the architecture of trust, and exploited it perfectly. He was smarter than the law. He had won. The weight of that injustice was a physical pressure in her chest, making it hard to breathe.

Her gaze drifted around the cluttered room, landing on a stack of her law textbooks. Contract Law. Tort Law. Useless. They were books about rules for people who played by them. They were no help against a man who believed rules were for suckers.

To escape the crushing present, her mind did something strange. It didn't retreat to happy memories—those were all poisoned now. Instead, it dredged up the most soul-crushing, mind-numbing experience of her life: the summer she’d spent as a temp at a third-rate debt collection agency.

The office had been a purgatory of grey cubicles and flickering fluorescent lights, smelling of stale coffee and quiet desperation. Her job was data entry, transferring details from returned mail and court documents into an ancient database. It was eight hours a day, five days a week, of pure, unadulterated tedium. But it had paid well enough to cover her deposit for the apartment. The irony was bitter. The job that had helped her build a home with Julian was now about to give her the tools to tear his world apart.

She remembered Barry, her paunchy, world-weary supervisor. He’d been explaining why some files were flagged as ‘unenforceable’ and chucked into a digital graveyard.

“See this one, Elara?” he’d said, pointing a nicotine-stained finger at his screen. “Credit card debt, six years and two months old. The lad hasn’t made a payment or written to them in all that time. Under the Limitation Act, it’s statute-barred. Dead in the water. We can ask him for the money, but we can’t take him to court for it. It’s legally dust.”

Elara had just nodded, her mind numb from the endless spreadsheets. But then Barry had leaned in, a conspiratorial glint in his tired eyes.

“But here’s the magic trick,” he’d whispered, like a magician revealing the secret to a cheap illusion. “The six-year clock isn’t set in stone. It can be reset. If we can get that same lad to make a payment—any payment at all, even a quid—the clock starts all over again. Bam. Another six years to chase him. If he even writes to us and says, ‘Sorry, I can’t pay my debt right now,’ that counts as written acknowledgement. Bam. Clock resets. It’s beautiful. Most of these muppets have no idea. They think if they ignore it long enough, it just vanishes.”

The memory hit Elara with the force of a lightning strike. She shot upright on the mattress, her heart suddenly hammering against her ribs. The fog of despair began to burn away, replaced by a cold, brilliant clarity.

Most of these muppets have no idea.

Julian.

Julian, who treated every bill as a personal insult. Julian, who boasted about using his parents' address for anything important so bailiffs could never find him. Julian, who lived on credit, store cards, and phone contracts he had no intention of ever paying off. Julian, who tossed any letter that wasn't a party invitation into a pile on the hall table, dismissing it as ‘junk’.

The pile of letters.

When she’d been throwing his things out, she’d swept that entire, neglected pile of mail into a cardboard box along with his old university textbooks and a broken gaming headset. In her haste to purge the apartment of his presence, she’d shoved the box into the back of her car. It was here. Somewhere in this room.

She scrambled to her feet, her movements no longer sluggish with grief but sharp with purpose. She tore through the neatly stacked boxes Chloe had helped her pack, searching for the one she’d labelled ‘Julian’s Crap’ with a thick, angry marker.

She found it under a pile of her own clothes. It was small, dusty, and forgotten. A box of things he considered worthless.

With trembling fingers, she ripped open the tape. Inside, beneath the useless textbooks, was a thick stack of envelopes. They weren’t junk mail. They were weapons.

She pulled them out, her breath catching in her throat. Final demands from phone companies. Overdue payment notices from online catalogues. Threatening red letters from credit card providers. And, at the very bottom, several letters from different debt collection agencies—the vultures who bought old debts for pennies on the pound.

Each one was a link in a chain he had carelessly forged over years of lazy entitlement. And almost all of them were dated four, five, nearly six years ago. They were all on the verge of becoming ‘legally dust’. His financial slate was about to be wiped clean by nothing more than his own negligence.

Elara spread the letters across the floor, a grim mosaic of his irresponsibility. The total was staggering—far more than the five thousand pounds he’d stolen from her. This was a debt he owed to the world, one he was about to slither away from, just as he had slithered away from her.

But the clock could be reset.

A smile spread across her face. It was not a happy smile. It was thin, sharp, and predatory. She felt a surge of power, a feeling she thought had been stolen from her forever. Julian thought the law was his shield, an excuse that let him get away with anything. He had no idea that for someone who knew the rules, the law could also be a sword.

He had taken her money, her trust, and her future. He’d left her with £7.34 and a broken heart.

She picked up the oldest letter, a demand for £850 from a credit card he’d maxed out five years and eleven months ago.

He was about to find out that she was the best-damned investment he’d ever made.