EROS CASHBACK SYSTEM: You Can't Fake the Interest

Chapter 49: Chapter 49: The Forgotten feature

Garrett looked at the kitchen for a long moment after the door closed behind Freya.

Clean counter. Untouched stove. Everything exactly where it needed to be for him to actually cook something.

He didn’t move toward any of it.

His ribs had other plans, a dull throb settling in now, and his hands ached in a way that made the idea of chopping anything sound like more effort than it was worth.

’Not tonight.’

He grabbed his jacket instead, checked that his wallet was still where he’d left it, and headed back out, moving slower than he had all day.

The place two blocks over did decent fast food, no questions asked about the bruising or the way he favored one side walking in. He ordered, waited, paid, and left with the bag in hand, back at his apartment within twenty minutes.

He ate at the coffee table, same as most nights, though tonight it took longer than usual, every motion a little more deliberate than it needed to be. He cleaned up after, rinsed the container, wiped down the coffee out of habit more than necessity.

By the time he got into bed, his body had made its opinion clear. Exhausted. Sore in places he hadn’t fully catalogued yet. Every part of him ready to shut down for the night.

His mind disagreed.

He lay there, staring at the ceiling, sleep refusing to come no matter how tired he was.

’Raymond sent three men after me.’

That alone would’ve been enough to keep anyone up. Not some vague threat, not a rumor passed along secondhand. Three actual people, waiting for him on his own street, following through on it without hesitation.

Because of Emiliana.

He still didn’t fully understand that part. Raymond’s interest in keeping him away from her went further than anything Garrett could explain with the little information he had. Whatever the reason, it was enough to justify getting beaten over it.

Then Freya. Watching the whole thing happen. Running toward him instead of walking the other way, no hesitation in it at all.

Helping him home. Her hand steady against his ribs the entire walk, patient with him even when he kept insisting he didn’t need it.

That moment against the wall, his hand over hers, the two of them just standing there for a second too long.

’Wasn’t planning that.’

He hadn’t been. It had just happened, the way things sometimes did when he wasn’t paying close enough attention to stop them.

Then the conversation after. Emiliana coming up again, him shutting it down faster than he probably should have. The cooking argument that somehow turned into an actual invitation. Friday, now sitting there on the calendar like it meant something.

Garrett stared at the ceiling a while longer, running through all of it without arriving anywhere new.

Not that long ago, his biggest problem had been making rent stretch far enough to cover both groceries and his phone bill. Now he had a mystery app on his phone handing out tasks with deadlines, more money than he knew what to do with, a man named Raymond who apparently thought violence was a reasonable way to make a point, and two completely different women pulling his attention in two completely different directions.

’Somehow the money problems were simpler.’

He almost laughed at that, quiet and dry, mostly to himself, mostly because there wasn’t much else to do with the thought except let it sit there.

Eventually, some time after the ceiling had stopped offering him anything useful to look at, exhaustion won out over whatever was keeping his mind running, and sleep finally caught up with him.

At some point, staring at the ceiling stopped being enough, and Garrett reached for his phone.

His thumb hovered over Daniel’s name.

He pictured how that call would actually go. Daniel picking up on the second ring, already asking what happened before Garrett had said a word, somehow able to tell just from the tone of his voice that something was wrong. Garrett would explain, and Daniel would go quiet for exactly as long as it took to process it, and then the questions would start. Who were they. Why Raymond. What did Emiliana have to do with any of it. Was Garrett okay, actually okay, not the version of okay Garrett usually gave people.

And somewhere in the middle of all that, Garrett would probably end up saying more than he meant to. Raymond. Emiliana. Freya. The system, if he wasn’t careful. Daniel had a way of pulling things out of him that Garrett usually kept to himself.

He locked the phone without calling.

’Not tonight.’

His thumb drifted instead, almost on its own, to Emiliana’s contact sitting further down the list.

He considered that one longer.

It wasn’t the same problem as Daniel. She wouldn’t interrogate him, wouldn’t demand an explanation for every detail. The problem was he had no idea what calling her would actually get him.

Would she know Raymond’s name. Would she already know exactly why he’d sent three men after Garrett, and just hadn’t said anything. Would she deny knowing anything at all, and would he even be able to tell if that denial was true. Would calling her tonight, in this state, with everything still raw, turn into something worse than it needed to be.

Too many unknowns for a conversation he wasn’t ready to have yet.

He set the phone down on the nightstand, screen dark, and left it there.

One complicated conversation was enough for tonight. He wasn’t in any condition to survive a second one.

Sleep still wasn’t coming. Might as well use the time for something.

Garrett exhaled and pulled up the system, more out of habit than any real plan.

[CURRENT MAJOR TASK: LOCKED]

Same as always. Whatever the major task actually was, the system didn’t deem him fit to tell him.

He moved past it, scrolling through what else was available, mostly out of boredom at this point. It occurred to him, somewhere in the middle of it, that he hadn’t actually done this in a while. Gone through everything properly, not just checked the countdown and closed it again.

’Been too busy dealing with everything the system’s already caused to actually look at what it gave me.’

There was something almost funny about that.

He checked his balance next.

[SYSTEM EARNINGS ALL TIME: £110,000]

[RECENT EARNINGS: £100,000]

Still sitting there, untouched, exactly where it had been since he’d first seen the number. He hadn’t figured out what to actually do with it yet, hadn’t wanted to draw attention moving that kind of money around carelessly. For now it just existed, a fact about his life that hadn’t fully caught up with the rest of him.

He kept scrolling, past sections he’d glanced at before without really reading, features unlocked somewhere along the way that he’d never bothered opening.

Then something caught his eye, tucked further down than he remembered it being.

[VALUE MULTIPLIER]

Garrett stopped scrolling.

He didn’t remember seeing that before.

Garrett opened it.

[NEW SYSTEM CONDITION DETECTED.]

[CONDITION UNLOCKED: VALUE MULTIPLIER.]

[MONEY SPENT TO CREATE GENUINE VALUE FOR A WOMAN — OR TO INCREASE HER GENUINE INTEREST IN HOST — MAY NOW GENERATE A RETURN MULTIPLIER.]

[MULTIPLIER: DETERMINED BY RECIPIENT’S GENUINE INTEREST IN HOST.]

He read it twice, slower the second time, letting each line actually settle before moving to the next.

His first instinct was the obvious one. Spend money, get money back. Simple enough on the surface.

But the wording didn’t say that.

’Genuine value. Genuine interest.’

Those two words were doing most of the work in that message, and Garrett wasn’t about to skim past them just because the rest of it sounded like free money.

Buying something expensive for a woman because she was attractive wouldn’t cut it, not based on this. The system wasn’t rewarding the price tag. It was rewarding what the money actually did once it reached her, whether it meant something to her specifically, whether it moved the needle on how she actually felt about him.

Which meant the same gift could mean everything to one person and nothing to another, depending entirely on who was receiving it and what already existed between them.

The multiplier itself, tied directly to her genuine interest, meant he had no real way of predicting the size of any return before it happened. That part he’d have to figure out through actually doing it. No shortcuts, no way to game it from the outside looking in.

Garrett stared at the screen a moment longer.

’I’ve had this the whole time?’

He tried to remember when it had unlocked and came up mostly blank, some vague memory of a notification he’d probably skimmed past during a week when everything else had felt more urgent. Raymond. The task. Freya. Emiliana. Somewhere in the middle of all of that, this had just sat here, unused, waiting for him to actually look at it.

He thought about the number still sitting untouched in his account.

£100,000, doing nothing, parked there because he hadn’t figured out what to do with it yet. If this feature worked the way it read, it might be exactly the use he’d been missing. Another way to make money, on top of whatever the system was already handing him.

But it came with an obvious limit built right into the wording.

He couldn’t just throw money at people and expect something back. It had to matter to them specifically.

That limitation was what made it interesting instead of just convenient.

He lay there for a while, turning the two conditions over again.

Genuine value.

Genuine interest.

He needed to spend money on something that actually meant something to someone, not a guess, not a gesture picked at random just to see if the system reacted. Something real enough that it would either work or it wouldn’t, and he’d know the difference either way.

Garrett closed the system, set his phone back on the nightstand, and stared up at the ceiling one more time.

He would figure out exactly how tomorrow.

But he was going to test it.

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