Her laugh was soft, practiced, the kind that sounded like silk until you felt the blade beneath it. “And yet here you are. Sittingright in front of me. Isn’t that ironic? You always come back to what you swore you’d escape.” She leaned forward, eyes glinting with cruel satisfaction. “This is fate, Hayden. Ours. It’s the legacy our siblings left behind. Yes, I’ll admit it, they loved each other. It wasn’t an arrangement like ours. But they’re gone, and someone has to carry what they left unfinished. You and I, we are what’s left of them. This—” she gestured between us, a smug tilt in her voice “—is what it was always meant to be.”
My pulse roared in my ears. “You manipulative fucking snake,” I hissed, my voice shaking with barely contained fury. “Don’t you dare use them to justify your bullshit. You didn’t love my sister—you envied her. And now you’re dragging her memory through the dirt to pull me back into that nightmare.”
She only smiled wider, her voice turning syrup-sweet. “Maybe. Or maybe I just know you better than you know yourself. You were always too sentimental for your own good.”
I was about to snap—every muscle in me coiled and ready to break—when the bell above the café door chimed.
And everything stopped.
Edwina walked in.
Her coat glistened with rain, droplets catching the light, scattering across her dark hair with the shimmer of broken glass. Aster was beside her, Gwen just behind, all of them laughing softly as they shook the drizzle from their hands. It should have been nothing, an ordinary moment. But the sight of her in that doorway knocked the air straight out of me.
What the hell was she doing here at this time? During class hours?
She should have been in the lecture hall, not walking straight into the fire I couldn’t shield her from.
But then she lifted her head. And her eyes found mine. The ground shifted beneath me. My lungs forgot how to work. The room tilted. My chest locked. The noise around us vanished.Her laughter stilled, her face shifting from warmth to confusion, disbelief flickering across her features as her gaze darted from me to Alessia, then back again.
And Alessia, of course, noticed. She always fucking noticed. Her lips curved slowly, triumph blooming across her face as she leaned back, eyes glinting with wicked delight. She watched Edwina the way a predator watches its prey, savoring the chaos she’d just unleashed.
I couldn’t move. My body was locked, my pulse a violent hammer in my chest as Edwina stood frozen across the room.
And Alessia smiled, the kind of smile that told me she believed she’d finally won.
I had told myself I could control this, that I could keep the two parts of my life separate, that I could manage the past without ever letting it touch the one person who had already wrecked me beyond repair. But as her eyes locked with mine across that crowded café, wide and wounded, I knew the lie for what it was.
There was no control anymore.
Her steps slowed for a single beat, confusion flickering across her face, then something in her forced her forward. She straightened, lifted her chin, and walked toward us. Every line of her body practiced composure. She wore professionalism as a mask, her hands composed at her sides, her expression schooled into polite neutrality. It tore me up to see her use distance the way she did, to watch her build a wall in seconds as though I were suddenly reduced to a name and a title.
When she reached the table her voice was clear and formal, and the words cut deep. “Good afternoon, Professor Stone,” she said. Not Hayden. Not the man who had kissed her and ripped her open with everything he’d whispered. Professor Stone. A line drawn in the sand.
My stomach twisted. Fury flared, hot and savage, but before I could move Alessia rose as if on cue. She flowed through themotion with the elegance the world had taught her, her smile immaculate, her hand extended in an offering that stung.
“You must be Edwina,” she said, voice layered with sweetness and steel. “I’m Alessia. Hayden’s fiancée.”
Those words detonated. They landed harder than the rain against the windows.
Edwina froze. Her eyes widened, and for a second I watched everything pass over her face — shock, hurt, betrayal — then she smoothed it into a careful calm that broke my heart all over again.
Something inside me cracked.
Fuck. Shit. No. Not like this.
This wasn’t how she was supposed to find out, not from Alessia’s poisoned smile, not in a crowded café with her friends only a few steps away, not while Edwina held herself together with the thinnest thread of composure. My jaw tightened until the taste of metal filled my mouth. My fists curled beneath the table. I should have stood. I should have ripped Alessia’s hand away, told the truth right there, stripped the moment of every fucking lie, told Edwina that the engagement was a carcass, a bargaining chip, and that the only woman who owned me was her.
But I was too slow. Alessia’s voice lingered in the air, smug and satisfied, as Edwina’s gaze found mine.
Those eyes, dark and wounded and accusing, locked on me, and heat rose through me that wasn’t just fury. I wanted to burn everything down. I wanted to tear the world apart and carve out a place where she knew she was mine. I wanted to curse the family, curse the contracts, curse the goddamn masks everyone wore. I wanted to tell her, to make her see the filthy truth of it, that she owned me, that every inch of me belonged to her and no one else.
Alessia smiled that same infuriating smile and said, her voice soft as poison, “We all have duties, Hayden. This is ours. We don’t get to choose who we become for other people.”
Her words struck with the force of a slap, calculated to wound, to claim, to drag the past out into the open and chain me to it. Rage unspooled through me, raw and vicious, and beneath it, something darker, an ache that refused to be silenced, a possessive hunger that would never let her go.
Chapter Thirty
Edwina
