WARNING!!! , SOME CHAPTERS IN THIS NOVEL CONTAINS EXPLICIT SCENES 

"Sign it, Aria. Don’t make this more pathetic than it already is."

The smell of his expensive cologne mixed sickeningly with the scent of her stepsister’s perfume on the damp hotel sheets. Julian didn’t look like the man who had whispered promises of forever an hour ago; he looked like a predator closing a trap. Beside him, Elena smirked, pulling the silk duvet higher over her shoulder—a silent, triumphant taunt.

"You were having sex with her," Aria whispered, her voice cracking as the roar of the fashion show’s bass thumped through the walls of the dressing suite. "On my runway night. In our bed."

"Technically, it’s my bed now," Elena chirped, her eyes gleaming with malice. "Just like it’s my lead spot in the show. You’re trending, sister. But not for the fashion."

Julian shoved the fountain pen into Aria’s trembling hand. "The scandal hits the press in ten minutes. Your career is dead, your reputation is ashes, and this divorce is your only way out before the sponsors sue you for every cent you own. Sign the papers, take your shame, and disappear."

With a numb heart and a hand that felt like ice, Aria scribbled her name, severing her life.

An hour later, rain lashed against the neon lights of the city as she stumbled into a darkened bar, a ghost in a couture gown. She didn't want comfort; she wanted to feel something other than the knife in her back. When the man in the corner—shadowed, lethal, and radiating a terrifying power—offered her his hand and a night of forgetting, she took it.

She didn't know his name. She didn't know he was the most dangerous man in the financial world. She only knew that as she walked away from the wreckage of her life the next morning, she was carrying a secret that would one day bring the world to its knees.

Chapter 118: THE PROPOSAL HE NEVER STOPPED PLANNING


The ring is still on the archive table when I come downstairs the following morning.


Liam left it there when he came to find me in the study, the small black box sitting in the center of the table with the particular patience of something that has been waiting a long time and has learned not to rush its own arrival. I pick it up. I do not open it. I hold it in my palm for a moment, feeling the weight of it, which is both lighter and heavier than I expected, and then I set it back down in exactly the same spot.


He has not mentioned it since yesterday. Not because he has forgotten, obviously. Because he is Liam, and Liam does not repeat himself unnecessarily and does not require acknowledgment of things that have already been said and does not push when the person he loves is still arriving at something in their own time.


Chapter 118 - 118 THE PROPOSAL HE NEVER STOPPED PLANNING