The moment I saw the love bite on Joshua’s lips, something inside me went cold. We were supposed to be celebrating our second anniversary, but he had just spent the night with someone else. His mistress. The woman he had been protecting all along.
And worse than that, he had drugged me to get me out of the way. I had given two years of my life to Joshua Yates. I had been the obedient, sensible wife. I had freed up his time for his other special someone.
I had swallowed every insult, every bit of indifference, and told myself I owed him for his kindness when I was a child. But that debt was paid. I was done. “Let’s get a divorce then,” I said.
“You can give her the title she wants. ”
Joshua didn’t believe me. He thought it was another game. Another childish stunt for his attention.
He tried to hold on, to drag me to his family dinners, to force me to play the good wife one last time. But I wasn’t playing anymore. When he asked me to dinner at the Yates Mansion, I went. I put on a nice dress, added a touch of makeup to my flawless skin, and let myself glow.
Joshua froze when he saw me come down the stairs. For a moment, he looked like he wanted to take it all back. But it was too late for that. At the mansion, Joshua’s older brother was there.
Caden Ward. The man Joshua had spent his life pushing into the shadows. The man who didn’t even carry the Yates name. “Alicia,” Caden said, offering his hand.
I didn’t take it. I didn’t want his filthy hands touching me. Something about him made my skin crawl, and I didn’t know why. That night, the pieces started to fall into place.
The night I was drugged, the stranger I woke up beside, the scent that clung to the fabric of a borrowed coat. His scent. His voice. It had been Caden.
The whole time. Joshua wanted the divorce papers fast. He wanted them before his father’s will was finalized. He was terrified the scandal would ruin his standing.
But he was more focused on one thing than anything else: the cheap silver wedding ring I had worn for two years. The same ring he bought for a few bucks while he went on to spend a fortune on bracelets and gifts for Liliana. “I want the ring,” he said. “If you can’t find it, I’ll assume you still care about me.
”
I had hidden it. I had made sure it was somewhere safe. The ring was the last piece of a life I wanted to forget. In the middle of this mess, Caden kept appearing.
He interfered with Joshua’s business. He bought Liliana’s company right out from under her. He made Joshua crawl for the entertainment deals he wanted for his girlfriend. And then he made his intentions clear to me.
“Take a seat first,” he said when I came to claim back the ring. “On my thigh. ”
I refused to be toyed with. So I played his game.
I tricked Liliana into paying fifteen million for a dress I had pretended to want just to humiliate her. She fell for it. Caden laughed. Joshua paid the bill when Liliana didn’t want to.
The plan was bigger than the dress. I had never told anyone the truth about who I really was. Not Joshua. Not Caden.
Not even Monica, the one friend I had left. But I had been holding onto a secret for two years, and it was time to use it. The movie premiere was approaching. Gary Hopkins had announced his new film, and the theme song was up for grabs.
Liliana was the favorite, backed by Joshua’s fortune and her die-hard fans. But I entered the competition too. I waltzed into Gary’s office with a song in my hand and a smile on my face. “Alicia, are you really trying to challenge Liliana?
” he asked. “Did you lose a bet? ”
“Think of it as a fun little game,” I said. “You’ll have to pick one of us.
”
Liliana was confident. Her fans had bought all the trending hashtags. She had hired a ghostwriter, a woman named Iris, to write a flawless song for her. She thought she had it all locked up.
But I knew something she didn’t. The voice that had made that hit song a year ago wasn’t hers. No one knew who the real singer was. I did.
Because it was me. I went to see Gary Hopkins behind closed doors and made a bet with him. If Liliana got the deal, I would go quietly, no fuss. But if I won, there would be a twist.
I told him to be ready for a show. The night of the competition, the live stream exploded. Liliana stepped on stage, smiled at her fans, and started lip-syncing to the song that Iris had sold her. The song that was supposed to be hers.
Her voice was pitch-perfect, flawless, beautiful. Except for one small detail. The real vocal track was playing from my own recording session. When Liliana reached the first verse, I took the stage.
I didn’t say a word. I just started singing the same song, live, with no backing track. And that’s when the truth hit the crowd. Liliana was a fraud.
She had been lip-syncing all along. Her fans turned on her in real time. The live stream flooded with accusations. The hashtags she had paid for were now mocking her.
“Liliana,” Joshua tried to save her, but it was too late. Her career was over. She collapsed in a heap of screaming and denial, and all of it was caught on camera. Caden was watching from the side with a slow smile on his face.
He had known all along, I realized. He had known about Iris. He had known about the ghostwriting. He had purposely acquired all the major platforms so that every dollar Joshua and the Green family spent promoting Liliana’s song went directly into his own pocket.
“Cunning,” I said. “You are truly a cunning man. ”
“Keep the compliments coming,” he replied. “I enjoy hearing them.
”
But the win didn’t feel as clean as I hoped. Liliana’s obsessive fans came after me after the show. Hired thugs, beaten up in a parking lot. Caden threw himself between me and them, took a hit meant for me, and left the fight with bruises on his knuckles and a fresh mark on his face.
When I tried to thank him, he just shrugged and said I probably made one of them impotent for life with that kick. That night, I drank. I drank too much, knowing full well I was allergic to alcohol. I was crying over a photograph of Joshua and Liliana, a giant billboard proposal right in the middle of the city, with a diamond ring that cost more than everything I owned.
Caden slapped the drink out of my hand. When my lips swelled and my skin burned, he carried me to a pharmacy, fed me antihistamines, and took me home through a blackout in the middle of a storm. “Do you even know who I am? ” he asked, holding my face in the dark.
“Why did you do this to me? ” I screamed at him. “Why do you treat me like this? ”
That’s when the truth came out.
He told me that I had cheated, two years ago, at a competition where I had won first place. And that because I had stolen that award, his parents had died in a car accident on the way to see him. I stared at him in disbelief. “Who told you I cheated?
It was Joshua, wasn’t it? ”
He believed him. He had believed every lie Joshua had ever told him. “Do you really think I’m that foolish?
” I said. “I only did what I was told. I never knew any of this. ”
The next morning, I woke up with a horrible hangover and a sinking feeling in my chest.
I checked the security camera footage from my own home. And there I was, in my own bedroom, undressing myself, guiding his hands, climbing into his lap. I hadn’t been drugged that time. I had just been drunk.
And I had slept with my enemy. I called Monica and told her I was okay, that I wished Joshua well, that I was fine. But I wasn’t. I couldn’t face Caden after what had happened.
I couldn’t face anyone. I had just slept with the man who had spent his life trying to destroy Joshua, the man who now knew more about me than I had ever intended to reveal. And I had no idea what to do next. I had won the battle.
But I had just lost control of the war.
