The bed creaked under me before I could even think straight. Ethan’s hand was on my waist, his breath hot against my neck. I told him to be gentle—it was my first time. He laughed.
“First time? For stealing your sister’s fiancé? ”
I didn’t answer. I just pulled him closer.
My name is Jane Sinclair. For twenty years, I was the invisible daughter, the one my father kept in the shadows while he worshipped my half-sister Stella. She had the name, the status, the future. I had Steven—or so I thought—until Stella took him from me.
I thought Steven loved me. Eight years I gave him. Eight years of being his secret, his backup, his pawn. He never introduced me to his family.
He never brought me to events. He just used me to get closer to the Sinclairs, and when he finally had an in, he dumped me with cold, cruel words. “Illegitimate. Powerless.
”
Those were his parting gifts. I was done being a pawn. When Ethan Hale, Stella’s newly returned fiancé from Europe, looked at me with those dark eyes, I saw an opportunity. I saw someone who could see me.
So I crawled into his bed, knowing exactly what I was doing. Stella would find out, Steven would lose his mind, and I would finally be the one making the moves. But my plan backfired. The morning after, Stella was screaming at the hotel door, calling me a homewrecker, threatening to skin me alive.
My father dragged me back to the mansion and hit me when he thought I’d made a fool of him. He called me filth. Stella swore me to a vow: never touch Ethan again. I swore.
But Ethan didn’t. When my father and stepmother tried to beat me over false accusations, Ethan appeared like a savior, vouching for my innocence, spinning a story that exposed Steven’s plot instead. Steven was banished from the Sinclair house. For the first time, the spotlight was on me.
That night, Ethan stayed over. Stella tried to slip sleeping pills into his tea. He pushed the cup aside and looked at me. “What if we gave them both a little karma?
”
I didn’t need to be asked twice. We staged a scene. Stella walked into the room thinking Ethan had drugged her, ending up in bed with Steven. We walked in on them.
The engagement was off. The Sinclairs were humiliated. I thought I had won. But I hadn’t.
Not yet. Ethan was playing a deeper game. He had his own mission. His father had been killed, and the Sinclair family—my family, my father, Stella, my stepmother—they were toxic, rotten.
Ethan wasn’t just some rich fiancé from Europe. He was a man with revenge in his blood, and he knew things. And I, in my desperation, found something I had never had before: a partner. Ethan stood by me.
He gave me and my mother a house, a safe place, and he covered her hospital bills when she got sick. When my mother fell into a coma, he was at her bedside every day, whispering promises. When I sold the bracelet his family had given me as a wedding gift to pay for her treatment, he didn’t get angry. He just said, “We’ll get through everything together.
”
I married him in a small ceremony with no family present. My stepmother and stepsisters only cared about the fund money. They wanted me to marry Kivanc Apekci—so they claimed—to get money for my mother’s surgery. But Kivanc was Ethan all along.
He was rich. He was powerful. He was the heir to his father’s company, and he was hiding his true worth to take back what his relatives had stolen. I didn’t know any of this at first.
I thought I’d married a poor stranger. Then I found out he was one of the richest men in the country, and he had lied about everything. I ran. I left him.
I wanted to divorce him. But the truth kept surfacing. My mother woke and told me he visited her every day, that he loved me the way I needed to be loved. Deniz, his best friend, had drugged my coffee and taken photos, making it look like I was in love with him, just to break us apart.
Deniz tried to shoot Ethan. Ethan survived, barely. I stayed by his bedside until he opened his eyes. We forgave each other.
My mother got better. My stepmother and stepsisters got what they deserved—prison cells and a mental institution. We donated our fund money to the hospital. And on the day of our real wedding ceremony, the groom was late.
I sat in my white dress, my mother beside me, my heart racing. “What if something happened to him? ”
“Don’t worry,” my mother said. “He’ll come.
”
Then the doors opened. Ethan stood there in a black suit, eyes on me, a small smile playing on his lips. “Hey, beautiful. I’m your future husband, Kivanc Apekci.
What do you say? Shall we get married now? ”
I laughed through my tears. “Yes.
Yes, I’ll marry you. ”
He had been my enemy’s weapon, my savior, my husband, my partner in revenge. Now, he was my future.
And together, we had clipped the wings of everyone who had ever tried to hold us down.
