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.

Eleanor's light goes off at four in the morning.


I am sitting in the chair by the window of my room with my knees pulled up and the estate's grounds visible below me in the particular blue-dark of early hours, watching the east wing the way you watch something you are not ready to stop watching. When the light disappears I sit with it for a long moment before I stand up, put on a cardigan over my nightclothes, and go downstairs.


The envelope on the kitchen table is already there.


I stand in the kitchen doorway looking at it for a long time before I cross to it and pick it up. The ink is the same pressed dark blue as everything Eleanor writes, and the address on the front reads *To all of us* in the particular handwriting I have spent the last several weeks learning to recognize as hers and which I can now identify in approximately the same time it takes to recognize Aria's or Marcus's or my own.


Chapter 117 - 117 THE WOMAN WHO CHOOSE LOVE