My-Ex Watches Me Marry His Rival

For three long years, I loved only one man — my silent protector, Xander Thorne.

I gave him everything: my trust, my secrets… and one night, my body.

But when morning came, so did his betrayal.

"Don't pretend it meant something, Athena. You were never that innocent."

He threw me out. Broken. Humiliated. With nothing but his cruelty ringing through the hollow corridors of the compound like a gunshot that never stopped echoing.

Worse?

He belonged to her.

Jessica Valcruz. My stepsister. The golden girl with a crown of lies and a heart carved from black ice. The bastard daughter my father's mistress bore him in secret, then smuggled through our gates like contraband. The one my father raised as his principessa while I scrubbed marble floors in silence, invisible as the ghosts that haunted the servants' wing.

So when Jessica rejected a blood-alliance marriage to the most dangerous man in Europe, I took her place.

"I'll marry Killian Arrows."

——

"I agree to marry Killian Arrows."

The words fell like spent casings onto the polished obsidian table.

The study was dim, curtains drawn against the afternoon light, the way my grandmother preferred it. Old oil paintings of Valcruz patriarchs lined the walls, their dead eyes watching from gilded frames. The air smelled of bergamot and cold authority.

My grandmother, Victoria Valcruz, didn't look up. A silver spoon clinked against bone china as she stirred her espresso with the unhurried precision of a woman who had survived three assassination attempts and two federal investigations without ever raising her voice.

"You are bluffing, aren't you?" she said, finally glancing at me. Her voice could have frosted the rim of her cup. "The other families will love it. The press will worship the fairytale. You will wear the ring, play the Don's bride. But behind closed doors?"

She finally met my eyes. Hers were the pale grey of a winter sea, and just as merciless.

"You will be nothing but a broodmare. A vessel to carry the heir. Nothing more. Nothing less."

"I know," I replied, and my voice did not waver. "And I accept."

She tilted her head, something close to disgust passing through her expression, the way one might regard a stray dog that had wandered into a formal dining room. "So that's it. You will warm the bed of a killer just to buy your name into a legacy that never wanted you?"

I met her gaze, unfazed. "Wasn't it you who once suggested marrying me off to that eighty-year-old real estate mogul whose last wife mysteriously drowned in a champagne bath? Gregory Carson, wasn't it? The one whose own son can't stand to be in the same room with him?"

I let the silence do its work, then added, "I am making it easy for you. Selling myself off to the highest bidder."

Killian Arrows. Il Diavolo in Dior. The Don of the Arrows Dynasty, the oldest and most feared crime family in Europe, with tendrils that reached into every continent, every port, every shadow where power changed hands. He had walked out of a maximum-security federal facility just three weeks ago, on charges no witness had dared testify to confirm. The photographs of his release had made front pages from Rome to New York: the immaculate charcoal suit, the eyes like polished obsidian, the faint indentation on his wrists where the silver cuffs had been.

They called him the Devil in Dior.

And now he would call me wife.

His family wanted a marriage to maintain their bloodline, to forge a transatlantic alliance with the Valcruz name. But my father's beloved daughter, Jessica, had refused. She had wept and screamed and thrown crystal against the walls of her bedroom like there was no tomorrow, and my father had folded like the weak, dissolute man he had always been.

She always had the luxury of saying no.

Unlike me.

Victoria finally leaned back in her leather chair. The study creaked around her, old wood settling, as if the house itself deferred to her movements. "You are that desperate for attention? Trying to prove your worth?"

"No," I said. "I am doing this because you need the Arrows Empire. And I am the daughter no one noticed until you needed a name to sign on the dotted line."

She studied me. Cold. Calculating. The way a consigliere studies a deal before deciding whether it's worth the blood it will cost.

"This could work," she murmured, more to herself than to me. Her fingers traced the rim of her cup. "A noble sacrifice. The other families will respect it. The press will adore it, and soon the Valcruz holdings will recover. The Arrows' protection alone would keep the wolves from our door." Her eyes sharpened. "Yes. Very well."

"I want compensation."

Her eyes narrowed to slits. "Excuse me?"

"I want half of your private estates. Thirty percent of Valcruz shares. And fifty million dollars. Cash."

Victoria's mouth twitched, just slightly, the only crack in a mask she had worn for sixty years. "That would make you richer than your uncles combined."

"I am not asking." I rose from my chair. The leather sighed beneath me as I stood, and for the first time in my life, I looked down at the woman who had ruled this family from the shadows. "Even if you refuse to recognize me, I am still the legitimate daughter. The one born of the bloodline. Jessica is an illegitimate bastard my father's mistress smuggled through the gates."

My voice cracked but did not falter.

"If I am going to chain my body and soul to a man who may never love me, just to save your crumbling empire from being absorbed by every rival syndicate circling this family like vultures, then I will be paid. For every year you made me invisible. For every year I slept in the servants' quarters while the bastard wore my mother's jewels."

"You ungrateful brat—"

"Ungrateful?" I let out a breathless laugh, one that sounded far too close to a sob. The sound of it surprised even me, raw and jagged in the stillness of that dim study.

"I was raised in the servants' wing, scrubbing dirty floors on my knees while Jessica wore diamonds to galas and kissed the rings of men who didn't even know my name. Don't talk to me about gratitude, Grandmother. You wouldn't recognize it if it kissed your hand."

I turned to leave. My heels clicked against the hardwood, each step deliberate, measured. Then I paused at the threshold, one hand on the carved mahogany doorframe.

"One more thing," I said, and my voice was bitter and choked, thick with something I refused to let fall. "Reassign Xander to Jessica."

"The soldier?" Victoria asked. There was a flicker of something behind her eyes. Curiosity. Perhaps amusement. "The one you shielded with your own body when your father tried to have him whipped? The man for whom you once refused to eat for four days until his punishment was lifted?"

She gave a short, dry laugh, the sound of old cruelty dressed in silk. "I thought you were in love with him. Even when he used you like a tissue and threw you aside."

My throat tightened. Unshed tears glistened in my eyes, catching the dim light of the chandelier above like shards of something broken.

"I thought that too."

With that, I left.

Three days ago, a bottle of wine and a reckless, aching heart had led me to Xander's quarters on the far side of the compound. The hallway had been dark, the guards rotated to the east wing, and the silence was the kind that made bad decisions feel like fate.

The next thing I knew, his mouth was on mine, searing and desperate, and I was confessing everything. Every word I had swallowed for three years. Every look I had memorized. Every moment his hand had brushed mine and I had told myself it meant something.

And then, in one of the most vulnerable moments of my life, I gave him everything. My love. My soul. My virginity. I surrendered it all to him in the dark of his room, believing with every fractured piece of my heart that he felt the same.

I woke to an ice-cold bed the next morning. The sheets beside me were already smoothed flat, as if no one had ever lain there. As if I had dreamed the whole thing.

Xander stood near the mirror on the far wall, his broad back toward me, already dressed in his tailored black suit. He adjusted his cufflinks with the slow, mechanical precision of a man preparing for a routine day. Composed. Emotionless. As though the night before had been nothing more than an entry in a logbook, already filed and forgotten.

"Now that you are up, get dressed and leave." His voice cut the silence like a blade drawn across stone. "You are not supposed to be in my room."

That was it.

No worry. No tenderness. No whispered words of love or a careful hand asking if I was in pain from the night before.

Nothing.

I sat up slowly, clutching the sheet to my chest. My heart pounded so violently I could feel it in my throat, in my wrists, behind my eyes. The room felt enormous and airless at the same time, the walls pressing in while the distance between us stretched into something vast and uncrossable.

"Xander…" My voice was barely a whisper. "I told you I love—"

"Love?" He turned slowly. The morning light from the narrow window caught the hard line of his jaw, the flat emptiness in his eyes. His muscles were taut beneath the suit jacket, coiled, as though even facing me required restraint. "Yesterday was a drunken mistake, Miss Athena Valcruz. I would advise you not to throw a tantrum over it."

The words landed like a fist to the sternum.

I stared at him. The man who had wiped my tears in the garden when I was seventeen. The man who had stood between me and my father's belt without flinching. The man who had remembered my birthday with a single white rose left on my windowsill when my own blood forgot I existed.

That man was gone. Or perhaps he had never been there at all.

My knees buckled slightly as I rose from the bed. Each step toward him was like walking barefoot across shattered glass, every fragment cutting deeper than the last.

"Was it all nothing to you?" I asked, reaching out. My fingers trembled in the air between us, but he wouldn't even look at me. His gaze stayed fixed on his reflection, adjusting a collar that didn't need adjusting. "You stayed by my side for three years. You wiped my tears when I had no one else. You remembered my birthday when even my own family didn't—"

"I did all of that because it was my job." His voice was flat. Final. The voice of a man reading terms of a contract. "I am your bodyguard. Nothing more."

His eyes met mine at last. Sharp. Distant. Unrecognizable.

"Don't romanticize this, Athena. I never saw you as anything but a responsibility. A duty I was assigned. A body I was paid to protect."

My breath caught. The room tilted.

"And the way you dress… the way you act…" He added, and now his words turned to knives, each one forged with deliberate, surgical cruelty. He looked at me with something worse than anger. Disdain. "Don't pretend last night was some sacred moment. You flirt like it's second nature. It's not like you were a goddamn virgin to begin with."

I reeled.

The air punched out of my lungs as if he had driven his fist into my chest. The room blurred. The blood drained from my face so fast that my vision darkened at the edges, and for one terrible moment I thought I would collapse right there on his floor.

He didn't know. He didn't even care enough to notice.

Without warning, his hand closed around my wrist. His grip was bruising, fingers digging into the thin skin over my pulse, and he dragged me toward the door like I was something foul he needed to remove from his quarters. Like dirt beneath his polished shoes.

"Don't confuse attention for affection, Athena." His voice was quiet. The quietness was the cruelest part. "That's where women like you always go wrong."

The door slammed shut behind me.

The sound echoed down the empty corridor of the compound like a gunshot, and then there was nothing. Just silence. Just the cold marble beneath my bare feet and the faint smell of his cologne still clinging to my skin like a brand.

I crumbled. Right there, on the floor outside his door, I shattered. Sobs tore out of me in ragged, animal sounds I didn't recognize as my own. I pressed my forehead to the cold stone and wept until there was nothing left, utterly used and discarded, a thing that had served its purpose and been thrown away.

But somewhere beneath the wreckage, beneath the humiliation and the heartbreak and the taste of salt on my lips, something else stirred. Something harder. Something that had been forged in twenty years of silence and neglect and sleeping in the servants' wing while the bastard daughter wore my mother's pearls.

Everyone had chosen to abandon me.

My father, who loved his illegitimate child more than the daughter of his own blood. The man who had used my body and thrown me out like refuse. The family who had never once, in all my years under their roof, considered me their own.

This time, I would be the one to decide.

This time, I would be the one to walk away.