They say betrayal has a sound.For me, it was the soft, private kind — a laugh, a breath, the rustle of sheets. Intimate noises that did not belong to my name.
My name is Elara Sterling, the heiress to the Sterling Group, and today, is a day of celebration. The Sterling-Vance deal has been completed. Vance... Liam Vance... The name that brings a smile to my face, my dear husband. Together, we will be stronger, we will conquer the business world, and... I wonder what he will say when he finds out that our baby is a boy!.
I was all smiles as I carried white lilies up the marble steps. Liam once told me they suited my aura — calm, graceful, honest.He never knew my real favorite was Verbena, my mother's favourite flower. I stopped decorating the house with Verbenas after that. But remember what they all say? A successful marriage is one built on concessions. Flowers are a small concession for a big love.
"Liam?" I called out, but the house was quiet — the hush too deep, like someone had swallowed the world whole.
I was going to call for him again when I heard something. From the master suite came a sound that made blood run cold. Liam's voice, low and sharp - grunts. And under it, a woman's breath, followed by something no woman should have to hear in her home - a moan.
My toes found the hallway tile before my brain did. The lilies trembled in my hand. The suite door stood ajar; a slice of golden light cut across the dark.
I pushed it open.
Silk, shadow, heat. The bed was a tangle. Bodies moved beneath sheets in a way that erased the polite distance I'd always assumed existed. Not violent. Not accidental. Intentional. The soft intake of breath, the low chuckle—everything said what the room didn't need words to finish.
The white lilies slipped from my hand at that sight.They hit the marble floor with a dull thud, scattering petals like fallen snow.
And there they were.Liam Sterling.My husband.And under him, panting, Chloe, my stepsister.
The sight of her there hit like a physical blow.
For a beat, nothing moved. Then Chloe, who noticed me by the door, looked at me with the slow, satisfied smile of someone watching the finale of a play.
"Oh." She let the word hang. "You're early."
Liam did not startle. He did not fumble. He turned around, baring his perfectly sculpted body. He smoothed his hair, and looked at me as if he had all the time in the world. Calm. Controlled. The man I'd promised myself to had always been in command — even of the moment of his own betrayal. I stared at him, desperate to find any hint of guilt, or even, drunkenness, from his handsome face.
"Liam..."
"As much as I hoped to tell you differently," he said, buttoning his shirt with deliberate, quiet motions, "I guess it is what it is."
My chest felt hollow. "You—" The name broke on the air. "What do you mean?"
Chloe laughed, a sound like glass. She tied a robe — my robe, loose and mocking — around her and let it fall open just enough to show she had nothing to hide. When she moved, the fabric brushed a small curve at her belly.
My throat closed. "You're—pregnant."
"Delighted you noticed," she said, and the triumph in her voice was ugly. "Aren't you thrilled to be an aunt?"
"Whose-"
"Oh com'on dear sister. You are smarter than that. You know everything now. Do you really have to ask?"
The world blurred. I took a step forward, stupid and furious. "This... You... Does Diana know? She wouldn't have-"
Chloe's eyes glinted. "Cut the crap. Do you honestly think she wouldn't? She taught me how to play the long game."
A cold drop fell in my stomach. "She… she told me she loved me." Tears rose before I could stop them. "She said she'd be my mother. I treated her like my own blood. I treated you like my sister. How could you!"
Chloe's smile sharpened. "She raised you to trust. That's all you ever were to her, to us all — a stepping stone."
"You! I want you and Diana out of the Sterling Group, now!" I was confused, everything is in a blur, tears dropped uncontrollably from my eyes, blurring everything further.
"Darling," Chloe's honeyed voice made me want to throw up. "Tell her."
I turned to Liam, "Tell me what?"
Liam's face stayed composed, polite in the way of a man giving a eulogy. "Elara," he said, as if explaining policy, "you should have read the documents more carefully."
"Documents?" I echoed dumbly. "What documents?"
"The merger documents," he said. "The authorizations. All the shares, the control. You signed when the merger terms were presented." He did not look cruel. He looked like a man stating an inescapable fact. "Diana arranged it. You signed everything she put forward didn't you — so trusting, so naïve, I almost want to feel bad for your dead parents."
"The documents... The documents..." I murmured, repeating the same two words, trying to remember what I signed.
"You signed everything away, Elara. Your estate, your company, your control, your money.. Everything. That's why people always say, love makes people blind and dumb." Chloe chuckled.
"Why?" The question scraped out of me. "Why would you take everything?"
Liam met my eyes with an apathy that felt engineered. "Because sentiment doesn't secure legacies. Because I want the company in a way you couldn't." He shrugged once, small and absolute. "And because with Chloe and our child, the public will accept a new Sterling line."
Chloe's hand dropped to her belly in a gesture that belonged to mothers, not conspirators. "We can't have complications." She sighed, as if she felt bad for me. "You should have stuck to our plot. Now that you know everything, I guess we can't let you go. A living claimant is a risk we can't afford."
A sudden burst of anger took over me like a thing with teeth. I lunged. My hand struck Chloe's face—or attempted to—and Liam's fingers closed around my wrist like iron. He shoved me back so hard my spine hit the nightstand. Pain exploded. The lilies skittered under the bed, crushed petals melting into dust.
"Don't make this worse," Liam said, voice low and flat. "You're embarrassing yourself."
I scrambled up, breath burning. "You can't murder me for what you did!"
Chloe's smile was almost kindly. "It's not murder, love. Just… necessary housekeeping." She walked slowly towards me, "We would weep for you, dear sister."
My knees buckled. "No. Don't—please. I'll sign anything. I'll disappear. I'll—"
"Your baby makes things messy," Liam said. The simple, clinical explanation landed like a verdict. "If you could be persuaded to leave quietly, fine. But a child complicates legal claims. We can't risk it."
The phrase complicates legal claims spun in my head in a sick, awful way. "What are you saying?"
Chloe's hand closed on mine with cruel tenderness. "We can't risk you contesting the transfers. We definitely can't risk your bastard child claiming things that do not belong to him. We need certainty. Permanence."
The balcony doors stood open a breath away, black space yawning beyond. Panic flared, hot and immediate. I clawed at them, screamed, begged. They moved with cold efficiency—Liam restraining, Chloe driving the final motion.
"Please!" I screamed. "You can't—"
Liam's face was a mask. "Goodbye, Elara."
They shoved.
The drop stole the air from me. Wind screamed. The city lights became a smear of gold and white. Pain came in a white bloom, bright and full and then all-consuming. I could taste the blood in my throat as a slowly fall into unconsciousness. My last coherent thought was small and stubborn: Verbena. My mother's voice threading through memory—something always finds a way to bloom.
A patch of purple verbena, impossibly bright against cracked concrete, flashed under my eyes.
Then nothing.
When I woke, light was gentle and domestic, not clinical. The scent of jasmine and lemon polish curled around me. No pain. No raw metal taste. My hands fumbled to my midsection—flat. Whole.
Cold realization crashed in. I bolted upright, heart hammering, sheets whispering against my legs. The room was a childish pink, porcelain dolls posed like witnesses on the vanity. Ribbons, crystal trinkets, a vanity mirror rimmed with lights.
I staggered to the mirror and stared.
A girl looked back—rounder cheekbones, a face still soft with sixteen years, chestnut curls tumbling over shoulders. Wide, startled silver-grey eyes.
Sixteen.
The word slammed through me and reverberated. The fall. Chloe's laugh. Liam's calm. Verbena at the curb. It all aligned into a brutal, impossible logic.
I tried to speak. My voice came out small and hoarse. "No. This—this can't be—"
Memory fragments snapped into me like photographs: the crushed lilies, the shove, the sensation of breaking, the verbena's stubborn purple. The memory of the pain made buckle and fell to the floor.
It wasn't a dream. It wasn't a second chance gifted by kindness. It was a reset. A wound stitched back with time.
A knock at the door made me flinch. "Elara?" My father's voice bled into the room — warm, alive, absurdly normal. "Are you awake? I'd like you to meet someone."
The sound of my father's voice, brought tears to my eyes. I'm so sorry daddy. I lost everything... Everything you and mummy built....
My thoughts were interrupted by another knock, and my father's concerned voice. "Elara dear, are you in there? Are you alright?"
I wiped the tears off my face and put on an innocent smile, "Yes daddy, I'm awake!"
The door opened. My father stepped in, followed by two others.
Diana stood framed in the doorway, impeccable and calm. Behind her, Chloe hovered—fifteen, an angel's smile pasted on, eyes quick to take inventory of everything in my room.
My father smiled like a man announcing good news. "Darling, this is Diana, and her daughter Chloe. They'll be staying with us. You will have a complete family again!"
"You look absolutely stunning dear Elara. I am Diana, nice to meet you!" Diana patted my head.
A cold, familiar coil tightened in my chest. Recognition burned: the way Chloe curled her fingers absentmindedly, the studied softness of Diana's voice, the tiny, practiced gestures they used to hide claws.
I faced them, the girl in the mirror a younger version of the woman who had fallen. The naive heiress lived in that reflection—trusting, hopeful. But the pavement had taught me a new language.
My lips curved slowly into a smile. Soft. Innocent. Perfectly believable.
"Welcome," I said.
Underneath, something hard and patient hardened further.
They had thought they'd made me the story's victim. They'd given me a death and a memory to haunt them.
Now I had both memory and time.And time is an instrument of power.
The game was on.
"I'm sure we will have so much fun together!"