Never Meant to be Seen
Struggling artist Sofia Leonie has one shot at saving her father's life: sixty thousand dollars to impersonate Isabelle Ashworth, a missing heiress whose face she shares by an unsettling coincidence no one will explain. All she has to do is play the perfect fiancée for three weeks, seal a merger disguised as a marriage between the Ashworth and Alfie empires, and disappear with the money before anyone notices the difference.
The role should be simple. It isn't.
From the moment she signs the contract, Sofia is buried in a stranger's life — a childhood she never lived, a dead horse she never owned, a signature she has to make her own. But the closer she gets to becoming Isabelle, the more she realizes someone played this role before her, and vanished for asking the wrong questions. Her handler, Mia Stilio, knows details about Sofia's own life she should have no way of knowing. Her own father goes quiet every time she asks about the mother she never got to know.
Then there's Arlo Alfie — cold, controlling, and far too perceptive for a marriage that was supposed to be strictly business. He notices what shouldn't be noticeable. He collects secrets like other men collect watches. And the more he unravels of Sofia's performance, the more she starts to wonder if he already knows exactly who she isn't — and is choosing, for reasons of his own, to let her keep pretending.
Just as the lines between performance and truth begin to blur, a woman appears out of nowhere at the engagement gala, calling Sofia by Isabelle's name — and claiming to be a sister no file ever mentioned.
Sofia came here to disappear into someone else's life long enough to save her father.
Basahin
Chapter: Chapter 6 - IzzyI stood frozen, my mind completely blank, Arlo, Ava, and a handful of curious guests every one of them was staring at me, I could hear guest whisper to themselves, they were all suspicious, and they questioned my identity, Mia has some explanation to do when I get home, if I make it out though.My knees threatened to give out beneath me, and my stomach sank so hard it felt as though the floor had vanished. Arlo noticed. I saw it in his eyes. He had caught every flicker of panic crossing my face.I had to do something, but how was I supposed to react to a sister I had never known existed? Whoever had orchestrated this sure know how to break me,they hadn't come to embarrass me, instead they had come to expose me.Before the silence and whispers could stretch any longer, instinct took over. "Sis."The word escaped before I could stop it, I stepped forward and wrapped my arms tightly around Ava. "Of course I remember you," I whispered with a shaky laugh. "How could I ever forget you? I'm.
Huling Na-update: 2026-07-31
Chapter: Chapter 5 ~ The Line We Crossed The engagement gala was held in a ballroom with ceilings higher than any ceiling should reasonably be, chandeliers throwing gold light across three hundred guests who all seemed to know exactly who I was supposed to be while I still wasn't entirely certain myself, some days, anymore. Arlo found me on the terrace an hour in, escaping the noise the same way I had. "You're good at this," he said, joining me at the railing, close enough that I could feel the warmth of him even through the cool night air. "Better than I expected. Better, honestly, than I think you realize." "Is that a compliment?" "It's an observation." He turned to face me fully, and something in his expression had softened since the study, some wariness quietly set aside, replaced by an intensity that felt more dangerous precisely because it no longer felt calculated. "I've spent three days trying to catch you in a lie, Isabelle. I haven't managed it once." "Maybe there's nothing to catch." "Maybe," he said, though
Huling Na-update: 2026-07-22
Chapter: Chapter 4 ~ The Control Mia found me in the kitchen at two in the morning, still too wired to sleep, my hands wrapped around a mug of tea I hadn't touched. "He noticed the hair," I said, before she could ask. "You told me nobody would notice small details like that." "Arlo Alfie notices everything," she said, sitting across from me with none of her usual crispness, tired in a way I hadn't seen from her before. "That was always the risk with him specifically. His family vetted the merger contract personally. He doesn't delegate the things that matter to him." "You said this would be simple." "I said it would be worth sixty thousand dollars," she corrected. "I never once said simple." She studied me for a long moment, something calculating behind her tired eyes. "What exactly did he say to you?" I told her, the hair, the midnight visit, the way he'd said, I collect secrets, like a threat wrapped inside something almost tender. Mia's expression didn't change, but her hand tightened slightly around her own
Huling Na-update: 2026-07-22
Chapter: Chapter 3 ~ The Fiance I heard him before I saw him, unhurried footsteps on marble that somehow still managed to sound like a warning, like a man who had never once in his life needed to walk quickly toward anything, because everything simply waited for him to arrive. I came down the stairs because staying hidden felt more dangerous than being seen, smoothing the borrowed silk of my robe, arranging my face into the practiced, unbothered calm Renata had spent two weeks drilling into me. Isabelle doesn't ask for things. Isabelle expects them. Arlo Alfie stood in the entryway like he owned the marble under his feet, which, I would later learn, he technically did, his family held the mortgage on half the properties in this district, this house included. He was younger than I'd expected from the file photos, dark-suited despite the hour, tie loosened just enough to suggest he'd come straight from somewhere that had already exhausted him. His eyes found me on the staircase and stopped there, sharp and assessin
Huling Na-update: 2026-07-22
Chapter: Chapter 2 ~ The Transformation They took my apartment key on the first day, which should have frightened me more than it did. Instead I felt something closer to relief, one less thing tying me to a life that had already stopped being enough to keep my father alive. "You'll live at the estate starting tomorrow," Mia said, walking me through a townhouse she'd rented for the transition period, sterile and beautiful in a way that felt more like a stage set than a home. "For now, we work here. Voice, posture, memory. You have three weeks to become someone the most powerful families in this country will look at and see nothing wrong." The voice coach came first, a small, exacting woman named Renata who made me repeat the same sentence forty times until the vowels sat differently in my mouth, flatter, colder, the practiced boredom of someone who'd never had to want anything badly in her life. "Isabelle doesn't ask for things," Renata said. "Isabelle expects them. Say it again." The posture came next, then the walk, th
Huling Na-update: 2026-07-22
Chapter: Chapter 1~ The Offer"You have three weeks left in this apartment, Ms. Leonie. I'm not enjoying saying that any more than you're enjoying hearing it."My landlord said it the way he said everything flatly, like a man reading a grocery list instead of ending someone's life piece by piece. Behind him, my father's oxygen machine hissed its slow, mechanical rhythm from the next room, counting down something neither of us said out loud."I have a payment coming," I lied. "This week.""You said that three weeks ago."I didn't argue. There was nothing left to argue with. I closed the door on him and stood in the hallway of an apartment I couldn't afford, above a studio full of paintings no one wanted to buy, down the hall from a father whose heart was failing faster than my bank account could keep up with the surgery that might save it.I'd sold two canvases that month. Four hundred dollars combined. The specialist wanted sixty thousand just to put my father on the schedule.I went back inside and sat by his bed
Huling Na-update: 2026-07-22
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