The Vows we broke
"Marry me, and I'll help you burn every one of them to the ground."
Ivie Sterling didn't expect to end her engagement party in the back of a stranger's car, mascara down her cheeks, having just listened to the man she loved plan her destruction with her own best friend. She didn't expect to lose her job, her name, and her family in the same week. And she certainly didn't expect the coldest, most feared man in London to offer her a marriage certificate instead of his condolences.
Alexander Blackwood doesn't have sympathy. He has leverage. And Ivie Sterling, though broken, furious, and finally done being polite about it, is the sharpest piece of leverage he's found in ten years.
But the closer they get, the more the lines blur between contract and marriage, between the woman he married to destroy her family and the woman he'd now burn the world to protect. Every secret they uncover together peels back another layer of a lie that's been building for twenty-five years, and at the center of it is a betrayal so personal, so close to home, that Ivie will have to ask herself who she can actually trust.
Her best friend was never just a friend.
Her father's death was never an accident.
And her husband's revenge was never really about her family at all.
When the truth finally surfaces, it won't just cost Ivie her inheritance.
It might cost her the only man who ever chose her for real.
Ler
Chapter: C7Chapter 7Maria’s WarningArchive.Ivie sat with the scrap between her fingers. The study stayed quiet. Her father’s chair was still too big under her, the way it always had been.She stayed until the light outside had gone. She turned the paper over once, then again, as if the blank side might give her something the other hadn’t. It didn’t. Eventually she folded it small and slipped it into her coat pocket.She left the house and took a cab to Sterling Holdings. She didn’t go inside. She asked the driver to leave her in the underground garage and sat for a while, looking up at the building, wondering if the answers were somewhere behind those walls.Her phone buzzed as she got out of the car. A text from a number she didn’t recognize.Can we talk? Somewhere quiet. Not inside.She almost ignored it. Then another message came through.It’s Maria. From records. It’s about your father.Ivie stood by the elevator, the cold
Última atualização: 2026-09-01
Chapter: C6Chapter 6 Her Father’s HandwritingHer aunt’s voice faded as she moved down the hall. Ivie waited until she couldn’t hear anything at all, then left the building without speaking to anyone.In the car she sat for a moment before she told the driver where to go. “The house,” she said and the driver took her to her father's house The study smelled like him. She hadn’t expected it. Nearly a year, and no one had aired the room out or packed away what didn’t need to stay. The leather chairs still held the shape of him. The cologne was mostly gone, but not completely. She stood in the doorway longer than she meant to before she made herself walk in.She hadn’t come looking for anything. The rest of the house felt like it belonged to other people now. This room still felt like his.His photograph sat on the corner of the desk the way it always had him on the terrace in Cornwall, squinting into the sun, one hand half raised as if he’d been
Última atualização: 2026-08-30
Chapter: C5Chapter 5 A Room Full of People Who Already DecidedThe boardroom smelled the way it always did, coffee and old carpet. That hadn't changed. Everyone sat in the seats they always sat in. Edmund at the head of the table, near her father's usual chair, close enough that Ivie noticed and hated that she noticed. Her aunt was two seats down. Faces she knew her whole life, arranged the way they'd always been arranged, except today none of them would quite look at her."Thank you all for coming on short notice," Edmund said, once she'd taken her seat. He kept his eyes on the table when he said it, though the words were plainly for her too. "I know it's an unusual time for this."Ivie set her folder down in front of her. She'd prepared for this the way she prepared for anything, notes, figures, a clear sense of what she'd say if she got the chance. She didn't know yet that the chance wasn't really coming."I'll get to it," Edmund said. "The past few
Última atualização: 2026-08-24
Chapter: C4Chapter 4 The Story They Told FirstIvie saw it before she meant to. Her phone lit up on the desk while she was still staring at the redacted line in the calendar, and a name flashed across the screen a gossip account her cousin followed, the kind that posted three times a day and somehow always knew things first.She almost didn't open it. Then she saw Damien's name in the preview text and picked the phone up anyway.The post had gone up forty minutes ago.There was a photo from the party Damien and Sophia standing close together near the bar, taken from an angle that made it look like the middle of an ordinary conversation. Under it, a caption written like it was doing her a favor.*LIvie Sterling's engagement party took an unexpected turn last night when the bride-to-be reportedly accused her fiancé and her closest friend of an affair, based on a private business conversation she misunderstood. Sources close to the couple s
Última atualização: 2026-08-24
Chapter: C3Chapter 3 The Morning After Doesn't Ask PermissionThe building looked exactly the same. That was the first thing Ivie noticed, and it annoyed her a little, that it did.She walked through the lobby the way she always did, heels loud on the marble, phone in one hand, scrolling through the morning's messages like they might tell her nothing had happened. Security nodded at her. The coffee cart sat in its usual spot. Somewhere above her, Sterling Holdings was doing exactly what it did every Tuesday.She held on to that. The sameness of it.She'd barely slept. Lying awake, she told herself coming in today mattered that if she stayed home, if she let one bad night keep her out of her own building, she'd be handing them something. She didn't know exactly who "them" was yet. She just knew she wasn't giving it to them.The elevator opened onto the fourteenth floor, and the first thing she registered was how fast two assis
Última atualização: 2026-08-24
Chapter: C2Chapter 2 The sound a room makes Sophia didn't move. Neither did Ivie.For a moment nobody said anything. Party noise drifted down the hall and filled the space where words should have been.Then Damien turned and saw her too.Neither of them flinched. That was what she noticed first."Ivie." He set the glass down on the desk, careful, unhurried, like he had time for this. "How long have you been standing there?""Long enough." Her voice came out smaller than she wanted it to."Okay." He said it the way you'd talk to someone who'd misread a text message. "Okay, before you…""Before I do what?" She stepped into the room. The door swung wider behind her. "Before I ask what you meant by playing house? Before I ask what the Sterling assets have to do with either of you?""You're taking this the wrong way.""Then tell me the right way." She waited. Actually waited, some part of her still hoping he'd say something that made this stu
Última atualização: 2026-08-24
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