004

~Sandra’s pov~

"Because your husband deserves worse," he said. "And only I can help you give it to him."

I should have walked out the moment he smiled like that.

Instead I stood there in the middle of that loud, dark club with my palm still stinging from the slap and my heart doing something unsteady in my chest, as I stared at Ryan Hale and tried to work out what angle he was playing.

Because a cunning man like Ryan was always playing one. He didn't do anything without a reason. He didn't offer anything without wanting something back. That was the thing everyone who knew him understood instinctively.

That underneath all that easy charm and that dangerous, half-amused calm was a person who was always, always calculating, and I had been Liam's wife long enough to know that whatever Ryan wanted from this situation, it was not simply to be helpful to me.

"What do you actually want?" I asked him.

"I told you. I want to help you."

"People like you don't just help people like me. You don’t even like me."

He considered that for a moment with his head tilted slightly, turning the wedding ring over in his fingers in a way that I found irritating and unsettling in equal measure. "People like me," he repeated, like he was testing the phrase. "What does that mean, exactly?"

"It means everyone knows that you don't do anything for free. It means there's something in this for you and you haven't told me what it is yet. It means I would be genuinely stupid to sit back down and listen to whatever you're about to propose." I reached out and took the ring from his hand, dropping it into my bag because I didn't want to look at it.

"So thank you for the warning about Priya, but I'll take it from here."

"There are many other women, you know," he said. “And I know all of them.”

I stopped.

He said it calmly and without drama, rather than like what he was actually doing, which was detonating a grenade.

I turned back around and looked at him and he looked back at me and I knew, from the steadiness of his expression, that he wasn't saying it to hurt me. He was saying it because it was true and he had decided I should know it.

"What do you mean many others?" I asked.

"I mean Priya isn't the only one your husband is fucking. She's just the one you found out about." He paused. "There was a woman before her — Camille. I think you met her once, actually, at the Whitmore charity event two years ago. Blonde, worked in property development. That affair was about fourteen months." Another pause. "Before that there was a woman named Jade, she was the wife of his colleague, that lasted just 3 months. And there were shorter ones in between that I don't have the full detail on, but I have enough."

The music was still going. Someone at the bar was laughing about something. The world was continuing completely normally around me while I stood there and felt the floor shift under my feet in a way that had nothing to do with the alcohol.

Camille.

I remembered Camille. I had shaken her hand and complimented her earrings and thought she seemed nice, and Liam had stood beside me with his hand on the small of my back and smiled at her and I had noticed nothing.

I had noticed absolutely nothing because I had been too busy being his perfect, obedient, utterly foolish wife to notice the way they looked at each other, or maybe I had noticed and buried it because I had been so committed to the story I was telling myself about our marriage that I couldn't afford to look at anything that contradicted it.

I sat down. Not because I wanted to, but because my legs had suddenly become too weak to carry me.

Ryan sat across from me and didn't say anything for a moment, and I appreciated it. He just let me sit there and absorb it while I tried not to faint.

"When did these all start?" I finally said.​

"As far as I can piece it together? The first time was about 26 months ago, two months before your wedding."

Before our wedding?

We had been married for two years.

That meant that for all of our entire marriage, while I had been home making his favorite dinners and buying lingerie I thought he'd appreciate and convincing myself that the distance between us was something we could fix if I just tried harder— he had been methodically, continuously, and apparently rather enthusiastically sleeping with many other women. Women I had met. Women who had smiled me in my face and fucked my husband behind my back.

I pressed my fingers to my mouth, stared at the table and tried very hard not to fall apart in front of Ryan Hale.

"Why did he even marry me?" I whimpered, and I hadn't meant to say it out loud but there it was, floating in the air between us, humiliating in its rawness.

Ryan was quiet for a second. Then he said, carefully, "Do you actually want to know the answer to that?"

Something cold moved through me. "Tell me."

He leaned back and looked at me with something that might have been the closest thing to genuine discomfort I had ever seen on his face.

"Our parents were going to restructure the business inheritance. His father had decided that Liam needed to demonstrate that he could be responsible — settled, stable, the kind of man you hand a company to. There was pressure for him to change immediately. And Liam found the fastest solution available to him, which was to find a decent woman who would make him look like a responsible, loving husband."

He held my gaze. "You were exactly what he needed. Quiet, loyal, respectable. Someone who would keep the house and keep the image and not ask too many difficult questions."

The silence that followed was one of the worst of my life.

Two years. I had wasted the last two years of my life, trying to be exactly what I thought he wanted.

I shrunk myself down to fit neatly into the shape of a good wife, and it had all been a lie. I had been a business strategy. A prop in a presentation he was making to his parents.

I vowed to not cry again tonight. I had cried for an hour on the floor of our bedroom before I came here, and I had thought I was past it, but sitting there in that booth with Ryan's words settling into me, I felt my eyes fill up again and I hated myself for it.

"He never intended to stop cheating on me," I said. It wasn't a question.

"No."

"And you knew all of this."

"Not all of it immediately. Pieces of it, over time." He said it without apology or excuse. "Liam likes to brag about these things. He always has. He thinks it makes him look better than me."

I wiped my eyes quickly and looked away. Then I thought about what I would do next, and that was when the fear arrived.

Because divorcing Liam sounded simple when you said it as a sentence. Just divorce him. Get out and move on. But I had no job, because he had discouraged me from working. I had no money of my own that he didn't have full authority over. I had no family I could call who wouldn't either judge me or use it against me.

I had nowhere to go that he couldn't reach, and I had nothing to stand on in a courtroom except my word against his, and his word came with lawyers and family money and two years of carefully maintained appearances.

And the worst part was, I didn’t even have a fucking Pre- nup!

I was trapped. The rage was real and the decision was made but the execution was a wall I couldn't see over.

"I want to divorce him, but I need money," I said, thinking it through as I said it. "I need enough to survive on my own. Enough that I can leave and not be pulled back. He has to pay for this, actually pay for it, and the only way to make that happen legally is if I have proof." I looked up at Ryan.

"Evidence. The kind that holds up in a court."

"Yes," he said, and something shifted very slightly in his expression. He was watching me differently now, with a quality of attention that was sharper and less amused, like I had surprised him.

"You need to have a document of the affairs. Dates, hotels, communications if possible. Enough to make a very persuasive case that I deserve a significant portion of everything he has, because I spent 2 years of my life being his cover story and I intend to be compensated for it."

"There it is," Ryan smiled. “I knew there was a feisty tiger underneath all that good girl nonsense.”

"Don't act like you know me, and don’t smile at me like that." I hissed but his smile grew.

"I'm not smiling."

"Yes you are!."

He swallowed a laugh. "You walked in here tonight to hire a man to sleep with you because you were angry and hurt and you wanted to feel something. That's still in there. But underneath it there's something else entirely, and it's a lot more interesting." He leaned forward slightly. "You're not just wounded. You're already taking your revenge."

"I told you I wanted money for that revenge."

"I know. I'm saying I like your new attitude." He said it simply, like a fact. "It's a better look on you than crying, for what it's worth."

I should have been offended by that. Somehow I wasn't. "You said you'd help me. What does that actually mean, and what does it cost?"

He held my gaze and said nothing for a beat, and the pause had a specific kind of weight to it that made the back of my neck warm in a way I was not particularly happy about.

"Your husband likes bragging to me, more than he should, so I have access to things you can't get to on your own —. I can get you his conversations, details, documentation he doesn't know I've kept. I can hand you a case that would make his lawyers sweat." Another pause.

"And In return…. I want to fuck you for one night."

I stared at him and my mouth dropped. "Excuse me?!"

His gaze suddenly darkened and he smiled a slow, predatory smile ass his eyes slowly scanned up and down my half-naked body.

“You heard me sister in law, I want to fuck you for one night.”