CHAPTER 8

JEALOUS SISTER

Chloe came to my apartment the next morning carrying coffee and a paper bag of pastries.

She looked perfect. Soft sweater. Clean makeup. The same gentle expression she wore when she wanted people to believe she worried about me. It was the expression of someone who had spent years perfecting the art of appearing concerned while calculating everything.

"You didn't answer my texts," she said as she stepped inside. "I got worried."

I took the coffee she held out. Our fingers brushed. The contact felt deliberate on her part.

"I slept in."

Chloe set the bag on the counter and started unpacking like she belonged here. Croissants. Fruit. The exact breakfast she used to bring when we were younger and I was sick. Back when we actually trusted each other.

"Ethan called me last night," she said casually, moving around my kitchen with the ease of someone who had visited a hundred times. "He was upset. He said you two had another fight."

I leaned against the counter and watched her carefully. I needed to see everything. Every gesture. Every hesitation. Every tell.

There was a faint reddish mark on the left side of her neck, just above the collar of her sweater. She had tried to cover it with makeup. Under the kitchen light it still showed through—a bruise or a mark that hadn't been there before.

Not a love bite from last night. Something fresher. Something recent.

I kept my voice light. "Did he?"

"He was drinking. You know how he gets when he's hurt." Chloe glanced at me sideways, her expression perfectly pitched between concern and gentle reproach. "He still cares about you. Maybe you should talk to him before things get worse between you."

I took a sip of coffee. It was warm. She had brought it fresh from the café downstairs.

"I'm done talking to him."

Chloe's hands stilled on the pastry bag. Just for a second. The motion was barely perceptible, but I caught it. That small pause that revealed everything.

Then she smiled again, and it was perfect once more. "You're angry. I understand. But freezing him out only makes him spiral. He showed up at my place last night in a state. I had to calm him down."

"I know."

The words came out quieter than I expected. They landed differently than she anticipated.

Chloe looked up sharply. Her eyes narrowed slightly as she tried to figure out what I meant.

I set the coffee down carefully. "I know he went to you. I know he stayed until after three. You don't have to protect his feelings in front of me anymore, Chloe."

Silence filled the kitchen. It was the kind of silence that comes when someone realizes their secrets aren't as secret as they believed.

Chloe's smile didn't disappear, but it stopped reaching her eyes. She turned fully toward me, arms loosely crossed, still playing the picture of a concerned sister who had been forced into an uncomfortable position by circumstances beyond her control.

"I'm not the enemy here, Ariana."

"I didn't say you were."

"You're looking at me like I am."

I let my gaze drop deliberately to the mark on her neck. I held it there long enough for her to feel exposed. Long enough for her to understand that I had seen it. That I knew.

Chloe noticed. Her hand twitched upward, almost touching the spot, then dropped again. A faint flush crept up her throat, spreading across her skin like she couldn't control her own body's response.

"It's nothing," she said quickly.

"I'm sure."

The air between us tightened. It became something you could feel in the room—pressure building, the moment right before something breaks.

For a moment neither of us spoke. The mask Chloe wore in public was still on, but it had thinned. I could see the calculation behind her eyes now. The quick, silent assessment of how much I knew and how much damage it could do. She was recalibrating. Deciding which story to tell. Which version of events would be most believable.

"He was upset," she said finally, her voice taking on a different quality. Defensive. But also something else. Something possessive. "He needed someone. You pushed him away. What did you expect him to do?"

"Not that."

Chloe laughed once. It was a sharp sound. Disbelieving. "You returned his ring. You humiliated him in front of your family. And now you're angry that he sought comfort from someone who actually cared?"

"I'm not angry."

"No. You're something else." Her voice had lost some of its sweetness now. The mask was slipping further. "You've been different since the hospital. Cold. Distant. Like you're waiting for everyone around you to fail so you can feel justified in treating them poorly."

I didn't answer. I simply watched her.

Chloe stepped closer. She was trying to intimidate me now. Trying to make herself seem larger, more threatening. It didn't work. It only made her more transparent.

"You still want him," she said quietly. "That's what this is about. That's what's really bothering you. You pushed him away, but you hate that he came to me. You hate that he could even look at someone else."

There it was. The real wound underneath all of this.

Not the plan. Not the shares. Not the business empire I was rebuilding.

The simple, ugly fact that Ethan had still reached for me first last night. That his hands had touched me like he hadn't let go in years. That even after everything—after I'd rejected him, after I'd broken his heart—some part of him still wanted the version of me he thought he could control or save or fix.

And Chloe had seen the evidence written on her own skin.

I looked at the mark on her neck again. Held the look there.

Whatever had happened after he left my apartment, it hadn't been enough to erase me from his head. She would know that. She would have felt it. And it was eating her alive. The knowledge that even when she had him, even when she was with him, she was still second choice. She was still the backup.

"You're wrong," I said.

"Am I?"

"I don't want him."

Chloe stared at me. The gentle sister expression finally slipped completely. What showed underneath was sharper. Raw. Jealous in a way she had never let me see before. It was like looking at a different person.

"Then stop haunting him," she said, voice low and bitter. "Stop letting him touch you and then throwing him away. Stop looking at me like I'm the one who stole something that belonged to you."

"You did."

The words left my mouth before I could stop them. Before I could calculate whether saying them out loud was strategic or just emotional.

Chloe's face went still. Completely still. Like I had struck her.

In the original future I had never said it out loud. I had swallowed every suspicion until it was too late to matter. I had let her win by default, through my own silence. Now the truth sat between us in my bright kitchen, simple and irreversible.

Chloe's voice dropped to almost a whisper. "Be careful, Ariana."

"Or what?"

She didn't answer. She just looked at me for a long moment, eyes flat and cold, the sweet mask completely gone. I could see what she looked like without the performance. And it was nothing like the sister I had known.

Then she picked up her bag, left the pastries on the counter where they would slowly go stale, and walked to the door.

At the threshold she paused without turning around. Her hand rested on the doorframe.

"You're going to lose more than him if you keep going like this," she said. "More than you can possibly imagine."

The door closed quietly behind her.

I stood alone in the kitchen, coffee growing cold in my hand. I could hear her footsteps in the hallway fade. I could hear the elevator doors open and close. And then there was nothing but silence.

She had cracked.

Not in public. Not in a way she couldn't repair by dinner time. Not in a way that would destroy the facade she had built so carefully over the years.

But I had seen it. For just a moment, I had watched the mask fall away and seen what was underneath. The jealousy. The possessiveness. The fear that even now, after everything she had taken from me, Ethan's body still remembered me first. His hands still reached for me first. His heart still turned toward me first.

I set the coffee down and exhaled slowly.

The first piece of her plan was already gone.

Not destroyed completely, but fractured. Weakened.

Now the second piece—Ethan's loyalty—had a fracture in it too. A weakness she could exploit, but also a vulnerability. He wasn't as securely hers as she needed him to be.

And Chloe knew I had seen the crack.

She would be thinking about that now. About what I would do with this knowledge. About how I might use it against her.

She would be afraid.

And fear made people make mistakes.