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Synopsis
Contemporary
Third-Person POV
Girl Power
CEO
Possessive
Love after Marriage
Hate to Love
Contract Marriage
"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.
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C1
Chapter 1
What the Walls Overheard
The music was too loud to think in, so Ivie left it behind.
She slipped past a knot of guests by the bar, past a waiter balancing a tray of empty glasses, and out into the hallway, where the sound dropped to a dull thud behind her. She wanted five minutes. Just five minutes with the man she was marrying, before her father pulled him into another round of introductions and the night swallowed him whole again.
The study door was open a crack. Light spilled out in a thin line across the carpet.
She almost called his name. Her hand was already on the door.
Then she heard Sophia's voice, low and even, cutting through the quiet.
"If we push past March, the board starts asking questions we don't want asked."
Ivie stopped.
Her hand stayed on the door, but she didn't push it open. She didn't call out either. Something in the tone made her wait, the way you wait when a room feels different than you expected before you even know why.
"March works," Damien said. "Barely."
"Barely isn't good enough. You know how vesting works, Damien. The moment those shares convert, everyone's watching them. We move before that or we don't move at all."
Vesting shares. Ivie knew that phrase. She'd heard her father use it a hundred times at the dinner table, half-joking, the way people talk about money once they've had enough of it to stop being careful about it. It sounded wrong coming from Sophia. Worse was how easily Damien answered it, like this was a conversation they'd had before.
She pushed the door open another inch. Just enough to see.
Damien stood near the window, a glass in his hand he wasn't drinking from. Sophia sat on the arm of the leather chair across from him, one leg crossed over the other, completely at ease. They looked too comfortable. Like this wasn't the first time they'd had this conversation.
"How much longer do we have to keep playing house?" Sophia asked.
Playing house.
The words didn't make sense. Not at first. Ivie stood there turning them over, waiting for them to mean something else.
Damien turned the glass slowly in his hand. "As long as it takes."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the only one I've got right now." He looked at her, and there was nothing soft in his face. Nothing like the way he looked at Ivie. "The Sterling assets aren't going anywhere. We don't need to rush this."
The Sterling assets.
Her family, reduced to something they could divide between themselves.
She kept waiting for the next line to explain it away. A meeting. A deal with an unfortunate name.
It didn't come.
"You're overthinking the timeline," Damien said.
"I'm not the one who needs to worry about timing." Sophia's voice had an edge to it now, something Ivie had never heard her use on him before. "You're the one who has to sit across from her father every Sunday."
Damien didn't answer that. He looked down at the glass instead, like it had asked him the question.
"Nobody's looking this closely," he said finally. "Not yet."
"Someone always looks eventually." Sophia uncrossed her leg, stood, walked the two steps to the window beside him. Unhurried. "I'd rather we control when that happens than find out the hard way."
Ivie noticed the rug first. A small burn mark near the leg of the desk, shaped like a comma, that had been there since she was a girl. Her father used to joke he'd put it there himself and no one ever believed him. She didn't know why she was looking at it now, of all things, instead of at them.
This is Sophia, she made herself think. The girl who used to sneak into Ivie's room the night before every big event and redo her eyeliner three times until it was right, because Ivie always cried it off worrying.
Latest chapter
The Vows we broke C6
Chapter 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
Last Updated : 2026-08-30The Vows we broke C5
Chapter 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
Last Updated : 2026-08-24The Vows we broke C4
Chapter 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
Last Updated : 2026-08-24The Vows we broke C3
Chapter 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
Last Updated : 2026-08-24
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