All Chapters of Forbidden By Her Sister's Husband : Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

“I didn’t mean to…”“Apologize!” Cassandra demanded. She shoved Aria’s shoulder. It wasn’t a hard shove, but Aria was standing on the wet, slick edge of the infinity pool. Her bare feet had no grip on the stone. She slipped. Her arms windmilled wildly. She dropped the tray with a deafening clatter.And then, she fell backward.The water closed over her head with a rush of silence. It was shocking. Aria kicked to the surface, gasping for air, pushing wet hair out of her eyes. Her cotton dress ballooned around her, heavy and clinging.Laughter. That was the first thing she heard. Cassandra was laughing.“Oh my god,” Cassandra giggled, clutching Mr. Sterling’s arm. “Look at her! Like a drowned rat! I told you she was a disaster!”The guests laughed too. A ripple of amusement went through the crowd. Aria trod water, blinking against the chlorine burning her eyes. She felt a shame so hot it made her nauseous. She swam toward the ladder, desperate to climb out and run.But before she could r

The Lake House didn't just feel old; it felt like it was dying. Tonight, under the assault of the winter gale, the house groaned like a rotting corpse being torn apart by the wind.Thunder rattled the windowpanes in their rotted frames, vibrating through the floorboards like a heartbeat beneath the wood. The power had died hours ago, leaving the estate swallowed by an absolute, suffocating darkness. The only light in the entire house came from a single, flickering candle Aria had placed on the coffee table in the center of the cavernous living room. It was a tiny, pathetic flame, and it did nothing to push back the shadows that seemed to be encroaching from the corners of the room.Aria sat huddled on the sofa, wrapped in a thin, scratchy blanket that smelled of mothballs and dampness. Every time the wind shrieked through the cracks in the walls, she flinched. She was alone, isolated in the middle of a forest, trapped by a storm that felt personal.Then, the door erupted.It wasn’t a k

The transition from the rotting, wet silence of the Lake House to the steel-and-glass scream of New York City was jarring. It felt as though Aria had been plucked from one circle of hell and dropped into another—one that was far more expensive and infinitely more dangerous.Aria sat in the back of the black Maybach, her forehead pressed against the cold glass of the window. Outside, the December sky was a bruised charcoal gray, and the sleet turned the city into a jagged landscape of shadows and neon. The city looked like a jaw of jagged teeth biting into the clouds, ready to swallow anyone who wasn't strong enough to fight back.Damian sat next to her, a monolith of frozen silence.He hadn’t spoken a single word to her since they had pulled out of the Lake House driveway. He spent the entire three-hour drive on a conference call, his voice low and clipped as he switched effortlessly between Mandarin, French, and a sharp, icy English. He didn’t look at her. He didn’t acknowledge the fa

The biting chill of mid-December in the basement was indistinguishable from the rest of the year. Three floors below the frozen pavement of Manhattan, there was no sun, no seasons, and no time. There was only the hum of the industrial ventilation system and the dry, stale smell of oxidizing paper.Aria had been working in the Archives for nearly two weeks. She had settled into a routine of invisible survival. She arrived at 7:30 AM via the freight elevator in the alley, swiping the white key card Damian had thrown at her. She worked for nine hours in the silence of Level B3. She ate lunch alone in the breakroom, staring at the vending machine. She left at 5:30 PM via the alley, dodging the garbage trucks and the icy wind of the side street.She hadn’t seen Damian since the night he gave her the key. He was fifty floors up; she was three floors down. The ecosystem of Cross Tower was designed to keep the lions separate from the mice.It was 4:00 PM on a Tuesday when the silence broke. He

The basement was a place where time went to die. Three floors below the pavement of the city, there were no windows to show the passage of the sun, no shifting shadows to mark the hours, and no seasons to change the temperature. There was only the low, constant hum of the massive industrial ventilation system and the dry, biting smell of oxidizing paper that seemed to coat the back of Aria’s throat like a layer of fine silt.Aria had been working in the Archives for weeks, and in that time, she had become a ghost. Her entire existence had been reduced to a vertical shaft of glass and concrete. Her mornings began in the sterile, high-tech silence of Unit 40B. She would dress in the clothes Damian had provided—clothes that felt like a uniform for a role she never asked for and then she would take the freight elevator.She avoided the main lobby. She avoided the people. She slipped through the service corridors, a shadow moving through the "grey world" of the building, descending until sh