All Chapters of THE WRONG SISTER : Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

44 Chapters

Chapter 21: The Morning After

Should she wake him and tell him about the message. Or delete it and pretend she never saw it?Her hand moved toward the phone, trembling.Before she could reach it, Caelum stirred again, his arm tighter around her waist as he pulled her closer. He made a soft sound, half asleep and completely vulnerable.“Arwen,” he murmured, his voice rough with sleep. “Please stay.”Even in his dreams, he still wanted her.The conflict was agonizing in her mind. Part of her wanted to wake him, confess everything, show him the message and let him decide what happened next. But another part—the part that had just spent hours wrapped in his arms learning what it felt like to be wanted—couldn’t bear to watch that peaceful expression turn back into cold suspicion.The phone screen went dark, the message disappearing into the blackness.Caelum’s breathing had changed. She felt him wake fully, his body going from relaxed to tensed in seconds.“You’re awake,” he said quietly.“I couldn’t sleep.”“Why not?”

Chapter 22: The Unspoken Agreement

They didn’t speak of the message.Arwen woke the next morning to find Caelum’s phone face-down on the nightstand, the screen was dark and silent. He was already awake, propped against the headboard watching her with an unreadable expression.“Morning,” she said carefully.“Morning.” He reached out and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. “Slept well?”“Eventually.”“That's good.” He kissed her forehead, gentle and deliberate. “We should get up. My mother wants us at breakfast in an hour.”No questions about messages. Just his hand warm against her skin and his mouth soft on hers.They fell into a pattern over the next few days that felt natural and fragile.At breakfast, Caelum would pull out her chair and his hand would linger on her shoulder longer than necessary. During business meetings, his eyes would find hers across the conference table and hold for just a second too long. At charity events, he’d keep his palm pressed to the small of her back, a possessive gesture that made

Chapter 23: Damage Control

“Call Silas,” Caelum said immediately, his hand finding Arwen’s under the table. “We need to get ahead of this before Viktor can weaponize it.”Marcelline was already reaching for her phone. “I’ll have him here within an hour.”Arwen couldn’t breathe. The signature, the one she’d practiced a hundred times until it looked exactly like Isolde’s.“Hey...” Caelum’s voice cut through her panic. “Look at me.”She forced her eyes to meet his.“It’s going to be fine,” he said, his thumb tracing circles on her palm beneath the table. “This is just Viktor trying to stir up trouble. We’ll handle it.”“But the timeline...”“We’ll explain the timeline. You signed remotely, sent the documents back from Switzerland. It happens all the time with charity paperwork.” His grip tightened on her hand. “This is manageable.”Marcelline watched them both with those sharp eyes that saw too much. “Viktor wouldn’t bring this up unless he had more. What else is he looking for?”“Anything he can use to destabiliz

Chapter 24: The First Secret

“Pack a bag,” Caelum said the morning after. “We’re leaving for a few days.”Arwen looked up from her untouched breakfast. “Leaving? Where?”“Away from here. Away from Viktor and my mother and all of this.” He gestured vaguely at the estate around them. “I have a property up the coast. Where there is no cameras and no one watching our every move.”“What about the business?”“The business can wait.” He moved closer, tilting her chin up to look at him. “You’ve been tense for days. I can feel it every time I touch you. We need space to just be without everyone analyzing every step we take.”“Caelum...”“Please, it's just a few days. Let us go somewhere we can actually breathe.”She nodded, unable to refuse him when he was looking at her like that.Two hours later they were in his car driving up the coastal highway, the ocean stretching endless and blue on their left. Caelum drove with one hand on the wheel and the other resting on her thigh.“Tell me about this place we’re going to,” she

Chapter 25: A Partial Truth

The guilt was eating her alive.Arwen lay in Caelum’s arms on the deck under the stars, wrapped in blankets and his warmth.He’d given her his truth and his pain.And she was still lying to him about everything that was supposed to matter.“I can totally relate to every thing you said.” She said quietly, needing to fill the silence before it consumed her.“What do you mean?”“The trauma of feeling like no matter what you did, someone was always going to find it lacking.” She adjusted to pull the blanket up to her shoulder.He shifted to face her, his expression curious in the starlight. “Really, tell me about it.”She took a shaky breath. “You talked about never being enough for your father. I understand that more than you know.”He waited.“I grew up in the shadow of someone perfect.” The words came slowly and carefully. “Someone who was everything a daughter should be. Beautiful, charming, socially perfect. Everyone loved her and wanted to be near her.” She took a deep breath. “I wa

Chapter 26: The Journalist’s Gambit

They returned from the glass house three days later to find chaos waiting.Caelum’s phone started buzzing the moment they hit the city limits, call after call from his PR team, his mother, his lawyers.“What’s happening?” Arwen asked, watching his expression darken as he read message after message.“Evelyn Crowe.” His jaw tightened. “She published something.”“About what?”“The merger and your family’s financial situation.” He pulled the car over to read the full article. “She’s implying the marriage was arranged to save the Valeharts from bankruptcy.”Arwen’s stomach dropped. “Can I see?”He handed her his phone and she read the headline:The Vanishing Heiress: Convenience or Conspiracy?The article was carefully worded, avoiding direct accusations but raising pointed questions about the timing of the merger, the rushed wedding, and the significant financial transfers from Ravencroft Industries to Valehart Holdings.“This is bad,” she whispered.“It’s a speculative journalism with no

Chapter 27: A Dangerous Bargain

She told Caelum she was visiting a friend.He’d kissed her forehead and told her to be back before lunch. And she’d smiled, picked up her bag, and walked out of the estate.The café was a twenty-minute drive, but it felt longer. She spent it with both hands on her bag and her eyes on the road ahead.Evelyn Crowe was already there when she arrived.Same corner table and same leather notebook open in front of her. She had the same watchful eyes that didn’t give anything away easily. She looked up when Arwen walked in and didn’t smile.“You came alone.” It wasn’t a question.“I said I would.” Arwen sat across from her and kept her bag on her lap. “Let’s not drag this out... what exactly do you want?”“Hey, calm down.” Evelyn said, pretending to set a pleasant atmosphere, when she was actually hunting for a prey. “You can order something, so it'd look like we are having lunch.”“I don't have the luxury of time,” Arwen said, bracing herself to handle whatever the journalist had coming for

Chapter 28: The Public Performance

The interview was Marcelline’s idea.“Controlled exposure,” she’d called it, sitting at the head of the conference table with her hands folded. “You go on, give them something real enough to satisfy the noise and buy us another month of quiet.”Caelum had looked at Arwen and said yes.-----The studio lights were bright in warm gold.A woman with a headset clipped a microphone to Arwen’s collar. A man moved to powder Caelum’s jaw and got a look that sent him retreating immediately.“Stop intimidating the makeup team,” Arwen murmured.“I’m not intimidating anyone.”“Your face is doing it without your permission.”He looked down at her, and the corner of his mouth moved. “You’re the only person who talks to me like that.”“Someone has to.”The host, a polished woman named Dana Reeves with a warm smile, came over to shake their hands before they went on.“Thank you both for coming. This is just a conversation, not an interrogation.” She said. “I’m just interested in who you are together.

Chapter 29: The Gift of Trust

She woke up to find him in his home office at seven in the morning.Not behind his desk, he was standing at the window with his jacket off and his sleeves rolled to the elbow, staring at something on his tablet with the focused expression he usually reserved for boardroom battles.“You’re up early,” Arwen said from the doorway.He looked up. Something in his face relaxed when he saw her. It still caught her off guard every time. That small, visible shift, like he’d been holding a little tension that only she could take from him.“Come here,” he said. “I want to show you something.”She crossed the room and he turned the tablet toward her.Verdant. A small logo, green and clean, over a company profile that looked like it hadn’t been updated in three years.“A green tech subsidiary,” he said. “I acquired it five years ago. I has clean energy infrastructure, sustainable urban development and community-level power solutions.” He set the tablet down. “The board has been pushing me to sell

Chapter 30: The Shadow of Isolde

The office Caelum gave her smelled all leather and old paper.It was a smaller room off the main corridor, just a quiet space with good light and a desk that faced a window overlooking the garden. He’d had it cleared out and restocked in two days with new sketchbooks, proper art markers and a corkboard the entire length of one wall.“For your ideas,” he’d said, standing in the doorway watching her take it in. “So they have somewhere to actually live.”She’d had to look away before he saw her face.-----She threw herself into Verdant the way she used to throw herself into paintings.By the third morning she had the corkboard covered.Brand direction on the left, community story angles in the middle, logo iterations spreading across the right side in varying sizes and colors. She’d been on calls with Verdant’s field team, listening to project managers talk about neighborhoods that had cut their energy costs by thirty percent.She’d asked them to send real photographs, not the stock ima

1 2 3 4 5

SCAN CODE TO READ ON APP