All Chapters of MARRIED IN HATRED: FELL IN LOVE AFTER SHE LEFT?: Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

JOLENEI blinked back tears as the Priest’s droning voice sounded in my ears. “I now pronounce you man and wife. You may now kiss the bride.”I sucked in a breath, hating the tremor that ran through me as Jake stepped closer. He was so close I could feel his body heat, that wiff of lime scented aftershave.I closed my eyes, angling my head up as I remembered the last time we’d kissed. The last time he’d held me in his arms, treated me like a meant a thing…Someone laughed, and a few other sniggers followed. I could hear the ever present paparazzi cameras clicking away.My stomach dropped and I sucked in a breath opening my eyes, only to see Jake walking away.He had left me standing there by the altar, waiting to be kissed.I bit down my lower lip, feeling my lips stretch into a huge, fake smile when all I wanted to do was cry.In one single morning, I had lost my best friend, my sister’s future hung on a thin line, and I was married. Married into a family that hated my guts.I could

TWO WEEKS LATERJOLENE’s POVIt’s been two weeks since the will reading. The table sat in a graveyard hush and the only clink of silverware was permitted to sound.And as always, I didn't exist. My fingers still itches me from the hot water that accidentally poured on me.Not until Rebecca threw a spoon over the chowder soup just as I was about to take a sit.“Jolene.” Her voice sounded like a ticking bomb. I'd anchored myself for the hit, daring myself not to look into her eyes.“This soup is lukewarm. Do I look like someone who drinks lukewarm soup?”My fingers tightened. Three years caring for Logan and I’d never burned a meal. Now, one week as a wife and I couldn’t pour water right.I kept my head down, hands shaking around the ladle. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Henderson. I’ll heat it right away.”“You’ve been heating it wrong for three years,” Hailey snorted from across the table twirling a noodle on her fork. “Maybe it’s not the soup. Maybe it’s you.”Shame scalded me. The servants here

JOLENE’s POVThree Weeks LaterIt felt like the living beings in this house learnt how to hurt me without making any noise.It had been twenty-two days since the gala, three hundred and forty-three left on the contract and I counted it like I had no other job.Every morning started the same, I made coffee at 6:30 because Rebecca liked it black and she liked it to burn her tongue.I'd set her cup on the island and step back, then the usual mockery and insults.But they didn't hurt more than the footsteps that'd come from the west wing.The first sounds were soft, Maya's bare foot and then heavier ones which were Jake's.Maya always came in with her arms already around him, and when we'd accidentally crosspath, she'd put on a smile that explains she was taking over.“Morning, babe,” she would murmur against the back of his shirt. And Jake would turn, just a little, and his hands would come up to cover hers.He never did that with me and I thought I'd be fine by it but I wasn't, rather

JOLENE'S POVRebecca came home two days later, weaker but alive, and the first thing she did was study me from across the kitchen like she was trying to remember something she'd almost forgotten."You didn't poison me," she said finally, not quite a question."No," I answered carefully, bracing myself for whatever came next."I know," she said, and there was no warmth in it, just fact, delivered the way she delivered everything, like an audit. "I remember making that tea myself." Her eyes flicked toward the hallway, toward the direction of the west wing, and something passed over her face too quick for me to name. "I remember a lot of things people think I don't."She didn't say anything else, just walked past me to her room, her steps slower than they used to be, but it was the first time since the wedding that Rebecca hadn't looked at me like something she wanted scraped off her shoe.I didn't trust it. But I noticed it, the way you notice the first crack in ice you've been told is

JOLENE'S POVI should have known Maya would notice.It started small. My folder of old case notes, the ones Victor had helped me pull together, went missing from the guest room drawer where I'd hidden them beneath a stack of sweaters. I told myself I'd misplaced them. I hadn't. I never misplaced anything in that house, not when everything I owned could fit into a single drawer, not when I'd learned to keep track of every small thing that was actually mine.I searched the room twice before I accepted it, pulling out every drawer, checking under the mattress, even the closet floor where I kept my one good pair of shoes. Nothing. Whoever took it had known exactly where to look, which meant whoever took it had been in that room before, watching, waiting for the right moment.Then Rebecca's favorite necklace disappeared from her dressing table, the one she wore to every gala, the one that had been photographed a hundred times, sapphires set in a thin gold chain that had belonged to Logan's