All Chapters of The Billionaire's Scandalous Fat Wife : Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

Natasha's POV The cake was the first wrong thing. I saw it before I heard anything else — sitting on the dresser through the half-open bedroom door, twenty-two pink candles unlit, my name looped in careful icing. I'd told Ethan not to make a fuss. He'd promised something small. This was small. A cake, waiting in the dark, nobody around to light it. Then I heard the sound under the sound. Not the TV. Not music. Something with a rhythm to it, low and unhurried, coming from behind a door I'd walked through a hundred times without knocking. I told myself it was nothing three separate times before my hand reached the doorknob anyway. I wish it had been nothing. Ethan's back was to me, his hands fisted in dark hair that wasn't mine. The woman under him arched her spine the exact way I did — because we'd been arching our spines the exact same way since before either of us knew what a body was for. Same collarbone. Same laugh, currently being spent on someone else's ceiling.

Natasha's POV By nine that morning, the Hartwell Estate looked like something out of a magazine I'd never be able to afford a subscription to — white peonies cascading down a thousand feet of aisle, crystal catching the light like it had been personally instructed to. My work. Nobody would remember that by noon. I moved through it the way I always did on wedding days — present enough to fix a leaning centerpiece, invisible enough that nobody thanked me for it. Headset in, clipboard in hand, adjusting a runner three inches to the left because the photographer needed the angle. This was the version of myself I trusted. The one nobody looked at twice. I turned the corner toward the west corridor to check on the champagne delivery, and walked straight into a wall of cologne and heat. "Sorry, I didn't—" The words died. He looked at me first with the mild irritation of a man interrupted, and then his eyes actually landed, and something in his face went very, very still. I kne

Natasha's POV The ring wasn't mine. The smile wasn't either, not really — I'd practiced it in the car mirror on the way over, the exact curve that read as radiant instead of hostage. "Mr. Stone, Mrs. Stone — over here!" Cameras everywhere, a wall of them, flashing in a rhythm that made my eyes water if I looked at any one for too long. I'd rehearsed three lines. We're grateful for the support. We'd appreciate privacy as we begin our life together. Yes, it happened fast — when you know, you know. Safe. Rehearsed. Nothing true in any of it. Then a reporter near the back didn't ask a safe question. "Mrs. Stone, is it true your fiancé left you for your twin sister the same week you married Mr. Stone? How does that feel?" The room didn't go quiet so much as it sharpened, every lens angling toward my face like they could smell the crack before it opened. My mouth opened. Nothing came out. My rehearsed lines evaporated, and underneath them there was nothing — just the sound of Et

Ace's POV The chair was the kind of plastic that never gets warm, no matter how long you sit in it. I'd been sitting in it for three hours.Down the hall, a vending machine hummed. Somewhere closer, a monitor beeped in the same lazy rhythm it had been beeping in since they moved her out of triage — steady, unbothered, completely indifferent to the fact that I had personally rewritten the sound of her body hitting the pavement into a loop I could not, no matter what I tried, get to stop playing.Wet. That was the word my brain kept handing me, over and over, like it thought repetition would help. The specific, flat sound of a person hitting concrete at speed. I'd heard gunfire before. I'd heard a hostile takeover collapse in real time on a conference call, forty million dollars evaporating in the space of a sentence. I had never heard anything that did what that sound did to me.A nurse came in to check the IV line, glanced at the admission clipboard still balanced on my knee, and pause

Natasha's POVThe three boxes had been sitting in Priya's spare room almost two weeks, ever since Noel packed them and I couldn't stand to look at them long enough to bring them anywhere. I went to get them that evening, mostly because I didn't want to keep asking Priya to store the entire wreckage of my old life in her hallway, and partly because some stubborn part of me wanted to prove I could still do ordinary things — carry boxes, drive a car, exist outside the version of my life that came with a security detail.Felix drove me. I hadn't asked him to. He was simply there when I came downstairs, waiting by the car like he'd been told, which I was starting to understand was how everything worked in Ace's world — nothing was ever technically an order, it just arrived, fully formed, before you'd finished wanting it."Back to the penthouse?" he asked, once the boxes were loaded."Back to the penthouse," I said, and felt strange saying it. Home. I still hadn't figured out if that word ap