Chapter 1

Eve’s POV

If I’d known I would see my stepsister’s legs wrapped around my fiancé, I would have worn high heeled shoes that would have doubled as a weapon.

Instead I stood in the cottage doorway in ballet flats as the three of us were frozen in a tableau so absurd it could have been a Renaissance painting: The Betrayal of the Heiress, oil on canvas, circa the worst moment of my life.

Delphine’s laugh cut off the second the floorboard creaked under my foot. Ambrose was still half on top of her, shirtless and gleaming, his hand locked on her thigh like a man who’d just realized he’d left the stove on and his entire future was on fire.

The champagne bottle on the floor rolled in slow, lazy circles, and I watched it spin because looking at spilled champagne was easier than looking at the two people who had just detonated my life.

I’d been calling him for the past three hours. Three hours of voicemail and read receipts while I circled the estate with a list of wedding details that now mattered about as much as a grocery receipt. His great aunt couldn’t sit near his mother. His college friends needed a table far from the bar.

I’d spent my morning negotiating with the florist while Ambrose was here, in the cottage my mother had loved, doing things to my stepsister I sincerely hoped weren’t in any manual anywhere.

The seating chart crumpled slowly in my hand. I noted the Delphine’s dress on the floor and the red marks on Ambrose’s neck that matched her lipstick shade exactly, a color I’d spotted in her bathroom last week and almost complimented.

“Well,” I said. “At least someone’s having a good afternoon.”

Ambrose scrambled backward so fast his spine hit the armrest and he made a noise like a goat startled by a car. “Eve. This isn’t what it looks like.”

“I truly hope not, because it looks like you’re sleeping with my stepsister in my dead mother’s cottage four weeks before our wedding, and that would be a new low even for this family.”

Delphine sat up slowly, pulling her dress over her shoulders with the deliberate care of a woman who’d been waiting for this moment and intended to savor every second of it. Her dark hair fell in perfect waves, which was frankly offensive.

If I’d just been caught betraying someone, I would at least have the decency to look disheveled. She looked like she’d stepped out of a perfume ad called Deception with top notes of betrayal and base notes of audacity.

“You weren’t supposed to find out now,” she said.

I kept quiet and let her continue.

“You were supposed to find out the day before the wedding,” she continued, smoothing her skirt. “A few hours before the ceremony. We wanted to time it perfectly so there was no room for you to fix anything. No time to find a replacement groom. No time to meet that little deadline your mother set.”

She tilted her head with a smug smile. “You would have walked in, seen us, and realized you’d lost everything. It would have been devastating.”

She said it the way someone describes a surprise party they were especially proud of planning. Every detail considered, every outcome anticipated. A gift wrapped around a bomb with my name on the tag in elegant calligraphy.

To say I was enraged would be an understatement but I’d spent my whole life in a house full of people waiting for me to crack, so I did what I always do. I smiled. It was the smile of someone who’d learned emotional warfare at the dinner table before she learned algebra.

“So you’ve been plotting this for months. The affair, the timing, the grand reveal were all designed to make me miss the inheritance deadline.” I turned to Ambrose, who was now deeply fascinated by the floorboards. “And you proposed to me in front of my family and said you wanted to spend your life with me, all while planning to pull the rug out the day before the wedding. I didn’t know you had that much follow-through.”

Ambrose’s mouth opened and closed. He looked like a fish dropped on a dock, still trying to negotiate with gravity.

“She made it sound reasonable,” he said finally.

I laughed in disbelief.

“So you think that betraying your fiancée and sleeping with her sister was reasonable. Do you also find it reasonable that you’re half naked and about to be single for the rest of your natural life, or is that just a happy coincidence?”

Delphine stood, barefoot on the old wooden floor, and somehow still managed to look regal. That infuriated me most of all. “You can joke all you want, Eve, but you have just thirty days. Good luck finding someone to marry you once word gets out. The desperate heiress, dumped right before her deadline. It’s practically a headline.”

“Desperate Heiress does have a nice ring to it. Very tabloid chic.”

“You think this is funny.”

“I think this is the most effort you’ve ever put into anything, and honestly I’m almost flattered. You’ve wanted my things since we were fourteen. My clothes, my jewelry, my college boyfriend who suddenly stopped calling and appeared on your social media a week later. And now my fiancé.”

I glanced at Ambrose, still crumpled against the armrest. “Though your taste hasn’t improved over time.”

Ambrose made a small offended noise nobody acknowledged.

“The inheritance should have been shared,” Delphine said, and the practiced calm slipped just enough for me to see the rot underneath. “Your mother locked everything up for you. We got nothing. We had to live in your house and smile at your parties and watch you walk around like you were better than us. Do you know what that felt like?”

“I imagine it felt like being a guest in someone else’s home and resenting them for it instead of being grateful you had a roof over your head.”

“You think you’re so clever.”

“I think I’m the only one in this room wearing a complete outfit, which at the moment feels like a moral victory.”

She stepped closer, and the floorboard creaked under her bare foot. “Laugh now. But in thirty days you’ll lose everything: the estate, the company and the money. And I’ll be there, watching, when you realize you finally have nothing left that I want.”

“Because you’ll already have taken it.”

“Exactly.”

I stared at her intently before walking out of the room. Behind me, Ambrose scrambled up and called my name, but I didn’t stop. I walked past the house, the gardens, the fountain my mother had imported from Italy the summer before she died. I got in my car and drove away without looking back.

My apartment sat on the other side of the city, a clean and quiet space I’d bought with my own money three years ago, when I realized I needed somewhere to breathe that didn’t smell like my stepmother’s perfume and my father’s avoidance. I drove with the radio off and the warm air whipping through my hair, and by the time I pulled into the underground garage, I had gotten a hold of my chaotic emotions.

I called Devin. I’d missed three of his calls already, too busy marching toward my own destruction to pick up. He always called when something was off. If the man had a superpower, it was an inconveniently accurate sense of when my life was imploding.

He answered on the first ring. “Eve, talk to me. What happened?”

His voice undid something in my chest I’d been holding together with pure stubbornness. The words came out in a rush. “I found my fiancé in the garden cottage sleeping with my stepsister. They planned the whole thing, Dev. They were going to wait until the day before the wedding so I’d have no time to find anyone else.”

I could tell he was shocked by this turn of events when he kept silent for a few seconds before responding.

“Where are you now?”

“ I am in my apartment. I couldn’t stay in that estate another minute.”

“Are you hurt?”

“My dignity is in critical condition, but the rest of me is intact.”

“I’m getting on the next flight. I’ll be there tonight.”

“You don’t have to do that. You’re always in the middle of something important, and I can’t keep pulling you back every time my life turns into a soap opera.”

“Stop talking.” It wasn’t harsh, just firm, the voice of someone who’d already made up his mind. “I’m coming home. You need me, and I’m coming home. That’s the end of the conversation.”

I closed my eyes, and the tears I’d been holding back finally broke free, hot and fast down my face. “Okay.”

“Keep your phone on. I’ll call when I land. And Eve?”

“Yeah?”

“Don’t do anything reckless while I’m in the air.”

“No promises.”

He hung up, probably already dialing the airport, already moving, already doing what he always did when my world cracked open. Devin showed up. He’d been showing up since we were teenagers. He held my hand at my mom’s funeral when I couldn’t feel my fingers. He stayed awake with me on the nights grief came back like a tide. He never asked for anything in return. He was my best friend. My gay best friend. The one person in the world who wanted nothing from me except my company and the occasional pastry when I stress-baked at two in the morning.

I’d been so certain of that for so long.

I sat on my couch in the quiet of my apartment and let myself cry for exactly two minutes. Then I wiped my face and stared at the city lights blinking on outside the window. I had thirty days to find a husband willing to marry into a family of vipers, thirty days to save my mother’s legacy from the people who’d spent two decades trying to steal it.

My mother hadn’t raised a woman who went down without a fight. She just hadn’t raised me long enough to finish the job. I would have to finish it myself. I stared at my phone and waited for it to ring again, already calculating my next move.

I could work with thirty days. The math was not promising but the alternative was letting Delphine win, and I would sooner walk into the ocean with rocks in my pockets than give her the satisfaction.