Lahat ng Kabanata ng He Chose My Sister, So I Married His Enemy: Kabanata 21 - Kabanata 30

“You knew?” I asked.“Yes.” No hesitation. No denial. He let the word land exactly as hard as it needed to.My father was still on the line. “How did you know he knew?” I asked.“Ethan’s mother told me,” he said. “While she was persuading me to support the objection. She said Damien had been watching the whole thing, waiting for an opening.”“I will hear the truth from him,” I said, and hung up.I turned back to Damien. “How long?”“Several weeks before the party. I saw Ethan leaving a private dinner with Ava. I asked around afterward, quietly. The meetings had been going on for months.” He didn’t look away from me once. “I knew enough to believe there was an affair. I didn’t know he planned to announce her publicly that night.”I thought about choosing my gown that week, about every small, hopeful decision I’d made preparing for that party, believing Ethan would be standing beside me at the end of it.“You watched me walk into that room,” I said.“Yes.”“You knew enough to stop me fr

Silence settled over the room. Damien’s hand stayed exactly as it had been, neither tightening nor loosening around mine.“Are you going to deny it?” Ava asked.“No.”The word seemed to surprise everyone, including me. I did not claim the messages had been taken out of context or that Ava had changed the words. I had written every one of them.Ava looked down at the phone and continued. “I want Ethan to regret choosing her.” She scrolled before reading another. “I don’t care what Damien wants as long as Ethan sees me beside him.”I remembered writing those words while I was broken and furious, desperate for Ethan to feel even a small part of what he had made me feel. I would not excuse them now. They belonged to a version of me that no longer existed, but I was not going to pretend she had never been real.“She didn’t choose you,” Ava said to Damien. “She chose what you could do to Ethan.” Then she looked at me. “If Ethan had chosen her that night, she would never have looked at you t

Reporters kept shouting. One asked whether I had planned the transfer with Ethan, while another called me Ethan Cole’s abandoned fiancée.Damien started to move in front of me. I touched his arm.“Beside me. Not in front of me.”He stepped beside me without arguing.I faced the cameras directly. “I did not arrange the trust transfer. I receive no benefit from it, and Ethan has formally rejected any personal claim. I married Damien because I chose him.”“So you deny working with your former fiancé?” someone called out.“I am not working with Ethan,” I said. “I am married to Damien.”“Ms. Hart, can you respond to claims that Ethan Cole’s abandoned fiancée—”“Olivia Black,” I corrected.The reporter tried again but stumbled over my old name, as if it still belonged to me. Damien stepped forward only then.“My wife’s name is Olivia Black,” he said. “Use it.”No long speech. Just that.“Ethan made his choices,” I said before anyone could ask another question. “I made mine.”I was not going

Damien studied my face before touching me again. “Tell me if that changes.”“I will.”“Do you want me?” he asked.“Yes. Not because Ethan came here. Not because we are married.” I held his gaze. “Because I want you.”I kissed him again, and this time he let himself respond more fully, his hand settling at my waist, the quiet of the penthouse pressing in around us. My ring caught the light between us, and he said my name once, low, like it mattered more than it ever had before.“Wait,” I said, my nerves rising without warning.He stopped immediately. “I’m here.”I admitted I was afraid of disappointing him, that with Ethan I’d always felt I had to become whatever he expected before he could love me. I didn’t want tonight to be another test I had to pass.“There is no right way to be with me,” Damien said. “You are not being judged.”“Are you nervous too?” I asked.He tried to avoid it at first. I pressed gently, and he finally said, “Yes.” It surprised me. “I know what I want,” he said

Damien didn’t answer right away. He stood there with Claire’s words still hanging in the room, and for a moment I let myself believe he was actually considering it, that the safest path really did mean pretending none of this had ever become real.“You do not have to answer now,” his grandmother said gently.“Yes, I do.” He turned to me, not to her, not to Claire. “I will not protect this marriage by lying to my wife.”He said it plainly, the way he said most things, like the decision had already been made somewhere inside him before anyone asked the question out loud. Whatever official response they drafted could admit the truth. The marriage had begun as protection, strategy, something close to revenge on both our parts. He wasn’t going to dress that up as anything softer.“We did not marry for love,” he said. “That does not mean love was forbidden from finding us afterward.”He asked Claire and his grandmother to give us a moment. Claire left without protest, but his grandmother li