My Husband and First Love Destroyed My Family, So I Destroyed Them

To please his precious moonlight, Selene Blanc, my fiancé Grayson Delgado publicly exposed the core jewelry design patents my mother had poured half her life into — right in the middle of our wedding.

Overnight, the jewelry brand my mother had built from nothing collapsed into bankruptcy. She couldn't withstand the devastating blow. A sudden heart attack took her from me forever.

I was drowning in despair, consumed by nothing but the need to destroy Grayson, when Samuel Rowe — the boy I'd grown up with, now the godfather of Sicily's jewelry empire — flew back from overseas with an army of men.

He mobilized his entire family's power to help me salvage what was left of the brand. He made me a solemn promise: he would find whoever was truly behind the patent leak and make them pay for what they'd done to my mother.

I believed him. After the only light in my world had been snuffed out, he became the last thing keeping me afloat.

After my mother's funeral, I tore up my engagement to Grayson with my own hands and married the man who had held me steady through my darkest hour.

Five years. More than eighteen hundred days and nights. He sheltered me under his wing, gave me the deepest tenderness and the safest harbor. I thought I had finally walked out of the darkness and into a new life. But one evening, five years later, at the end of a corridor in a private club, I overheard a conversation between Grayson and Samuel.

"Every time Lois Simmons sees me, she looks like she wants to tear me apart. She's so convinced I'm the one who destroyed her mother, destroyed everything she had."

"But tell me — if that stupid woman ever found out the person who actually leaked her mother's patents was the husband holding her in his arms every night, do you think she'd lose her mind on the spot?"

——

My hand froze an inch from the door handle. The blood in my veins turned to ice.

Grayson's mocking voice kept going, each word a poisoned blade driving straight into my skull:

"You're a real piece of work, Samuel. Lois treated you like her own brother when she was a kid. She trusted you with everything she had. She grew up and married you, gave you her whole heart. But she could never have imagined — not in her wildest nightmares — that the person who destroyed her mother's life's work, the person who drove her mother to her death, was you all along."

I clenched my fists so hard my nails cut into my palms. The pain was blinding, but it was nothing — not even a fraction — compared to the agony ripping through my chest. Inside the room, Grayson's voice rose again, dripping with insinuation:

"Think about it. This poor, clueless woman runs your household every day, helps you manage the jewelry business, gives you everything she's got. She'd hand you the whole world if she could. If she ever found out that you were the one who sold her mother's core patents to a competitor — that you personally drove her mother to her grave — do you think she'd skin you alive?"

"Shut your mouth."

Samuel's voice cut through like a blade of ice, low and tightly controlled, laced with barely restrained agitation.

"Oh, would you look at that. The great godfather of Sicily's jewelry world, playing the devoted saint." Grayson let out a scornful laugh. "Her mother treated you like her own son. And you repaid her by selling her out to keep Selene happy, to hand Selene the keys to the jewelry world's inner circle. You pushed that woman straight into her grave. How do you sleep at night?"

A bottle slammed against the table, the sharp crack of shattering glass cutting through the air. Samuel's voice came through the door, his teeth grinding around every syllable, raw with an obsessive edge:

"What I owe Lois and her mother — I'll never be able to repay it, not in this lifetime. Everything I did back then was to keep Selene safe, to help her gain a foothold in the industry. If you so much as touch a hair on her head, I will make you wish you were dead."

"Such devotion. Truly moving." Grayson's cold laughter was thick with contempt. "You'd rip your own heart out for Selene Blanc, but I doubt she'd spare a second glance at a businessman with blood on his hands. Why don't you just go home to your precious Lois? She thinks you're her salvation. She has no idea that you're the worst thing that ever happened to her."

The sound of a glass exploding against the wall was deafening, and it hammered straight into my heart.

I fought to control the violent trembling in my body and half-stumbled toward the rooftop bar. I grabbed a bottle of liquor, tilted my head back, and poured it down my throat. The burn seared through me, and tears streamed down my face as I choked. I never drank. Not a drop, not ever. But in that moment, all I wanted was to drown myself in alcohol until those words stopped echoing in my skull.

So the person who leaked my mother's patents was never Grayson.

It was Samuel. The man who had sworn to avenge my mother. The man who had promised to protect me for the rest of my life.

My mother's sudden death. The brand's catastrophic collapse. All the pain, all the despair — it had all been engineered by the man who slept beside me every night.

No wonder he could always pinpoint the exact solution to every crisis the brand faced. No wonder he knew my mother's patents inside and out. I had been naive enough to believe it was just his brilliance, his dedication.

It never occurred to me that the man who had shared my bed for five years, the man who had given me all my warmth and all my hope, was the very person who murdered my mother.

Five years of tenderness and care. Five years of safety and companionship. All of it was nothing but an elaborate lie he'd woven around me — a guilt-ridden act of atonement to quiet his own conscience.

How pathetic. How utterly absurd.

A tidal wave of hatred and despair surged through my chest, threatening to rip me apart from the inside.

With bloodshot eyes, I pulled out my phone and called his greatest rival — Joshua Cox. The one opponent Samuel could never beat. And as it happened, Joshua owed me a favor.

The moment I hung up, my fingers had barely grazed the glass again when a familiar figure wrapped around me from behind. Samuel, reeking of alcohol, buried his face in the curve of my neck. His warm breath spilled across my skin, and his voice was the same gentle murmur it always was:

"Lois... who were you calling? I've been looking everywhere for you. I missed you so much. Let's go home, okay?"

Every time he got drunk over the years, he would hold me just like this from behind, saying over and over that he missed me, that he loved me.

But now, his tenderness made my skin crawl. It cut straight to the bone.