He Humiliated Me for His Ex,Now He's Begging Me to Stay

The night before we were supposed to register the marriage, there was a singles' party.

My fiancé had two drinks, then suddenly buried his face in his hands and broke down.

"I still can't forget her. What am I supposed to do?"

The girl he meant—I knew exactly who she was.

His ex-girlfriend. The one who'd stuck by him through three years of hardship when he was pretending to be poor.

The festive atmosphere in the room froze solid in an instant.

Everyone stared at me, squirming with secondhand embarrassment.

They expected me to do what I'd always done—grab him by the collar and smash a bottle over his head to snap him out of it.

But all I did was drain a bottle of wine.

Then I called the girl and told her to come pick him up.

My friends said I'd lost my mind.

I'd been crazy about this man for years, pining down to the marrow of my bones, and now that an old engagement was finally giving me my chance, I was throwing it away.

I didn't explain.

Instead, I found his mother, took the oversized check she owed me, and left without looking back.

What they didn't know was this:

My feelings for him had died the day his cover was blown—the day he destroyed my family's finances just to prove to that girl that his love was real.

The only reason I'd stayed was to hold up my end of the deal with his mother.

I was a decoy. A stand-in for the real bride his family had lined up through their alliance. A human shield, absorbing every round Victor Swanson fired in his war against the arranged marriage, against the expectations of marrying within his class.

Now their wedding date had arrived. My job was done.

——

When I walked back from making the call outside the private room, the sound of things shattering bled through the door, tangled with Victor's ragged, suffocated sobs.

I swallowed the bitterness rising in my throat and pushed the door open.

A bottle came hurtling past. It exploded against the doorframe, and a shard sliced across my forehead before I could flinch.

Something warm slid down from my brow.

Those striking eyes of his held a haze of liquor, but beneath it—far more than drunkenness—was a fury he was using the alcohol as an excuse to unleash. Fury and frustration, unchecked and vicious.

Eight years ago, at his coming-of-age party, he'd gotten drunk and punched a classmate who was pressuring me to drink and making crude jokes at my expense.

Now the person on the receiving end of that hateful glare was me.

I was used to it by now.

We'd grown up together for twelve years. He'd always known he was supposed to marry me. But after he took that bet with his friends—lived as a nobody, fell in love with the tough, kindhearted Alice Frost—and his mother used their family's expectations to force them apart, everything changed.

He was convinced I'd poisoned his mother's mind. That I was the reason he couldn't be with the woman he loved. His contempt for me turned savage.

Ruining my family wasn't enough to satisfy him. At every single step of the wedding preparations—dress fittings, guest lists—he found ways to humiliate me. Small things, like refusing to look at me. Big things, like showing up with a different woman on his arm and getting handsy with her right in front of everyone.

In the beginning, I screamed at him. Demanded to know why we couldn't just call off the engagement like civilized people and let me keep a shred of dignity. But eventually, I turned into something pathetic—a lovesick fool who'd do anything, no matter how degrading, just to beg for a sliver of his time.

The last straw was when I stood in a downpour to deliver condoms to him and whatever woman he'd brought around just to disgust me—all because I'd been trying to get him to show up for a wedding menu tasting.

Everyone assumed I was just hopelessly, helplessly in love with him.

The truth was different. The time before that, at the engagement ring fitting, he'd decided to humiliate me by turning my family's bankruptcy into a punchline—telling the whole room like it was a funny story, just to watch my face crumble. I snapped. I contacted the tabloids and leaked the story about how he'd hidden his identity and played with someone's feelings.

The fallout hit his family hard. Public backlash. Stock prices in free fall.

Christine, who'd been turning a blind eye to everything until then, called me with a warning: pull something like that again, and I could forget about the fifty million dollars we'd agreed on.

That was the moment I finally saw myself clearly.

I wasn't some important character holding a childhood-sweetheart script.

I was an NPC. The kind they could use as a punching bag, threaten, and discard the second I touched their bottom line.

Sentiment was the cheapest currency between us.

They all sucked in a breath.

Terrified I'd do what I always used to do—make a scene over a tiny scratch, blow it out of proportion, all just to make him glance my way.