The morning after feels like waking up dead. I sit at the breakfast table mechanically buttering toast I won't eat. The knife scraping against bread with the same rhythm as my thoughts:
He fucked her, he fucked her, he fucked her.
The family tableau appears deceptively normal.
Father reads merger documents over his espresso, occasionally marking margins with his Mont Blanc. Patricia scrolls through her phone, double-tapping photos of people she secretly hates.
The grandfather clock ticks. The coffee steams. Everything precisely as it should be.
Except for the bruise on my heart shaped like betrayal.
I didn't sleep. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw them—Aaron's face twisted in pleasure, Kaia's legs wrapped around him, her triumphant smile as she looked at me over his shoulder.
The sounds… God, the sounds will haunt me forever.
Kaia enters twenty minutes late, and my stomach turns to acid. She's wearing a La Perla negligee that barely qualifies as clothing, black silk against golden skin. Her lips are still swollen, bee-stung from activities I witnessed firsthand.
Hickeys bloom along her collarbone like violet accusations.
She doesn't look ashamed. She looks victorious.
"What a party that was last night." She slides into her chair with feline grace, deliberately stretching so the silk rides higher. "The Morettis stayed until three. The champagne bill must be astronomical."
She picks up a strawberry, examining it before sliding it between her lips with pornographic precision. Her tongue catches the juice, and her eyes—those same green eyes we inherited from our mother—lock on mine with amusement.
"Can't wait for the wedding." Her voice drips honey laced with cyanide. "Can't wait to stand beside you in that backless Versace as your maid of honor. You know, the one that makes your spine look so elegant."
The knife in my hand stills. Patricia glances up with mild interest, the way she might notice a bird hitting the window—momentarily curious, ultimately indifferent. Father doesn't even pause in his reading.
"Speaking of the wedding," Kaia continues, reaching for another strawberry, "Aaron mentioned the funniest thing yesterday. You two haven't even... consummated yet."
She pauses, letting the word hang in the air like rotting fruit. "Still saving yourself for marriage? How quaint. How very 1950s Virgin Mary of you, sister."
The breakfast table explodes when my palms slam down hard enough to make the china jump.
Coffee tsunamiing across Father's documents. The Waterford crystal trembles and even Patricia's phone clatters to the marble.
"I found them fucking in the wine cellar last night." My voice comes out deadly quiet but carries like a gunshot. "Aaron and your whore daughter. Against the '82 Bordeaux you've been saving for my wedding."
Father's eyes snap up, but the irritation flashing across his features isn't about the revelation—it's about his ruined paperwork. He sets down his glass of water with the deliberate calm of a man deciding whether to use a knife or a gun.
"Esther, control yourself. We're eating."
"Control myself?" My laugh could shatter windows. "I just told you my sister is fucking my fiancé at my engagement party, and you're worried about breakfast etiquette?"
"Language," Patricia murmurs.
"Call off the wedding. Now." I'm standing, though I don't remember rising. "I won't marry a man who—"
Kaia's laughter cuts through my words like crystal breaking.
She doesn't flinch, doesn't attempt denial, doesn't even have the decency to pretend shame. Instead, she leans back in her chair with the confidence of someone holding a royal flush.
"Finally grew a spine? How refreshing." She examines her manicure, blood-red nails gleaming. "Yes, I've been fucking your fiancé. For months now, actually."
The room tilts. Three months. Not a moment of weakness, not a drunken mistake.
Three months of deliberate betrayal.
"Every Tuesday when you think he's at his poker game with the guys?" She smiles, sweet as arsenic. "He's at my apartment. We have this thing where he calls me from the car beforehand, tells me exactly what he's going to do to me. It's really hot."
My vision tunnels. The edges go dark.
"Those weekend business trips to Miami to check on operations? We never left the city. Just holed up in hotels, fucking like rabbits. That hotel charge you questioned last month? He likes the mirrors on the ceiling. Likes watching me ride him from every angle."
I wait for the explosion. Father's legendary temper that once left a man's hand nailed to a table for skimming profits. The violence that follows betrayal in our world. Instead, he merely sighs like a man confronted with a minor shipping delay.
He dabs coffee from his documents with his napkin, movements precise and economical.
"And," Kaia continues, placing a hand on her flat stomach with theatrical timing, "I'm pregnant. Twelve weeks. Dr. Morrison confirmed it last week."
The grandfather clock keeps ticking but I can't hear it over the roar in my ears when I can feel the world stops.
Her smile is pure venom. "Aaron's thrilled, by the way. Already talking about names. He likes Vincent for a boy. After Daddy."
I turn to my father, expecting fury, demanding justice. Waiting for him to defend his eldest daughter's honor the way the old stories say men used to.
"Well." Vincent Castellano sets down his napkin with finality. "This changes things."
"Changes things?" My voice cracks. "She just admitted to—"
"I heard what she admitted to." His tone could freeze blood. "Kaia will marry Aaron. A rushed ceremony before she starts showing. We'll claim the baby arrived early—no one will dare question it."
"And me?"
Though I already know. The acid in my stomach already knows.
"You'll take Kaia's place as the Greyhaven bride." He returns to his documents as if he hasn't just sold me like cattle. "The contracts are signed. The alliance is necessary. Cassian Greyhaven expects a Castellano bride in four weeks, and he'll have one."
"No." The word tears from my throat. "Absolutely not. I won't—"
"You will." Father doesn't even look up. "Unless you have your own money hidden somewhere? Your own connections outside this family? Somewhere to run where the Castellano name doesn't reach?"
My silence is answer enough.
"Cassian Greyhaven killed his own father with his bare hands," I whisper. "They say he keeps a room in his house just for—"
"Rumors." Father waves them away like smoke. "Cassian Greyhaven is a businessman. You'll be a business arrangement. Adapt."
"You want me to be a whore?" My voice is deadly calm now. "Sold to the highest bidder to clean up Kaia's mess?"
"I want you to be smart." He straightens his cufflinks, the gesture that always precedes violence. "You're a Castellano. Act like one."
Patricia finally speaks, voice bright with false cheer. "Think of it as an opportunity, darling. The Greyhaven fortune is three times ours. You'll have houses in the Hamptons, Milan, Dubai—"
"I'll have a monster who murders people for sport!"
Kaia bites into another strawberry, satisfaction radiating from every pore. "Don't look so devastated, sister. I'm doing you a favor. Aaron was never going to be faithful to someone so... frigid."
She stands, silk sliding over skin, moving close enough that I smell Aaron on her. His cologne, his sweat, his betrayal.
"At least with Greyhaven, you'll learn what real men are like." Her whisper is intimate, poisonous. "If you survive… ‘the education’, of course."
She saunters out, humming the wedding march. Patricia follows, already on her phone spinning the narrative. Father returns to his documents, the discussion concluded in his mind.
I sit alone at the breakfast table, surrounded by cold coffee and casual cruelty, sold to a monster to pay for my sister's sins.
The toast is burned. The butter has congealed.
And somewhere in this city, Cassian Greyhaven is preparing to collect what my father just promised him.
Me.