Chapter 3: The Discovery

The key slid in the lock with the soft click it had done a thousand times before, but the rest of the world was wrong.

It was 2:47 p.m. on a Tuesday. She was not supposed to be here — not when she should be at her dress fitting, standing straight and stiff as a board on a pedestal, while Elena’s seamstress ran pins and hands through fabric. But the seamstress had called at the last minute to cancel, and Anya had decided to surprise Marcus with a lunch date.

She had a heavy paper bag full of handmade pasta, his favorite, and a bottle of champagne under her arm. A romantic gesture, she reminded herself. An olive branch.

But the moment she pushed open the door, she knew.

The apartment didn’t feel empty, but it didn’t feel right. Too quiet. Too still. As if it were holding its breath.

She heard music then. Soft, bluesy, sultry music. Music Marcus never played when he worked — he liked to work in silence, or, on rare occasion, classical to keep his mind sharp. But this…

“Marcus?” she called, dropping the bag on the counter. “I made us lunch!”

There was no response. But up the stairs, floorboards creaked, fabric rustled. And voices.

Plural.

Her breath caught in her throat. Clients, she told herself. Phone call. Maybe an emergency.

Then the laugh.

A low, throaty laugh Anya had known since she was a child, the laugh that had sung along with her on birthdays, whispered in dark hours that shared private jokes she was the only one who understood.

Elena’s laugh.

The bag fell from her hands, and pasta slid across the tile with a wet slap. The silence in the house was absolute. The music cut. The voices stopped. The entire house seemed to pause with her.

And then she was moving. Her legs carried her up the stairs one slow step at a time without conscious thought. It was like moving underwater, her body stiff, rebelling against her every step. But she could not stop. She would not stop.

The bedroom door was half open. Sunlight spilled through the crack and across the bed, falling over tangled sheets and —

Elena.

Marcus lay naked in the afternoon sunlight, haloed in a false god's sheen. His hands tangled in the honeyed tresses Anya had known all her life, Elena’s manicured tiara, first a little-girl vanity, now a blade. His lips brushed reverent trails on her skin, eyes swollen with rapture, as if desecrating Anya’s future were an act of worship.

Elena, beautiful even as a traitor, beneath him, hand clutching a silk pillow, her wedding ring a sharp glint against her pale skin.

The world held its breath, for a heartbeat, three. Elena’s eyes fluttered open, cheeks flushed with satisfaction. Marcus, mid-motion, still, his hand coming away slick from where he had touched Elena. And Anya, hands clenched at her sides, rage and betrayal and shame burning hot in her veins.

“Anya!” Marcus scrambled for the sheet to tuck around his waist. “You’re not supposed to be—”

“How long?” The words slid over her tongue like razors. “How long has it been?”

Elena’s eyelids fluttered closed, and she sat up slowly, not bothering to cover herself. Her blue eyes were lit with an all-consuming fire, a hunger not for pleasure, but for victory. “Six months,” she said easily, voice smooth. “Seven, if I’m being generous. I lost track.”

“Seven,” Marcus said, his voice soft, and his face ashen.

Seven months. Seven months while she chose flowers and bubbled champagne and made plans to thank God for her fortune, they had been here. Laughing. Touching. Building something without her.

“You were never enough for him, little sister,” Elena said softly, almost fondly. “You’re too fragile for this world. Too weak for a man like Marcus.”

“Stop,” Marcus snapped, but Elena ignored him, her smile widening. “I warned you, didn’t I? I tried to protect you, but you just kept asking questions.”

Protect me? Anya’s blood was a fire in her ears. Her own sister had gaslit her, mocked her insecurities, all while taking what was rightfully hers.

“You’re my sister,” she said, quiet but fierce. Her voice broke. “You were supposed to love me.”

“I do,” Elena said, voice like silk between clenched teeth. “But this is better for you. You’ll find someone more… appropriate. Someone who doesn’t need a real partner.”

“Stop talking,” Anya said, the words louder than she had intended, reverberating through her body.

Elena blinked. Sweet, yielding Anya did not raise her voice.

“You fucked my fiancé in my bed,” Anya spat, and then her own fury was spilling out in a flood.

“For seven months. And I’m the vulgar one?”

Marcus pulled the sheet taut across his waist, and the lawyer who had always smoothed over every word he spoke was gone. “Anya, let’s talk about this, please—“

“Talk?” Her laugh was bitter and brittle. “Adults don’t sneak around. Adults don’t lie. Adults don’t make fun of the people they supposedly love. You don’t get to tell me you love me.”

She looked at them both — the sister who had taken her future and the man who had shattered her trust — and she felt something break inside her. Something brittle inside her spine snapped, and in its place, she felt iron.

“The engagement party is in two weeks,” she said, voice deceptively calm.

Marcus frowned. “Anya—“

“The party is in two weeks,” she repeated, holding his gaze. “All the families will be there. All of Alexei’s men. Everyone whose opinion means anything in this world.”

Fear flickered across Elena’s perfect face for the first time.

“You can’t,” she said. “Think about what this would mean to him—“

“I can,” Anya said, and for the first time in her life, she smiled as if wearing the first real mask she had ever donned. “And I will.”

She turned and walked away, past Elena’s rising panic, past Marcus’s frantic whispers, into the blinding sunlight of the street, and for the first time in her life, Anya felt tall.

They had underestimated her.

They would not make that mistake again.