Chapter 2

In the past, our clashes had been confined to sharp tongue-lashings and sneering glares.

That was the first time she had ever laid a hand on me.

I stood frozen for a second before an overwhelming wave of humiliation and fury engulfed me.

She was nothing but an opportunistic parlor girl who had dragged her baggage into our household halfway through my life. If my own mother hadn't passed away, she never would have been worthy of stepping foot through our front door.

What right did she have to walk all over me?

So what if my father spoiled her rotten because she was his first love? So what if I had feelings for her son?!

With years of old resentment piling onto new hatred, I hurled the ledger to the floor and lunged into a violent scuffle with her.

"None of your damn business what I do! What right do you have to track every dime I spend?! Everything you eat, wear, and use comes straight from my father! You're just a useless trophy wife trapped in this house, so who are you to demand I pay you back?! I'm spending my own father's money, it has nothing to do with you!"

She was older, after all, and with a few desperate shoves, I pinned her against the wall. Her eyes were dripping with venom.

"You're the spawn of a homewrecker! You owe me!"

It was almost laughable. She had always firmly believed that whichever woman went unloved was the true mistress, convincing herself that my mother's arranged marriage to my father had destroyed her precious romance with him. That was why she spent every single day neurotically tracking my expenses, demanding I pay her back once I turned eighteen.

She was like an unhinged lunatic, so pathologically obsessed with my father that she took every ounce of it out on me.

Brainwashed and relentlessly pressured by her day in and day out, I had scrimped and saved every penny behind everyone's back, fueled entirely by the burning desire to take stacks of cold, hard cash on my eighteenth birthday and slap them right across her face.

I wanted to mock her, to tell her she was nothing more than a pathetic parasite who couldn't survive without a man, utterly inferior to my mother, and even more inferior to me.

I raised my hand, fully prepared to return the slap, when a drowsy, raspy voice behind me froze me in my tracks.

"Zoe? You're back? ...Mom? What are you two doing?"

My hand snapped back instantly.

When pushed to the brink, I could scream my lungs out at her, and when Ethan came to comfort me, I could complain endlessly about how cruel she was.

He would always listen to me vent, carving out a little pocket of sanctuary for me, occasionally shielding me from her blatant malice.

Yet I never dared to strike his mother in front of him. I was terrified of crossing his boundaries, terrified that he would come to loathe me.

If the only person in this family who actually cared about me abandoned me, I had no idea what I would do.

Lowering my head, all my fiery rage fizzled out in an instant.

Cautiously, I stole a glance at his face.

In the next second, I jolted awake from the dream.

I didn't open my eyes. The surroundings were dead silent—no early morning birds, no piercing sunlight filtering through my eyelids.

Only the rhythmic ticking of the clock and the steady sound of my own breathing.

Ethan wasn't in the room.

Having shared a bed with him for nearly a month, I knew he was an exceptionally light sleeper.

Seeing how exhausted he would get, I had once tried turning off the alarm and slipping out of bed without making a sound, yet he would always open his eyes the moment I shifted.

So why... why had he only conveniently woken up that day just as I was about to hit his mother?