The Billionaire Heiress They Betrayed

Lydia Sinclair gasped, the air catching in her throat,her mouth left agape. Her balance went first. Her heels gave out, forcing her two jagged steps backward as the floor beneath her seemed to tilt. For a splitting second, gravity almost won. Her eyes darted wildly, trying to find an anchor in the room, but the scene unfolding before her was absolute,indisputable. Atrocious. Now, the pieces finally clicked. The sheer, irony of it. What a scumbag! To suspect her, hunting her down for the exact sin he was currently committing. Was everyone in his orbit just as barbaric? Did the whole world bend to the rules of his twisted, self-centered mind? Her thoughts didn't march; they blurred, into a roar of pain rising and falling indiscriminately against her mind.It was mercurial,a frantic mental scramble to process a sight her brain wanted to reject. The dazed paralysis only broke when her shoulder slammed into one of the standing bedroom pillars, the wood taking her weight before she could collapse. Suddenly,the cacophony stopped dead.The moaning sounds that had made her stomach turned and choked her with disgust vanished into a vacuum. Through the space, two pairs of eyes pierced straight through her. Henry and Natasha. Cuddled into one another, naked from head to toe, they simply stared at her in a paralyzed shock. After a few seconds of silence, Henry finally broke. He shoved himself away from the disheveled, wild-haired girl on the mattress, dragging a tangled tail of bedsheets along with him. Shit! His mind was visibly scrambling. How was Lydia here? The quiet stretching between them felt deafening.He began to close the distance, moving toward Lydia with a slow, practiced caution. He forced his trademark charming smile onto his face,but seasoned it with a pathetic, apologetic edge. He extended his hands forward, palms flat, gesturing smoothly as if trying to placate an unpredictable animal. "Honey, look at me," he pleaded, his hands waving in a bid to shield her line of sight from Natasha and gain her attention. Behind him, Natasha looked utterly hollowed out, terrified half to death. "Babe, it's not what you think. Trust me. I can explain. I swear to god, it’s not what it looks like" Seriously?! Did he honestly take her for a fool? The closer his feet slid across the floor, the more steps she took backward. Her heel caught,making her stumble a bit. Henry's foot tangled into the long velvet bedsheet that had slanty migrated to the floor,crumpled, and slightly damp with whatever their illicit filth had been. A wave of profound nausea hit her. The entire display was sickening, and the longer she stood there absorbing it, the more despicable the pair of them became. "Sis, please, I didn't mean..." Natasha’s voice died in her throat.A sudden flush of heat flooded her face, thick with a traces of embarrassment. It was something Lydia honestly never expected. So Natasha actually possesses a conscience? The thought was fleeting, the shame didn't last. "Wait! I'm not even the one to blame here!" Natasha snapped, her demeanor pivoting violently. "It's you. It's all your fault!" She spat the words out, her eyes bulging with a grotesque flood of righteous anger—a delusion so that seemed she had forgotten what she had just been caught doing. Lydia let out a hollow, dejected smirk. "Yeah. Of course it's me."She scoffed,the irony settling in her bones. She was the one. She was adamant convincing him—Perhaps Lydia was thinking back to the days of her illness,those long hours when she was struggling just to survive, dependent on her Lydia's fiancé to care for her day in and day out because he was a "professional." A professional? God, she had been an i***t. Stupid enough to believe these two actually possessed a single shred of benevolence between them. On the floor, the man scrambled to his feet. Henry crawled toward her, reaching out blindly, his hands seeking her ankles.Lydia didn't hesitate but forcefully kicked his miserable fingers off her legs, with a sharp and dismissive impact. Without a single glance backward, she tore herself away and stormed out of the suffocating room. Natasha in the room, looked like a literal ghost,her foundation completely ruined, eyeliner smudged into dark tracks, and her mouth smeared in a messy trail of crimson lipstick that only made her look more despicable. "Why are you staring at me?!" Henry snapped from the floor. He scrambled his way up, his eyes cutting toward the bare lady on the bed who was frantically covering herself with her hands."I thought you had her under control!" she shrieked back, her face flushing ,a furious red. "So what? Are you trying to blame me for this?!" Natasha's gaze practically screamed the line"you should have been careful" without her having to say them out. "Hey! Look at me. It's me and you in this, get that through your thick skull!" Lydia, on the other hand, was already flying down the stairs. She was moving in a hurry, the frantic click-clack of her heels hitting the steps while the train of her long black dress dragged roughly behind her. The weight of what she had just witnessed pressed down on her chest. It was unbelievable. Was this truly her reward for being a devoted girlfriend? Had she really wasted over a decade of her life on an absolute bum, only for her pesky, so-called 'sister' to turn traitor? Well, she had always known Natasha was no saint. The girl was a walking red flag, defined by a terrible attitude and a toxic, arrogant personality,but Lydia had never, in her thoughts expected her to stoop this low. Distracted by the blinding fury, Lydia’s footing failed.Suddenly, she felt herself going down. Her heel slipped on the edge of a step, her balance shattering completely as she plunged forward into the empty air of the stairwell. She braced for impact, but instead of hitting hard wood, she slammed directly into a body. Just in time, two strong hands locked around her waist with a grip that was firm and unyielding, effortlessly saving her from what would have been a tragedy at the bottom of the stairs. Breathing unevenly, Lydia looked up to examine the features of the man holding her. It was Adrian. Henry’s older brother, and the true, undisputed heir of the Harold house. He stared down at her, his dark gaze sweeping over her face with unblinking curiosity. Even in the middle of her breakdown, Lydia’s striking beauty was undeniable with her full curves, green almond eyes, and flushed pink lips made the term 'goddess' feel less like an exaggeration and more like a simple fact. But Adrian’s presence was just as arresting. He was in his early thirties, radiating a sharp, masculinity and an overwhelming aura , undiminished and commanding . For a second, the house went still. His grip wa still steady around her waist. Then, out of the blue, Lydia parted her lips and whispered two words that threw the powerful heir off balance. "Marry me."