Too Curvy To Be A Side Piece

Chapter 3

Isla's pov

“What the f**k is going on here?” The question ripped out of me the second I pushed the bedroom door wider.

My voice sounded strange even to my own ears. Rhys’s head turned and for one fragile second I thought I might see guilt, or at least shock. Instead his expression settled into something bored and faintly irritated, as if I were a fly that had wandered into the wrong room.

“Oh,” he said. “It’s the b***h again.”

He didn’t stop. He kept moving inside Talia, slow and deliberate thrusts that made the mattress creak and her breath catch. The wet sound of their bodies filled the space between us. Talia looked over her shoulder, dark hair stuck to her cheek, and the smile she gave me was almost lazy.

“Care to join the fun, Isla?” she moaned, voice thick and unashamed.

Something inside my chest recoiled so hard I felt nauseous. “You both are f*****g sick.”

Rhys’s hand tightened on her hip. He still didn’t bother looking at me for more than a second. “Get off my back. I already told you—our marriage was a dare. It didn’t mean s**t to me. So f**k off.”

The words landed like a final blow. Tears spilled down my face, hot and helpless, sliding over my chin and dripping onto the front of my dress.

He ignored them completely. He kept f*****g her as if I weren’t standing three feet away watching the man I had married for three years erase me in real time. Talia’s soft gasps rose and fell with every thrust.

I stood there longer than I should have, rooted to the carpet, unable to look away even though every second burned. My wedding ring felt like it was cutting into my finger. The image of them—his hands on her, her back arched, the way his face looked when he was close—burned itself behind my eyes so deeply I knew I would see it every time I closed them for the rest of my life.

Finally I turned.

I left the bedroom, left the apartment, left the building without looking back. My heart pounded against my ribs so hard it hurt to breathe.

My feet carried me forward, one numb step after another, past streetlights and closed shopfronts and the occasional late-night taxi that never slowed for me. It still felt like a dream—something too vicious and surreal to be real.

Part of me kept waiting to wake up in our small flat with Rhys’s arm around my waist and the whole night revealed as a nightmare.

That part of me was wrong.

I kept walking until my legs ached and my shoes rubbed blisters into the backs of my heels. At some point I raised a hand and managed to hail a black cab. The driver slowed, window rolling down, face expectant. I reached into my coat pocket for my wallet—

Nothing.

The pocket was empty. I checked the other side, then the small bag I had carried all evening.

It was gone.

The driver waited two seconds, muttered something under his breath, and sped off. The tires hit a puddle and sent a cold sheet of dirty water across my legs and the hem of my dress.

Rain began to fall almost immediately after.

It started as a fine mist that beaded on my hair and eyelashes, then thickened into steady, icy sheets that soaked through every layer I was wearing within minutes.

My dress clung to my soft, full body like a second, freezing skin, outlining every curve. My hair plastered itself to my face and neck and I kept walking.

I had nowhere else to go. Home was impossible—every corner of that flat still carried Rhys’s scent, Rhys’s lies, the ghost of every morning I had woken up believing we were building something real.

The rain washed the tears from my face and replaced them with colder ones. Hours blurred together, street after street. My toes went numb inside my ruined shoes. My fingers ached from the cold and every time I blinked I saw Rhys’s face above Talia.

I finally stopped in front of a small hotel with a faded sign and a single fluorescent light buzzing above the entrance.

It looked cheap. I pushed the door open and stepped into a lobby that smelled of old carpet and the faint damp of rain tracked in by other people. The clerk behind the desk glanced up, took in my dripping hair and ruined dress and the soft, plump shape of me shivering, and waited without comment.

“Give me your cheapest room,” I said. My voice came out thin and hoarse, like it belonged to someone who had been screaming for hours.

He hesitated, fingers hovering over the keyboard, then nodded once. “Hold on a second, ma’am.” He checked something on the screen, typed a few keys, and slid a key card across the counter.

I handed over the last crumpled notes I had found in the bottom of my other pocket—money I had forgotten was even there, leftover from a grocery run days ago.

He didn’t ask for identification, he just gave me the key and the room number.

“Room 214. Second floor.”

I took the key without another word and climbed the narrow stairs. The hallway was dim and quiet, the carpet worn thin in the middle from years of footsteps. I found the door, unlocked it with fingers that still shook, and stepped inside.

The room was small, one narrow bed with a thin mattress and a single window covered by a faded curtain.

I kicked off my wet shoes, peeled the soaked dress from my soft, curvy body, and let it drop in a heavy heap on the floor. I crawled onto the mattress in my damp underwear, the full weight of my plump figure settling into the thin mattress, pulled the thin, scratchy blanket over myself, and curled onto my side.

Sleep took me almost immediately. Exhaustion dragged me under like a riptide, but even in the dark my heart kept aching—a dull, constant throb that followed me into dreams filled with laughter and open bedroom doors and the sound of Rhys’s voice telling me I had never meant anything at all.

“Who the f**k are you?”

My eyes flew open. A man stood above the bed, a white towel wrapped low around his hips, water still beading on the broad planes of his bare chest and shoulders.

For a second his face was nothing but a blur of dark hair and sharp angles and cool, furious eyes. My head felt thick, my thoughts slow and sticky. The room still smelled faintly of rain.

“Am I in heaven?” I muttered, the words slipping out before I could stop them, half-delirious and completely unfiltered.

I tried to sit up too fast. My forehead collided hard with something solid—his collarbone, or the edge of his jaw. Pain flared white-hot across my skull. He cursed, one hand coming up to rub the spot where I had hit him. “f*****g hell—who are you?”

I scrambled backward on the bed until my spine hit the headboard, heart slamming against my ribs all over again. The blanket tangled around my soft legs. My damp hair stuck to my cheeks. “Who are you,” I demanded, voice shaking, “and what the f**k are you doing in my room?”

My vision cleared enough to take him in properly. Recognition hit a second later, cold and absolute and impossible.

The man standing in the middle of the shabby hotel room, half-naked and clearly furious, was Cassian Hale.

The richest man in the state.