The Billionaire Accidental Bride

chapter 7

**Natalie’s POV**

> *"Imagine what Gavin will do if he sees this."*

>

Ava’s lips barely brushed the curve of my ear, but her voice hit me with the force of an avalanche. Her breath felt like a trail of liquid ice scorching across my skin, poisoning the very air I relied on to stay grounded.

My whole body turned to lead, yet my heart felt hollowed out—emptied of hope, of blood, of courage. A wave of raw, gut-wrenching panic surged through my veins. Desperate to hide the glowing evidence of my ruin, I jammed the lock button on my phone with a sharp, frantic *click*. My limbs moved on pure terror as I staggered backward, putting as much physical space as possible between myself and the venomous woman standing in the center of the foyer.

"Don't," I choked out. The word tore from my throat, raw and fractured, a pathetic plea from a beggar standing on the executioner's block. My hands shook so violently that the heavy glass of the phone nearly slipped from my cold, clammy palm onto the marble floor below.

Ava’s lips curved higher, stretching into a slow, predatory grin that drank in my complete undoing. "Then give me a reason not to show him."

I stared at her, my vision blurring around the edges as my pulse thundered in my ears. My mind scrambled through the dark, spinning wildly in a desperate search for a lifeline—a lie, a bargain, a sudden miracle—anything that could halt the blade swinging toward my neck.

"What do you want?" I whispered, my voice trembling so hard I could barely articulate the words. I kept my chin down, terrified that a single loud note would bring Gavin rushing over to investigate the wreck of my composure.

"Nothing complicated." She flicked her dark, mascara-coated eyes sideways toward Gavin, who remained anchored on the far side of the hall. He was watching us like a hawk, his broad chest rising and falling slowly, his gaze heavy with an intense, suffocating suspicion. Ava looked back at me, her smile dropping into something sharp and merciless. "I want you to pack your things and leave him. Forever."

My heart gave one last violent slam against my ribs and then seemed to stop entirely.

"What?"

"You heard me, sweetheart," she purred, her tone smooth as silk and twice as deadly.

"No..." I shook my head frantically, my breath catching in ragged hitches as I tried to push her demands away. "No... you're insane. You can't do this."

"Maybe I am." Her gaze hardened into solid ice, the last remnants of her playful taunting vanishing to reveal a cold, sociopathic focus. "But I'm not the fraud sleeping in his bed. I'm not the coward lying to his face every morning while pretending to be his savior."

The blow hit me square in the chest, knocking what little air I had left straight out of my lungs. Before I could stitch my shattered thoughts together to form a defense, a deep, resonant voice shattered the silence.

"Natalie."

The sound of my name pulled the earth out from beneath my feet. I turned, my body rigid with dread.

Gavin stood just a few paces away now, his towering frame casting a long, intimidating shadow across the room. His jaw was set like granite, his dark eyes brooding and utterly unreadable. Yet beneath that stoic facade, the air around him hummed with a dangerous, volatile energy—a storm waiting for the single spark that would set it off.

"Why does it look like the two of you are fighting over something?" he demanded. His voice was low, carrying a quiet, dangerous authority that demanded absolute obedience.

I opened my mouth, but my throat was a desert. My heart hammered against my ribcage like a captive creature screaming to break free from its bone cage.

Before the silence could betray me, Ava transformed. In the span of a single heartbeat, the viper vanished. In her place stood a picture of radiant, effortless elegance—a woman completely at ease, exuding a polished, harmless charm.

"No, Gavin. Of course we aren't fighting," she lied smoothly. She took a slow, fluid step toward him, her heels clicking softly against the stone, claiming the space beside him as if she had done it a thousand times before. "I was just sharing a few memories with Natalie. Telling her a little story about you."

Gavin’s dark brows pulled together, a deep, sharp crease forming between his eyes. "About me?"

Ava stopped right at his side, her shoulder almost brushing his. Slowly, deliberately, she turned her head back toward me, pinning me with a look of absolute, sadistic triumph. She took a deep breath, letting the tension stretch until I thought my chest would physically burst, and then dropped the bomb.

"Yes. I was just catching her up on the past... telling her all about that unforgettable night you and I spent together."

The world didn't just stop—it shattered into a million jagged pieces.

The air turned to ash in my throat. I felt the floor tilt beneath me as the words hit me with the weight of a physical blow. *A night together.* The image burned behind my eyes, searing through my mind with a blinding, agonizing heat.

Gavin’s face darkened instantly, a flash of deep disturbance and rising anger rippling across his features. But before I could even begin to process the agonizing betrayal twisting through my gut, a sharp, cruel vibration exploded against my palm.

*Buzz. Buzz.*

My hands were shaking so hard I could barely raise the glowing screen to my eyes. Blurred by unshed tears of terror and humiliation, I forced my gaze to focus on the fresh notification burning through the dark glass:

> *You have 30 minutes to pack your bags and get out of his life, or I send him the video and tell him every single detail of what you did to him that night.*

>

The words burned into my retina like acid.

I slowly lifted my head, my eyes darting frantically from the invisible clock ticking down on my screen to Ava’s gloating, triumphant face, and finally to Gavin. He looked so close, yet infinitely out of reach—a man shrouded in secrets of his own, growing more distant with every passing second.

A agonizing realization clawed its way up my throat, suffocating me from the inside out: *How am I supposed to walk away and leave her with him?*

The sickening thought of them together—of her pulling him back into her web, of her holding his heart while I was cast out into the cold—tore my soul apart. It sparked a fierce, desperate wave of possessiveness and jealousy that I had no right to feel. I was a ghost in his life, an imposter who had traded her soul for a temporary place in his world. I was trapped in a cage woven from my own cowardice, bound hand and foot by my own lies, held hostage by a woman holding the detonator to my entire life.

Thirty minutes. The timer was bleeding out.

Thirty minutes to walk away from the man I was helplessly, foolishly falling in love with, or stay and watch the terrifying truth burn everything I cared about to the ground.