After Exposing My Husband’s "Loving" Facade, I Lost All Restraint Chapter 2

That night, I locked myself in the guest room.

Sleep wouldn't come. My mind was a whirlwind of the past.

Three years ago, before the Preston family’s ruin.

Joey Preston was known as the darling of Veridia City.

He brought me breakfast every morning.

He would brew me ginger tea when I had my period, holding my hands and whispering, "Seraphina, the day I graduate, I'm going to make you my wife."

Back then, Silas Blackwood was the monster no one dared to cross.

He was the Blackwood family's illegitimate son, raised abroad, a dark secret.

When he returned, he carried an air of brutal intensity.

I first met him at a Preston family gala.

He beat a trust-fund brat who was harassing me half to death, then strode over to me, looking down his nose at me.

"Seraphina Meng," he'd said, his voice laced with contempt. "Joey Preston can't protect you. You'd be better off with me."

I despised him then. I saw him as a brute who solved every problem with his fists. Until the Prestons fell.

Joey’s father was investigated for embezzlement, and their empire collapsed overnight.

Looking back, the "evidence" was almost laughably obvious. The signature on the ledger was a clumsy scrawl, nothing like the elder Mr. Preston's elegant script. But I was blinded by grief and chaos, desperate to salvage what little was left of their family. I never stopped to question the convenient timing or the glaring inconsistencies.

It never occurred to me that Joey's family had been framed.

And that was when Silas started circling me, relentlessly, telling me to forget Joey, to marry him instead.

But I was devoted to Joey.

Watching him fall from grace into ruin broke my heart.

I begged my grandfather to have the Sterling family step in, to offer him a lifeline.

He knelt before me, his forehead pressed to the toe of my shoe, his voice thick with emotion.

"Seraphina, thank you. I'll never forget this. I'll protect you for the rest of my life."

And I believed him.

I never imagined that he would immediately turn around and fall into bed with my cousin, Maya.

I was overseas for a business deal when I discovered their affair.

It was a video. Joey was holding Maya, their faces close, about to kiss.

"Once I get the Sterling data," Joey was saying, "I'll ditch that fool Seraphina. Then we can finally be together, out in the open."

Maya smiled and kissed him.

"Don't go soft on me, Joey," she purred. "That bitch should have been dead years ago."

In that moment, I was consumed by a tidal wave of betrayal and rage.

I booked the first flight back, planning to confront him at the altar.

If it was true, I would kill him with my own hands.

But Silas beat me to it.

He hung Joey's head from the cathedral spire.

Then he came to me, his voice as gentle as if he were soothing a child.

"Seraphina, a traitor like that doesn't deserve you."

I thought then that he and I were the same.

We were both monsters. We both had no tolerance for betrayal.

Now, I see how catastrophically wrong I was.

Joey's affair had driven me mad with rage, and I had blindly accepted the "evidence" Silas and others had fed me.

Only now do I realize it. The affair, the evidence, the seduction...

It was all a meticulously crafted trap, set by Silas and Maya.

Thinking back, Silas’s intentions were never pure. He didn't want me; he wanted the Sterling family's resources and influence.

And Maya... she had been jealous of me her whole life.

She always whined about how unfair it was that I was born the Sterling heiress, that everyone seemed to love me so effortlessly.

Seducing Joey wasn't just about hurting me.

It was about using him to get her hands on Sterling Corp's core data.

To help Silas seize control of my family's empire even faster.

They were in it together from the start.

A perfectly orchestrated performance, slowly devouring the foundations of the Sterling legacy.

He took personal control of our most important projects. He replaced the heads of our core departments with his own people. Even my personal assistant became his spy.

I was a figurehead, a puppet queen in my own kingdom, about to lose any real power I had left.

The more I thought about it, the more the hatred burned. Hatred for my own stupidity, for being deceived by his charade for so long.

But there was no turning back. Maya and Silas... they would pay for what they had done.