My Husband Cheated With His Ex-Girlfriend (She Gets Revenge #14)

Prologue

The entrance doors swing wide and I know before I see her.

A shift in pressure rolls through the ballroom—a current reversing direction.

My champagne glass is halfway to my mouth and my hand stops because my body has already registered what my brain is still catching up to.

The string quartet keeps playing. Three hundred people in black tie keep talking.

And Annabelle Collier walks into the gala in an emerald dress that clings to the swell of her pregnant belly.

My husband’s baby.

The glass stem bites into my fingers. My vision tunnels until the ballroom is gone—the auction displays, the chandelier, the white-jacketed waiters—all of it sucked to the margins, and the only sharp thing left is Annabelle with her hand resting on her stomach like she’s cradling a trophy.

He knew. Clarence knew she was pregnant when he zipped my dress tonight.

When he pressed his hand flat against my back and steered me through the front door.

When he handed me champagne and smiled at his partners and introduced me as his wife—he knew that woman was carrying his child, and he brought me here anyway.

Not because he’s reckless. Because he looked at the woman who built his home and cooked his meals and ironed his napkins and decided she was too boring, too stable, to cause a problem.

My back teeth lock together so hard my jaw pops.

The rage isn’t building—it’s already built.

It’s been building since I found the texts on his iPad, since I read boring but stable and felt the floor dissolve under my feet, since I watched him flinch away from my hand at our own dinner table.

Weeks of swallowing it down. Weeks of smiling at contractors and filing paperwork and lying next to him in the dark with my fists clenched under the covers.

All of it stacked and compressed into a white-hot core behind my sternum, and now it’s detonating—a clean, silent explosion that leaves my hands steady and my vision razor-sharp.

Annabelle scans the room. Her eyes find me and the confidence drops off her face like a mask hitting the floor—color draining, lips parting, fingers tightening on her belly like I might cross the room and rip the future she stole right out of her hands.

Good. She should be scared. She read the texts where her boyfriend called his wife boring and she kept going.

She slept in hotel beds paid for with my money and she kept going.

She got pregnant by a married man and walked into this ballroom like consequences are for other people.

Clarence materializes at my shoulder with a second glass of champagne.

I watch his gaze land on Annabelle. On her belly.

The color falls out of his face and his mouth opens and for one beautiful, brutal second the mask cracks—the charming husband, the perfect host, the man who manages every room he walks into—all of it shattered by the collision of the two lives he thought he could keep apart.

My hand is steady. My breathing is even. My heart is hammering so hard I feel it in my teeth, and none of it shows on my face.

He called me boring. Stable. A floor he could stand on while he lived his real life with her. He looked right at me for seven years and never once considered that the woman holding everything together might be paying attention. Might be planning. Might be dangerous.

She took my husband. She can keep him—I don’t want him back. But she took him thinking there would be no cost, no fallout, no consequences. She was wrong. What I’m about to take from her will hurt worse than any man.

Clarence thought I was boring. Underestimating me was his fatal mistake.

What’s about to happen isn’t boring.