My Husband Gave My Wedding Ring To His Mistress (She Gets Revenge #18)

Prologue

The champagne is cold in my hand and the folder is like a bomb in my purse and somewhere in this room a woman I’ve never met is wearing my dead grandmother’s diamond.

I take a sip. The bubbles sting my tongue.

I swallow and my throat clicks—dry, tight, the muscles clenched all the way down into my chest. My fingers are wrapped so hard around the glass stem that the cut crystal is biting into my palm.

I loosen them. Tighten again. My body won’t listen to me.

Every muscle from my jaw to my knees is pulling taut and releasing and pulling taut again like something inside me is trying to shake itself loose.

String lights. Glass walls catching the last orange band of sunset.

Fifty, sixty people in cocktail attire, laughing, leaning into each other over high-top tables.

A jazz trio in the corner. Waiters circling with trays.

And this rooftop—this rooftop—the same table by the railing where Drew held my hand on our first anniversary and told me he couldn’t believe he got to keep me.

My back teeth grind together so hard the pressure shoots up through my temples.

I set the champagne down because my hand is trembling and if the glass breaks against my palm I will bleed all over this dress and that can’t happen.

There she is.

Dark hair over one shoulder. Champagne in one hand, the other resting on a friend’s arm. Laughing—head tipped back, throat exposed, the kind of laugh that comes from a woman who has no idea what’s coming.

And on her left ring finger, catching the string lights the way it used to catch the kitchen window light while I washed bottles at dawn—the diamond.

My grandmother’s diamond. The old European cut with the feather inclusion at four o’clock.

The Ceylon blue sapphire flanking it. The setting Francis’s father redesigned three times because the stones kept fighting each other.

My ring. On her hand. Throwing light across a party I wasn’t invited to.

My nails bite into my palms. The sting travels up my forearms and settles behind my sternum—this white-hot compression, this pressure cooker hiss in my chest that I’ve been carrying for weeks and I can feel the seal starting to give.

The maid of honor moves toward the front of the room. Glass raised. The toast is coming.

I unzip my coat and shift my bag, which holds the folder that will bring Drew’s world crashing down.

Then his laugh cuts through the noise. That laugh. I’d know it across a stadium. Low, easy, the one he uses when he’s charming a room. My stomach lurches—hot, sour, climbing the back of my throat.

Drew is at the bar. Blue sport coat, collar open, drink in his hand. The same jaw I used to trace with my finger. The same mouth that told me we’ll find it, babe night after night while my grandmother’s diamond sat on another woman’s hand.

His eyes sweep the room and land on me.

The laugh dies. His glass tilts. Champagne spills over his knuckles and he doesn’t notice because his face is doing something I’ve never seen—mouth still open, skin draining gray, eyes going wide and wild.

Good. There it is. That’s the face I came for.

He crosses the room fast. His hand closes around my elbow and his cologne hits me—the same cologne, the one I used to breathe in when I pressed my face into his neck—and my skin crawls. Every cell where his fingers are touching me is screaming to pull away.

“What are you doing here?”

I’m here for revenge.