I Left My CEO Husband. His Billionaire Enemy Found Me First.

The champagne was too sweet.

That was the first thing I remembered thinking, right before my world split open.

I'd been standing near the edge of the ballroom with a flute of Moët pressed to my lips, watching Liam work the room the way he always did—easy smile, easy charm, that particular brand of effortless magnetism that made you feel lucky just for knowing him. The Kingstons had rented out the entire rooftop of the Harlow Hotel for his twenty-third birthday. Crystal chandeliers. A live jazz quartet. Two hundred guests dressed like they were rehearsing for their own magazine spreads.

I wore midnight blue. Liam had picked it out.

Somebody dimmed the lights.

A cheer went up from the crowd—I assumed it was for the birthday toast, assumed the projection screen behind the makeshift stage was about to fill with some embarrassing childhood photo montage. Liam's mother had mentioned something like that earlier, laughing, squeezing my arm like we were already family.

The screen flickered.

And then every single person in that room was staring at my boyfriend's dick.

My champagne flute slipped.

I heard the crystal hit the marble before I felt my fingers go empty. The sound was sharp and clean and impossibly loud, but no one turned to look at me—they were all transfixed by the projection, the blue-white glow of it painting two hundred slack jaws in ghostly light. The moaning was quiet at first, almost buried under the jazz track that kept playing for four surreal seconds before someone killed it. Then the sound filled the whole room.

A girl's voice. Breathless. Familiar.

*Liam. Show me yours first.*

Mackenzie.

My best friend Mackenzie's voice, cooing up at him from somewhere off-screen, and the sound of it hit me somewhere below the sternum, something cold and blunt pressing straight through.

I didn't move. I couldn't. My heels were rooted to the floor and my nails were digging into my palm—half-moons forming, pressure building, the sting of it the only thing keeping me upright while two hundred people I'd smiled at all night turned to find me in the crowd with the specific, hungry curiosity of people watching a car accident.

I felt every single gaze like a physical weight.

Someone near the back laughed. Nervous, high-pitched. Then silence swallowed it whole.

Liam appeared at my side so fast he must have been watching me, not the screen.

His hand closed around my arm. Tight.

"It's old." His voice was low and controlled, the voice he used in boardroom simulations, in arguments he'd already decided he was going to win. "It's from before us. Sloane—"

"Don't." The word came out barely above a whisper.

"Look at me." He shifted his body to block the room from view, tipping my chin up with two fingers. His eyes—brown, warm, the eyes I'd spent a year believing in—searched my face with something that looked a lot like desperation. "Look at me. I said I'd delete everything. Don't you trust me?"