Sinful Ties: My Ex Husband, My Stepbrother

The envelope was the color of old money.

Cream. Thick. Heavy in a way that had nothing to do with weight and everything to do with intention. It sat on Ayra's welcome mat like a coiled snake, and she knew before she even bent to pick it up that her carefully rebuilt life was about to crumble.

Three years.

Three years of hiding in this modest apartment with its leaky faucet and thin walls. Three years of building a new name for herself, a new face, a new person entirely. The woman who married Damien Pierce died the night she signed those divorce papers.

She killed her herself.

She slid her finger under the seal and pulled out an invitation so ornate it belonged in a museum. Gold leaf. Hand-pressed lettering. Her mother's name entwined with a surname Ayra had spent thirty-six months trying to forget.

Margaret Ellison & Harold Pierce

Request the pleasure of your company at their engagement celebration.

The blood in her veins turned to ice water.

Pierce. Harold Pierce. Damien's father. The man who raised the monster she had barely escaped with her sanity intact.

Her hand trembled. The invitation fluttered to the floor, landing face-up like it wanted to mock her. She stared at it until the gold lettering blurred into a smear of accusation.

You thought you were free. You thought running far enough, changing your number, deleting your social media, moving to a city he never visited-you thought that would save you.

Fool.

She grabbed her phone. Her mother answered on the third ring, her voice light and breathless with the kind of happiness Ayra had not heard from her since her father walked out fifteen years ago.

Her mother gushed about the invitation, about the beautiful stationery Harold had insisted on, about the party she had been planning for weeks. Her voice floated through the speaker like honey, thick with a joy that made Ayra's chest ache.

Ayra cut her off. Her voice came out strangled. She told her mother to listen very carefully. She told her she could not marry this man.

The silence on the other end stretched for an eternity.

Then a small, confused laugh. Her mother asked if she was joking, said Ayra had not even met Harold yet. She called him wonderful, kind, gentle. She said he made her feel the way she had always deserved to feel.

Ayra closed her eyes and said the name she had trained herself to forget.

Damien.

She said Harold was Damien's father.

The silence that followed was the loudest thing Ayra had ever heard. She could picture her mother's face. The color draining. Her hand coming up to press against her chest the way she always did when the world shifted beneath her feet. Ayra hated herself for being the one to make that happen, but she hated the alternative more.

Her mother's voice cracked when she finally spoke. She said Ayra had divorced Damien three years ago. She said