Chapter 4
Charlotte stared at Elias, a bitter smile playing at her lips while something ice–cold settled in her chest. The sheer audacity of his request left her momentarily speechless.
“Are you kidding me right now?” Her voice came out quiet, almost hollow. “I’m not your lovesick puppy anymore, Elias. You don’t have to keep finding creative new ways to break
me.”
She walked out before he could respond, her back straight despite the trembling in her hands. Behind her, Elias stood frozen, genuinely blindsided by both her words and the unfamiliar emptiness in her eyes.
Charlotte took an Uber to campus, desperate to finalize her Peace Corps paperwork and escape this nightmare. As she left the international programs office, the atmosphere around her shifted. Heads turned. Whispers followed. Some people didn’t even bother to lower
their voices as she passed.
“Guess the rich really do play by different rules,” someone said loudly.
“Always the quiet, bookish ones who are freaks behind closed doors,” another voice added.
“I’m totally calling my next romance novel ‘The Billionaire’s Plaything,” a girl announced to her laughing friends.
Before Charlotte could process what was happening, her roommate came sprinting across the quad, face flushed with panic.
“Charlotte! Oh my God–your phone–check Twitter now!”
With a growing sense of dread, Charlotte pulled out her phone. There it was, trending nationwide: “Delaney Heir’s Forbidden Romance Exposed.”
Her fingers felt numb as she clicked the link. A video appeared–faces partially blurred but still recognizable–depicting her and Elias in an explicit encounter. Her stomach lurched
violently.
“This is completely fake,” she whispered, rage and humiliation burning behind her eyes.
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The Moment I Let Go My Uncle: Escaping the Forbidden Past
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Chapter 4
“This never happened!”
“I know that,” her roommate said fiercely, gripping her arm. “This has calculated attack written all over it. You need to find whoever did this and destroy them!”
Charlotte immediately headed back to the mansion, her mind racing. She needed to talk to Elias–surely he would help fight this together, regardless of their personal issues. As she rushed up the front steps, she found him waiting at the top of the grand staircase, his face contorted with disgust and fury.
“So this is what ‘not interested anymore‘ looks like?” he snarled, his voice vibrating with barely controlled rage. “You’d really go this far? Faking a sex tape to force my hand before
my wedding?”
The accusation hit Charlotte like a physical blow. “You think I did this?” she whispered, the betrayal cutting so deep she could barely breathe.
Elias mistook her shock for guilt. A cruel smile twisted his lips as he stepped closer, towering over her.
“If you think this pathetic stunt will force me to marry you, you’ve seriously miscalculated,”
he said, each word precise and venomous. “I will never–do you understand me?-never
marry anyone but Scarlett. Not in this lifetime or any other.”
As he finished speaking, Charlotte realized Scarlett had appeared behind him, her face a perfect mask of wounded innocence that didn’t reach her calculating eyes.
“Oh, Charlotte,” Scarlett said, her voice dripping with false sympathy as she descended the stairs. “A woman should have some dignity. This desperate attention–seeking is just… honestly, it’s embarrassing to watch.”
Charlotte opened her mouth to defend herself, but before she could speak, Scarlett moved with surprising speed–subtly but forcefully shoving her backward toward the steep marble staircase with its fifty–foot drop.
In the same fluid motion, Scarlett twisted her ankle and fell forward with an Oscar–worthy
cry of pain.
Elias reacted on pure instinct, lunging to catch Scarlett without a moment’s hesitation or thought for anyone else.
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It was only after he heard the sickening series of thuds behind him that he remembered
Charlotte existed.
Charlotte curled into herself at the bottom of the stairs, biting her knee to keep from screaming as tears streamed silently down her face. The pain was everywhere, white–hot and blinding, radiating through her body in waves that threatened to pull her under.
Elias’s face drained of color as he raced down the stairs. “Charlotte! Jesus Christ–are you okay?” For the first time in years, genuine fear for her flashed across his face.
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