Everyone said it.
The best twisted roleplay game in all of Riverton was run out of the Delgado mansion.
All because Victor Delgado, the family's second son, had a rather unique way of blowing off steam: acting out elaborate scripts with a rotating cast of women.
A few days ago, it had been a rich young playboy rescuing a down-on-her-luck nightclub girl.
Before that, the brooding genius and the sweet, impoverished wallflower in a tale of mutual salvation.
Now Victor had a new obsession.
He'd developed a taste for the taboo.
He'd actually made his kept woman play the role of "little stepmother."
And me, his fiancée? I was expected to treat her like she was truly my mother-in-law.
"When you serve her tea, you kneel properly. When you greet her, your face shows respect. Whatever she says, you listen."
Everyone assumed I'd tear into him the way I always had, calling him out for being a degenerate waste of space.
But this time?
I just lowered my head and answered, softly, "Alright."
Victor had been riding that high for days, convinced he'd finally broken me.
What he didn't know was that his eldest brother, the one who'd been overseas for years, the one he'd never even met, was coming home next month.
And everyone in the Delgado household already understood, without a word needing to be spoken:
Victor was unfit. He didn't deserve to marry me.
The day the Delgado heir walked through that door, I would become his sister-in-law no longer. I'd be his wife.
……
"Lorraine Winfield, if you'd just behaved from the start, I might've been generous enough to let you play a lead role."
The man in front of me sat with one leg crossed over the other, basking in his supposed victory over me.
I couldn't help the mocking curve that tugged at the corner of my lips. The sarcastic retort made it all the way to the tip of my tongue before I swallowed it back down.
Laurel Delgado had been right.
Victor was erratic, unpredictable. He never played by the rules.
Now wasn't the time to show my hand.
"When I said 'alright,' I meant you're free to play whatever games you want with Fern James. I never said I'd join your little game of house."
I turned on my heel to leave.
Behind me, the man snapped his fingers.
Two hulking bodyguards in black materialized in front of me, blocking my path without a word.
"The game's started. I haven't said it's over. Nobody leaves."
Victor exhaled a lazy plume of smoke, watching me through the haze, his eyes glinting with the kind of amusement a person reserved for something beneath them.
"Now go wake Fern up and help her get dressed."
I looked up at him, my face utterly blank.
"Why should I."
That expression set him off again.
The smile drained from Victor's face. He closed the distance between us in three strides and seized my chin, his grip vicious enough to bruise.
"You know what I hate most? That look on your face."
"You're nothing but an orphan living under the Delgado roof, and yet you always look at me, the Delgado heir, like I'm something stuck to the bottom of your shoe. Lorraine, you really don't know your place."
I let out a cold scoff but said nothing.
One expression. That was all it took to shatter his composure.
If this was how he reacted now, imagine the day he found out the truth.
That I might be an orphan, but I was an orphan sitting on an inheritance worth over ten billion dollars.
And that he was no longer the Delgado heir.
The look on his face then would be far more entertaining.
"Maybe if you stopped doing things worth looking down on, I wouldn't have to look at you this way."
Victor's breathing grew heavier.
He grabbed my wrist instead, squeezing with enough force to grind bone, and dragged me toward the stairs without another word.
"Mom and Dad are out of the country. Nobody's here to protect you now."
"This little script of mine? It's designed to grind you down. Lorraine, by the time I'm done, you'll be on your hands and knees begging me like a dog."
Upstairs in the master bedroom, Fern James was already awake.
She slid barefoot out of bed and scampered across the room, throwing herself into Victor's arms.
