Ficorpio
Chapter 1
I had been with Adrian Sterling for three years.
Because of the damage I carried inside me, I had never been able to tell him I hadn’t been untouched when we met.
Then came our wedding night, and he found out.
Adrian still went through with that night. But at the very last moment, he released me, and his voice drifted beside my ear, calm and almost careless.
“Liar.”
After that, he never shared a bed with me again.
Instead, he found his comfort everywhere else.
On our third wedding anniversary, I pushed open the front door and walked straight into the sight of him and his mistress tangled together in our marriage bed.
Adrian lazily pulled on his robe. His gaze swept over me where I stood frozen in the doorway.
“Now I’m not exactly untouched either, Nora,” he said. “I suppose that makes us even.”
I looked at him. Then at the rose petals scattered across the floor. Then at the wedding portrait from three years ago.
Suddenly, all of it seemed unbearably ridiculous.
“Let’s divorce, Adrian Sterling.”
The wedding portrait on the nightstand had two blurred handprints on the glass.
One on the left, one on the right.
They covered both our faces.
Anyone could have guessed, with a single glance, how heated things in this room had been only moments before.
“What is it this time?”
His amused voice brushed my ear, indifferent as ever.
I drew in a slow breath. “I’ve already had my lawyer draft the agreement.”
Before Adrian could answer, the woman draped over him like a snake let out a soft laugh.
“Miss Bennett, you’ve known all along, haven’t you?” Vanessa Sinclair said sweetly. “Adrian doesn’t despise you. He’s just a little particular about cleanliness, that’s all.”
She thought I was asking for a divorce because Adrian had never slept beside me again.
I frowned and was about to correct her.
“Nora.”
Adrian paused. Then he spoke with open contempt.
“She’s right. You know how I am. I’ve always had a thing about cleanliness. I don’t like other people touching what belongs to me.” His eyes lowered, cold and cutting. “That includes people.”
His words were like a blade, slicing again and again into the softest part of my heart.
I knew he had never let go of the fact that I hadn’t come to him as some pure, untouched bride.
The way Adrian treated me, the way he looked at me, had never returned to what it once was. The eyes that had once been full of love now held nothing but contempt and casual disdain.
I knew I had hidden the truth. I had wanted to explain.
But no matter what I said, he remained distant and composed. In his eyes, I had lied to him. That was an unshakable fact.
Only after I had talked myself hoarse would he toss out one mild sentence.
“Can a liar be believed twice?”
So many times, I had wanted to tell him everything.
I hadn’t meant to hide it from him. I had only been ten years old when it happened.
Chapter 2
What happened back then left a scar in me that would never fully fade. I couldn’t open my mouth and describe it to someone else all over again.
I couldn’t bring myself to tear open the ugliest wound I had and show it to the man I loved.
So I hid it.
And he didn’t believe me.
From his place far above me, he had looked down and sneered.
“To cover up your own lack of self-respect, you’ll even invent a story like that?”
“Nora Bennett, it seems you didn’t only lie to me. Maybe the Nora I knew before was an act too.”
Remembering those words now, I looked at the two of them, at the intimacy still clinging to the room.
My heart didn’t even stir.
There was only one thought left.
Divorce.
“So let’s end this cleanly,” I said.
Even then, Adrian didn’t believe I meant it.
He didn’t bother lifting his eyelids. His voice carried the same familiar contempt.
“Nora, you lied to me, and now you want to move on and lie to someone else? Your ambitions really are endless.”
I didn’t answer.
I simply stood in the doorway and waited until Vanessa finally got up and left.
Only then did Adrian come to stand before me. He caught my chin between his fingers, rubbing lightly as if examining something he owned.
“Nora Bennett,” he murmured, “this face of yours is exactly how you fooled me.”
His thumb brushed over my skin.
“If you divorce me, you’ll have nowhere left to go.”
My lashes trembled.
Years ago, my father had run up a debt and handed me over to the Rival Family.
Adrian had been the one to save me.
The Rival Family couldn’t afford to offend the Sterlings, so they let me go.
From that moment on, my life had been tied tightly to Adrian Sterling’s.
Once word of our divorce got out, my father’s enemies would come for me immediately.
He was right.
I really had nowhere left to go.
The first half of my life had been every bit as miserable as Adrian Sterling said.
Adrian and I were supposed to be the prince and Cinderella from a fairy tale.
My father had been addicted to gambling for as long as I could remember, and my mother had spent years sick in bed.
On my eighteenth birthday, I walked through the door and found a room full of unfamiliar faces. Every one of them looked at me with something ugly in their eyes.
Then I saw my father standing behind them.
He had handed me over to a loan shark with his own two hands. He said he would marry me off to settle what he owed.
I refused. My mother dropped to her knees, crying so hard she could barely breathe as she begged him to stop.
My father shoved her aside and cursed at both of us.
“What else is a daughter good for if not bringing in money? Useless, both of you. Nothing but dead weight.”
Chapter 3
By some miracle, I met Adrian Sterling.
Back then, he was not yet the Sterling heir everyone feared and flattered. He was only a spoiled rich son drifting through every underground club and backroom casino the city had to offer.
Maybe he saw my swollen, bloodshot eyes. Maybe he saw my torn clothes. Maybe, for one rare moment, he felt sorry for me.
Whatever the reason, he asked the loan shark for me.
The man knew better than to cross the Sterling family. In the end, he gritted his teeth and let me go.
I still remember the first time Adrian looked at me.
He crouched in front of me, studying me with that half-amused, careless expression of his, and asked, “Coming with me?”
I had no other choice.
So I nodded.
Adrian supported me all the way through college.
On the day I graduated, beneath a sky full of stars, he confessed to me.
“Nora Bennett,” he said, “will you stay with me for the rest of your life?”
I said yes.
Everyone said it was a fairy tale come true.
I believed it too.
But the closer I came to happiness, the more clearly I could feel the ending approaching.
The deeper he loved me, the less courage I had to tell him the truth.
On our wedding night, I watched him burst into the room glowing with joy. He swept me into his arms and whispered, “My wife.”
Looking at the happiness on his face, I still couldn’t make myself speak.
Not until he found out.
In the dark, I watched the shock in his eyes harden into indifference.
That single moment felt as if it lasted a century.
Adrian hated being lied to more than anything.
After that night, he became someone else.
No—he became the Adrian Sterling he had been before he ever met me.
But when I learned he had cheated, I still fell apart.
I still fought with him.
I clutched his shirt and sobbed until I could hardly form the words. “Adrian, I’m begging you. Please don’t do this.”
I humbled myself completely.
He gave me nothing in return.
His face stayed cold. His voice was even colder.
“Liars don’t get to make demands.”
His words were like a poisoned blade driven straight into my heart.
“Nora, you lied to me for years. I don’t know which word out of your mouth I’m supposed to believe anymore.”
“Maybe the whole scam started the moment I saved you, didn’t it?”
“Your father’s gambling debts. Your mother’s medical bills. All of it came from lying to me.”
He no longer believed me.
He had begun to suspect that I had worked with my father from the start—that the two of us had staged everything just so he would rescue me.
I wanted so badly to tell him no.
It wasn’t like that.
It had never been like that.
But he never once let me finish explaining.
Now, in this moment, he was right about one thing. If we divorced, I truly had nowhere left to run.
But I had never planned to run.
What he didn’t know was that I was going to die soon.
All I had left was three months with him.