I Married My Father’s Friend to Take My RevengeChapter 1

I got married when I was twenty to my dad’s friend, Dominic Faviano.

He was eighteen years older. The kind of man people called dangerous when they thought I couldn’t hear. Cold. Ruthless. Always in control. But when it came to me, he acted like I was glass.

If I said I liked something, he’d buy it before I could even finish the sentence. If I said my stomach hurt, he’d cancel meetings, make ginger tea, and feed it to me like I was some fragile thing.

Sometimes at night, when he kissed me, his voice would go low and rough. “Be good, baby,” he’d whisper, like loving me was something that broke him a little.

All his passwords, usernames, accounts... they all had one name: “Loriana”

I thought it was because of ‘My Loriana’, the song I was playing when we met. I thought it was romantic.

But then one night, I was cleaning his study and opened one of his old photo albums.

There she was. A girl who looked like me, but prettier. Softer. Smiling beside a piano. On the back of every photo were the same words:

“My dearest Loriana.”

That night, something inside me cracked.