He Jilted Me at the Altar. I Married His Enemy by Midnight. Chapter 01

He Jilted Me at the Altar. I Married His Enemy by Midnight. Chapter 01

My fiancé left me at the altar in front of four hundred guests.

That wasn’t the worst part.

The worst part was the video.

I was standing under an arch of ten thousand white roses, six weeks pregnant, holding a bouquet with my hands shaking from happiness—when the giant LED screen behind the altar flickered on.

It was supposed to play our love montage. Three years of photos. Paris. The lake house. Him on one knee.

Instead, it played my fiancé, Julian Whitmore, in a hotel bed.

With my sister.

「Turn it off,」 I whispered. Then screamed. 「TURN IT OFF!」

Nobody moved. Four hundred phones rose into the air like a field of black flowers, all of them pointed at me.

On screen, Sienna laughed—that soft, breathy laugh she’d practiced since we were kids—and pulled the sheet up over her chest. 「What about Aria?」 she asked him.

Julian’s voice filled the cathedral. Warm. Amused. The same voice that told me I do in every dream I’d had for three years.

「Aria?」 He kissed my sister’s shoulder. 「Aria was never the plan, baby. She was the paperwork.」

The bouquet slipped out of my hands.

White peonies scattered across the marble like something dying.

I stood there in a custom gown that took eight months to make, in a cathedral my family had rented for a fortune, carrying a baby I’d planned to announce tonight as my wedding gift to him—and I listened to four hundred people watch me become a joke.

Then the screen changed.

A live feed.

City Hall. Julian in a gray suit. My sister in a short white dress—white—a ring flashing on her finger.

He looked directly into the camera. Directly at me.

「Aria. Don’t take it personally.」 He smiled the smile I’d fallen in love with. 「Sienna and I got married an hour ago. The venue’s paid for. Enjoy the party.」

The feed cut.

Silence. Then the whispers started, spreading through the pews like fire through dry grass. Poor thing. Did you record it? Oh my God, her FACE.

I turned to my mother in the front row. My mother, who had helped me pick this dress. Who had cried at my final fitting.

She wasn’t crying now.

She was checking her phone. And when she finally looked up at me, her expression wasn’t grief.

It was irritation.

「Aria.」 She stood, smoothing her skirt. 「Don’t make a scene. It’s humiliating enough.」

「Make a—」 My voice cracked apart. 「Mom. He just—Sienna just—」

「Your sister has loved Julian for two years.」 She said it like I was the one who’d done something wrong. 「Maybe if you’d paid attention to anyone but yourself, you’d have noticed.」

My father didn’t even stand up. He looked at me the way he looked at a bad quarterly report.

「Take off the dress,」 he said quietly. 「It was never going to fit you anyway.」

Something inside my chest went very, very still.

I had one hand pressed flat against my stomach—against the secret no one in this cathedral knew, the tiny heartbeat I’d seen on a screen nine days ago—and I understood, all at once, with perfect clarity:

I was completely alone.

I picked up my ruined train with both fists and walked back down that endless aisle, past four hundred raised phones, my heels echoing like gunshots, mascara carving black lines down my face.

I made it to the cathedral doors before my knees buckled.

And that’s when I saw him.

A man in a black suit, leaning against a black car at the bottom of the steps, watching me with the calmest eyes I’d ever seen. Like my entire world hadn’t just burned down. Like he’d been waiting.

He held out a single card.

「Ms. Hale,」 he said. 「My employer watched the livestream.」

「He’d like to make you an offer before midnight.」