Her Husband’s Family Humiliated Her—Until the Billionaire Royal Bodyguard Exposed Her True Power

The Mask Begins to Slip

For an hour, Sarah managed to remain invisible. She mastered the art of looking politely interested in the architecture, of drifting from one empty corner to the next.

She spoke to no one, and no one spoke to her. The invisibility she had cultivated—her greatest defense—was now her prison.

Nate was trapped across the room, flanked by his mother and sister, being paraded before potential investors. He kept shooting her apologetic glances, but he was a fish on a hook, and his mother was holding the reel.

The first direct assault came from Chloe. She approached Sarah, holding two empty champagne flutes.

“Oh, thank goodness,”

Chloe said with a sigh of relief, pushing the glasses into Sarah’s hands.

“Could you be a dear and get these refilled for me and Lord Finch? The bar is just… oh!”

She feigned a gasp of realization.

“Oh, silly me! I’m so sorry, Sarah. For a moment, with that gray dress, I completely mistook you for one of the wait staff. How embarrassing… for me, I mean.”

Her friends standing nearby tittered. Sarah looked down at the empty glasses in her hand, then back up at Chloe’s malicious smile.

She felt the blood rush to her face, a hot, angry tide. Her royal training warred with the raw, personal sting.

A princess does not engage. A princess rises above.

“That’s quite all right, Chloe,”

Sarah said, her voice miraculously steady. She placed the glasses on the tray of a passing waiter.

“It must be difficult to tell people apart when you’re only looking at their labels.”

Chloe’s smile faltered, not expecting a retort. Before she could reply, her fiancé, Lord Barnaby Finch, walked up.

“Chloe, darling, what’s the holdup?”

he said. Then he noticed Sarah.

He stopped. He stared, not with the dismissal she was used to, but with a look of intense, confused recognition.

“I… I beg your pardon, madam,”

he said, his British accent thick.

“Have we met? Perhaps at the London summit last year? Or no, it couldn’t be.”

Sarah’s heart hammered. This was the complication she had feared.

A minor noble like Finch would have been at state events. He might have seen her.

“I’m afraid you must be mistaken, my lord,”

Sarah said, dipping into a small, polite curtsy that was subtly, perfectly executed.

“I’m just Sarah Harrison, Nate’s wife.”

The curtsy, more than her words, seemed to confuse him further. But Chloe, annoyed at the attention shifting, grabbed his arm.

“Don’t be silly, Barnaby. She’s a nobody. She’s never been out of Massachusetts. Now, come.”

As they walked away, Finch looked back over his shoulder, his brow furrowed in deep thought.

“He knows,”

Saraphina thought, a chill running through her.

“The game is unraveling.”

She needed air. She slipped through a set of French doors onto the stone terrace overlooking the manicured, moonlit garden.

The cold November air was a relief.

“I was wondering when you’d try to escape.”

Sarah turned. Genevieve Harrison stood in the doorway, a cashmere wrap around her shoulders, her expression unreadable.

“I wasn’t escaping, Mrs. Harrison. I was just admiring your garden.”

“Please, Sarah, let’s not play games,”

Genevieve said, walking onto the terrace. She stood beside Sarah but stared out at the city lights.

“You are an intelligent girl, I’ll give you that. You saw my son, a kind, weak-willed boy with a famous last name, and you latched onto him.”

“That’s not true. I love Nate.”

“Love?”

Genevieve scoffed, a short, ugly sound.

“You love what he represents: security, access, a step up from whatever backwater town you crawled out of. I’ve seen your records, Sarah. A scholarship student from rural Maine. No family to speak of, parents deceased. You are a classic, textbook gold digger.”

“You have no right,”

Sarah said, her voice low and shaking.

“I have every right!”

Genevieve snapped, turning to face her. The cold moonlight hit her face, making her look like a marble statue.

“This is my family, my legacy, and you are a dilution of it. You are a weight on my son. He could be marrying into the Cabot or the Lodge families. He could be cementing our new deal with the Sylvarian Sovereign Fund—a deal that will make us legends. Instead, he is tied to you.”

She reached into her small, beaded clutch and pulled out a checkbook and a slim gold pen.

“I am tired of this, Sarah. I want you gone tonight.”

She began to write, the scratching of the pen an obscenity in the quiet.

“I am going to write you a check for $50,000. You will take it. You will walk out of that door, and you will never see my son again. You will file for divorce, and you will disappear.”

She tore the check out and held it out. Sarah stared at the slip of paper.

$50,000. It was an insult.

Her watch, hidden under the cuff of her simple dress, was worth ten times that. She looked Genevieve square in the eye.

“I am not for sale, Mrs. Harrison.”

Genevieve’s eyes narrowed into slits.

“Every girl like you has a price. Fine. 100,000. That’s my final offer. Take it, or I will make your life and Nate’s a living hell. I will have him fired. I will cut him off from the family trust. I will ruin you both. Do not test me, child.”

“Mrs. Harrison,”

Sarah said, her voice dropping to an icy calm that she hadn’t used since she’d left Sylvaria.

“You are making a truly monumental mistake.”

“The only mistake,”

Genevieve hissed,

“is my son’s.”

She grabbed Sarah’s wrist, her fingers biting in like talons.

“You will take this!”

“Let go of me,”

Sarah warned, her body tense.

“You ungrateful little…”

“What the hell are you doing?”

Nate stood in the doorway, his face pale with horror. He had seen it.

He had seen his mother try to buy off his wife. Genevieve dropped Sarah’s arm as if it were on fire.

Her face, for a split second, flashed with panic before rearranging itself into a mask of cold fury.

“Nathaniel,”

she said, her voice trembling with rage.

“You will come inside right now.”

“No,”

Nate said, walking onto the terrace and pulling Sarah behind him.

“What did you do? What did you say to her?”

“I am saving this family,”

Genevieve shrieked, losing her composure.

“From her! This… this parasite!”

The argument was escalating, and guests were beginning to turn and look through the French doors. The string quartet faltered.

Genevieve saw her audience. She saw her impending social humiliation.

And in that moment, she made a tactical decision. She decided to burn the village to save her castle.

The Public Execution

She turned from them, sweeping back into the ballroom. She walked straight to the small stage, snatched the microphone from the quartet leader, and tapped it.

The feedback screeched, silencing the entire 300-person crowd.

“May I have your attention, please?”

Genevieve called out, her voice amplified, brittle as glass. Nate and Sarah followed, horrified, caught in the doorway.

They were trapped.

“This is not good,”

Sarah whispered, her hand instinctively going to her side, where a weapon would normally be.

“Mom, no,”

Nate breathed.

“As many of you know,”

Genevieve said, her smile wide and terrifying,

“my family’s greatest passion is philanthropy. We give to the arts, to education, and to those less fortunate.”

She locked eyes with Sarah, who was now the unwilling center of attention for all of Boston’s elite.

“Tonight, we have a very special, very personal charity case. My son, Nathaniel, in his great youthful idealism, has taken an interest in a young woman. A girl from truly unfortunate circumstances.”

The crowd murmured. People shifted, confused, sensing the blood in the water.

Chloe was smiling, a look of vindictive triumph on her face. Arthur looked ashen.

“My son married this girl, Sarah, believing he could save her,”

Genevieve continued, her voice dripping with false pity.

“But some things, alas, cannot be fixed. We have tried to welcome her. We have tried to educate her, but it is simply not working. She does not belong.”

She was going to do it. She was going to publicly destroy her.

“And so,”

Genevieve said, raising the check high for all to see,

“we are making one final grand gesture of charity. A scholarship, if you will. A fund to help this young woman get back on her feet, back in her own world, far from ours… to let her go and to free my son.”

She walked off the stage through the stunned, parting crowd and stopped directly in front of Sarah. The entire ballroom was silent.

She held out the check.

“Take it, Sarah. $100,000. It’s more money than your entire family has ever seen. Go build a new life for yourself, and leave my family and my son alone.”

It was a public execution. Sarah stood frozen, the focus of hundreds of pitying, scornful, and shocked stares.

She could feel Nate trembling beside her, paralyzed, speechless. He opened his mouth, but only a choked sound came out.

He was broken. Sarah looked at the check.

She looked at Genevieve’s triumphant, hateful face. She looked at the crowd.

And then she felt it: the familiar, cold calm of command. The “Sarah” persona evaporated, burned away by the sheer calculated cruelty of the act.

Her spine straightened; her chin lifted. The poor student was gone.

She was about to speak. She was about to end this, but she didn’t have to, because at that exact moment, the grand front doors of the Harrison townhouse burst open.