From Unwanted Ward To Unattainable Queen

Ellie POV

The silence in the library was heavy, not just quiet, but suffocating.

Marcus's hand was burning through the fabric of my shirt. He held me fast, refusing to let go. His gaze was intense, searching, stripping away the layers of indifference I had carefully built over the last three years.

For a heartbeat, I felt a ghost of the old feeling. That desperate, pathetic yearning to be held by him. To be seen by him.

He leaned in. His head lowered toward mine until his breath mingled with my own. His eyes were half-closed, his expression softened into something that looked painfully like affection.

My heart hammered against my ribs. I was frozen, caught between the past and the present.

"I've missed..." he murmured, his voice rough, drunk on the proximity.

He brushed his lips against my forehead. It was tender. It was intimate. It was everything I had once prayed for.

Then he shattered it.

"Chloe."

The name crashed into me like a physical blow.

The world around me seemed to fracture.

He wasn't holding me. He was holding a placeholder. He was holding a warm body and projecting the woman he actually wanted onto me.

I wasn't Ellie to him. I wasn't even a person. I was just a vessel for his confused lust.

A wave of nausea rolled through me. I shoved him. I shoved him with every ounce of strength I had left.

"Get off me!" I gasped, stumbling back.

Marcus blinked, shaking his head as if waking from a trance. He looked at me, then at his empty hands, confusion clouding his features. "Ellie? I... I thought..."

"You thought I was her," I spat, wiping my forehead where his lips had touched as if it were burned. "You called me Chloe."

His face paled. "No. I didn't. You're hearing things."

"I heard you," I said, my voice shaking with rage and humiliation. "You are sick, Marcus."

"Marcus?"

A sharp voice cut from the hallway.

We both turned. Chloe was standing there. She was wearing a pristine white dress, looking every inch the perfect fiancée. Her eyes darted from Marcus's flushed face to my disheveled hair.

She didn't look surprised. She looked triumphant.

"Well," she said, walking into the room, her heels clicking ominously on the hardwood floor. "I leave for an hour to handle the florists, and I come back to this."

"Nothing happened," Marcus said quickly, stepping away from me as if I were contagious. He smoothed his shirt, composing himself into the cold CEO again. "Ellie fell. I caught her."

"Of course she fell," Chloe said, her voice dripping with poison. She stopped in front of me, looking me up and down with a sneer. "She's always been clumsy, hasn't she? Always falling into places she doesn't belong."

I straightened my spine. "I'm leaving."

"Not yet," another voice boomed.

Richard and Eleanor Thorne, Marcus's parents, walked in behind Chloe. They must have arrived for the wedding preparations. They looked at me like I was a stain on their antique Persian rug.

"We saw that," Eleanor said, her nose wrinkling in disgust. "Throwing yourself at him in his own study? Have you no shame, girl?"

"He grabbed me," I said, my voice tight.

"Lies," Richard scoffed. "We know how you looked at him growing up. It was pathetic then, and it's repulsive now."

I looked at Marcus. I waited for him to defend me. I waited for him to tell the truth.

He looked at the floor.

He said nothing.

He stood there and let them tear me apart. He let them paint me as the seductress, the ungrateful ward, the problem.

Chloe wrapped her arm around Marcus's bicep, staking her claim. "You should go, Ellie. Before you embarrass yourself further. If you stay, I'll make sure everyone in this town knows exactly what kind of girl you are."

I looked at them. The united front. The Thorne family and their perfect bride.

I felt something inside me snap. It wasn't my heart. It was the last tether binding me to this place.

"You're right," I said softly. "I don't belong here."

I grabbed the locket from the shelf where I had dropped it. I clenched it in my fist until the metal bit into my palm.

"I'm going to my room to get my bag," I said. "And then you will never see me again."

I walked past them. I didn't run. I didn't cry.

But as I climbed the stairs, my vision blurred. The tears were hot and silent, sliding down my face not because I lost him, but because I realized I had never, ever had him.