Chapter 4

I first arrived at the Vance estate when I was twelve years old.

In my memories, before I was ten, my family was extremely wealthy.

We lived in a three-story mansion with a private garden. I had endless designer dresses, and I never had to tiptoe around anyone.

I was an only child, pampered like a little princess.

That golden life didn't last.

When I was ten, a traitor in my father’s tech firm leaked the company’s core source code. The leak triggered a domino effect, devastating several partner corporations and sinking our business overnight.

Nobody cared who leaked it. The company went bankrupt, drowning in astronomical lawsuits and liabilities.

During a violent confrontation with frantic creditors, my mother was accidentally shoved over a balcony. She died on impact.

My father watched his life's work vanish in an instant, and the shock of my mother's death shattered his mind. He was committed to a psychiatric ward.

A year later, on my eleventh birthday, he slit his wrists in his hospital room.

Overnight, my entire world turned to ash.

The first ten years of my life felt like a beautiful, vivid dream that had brutally devolved into a waking nightmare.

Only my grandmother was left. After selling off every remaining asset to cover what debts she could, she took my hand and brought me back to her hometown—a sleepy, rugged seaside village.

There, I learned from my grandmother how to live as an ordinary, impoverished girl.

It took me two years to accept and adapt to that harsh, simple life.

Yet two years later, fate played another cruel joke on me.

Grandma was diagnosed with late-stage stomach cancer.

At twelve years old, I stood by the bed and watched my very last living relative take her final breath.

After she died, I was completely alone in the world.

A kind neighbor called social services, hoping to find any distant relatives who would take me in.

No one wanted a burden.

I was on the verge of being sent to an overcrowded foster home just to avoid starving to death.

That was when the Vance family showed up.

They brought me, a penniless orphan, back to their luxury estate.

Only when I met the Vance matriarch did I learn that my grandmother had prepared a safety net for me before she died.

Decades ago, when they were both young, my grandmother had saved the life of Grandma Eleanor Vance.

Grandma never cashed in on that massive debt of gratitude for herself.

Instead, on her deathbed, she wrote a final plea to Eleanor, trading that life debt to secure a decade of shelter for me.

The Vance family did take me in.

Yet in a cold, ruthless dynasty like theirs, who truly gave a damn about an orphan who forced her way in through a dead woman’s favor?

Dependent on their charity, I learned to keep my head down and walk on eggshells.

Seeing how docile and quiet I was, the household staff began mistreating me.

I was given cold scraps left over from the servants’ table. My school uniforms were constantly washed poorly and left damp, so that when I put them on the next morning, they reeked of mildew.

For a long time, an unpleasant, damp sourness lingered on my clothes.

Those years were agonizing.

I counted down the days on my fingers, telling myself that once I turned eighteen and earned a scholarship to a good college, I could finally run away.

The torment eased in my second year at the estate, when fifteen-year-old Ethan returned from boarding school in Switzerland.

The young master’s return was a massive celebration.

The entire estate was buzzing with excitement.

All the maids and housekeepers were called to the main villa to prepare for the welcome banquet. Seizing the opportunity, I sneaked down to the empty kitchen to scavenge two cold, rock-hard breakfast rolls left over from that morning.

I hadn't eaten in over twenty-four hours. No one remembered to feed the charity case upstairs.

Those rolls were only there because the family chauffeur had taken pity on me and saved them.

I never expected that Ethan wouldn't go straight to the main banquet hall. He came straight to the quiet kitchen.

A hand suddenly landed on my shoulder. I gasped, dropping the half-eaten roll onto the pristine floor.

"Who are you? What are you doing in my house?"

At fifteen, Ethan already carried a sharp maturity beyond his years. His handsome, fair face was guarded, looking me up and down with an aristocratic arrogance that made me shrink back in shame.

"I—I'm not an intruder, I—"

"Wait, I remember now. You're the girl my grandmother took in."

"What was your name again... Sienna, right?"

"Sienna Brooks," I whispered softly.

Ethan snapped his fingers, his eyes lighting up.

"Right! That's it."

"Everyone’s over at the main hall for my party. Why are you hiding in the kitchen alone?"

He looked down at the hard, half-eaten roll sitting by his polished leather shoes, then leaned down and picked it up.

"This is rock hard. How can you even chew this?"

I kept my head down, staring miserably at my frayed sneakers, completely mortified.

I couldn't bring myself to tell him that the servants had deliberately left me to starve. The Vances gave me a roof over my head and paid my tuition.

I was terrified that if I complained, they would throw me out onto the street.

Blushing furiously, I lunged forward, snatched the half-eaten roll from his hands, and hid it behind my back.

Seeing that, Ethan’s brows furrowed as if piecing the puzzle together.

Without another word, he snatched the dry bread from behind my back and tossed it into the trash can.

Then, he grabbed my wrist.

"Stop eating garbage. Come on, I'm taking you to eat real food."

Ethan dragged me straight to the grand dining room.

His parents were constantly abroad managing global branches and were rarely home. Grandma Eleanor ruled the house from the head of the table. Aside from the mandatory monthly dinners she summoned me to, I hardly ever saw her.

To avoid burdening a young girl with finances, my living allowance had always been transferred directly to the head housekeeper in charge of my daily care.

Not a single cent of that money had ever reached my hands.

In front of Grandma Eleanor, Ethan casually made a couple of sarcastic remarks about the staff. It was enough to send the normally composed matriarch into a fury.

"Since when has the Vance family been so broke that our guest has to eat frozen scraps in the dark?!"

That night, what was supposed to be a celebratory welcome feast turned into a massive purge.

Nearly the entire staff, including the head butler, was fired on the spot.

The housekeeper who had embezzled my monthly allowance was escorted straight to the police station.

Grandma Eleanor apologized to me with tears in her eyes, expressing deep remorse for failing my grandmother and letting me suffer under her roof.

I was no longer a naive little girl. Having tasted the brutality of the world, I could tell polite corporate guilt from genuine love.

I knew Eleanor only reacted so harshly because she didn't want high society whispering that the Vances were ungrateful monsters who mistreated an orphan.

Even so, I was profoundly grateful.

In my darkest hour, a boy had reached out and pulled me into the light.

From that day on, I stayed by Ethan’s side.

He treated me exceptionally well. When prep-school bullies picked on me, he beat them bloody. When I was sad, he rented out entire amusement parks just to see me smile.

He introduced me to the world as his little sister. I knew I had no right to harbor romantic feelings for him.

Yet back then, Ethan was a blazing sun in the cold, gray winter of my youth.

How could a lonely, broken girl not fall hopelessly in love with him?

Even when I found out he had fallen for Chloe, the prettiest girl in his college department.

I had planned to bury my feelings deep inside my heart forever.

I graduated college and packed my bags, ready to leave the Vance estate for good. But an urgent phone call summoned me back to Eleanor’s deathbed.

The old woman had fallen gravely ill over the years.

Before she drew her last breath, she pulled me close and uttered her final wish: she wanted me to marry Ethan.

Ethan was already madly in love with Chloe.

However, Grandma Eleanor had investigated Chloe thoroughly. Having navigated high society for decades, the old woman saw right through Chloe’s greedy, manipulative nature.

So, Eleanor tied up the entire Vance empire in her will.

If Ethan wanted to inherit Vance Enterprises, the sole condition was that he had to marry me.

Otherwise, the controlling shares would be handed over to the board of directors, leaving Ethan with nothing.

Ethan fought it tooth and nail.

I will never forget the look in his eyes at the funeral when the will was read aloud—bloodshot, wild, and filled with unadulterated hatred.

In front of all the grieving guests and board members, he grabbed me by the collar and choked me against the marble wall, demanding to know what dirty tricks I had played on his dying grandmother.

"Sienna Brooks, do you have no shame?!"

"You begged my grandmother on her deathbed just so you could cling to this family!"

"Chloe was right about you! You're a fake, greedy gold digger! You couldn't bear to leave the Vance fortune, could you?!"

If the security guards hadn't pulled him off me, he would have strangled me to death right there.

Looking back now, if I had known that marrying him would lead to five years of living hell, I would have preferred he choked the life out of me that day.

I had been so painfully naive. I thought that even if he didn't love me, we still had years of shared history.

I thought that as long as I stayed by his side and loved him unconditionally, I could eventually melt his frozen heart.

Reality slapped me hard.

For five years, I lived like a ghost, a shadow in his grand home, treated like that wedding ring he so casually threw into the trash.

I made the wrong choice back then. These five years of torment were the price I paid for my mistake.

I refused to let the rest of my life rot in this darkness.