Trapped By My Fiancée's Crazy Sister

A sharp pain lanced through Kingsley Sterling's skull.

His consciousness surfaced slowly, dragged from a thick, syrupy darkness. His eyelids fluttered, heavy as lead.

The room was dim. Heavy curtains blocked the Manhattan morning, and the air was thick with a sweet, unfamiliar perfume. It wasn't the clean, white tea scent of his fiancée, Carmelita.

He tried to push himself up. His muscles ached, a dull throb that echoed the pounding in his head. Last night was a blur of fragmented, fiery images.

He turned, expecting to see Carmelita's sleeping face.

Instead, a cascade of dark black hair spilled across the pillow. A stark contrast to Carmelita's signature honey-blonde locks.

Kingsley's heart plummeted into an icy abyss. He shot upright, yanking at the corner of the duvet.

The movement stirred the woman. She rolled over, her face shockingly pale yet exquisitely fine-boned in the gloom.

It was Gretta Ramsey. His fiancée's quiet, troubled little sister. The one they said was mentally ill.

But as he stared at her, something struck him as deeply wrong. The timid, evasive girl he remembered-the one who could barely meet anyone's eyes-had been replaced by this woman who lay there with an unsettling stillness, her features arranged in a calm that felt almost predatory. Her eyes, even closed, seemed to hold a secret. It was as if the shell of Gretta Ramsey housed someone else entirely.

"You?" The word was a raw, disbelieving rasp. Horror and a tidal wave of fury washed over him. He had betrayed Carmelita. For a man who valued honor and contracts above all else, it was an unforgivable sin.

Gretta's eyes slowly opened. They were no longer timid or evasive. They were deep, calm, and filled with a chilling mockery. She sat up, naked, meeting his murderous gaze without a flicker of shame.

"Good morning, brother-in-law." Her voice was husky with sleep, but each word was a poison-tipped needle stabbing into his eardrums.

Kingsley snatched a robe from the bedside chair, his movements jerky with a violated rage. "What did you do to me?" He scanned the nightstand and saw an empty champagne flute.

"What you see," Gretta said, stretching languidly, a perfect display of her young, curved body. "We slept together."

"You drugged me." It wasn't a question. His tone was as cold as a Wall Street winter. He remembered her now, in the lounge last night, bumping into him with a drink in her hand. An "accident."

Gretta didn't deny it. She just smiled. The smile sent a strange, unfamiliar chill down his spine. This was not the Gretta he knew, the girl who could barely string a sentence together.

As Kingsley's fury mounted, a flash of another life seared through Gretta's mind-a life she had lived before she became this broken shell. She was not Gretta Ramsey. She was Eleanor, the eldest sister, the one who had been Kingsley's true fiancée before Carmelita destroyed everything.

She remembered it all with agonizing clarity. A cold, rainy night, the kind that seeped into bones. Carmelita's men had ambushed her in the stairwell of her own apartment building. They had pushed her-hard-and she had tumbled down the concrete steps, her body cracking against each edge. The worst pain came not from her broken ribs, but from the violent cramping in her abdomen as she lost Samuel, the son she had carried for nearly six months-Kingsley's son, their future.

She had screamed for help, but no one came. Carmelita had made sure of that.

Then came the final betrayal. Days later, while she lay weak and grieving in the hospital, Carmelita had visited, her face a mask of sisterly concern. But the needle she pressed into Eleanor's IV line held not medicine, but a lethal dose of insulin-enough to stop her heart and mimic a depressive's suicide. Eleanor had felt her consciousness fading, her limbs going numb, as Carmelita whispered, "You were always the obstacle, dear sister. Now Kingsley will be mine."

Those memories hardened into the ice in her eyes and the curve of her lips. "I was just taking back what's mine," she whispered.

"You're insane!" Kingsley couldn't comprehend her words. He fumbled for his phone, desperate to escape this room, this woman who felt profoundly dangerous.

As if reading his mind, Gretta pulled her own phone from under the pillow. She dangled it in front of him. A silent, thumbnail-sized video was playing on the screen.

It showed the two of them, tangled in the sheets.

The angle was damning. It clearly captured Kingsley's face and the body of the woman beneath him.

His pupils contracted. He lunged for the phone, but Gretta moved with a fluid grace, pulling it out of his reach.

"Kingsley Sterling, heir to the Sterling Group, New York's most eligible bachelor, rapes his mentally unstable future sister-in-law on the eve of his wedding to the perfect socialite, Carmelita Ramsey." Gretta recited the words like a line from a play.

"How does that headline sound?" She tilted her head, her expression deceptively innocent, but her eyes gleamed with a demonic light.

Kingsley froze. A cold deeper than anger seized him. He wasn't afraid of personal ruin, but of the catastrophic destruction this would wreak on his marriage to Carmelita-and the multi-billion-dollar corporate merger it represented.

"What do you want? Money?" He forced himself into business mode, the only way he knew how to solve a problem.

"Money?" Gretta laughed, a sound like shattering glass. "Of course I want money. Just not from you."

Her laughter died. Her eyes burned into his. "What I want," she said, each word deliberate, "is you."

Kingsley stared, completely unable to process her logic. She was nothing but a deranged, obsessive fanatic.

Gretta put her phone away and rose from the bed, walking calmly toward the bathroom. "You have ten minutes to get dressed, Kingsley. Our conversation is just beginning."

The bathroom door clicked shut.

Kingsley stood alone in the wrecked room, his handsome face twisted with rage and humiliation.

For the first time in his life, he felt a complete and utter loss of control.

He clenched his fists, the knuckles turning white, a dry, cracking sound filling the silence. He would make this woman pay. He swore it.

But first, he had to figure out how to escape the perfect trap she had laid.

He stared at the closed bathroom door, a flicker of violence in his eyes. But her words, "I want you," and the video she held, were an invisible cage, locking him in place.

The bathroom door opened. Gretta emerged, wrapped in a matching white robe, her wet black hair clinging to her cheeks. It gave her a look of fragile beauty that was bizarrely at odds with the cold calculation in her eyes.

Kingsley's gaze was a physical blow. He had already pulled on his trousers and shirt, leaving the top buttons undone, his neck muscles tight and exposed.

"Name your price, Gretta." He sat on the sofa, crossing his legs, trying to reclaim the posture of a negotiation, though the fire in his gut still burned.

She ignored him. She walked to the minibar, poured herself a glass of water, and drank it slowly.

Her deliberate disregard infuriated him. "You think a doctored video can threaten me? The Sterling Group's legal team will have it scrubbed from the internet and have you charged with extortion before you can blink."

"Oh, I know," Gretta said, setting the glass down. She turned to face him. "That's why I have more than one plan."

She walked to the massive floor-to-ceiling window, which overlooked the sprawling city below. "If the video leaks, you're right, you can suppress it. But what if I jump from here?"

Kingsley's breath caught in his throat. He hadn't expected that.

"A young woman, driven to despair after being violated by her future brother-in-law, leaps to her death from the top of the Park Avenue Hotel." Gretta's voice was soft, as if she were narrating a story. "Imagine the headlines in the New York Post tomorrow."

"Even without proof, public sympathy would drown you. Your wedding, your merger... it would all become a massive scandal."

The color drained from Kingsley's face. He realized she wasn't joking. The madness in her eyes was real. She would actually do it.

"What the hell do you want?" For the first time, a tremor of something other than anger entered his voice.

Gretta smiled and walked back toward him, looking down at where he sat. "I don't want to do anything. I just want to correct a mistake."

She leaned in, her hands on the arms of the sofa, trapping him. Their faces were inches apart.

"Because you were always supposed to be mine." She stared into his eyes, her words sharp and precise. "I, Eleanor Ramsey, am your real fiancée. The woman you were meant to marry before Carmelita destroyed everything."

Kingsley was completely lost. Eleanor was the name of Gretta's older sister, the one who had supposedly died in an accident years ago. He had been engaged to Eleanor before her tragic death-a death that had devastated him and driven him into Carmelita's arms. But this woman before him couldn't possibly be Eleanor. Eleanor was dead. He had mourned her.

He shoved her away, disgusted, and shot to his feet. "You'd even use your dead sister? You really are sick."

His words were exactly what she wanted to hear. She needed him to think she was insane. A madwoman was capable of anything illogical, and therefore, anything lethal.

"Sick? Maybe." Gretta's eyes suddenly filled with tears. Large, perfect drops rolled down her cheeks without warning. "I'm sick with love for you, Kingsley!"

She had switched from a cold-blooded blackmailer to a desperate, love-crazed woman in the blink of an eye. The performance was flawless.

"I've loved you since we were children, but everyone only ever saw Carmelita! She doesn't love you! She only loves your money and your status!" she cried, her voice choked with emotion.

Kingsley was caught off guard by the sudden shift, but his revulsion didn't lessen.

"Your love is disgusting," he said coldly.

"Is it?" Gretta wiped her tears and smiled again, a desolate, determined look in her eyes. "Then you'll just have to get used to it."

She picked up her phone again, her thumb hovering over Carmelita's name in her contacts. "What do you think would happen if I sent this little video to my dear sister right now?"

Kingsley's heart seized. He knew Carmelita. She would never tolerate this kind of betrayal. The engagement would be over in an instant.

"Don't!" The word escaped him before he could stop it.

Gretta's finger paused over the send button. She watched the panic finally bloom on his face, a look of pure satisfaction in her eyes.

"Good," she said, lowering the phone. "Now, we can talk about my terms."

Kingsley closed his eyes, taking a long, deep breath. When he opened them again, they were filled with cold, resentful surrender.

He was caught in a madwoman's web, and for now, there was no escape.

"Speak," he bit out.

Gretta walked toward him. She reached out a finger and traced the line of his shirt buttons, feeling his body go rigid at her touch.

"My terms are simple," she whispered, her lips close to his ear, her voice a venomous secret only he could hear. "For the next three months, you will be my secret lover."

Her breath was a hot, damp promise against his skin. "On call. No refusals."

"You're delusional!" Kingsley swatted her hand away as if it were something filthy, recoiling a step.

"Three months? Gretta, are you truly insane? I won't give you an hour!" he snarled, a vein throbbing at his temple.

Gretta looked at her rejected hand and gave a small, unconcerned laugh. "It seems you still don't understand your situation."

She suddenly spun around and strode toward the enormous window.

A knot of dread tightened in Kingsley's gut. "What are you doing? Get back here!"

She ignored him. With practiced ease, she unlatched the window and pushed it open just wide enough for a person to slip through. A blast of cold morning air rushed in, whipping her robe and hair around her.

As Kingsley watched in horror, she climbed onto the ledge, her slender body silhouetted against the thirty-story drop.

"Gretta!" He lunged forward but stopped a few feet away, terrified that any sudden move would send her over the edge.

"Don't come any closer," she said, her voice thin against the wind but perfectly clear. "Or I'll jump."

She held onto the window frame with one hand, the other stretched out into the open air like a fragile butterfly. "I have a history of suicide attempts, you know," she reminded him.

Kingsley's blood ran cold. He knew it was true. The Ramsey family's younger daughter and her struggles with depression were an open secret in their circle.

"Get down! Get down and we can talk about this!" He tried to keep his voice steady, but his hands were clenched into tight fists.

"There's nothing to talk about." Gretta looked back at him, a tragic smile on her face. "Either you agree to my terms, or you watch me become a stain on the pavement. For the rest of your life, you'll carry the reputation of the man who drove his fiancée's sister to suicide."

"You think the Sterling family lawyers can wash that away? They can't. They can't erase the judgment in people's minds." Her words were a hammer blow to his heart.

He was a man of extreme self-discipline and pristine reputation. He couldn't imagine his name being forever tied to such a sordid, ugly scandal.

His career, his family-everything would be tarnished.

"Why are you doing this?" He couldn't understand what kind of obsession would drive a girl to gamble with her own life.

"Because I love you," she said again. But this time, carried on the high-altitude wind, it sounded less like a confession and more like a curse from hell.

Kingsley's mind raced, calculating the odds. Call the police? That would only make it a bigger spectacle. Try to pull her back? She might jump instantly.

He had no options. This madwoman had pushed him into a corner with no exit.

The seconds ticked by. A cold sweat broke out on Kingsley's forehead. He could see Gretta's thin body trembling slightly in the wind, whether from cold or fear, he couldn't tell.

"Fine..." The word was a raw scrape from his throat. "I agree."

Gretta's eyes lit up, but she didn't move.

"Three months is too long. I don't have that kind of patience," Kingsley said, trying to claw back a sliver of control.

"One month." he stared at her. "One month. That's my final offer."

Gretta studied him, seeming to weigh the sincerity in his voice.

After a long moment, she nodded. "Fine. One month." She knew not to push too hard. She had already won the day.

"Now, get down." Kingsley held out his hand, his voice a low command.

Gretta looked at his outstretched hand and a triumphant smile touched her lips. She slowly, carefully, turned back from the ledge.

But just as she was about to step down, she intentionally let her foot slide on the smooth metal frame. It was a calculated move-she had planned this moment to perfection. Her body lurched backward, and a short, sharp cry escaped her. "Ah!"

Kingsley's pupils dilated. Without a second thought, he surged forward, his hand clamping around her arm an instant before she fell.

The momentum almost pulled him over too, but he planted his feet, using every ounce of his strength to haul her back from the brink of death.

Gretta's body slammed into his, soft and freezing cold. Kingsley could feel his own heart hammering against his ribs, a frantic beat of terror and rage.

He held her tight, his arms trembling from the effort, and roared down at her, "You crazy bitch!"

Gretta sagged against his chest, feeling the powerful, steady rhythm of his heart. A secret, satisfied smile graced her lips, hidden from his view.