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It was chaos.
Seraphina was sobbing hysterically.
Jude, his tie askew, was trying to placate her while a scantily clad woman looked on with cold indifference.
Soon, Jude's parents arrived. It didn't take a genius to figure out what had happened in that room.
Jude saw us standing there and pointed a trembling finger.
"It was them! They set me up! I was supposed to be with—"
He caught himself just before he confessed to attempting to assault me. If that got out, Grandpa Orson would destroy him.
"How could you do this to me!"
Seraphina shrieked.
"You said you only loved me!"
Her wails attracted a crowd of guests.
After his previous scandals, this new disaster would completely ruin what was left of Jude's reputation.
He was dizzy with fury, and he took it all out on Seraphina, striking her across the face.
"What are you crying for? Haven't you embarrassed me enough?"
With all the drama, no one noticed that the engagement ceremony was delayed by twenty minutes.
When Cassius and I finally appeared, arm in arm, we ignored Jude's murderous glare and stood on the stage, smiling sweetly at each other.
Then, my mother walked out from backstage, flanked by the Thorne family's chief of staff and several senior advisors.
A wave of shock rippled through the guests.
They might not have recognized my mother, but they certainly recognized the key figures of the elusive Thorne empire.
As several powerful figures started to move forward, eager to make a connection, my mother took the microphone and announced my identity as the sole heiress to the Thorne fortune.
Below the stage, Jude and Seraphina looked like ghosts, their mouths hanging open, their bodies frozen in shock.
Beside them, Jude's parents' faces cycled through shades of red and white, their chests heaving as if they were fish suffocating on dry land.
They never imagined I was the Thorne heiress.
In that one, earth-shattering moment, they finally understood what Grandpa Orson had meant all along: the man who married me would inherit the world.
