Chapter 40

Ethan heard my scream and burst into my bedroom. He was wearing only pajama pants without a shirt. He had a bat in his hand, ready to fight someone.

“Ava!” He shouted as he looked around, eyes squinting in the darkness of my room. “Are you okay?”

“No!” The words caught in my throat and I thrust the phone into his hands. He turned on the light and sat on the edge of my bed, watching the video that Dora posted.

“I’m here to tell everyone the truth about Ava Velasco. She may seem like a good person, the perfect little Luna for Ethan, but she’s not!” Dora’s high-pitched voice screeched in the empty room. Every word caused my pounding heart to grow faster and faster.

The views doubled every second.

“Ava and I grew up together, she’s my half sister,” Dora looked into the camera with a sorrowful expression. Ethan furrowed his brows as he watched. “She was never very sisterly, though.

“She’d make me clean her room, make her food, and do her chores, even though her mom was a maid for our father.” Dora kept going, “In fact, her mother seduced my father and forced him to have a child with her.”

Anger and fear coursed through my veins as she spread her lies about my family. No one else really knew this, but Liam, my father, raped my mother when she started working for him. That’s how she became pregnant with me. Dora’s lies were poison.

She continued to talk about how I was a horrible child and mistreated everyone in the household while we were growing up together. The awful thing was, her stories were all true, but she was the one tormenting me.

She was using my story to gain pity points for herself. I wanted to find her and throw my phone at her.

“Ava,” Ethan’s face was pale and stern. “What is she doing?”

“I don’t know,” I sobbed, the tears flowed freely down my cheeks and collected at the collar of my pajama shirt. “I don’t understand!”

Dora’s video continued, “Ava went so far as to steal my fiance. I was engaged to Ethan - we were in love!”

No they weren’t.

“Ava saw that I was going to have something good for once in my life and she swooped in to take him. She always wanted everything I had and more, she took my fiance from me and she’s been flaunting him all over the media to show off.” Dora’s fake sobs played through the speakers of my phone and I listened, frozen.

The video ended there, and the emotions bubbled up in my chest until they burst. The pressure in my head doubled and I couldn’t catch my breath. I started hyperventilating, unable to catch my breath, and I fell to the floor. I pulled my knees up to my chest and held either side of my head while Ethan tried to reassure me.

The comments ran through my head, calling me evil, a bitch, a backstabber, a homewrecker. Thousands and thousands of cruel comments were getting posted under the video.

Ethan grabbed his one phone, calling everyone he could to get the video taken down. Once it was removed from the website, other users get reposting it on their own accounts. The video was everywhere, it couldn’t be taken down.

I didn’t sleep at all that night.

The next day, I was curled up in my bed. My social media was flooded with death threats and messages calling me the worst things imaginable. Men were begging me to sleep with them because I was apparently such a slut, women were berating me for stealing Ethan from someone as sweet as Dora.

I couldn’t leave my room.

Ethan took the day off of work to post his own video calling Dora a liar and saying that he was never in love with Dora. That could only do so much, though, since Dora lied about my mother and our childhood together. Ethan couldn’t prove I wasn’t an evil child.

Everyone thinks that Ethan is being manipulated by me, that I’m some master manipulator that can bewitch good men.

I spent the next two days in my bed. Ethan eventually came in and asked me to get up.

“I don’t want to,” I murmured, cheeks hurting from the excessive crying I’d been doing lately.

“Ava,” He kneeled next to my bed, cradling the side of my face and using his thumb to brush away any lingering tears. “You need to go out and keep going to interviews. Show her that she doesn’t scare you - that her video hasn’t affected you.”

I glared at him, “It has affected me.”

“Pretend it hasn’t. The more you hide, the more suspicious it seems.” His voice was soft and commanding, I couldn’t say no to him.

He pulled me from my bed and ushered me into the shower. He helped me wash my hair and scrub the salt from my face.

We arrived at another talk-show segment with the same host as before. I tried to remain the same polite and happy girl I was before, but I couldn’t even speak.

The interviewer asked me a few questions, but Ethan answered for me. He didn’t even wait for me to be given a chance, and this time, I was thankful for it.

“Ava, so why did you think that you deserved Ethan more than Dora?”

Ethan didn’t like that question.

“I love Ava, that's the difference between her and her sister. I never even considered marrying Dora!” He defended me, but he was often brushed off. It made him bristle with annoyance.

“What did you do to seduce Ethan, did you learn any tricks from your mother who seduced your alpha father?”

My eyes widened at that question, and Ethan was the one to pull me off the stage at that point. The anger I felt was boiling underneath my skin, ready to bubble over and erupt. Ethan knew it, too. He pulled me away and we went home.

Every single interview that Ethan dragged me to after that one consisted of the same questions over and over. They all wanted to know why I was such an awful person, even though I wasn’t.

No one knew the truth.

As the speculations grew to an alltime high and every single segment about Ethan and I went viral, Sarah used the drama to bring up our old drama.

I was watching television with Ethan in our living room. The anger and fear in both our bodies was rolling off of us in waves. No one, not even Ethan’s Beta Tristan, wanted to come anywhere near us.

Sarah was being interviewed by a couple of gossip and drama reporters. I was hoping that she wouldn’t bring herself back into our issues, but I was never so lucky.

“How do I feel about it?” She chuckled, placing a hand on her heart. “I mean you all saw that video of her pushing me into the pool.”

The reporters laughed at her and urged her to continue.

“Listen, I always knew there was something wrong with her. I urged Ethan to beware of her, but he’s so blind by her manipulations that he doesn’t see her for who she truly is.” Sarah flipped her hair over her shoulder and leaned in.

The reporters listened intently.

“I’ve been friends with her half-sister for years-” She bragged.

That was a lie.

“And Dora always told me how awful she was. I was always too scared to come out about it publicly before. She’s really scary for someone with such poor birth status. The child of a maid? Plus, I don’t know if this is well-known yet, but she’s wolfless, too.”

The reporters gasped, “No!”

“Yes!”

Ethan clicked off the TV with a huff. His eyes had dark moons underneath them, neither of us had been sleeping since this all started.

Suddenly, Mars burst into the house, chest heaving with exercise, “There’s a petition going around to get you eliminated from being able to run for alpha chairman!”