Eternal Temptation

❥ 00| prologue

ONCE UPON A TIME, there was a girl. She met a prince, they fell in love and then they lived happily ever after. The End.

That's how most fairytales go, right? Well, not mine. That is, if you even count my story as a fairytale; it doesn't deserve to be, that's for sure.

I was just an ordinary girl. An ordinary girl who went to school, did all my work to the best standard, was every teacher's star student, gossiped with my friends, and got neglected by my parents but still did my best to always stay positive and smile. But that was all until, he entered my life. Logan Anderson. My first love. The first guy to pay me attention. Hell, the first person to pay me attention and see who I truly was. And he was my almost first kiss. He was everything I wanted, but everything I couldn't have.

He was my brother's best friend, you see. The only guy who actually looked past our money and stood with us for who we truly were. So that's why I wasn't allowed to love him in the open. Why I had to hide all of my feelings and lock them inside my heart. My chest hurt every time I saw Logan with a girl by his side, and every single thing I felt for him threatened to burst out and hit him, shake him, make him finally see that I was the one who he should be with. The one that endlessly loved him. Always had. Always would.

But little did I know, my love for him started with an expiry date. I always knew that this love would one day completely destroy me and shatter me into tiny pieces. And it did destroy me. But it also destroyed him. I'd always thought that he only ever saw me as Aden's little sister but, no, he saw me as me. The girl who was hopelessly in love with him and only ever wished for him to notice me and return my feelings.

By the time I realised he felt more for me than he let on, it was too late. I chose family over love. My parents' business was struggling and they were saved by the Haidars. The Haidars with their endless money and their beautiful family. My family's business was salvaged but the elders wanted to join both our families together. The Haidars and the Khans. And what better way to do that than marriage, right?

I was promised to another man. Another man whose name my heart didn't cry. But I still agreed like the dutiful daughter I was and accepted to marry Zayaan Haidar. He was a better match for me in the eyes of my family and if it was a way to make my parents happy, who was I to refuse?

That was my whole life planned away. My feelings all swept away and my happiness all gone. All gone.

But the one thing I didn't anticipate was for my future husband to also be the man who picked up the tatters of my heart, and put it back together, piece by piece, making it only ever beat for him anymore. He set my soul on fire and awakened the part of it that was torn from being ripped away from his own.