My sister m0cked my “cheap” funeral dress in front of an entire room of mourners, calling me an embarrassment to the Hale family.
She had no idea the dress she insulted cost thirty thousand dollars, that I owned the luxury fashion brand she modeled for, or that her termination letter had already been signed hours earlier. What happened next… was how I made every single one of them pay.
The church was heavy with grief—our father’s casket at the front, the air filled with murmured condolences—when my sister, Victoria Hale, decided it was the perfect moment to humiliate me.
“Elena, seriously?” she said loud enough to silence three pews. “Did you pull that dress out of a bargain bin? You’re embarrassing all of us.”
A flush crawled up my neck. My mother looked away. Our aunts froze. Victoria smirked, soaking in the attention. She always loved positioning herself as the superior Hale sister. To her, I was the plain one. The forgettable one. The one she had outshined since childhood.
She had no idea how wrong she was.
No one in that church knew the truth:
The “cheap” black dress she ridiculed was a thirty-thousand-dollar prototype.
Its design was unpublished, unseen, unreleased.
And I personally approved the final pattern.
Because I was the silent founder and sole owner of HÉLOISE—the luxury brand whose campaigns had turned Victoria into a minor industry darling.
For five years, she flaunted her title as one of our “faces.” She belittled junior designers, shouted at stylists, and mocked anyone she considered beneath her. She had never once imagined the girl she ridiculed the most—me—was the one who had built the entire company from the ground up.
But when she insulted me at our father’s funeral—the man who raised us with nothing but patience and kindness—something in me shifted. Something snapped cleanly, like a thread pulled too tight for too long.
Earlier that morning, before stepping into the church, I had signed a document:
Victoria’s immediate termination.
And that was only the beginning.
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