Chapter 2- The Wedding Night

The door snapped shut behind us like a verdict.

The guests’ murmurs and camera flashes fell away to a hum. Outside, the church still buzzed, but inside Damian’s suite it was like I’d been cut loose from everything I knew and dropped into a place that had its own rules.

He didn’t take off his gloves. He stood under the soft light by the window. For a man who’d just stolen my life in front of a hundred witnesses, he was shockingly calm.

“You okay?” he asked, like the question was casual, like he wasn’t the reason I was a headline.

“I don’t know. I thought… I thought Lucas would—”

“You thought a lot,” Damian said, cutting me off, not unkind, just factual. He came toward me and the air around him smelled of smoke and something darker—leather, spice. “You thought wrong.”

There it was again. That flat certainty in his voice that had made me say yes at the altar.

“Why are you doing this?” I blurted. I hated how small I sounded.

He paused at the ottoman and sat like he was taking the conversation seriously. “Because if you stand there and wait for him to come back, everyone will piece together the truth.” He looked at me as if deciding which word would land hardest. “And you will lose everything. I am… providing a solution.”

“A solution,” I repeated, tasting the word. “Or a trap.”

“Both,” he said. “Possibly. Depends on you.”

I wanted to scream that this wasn’t my life to barter, that I never asked to be anyone’s bargaining chip. Instead I went to the window and looked out without really seeing the city lights. I could make out the church roof across the street, the place where I’d been humiliated like some staged scene.

“Do you want a drink?” Damian asked, as if we were two people settling into the after-party.

“No,” I said. Then: “Yes.” The voice that answered me sounded far away. I wanted something to steady me. Anything. Even poison would do.

He poured. We drank in silence. The alcohol burned in a good way, right through the panic.

“Tell me,” he said finally. “Why would Lucas run if he’s not a coward?

Why would he do this?”

“Because…” I picked at the seam of my glove. “People change. People do stupid things.”

“You call marrying your best friend ‘stupid’?” He smirked. “It’s an odd definition.”

I didn’t answer. My phone buzzed in my clutch and I flinched. A text. From an unknown number. I opened it because I needed something else besides his voice to focus on.

Meet me tonight. I can explain. —L

For a second there was hope, stupid, ridiculous hope that Lucas had come to his senses. Then logic crashed through: Lucas had promised me the moon; he’d promised me everything. He’d lied. And Sophie, my friend. The thought of her with him made bile rise again.

“Don’t,” Damian said, as if he’d read my screen. “Don’t see him.”

“How would you stop me?” I snapped.

His hand was on my wrist before I could pull away. “Because anything you do without me on your side will be used. Don’t make it easy for them.”

“I don’t want to be anyone’s trophy,” I said.

“You’re not,” he murmured. “You’re something else.”

“What do you want from me?” I asked. I needed him to say it plainly.

He smiled, and for the first time it was not cruel. “I want you to be safe.” He said it like it was the most obvious thing in the world. “I want you in my world where people can’t hurt you like that. I want you to stop pretending you have a choice.”

“Is that what you want? Or what you need?” I whispered.

“Both,” he said.

He came closer and his hand slid up my arm, warm, sure. I felt the electricity, hot and dangerous. It made me dizzy. I could have stepped back and left. Instead I let my knees catch and I let him pull me into him.

We kissed like two people who had lost everything else to say to someone. The kiss didn’t start gentle. His mouth was hard and demanding at first, like everything else in him. I tasted smoke and whiskey and something metallic, fear, maybe, or control. I pushed at him with my palms, hard enough to make the point I’d been planning to make all day: Don’t make this about you.

He didn’t pull away. He pushed, not with force but with intent. Intent became hands, hands became the slow peel of lace and fabric. My dress unzipped with a whisper. At some point my veil slipped and fell to the carpet, my hair loose and hot against the back of my neck, and I couldn’t remember the last time I had felt this stripped of pretense.

I told myself it wasn’t real. That I was bargaining with him, with my own fear.

And yet, I don’t know, there was a part of me that wanted it. That wanted to know what it felt like to be wanted by someone who looked at me like I could be his.

“You’re trembling,” he said into my hair, his voice lower now.

“Because you’re heavy,” I breathed. My answer came out a joke because I couldn’t say what I felt. It would have sounded weak, would have sounded like surrender.

He laughed. “Good. Fight me. It makes it real.”

He took me apart in the best and worst ways. The room was hot, the bed too wide. He kissed me, kissed me until the edge of the anger blurred and turned into something that made my stomach clench and my knees go soft. He kissed like a man who’d planned this moment and a man who’d never planned it at all. It was violent and tender, messy and precise.

I said stop twice. And both times I didn’t push him away like I meant it. I let him. There, under the pretense of consent that is complicated and ugly, we crashed into each other until the world whittled down to breath and skin. I gave him things I’d never given to Lucas. Not because Lucas wasn’t worthy, but because I had been someone else with Lucas and someone else with Damian. Human. Unpredictable. I leaned into it and felt both guilty and alive.

Afterwards we lay tangled in the sheets like wreckage. I could hear the city again, faint and impossible. Damian’s breath was slow.

“You could leave,” he said suddenly, and I jolted. “I could let you leave.”

I sat up. “Why are you being kind now?”

He watched me, eyes unreadable. “Because I don’t like waste.”

“Of what? People?” The sarcasm was sharp.

“Of potential.” He said it softer. “Of things I want.”

A knock at the door cut through us. Sharp, urgent. Damian’s face changed in a sliver of a second. He moved to the door and opened it a crack. Marcus stood there. He looked like someone who’d just run from bad news.

“Problem?” Damian asked.

“Press.” Marcus said it like a statement of fact. “They’re already outside. Pictures up, a line of headlines forming. Someone’s planted a story about Lucas’s gambling. There’s video of him at a club with…” He stopped, glancing at Damian.

“At Sophie.” Damian finished for him.

My chest fell out of me. Marcus handed Damian an envelope. Damian didn’t open it. He just slid it into his pocket and fixed me with a look that made my skin crawl.

“It’s not over,” he said. “Not by a long shot.”

“What do you mean, not over?” I asked, voice too loud now, too betrayed.

He touched my face then, gentler than before, and for a moment it was nothing but tenderness. “Because there are people who will plan and people who will execute. Right now? You’re safe with me. But there will be more.”

I wanted to ask about Lucas, where he was, if he was hurt, if he was alive. I wanted to blast open the door and run and find him and demand answers. But Marcus’s presence, Damian’s watchful hand, the sudden knowledge that we were being watched from outside like specimens, everything slammed into me. I was married now. I had a name that belonged to a man whose hands had just pressed into me and made me say yes. And outside, the world was already starting to spin a story I didn’t control.

I lay back down and looked at the ceiling. Damian handled the bottle, poured himself another drink, and for the first time I noticed how tired he looked. Not the tired of a man who had everything, but the tired of someone who had to protect what he had with constant violence.

“What are you going to do?” I asked finally, small and exhausted.

He stared into his glass for a long time. “Tell me what you want,” he said. “Because I can’t read what you’re thinking, Elena.”

I wanted ridiculous things. I wanted to throw the ring at him and run. I wanted to fall into his arms and never leave. I wanted to find Lucas and beat the truth out of him. I wanted my life to be mine.

Instead I said, “I want to breathe again.”

He smiled, just that small, half-ruined smile, and leaned over me. “Then breathe,” he murmured. “But breathe where I can find you.”

The headlines pulsed in my pocket where my phone vibrated again. I didn’t open it. I didn’t know which disaster to attend to first.

And when the lights dimmed and the bed swallowed us again, there was a single thought pulsing in the hollow of me, one that felt like both a promise and a warning.

What had I actually traded for safety?