Chapter 3- The Morning After

I woke up with my mouth full of metal taste and the world tilted wrong. Sore in places that meant last night had been real. I blinked at the ceiling.

Then my phone buzzed.

The screen lit up with thirty missed calls, endless messages, and one message that made my stomach drop: “We’re live outside the Blackwell estate. Cameras rolling. Where is the bride?” —NewsLive

I sat up so fast the headboard hit my back. I could feel Damian behind me in the dark, a shadow of warmth and something else. Ownership?

“Morning,” he said, voice even, as if the events of the last twenty-four hours were just a long meeting. He was already dressed, tie still loose, hair a little mussed at the temple. He looked dangerous and tired at the same time.

“You’re not angry,” he said.

“I am,” I snapped. “I’m furious.” The words came out raw. “You made me say yes at the altar like a damn prop.”

He sat on the edge of the bed and watched me. “I fixed the scene so they didn’t tear you apart.”

“Fixed?” I laughed, a short brittle sound. “So being forced into your arms in front of everyone is what? A miracle?”

He gave me a look that could have been pity, if pity wore a suit and smelled like cologne. “We have to control the narrative, Elena. Right now people will believe anything. If they think Lucas abandoned you, then sympathy sits on you instead of scandal.”

“I don’t need your protection,” I said. “I need my life back.”

“You need to survive this,” he said, softer. “You need to think for more than one day. For your future.”

“You won’t get to decide what’s best for my life,” I said through my teeth.

“Not decide,” he corrected. “Guide.”

“Where’s Lucas?” I asked abruptly. “You said he ran. Where did he go?”

Damian’s jaw tightened. “He left with Sophie. That much is clear.”

I wanted to believe him. I also wanted to find Lucas and slap him and ask how he could do this to me. The need to know clawed at my throat. The reporters below wanted the story; I wanted the truth.

The door opened and Clara came in like a small storm, hair in a messy bun and a face that said she’d been crying and fighting at the same time.

“Elena,” she said, falling to the bed and pressing her mouth to my cheek. “You look like crap, but you look alive.”

“Thanks,” I said. “That’s...something.”

“Mother’s on her way,” she said. “She won’t stop. Dad’s still in his office—he left after the ceremony. He said something about dignity and figures and I wanted to punch him.”

“You want to punch everyone today,” I said.

“Today I want to punch Lucas,” she said. “Do you want me to go down and set their press on fire? Ludicrous suggestion. I’ll call a lawyer.”

“No.”

How could I accept help from people who would only make it worse? How could I let another lawyer talk to the press and dig into our trash for headlines?

Clara reached for my hand. Her fingers were small but steady. “You don’t have to do what he wants.”

“Who? Damian?”

“Damian. Lucas. All of them.”

She stared at me like she wanted to break something into pieces and hand me the pieces to hold. “You didn’t look like a woman who was rescued at the altar,” she said. “You looked stunned. You looked...trapped.”

Her words landed like small knives. She wasn’t wrong.

We dressed in silence. Clara helped with my hair, Damian in the adjoining suite giving orders about statements and photo angles. There’s an intimacy in watching the man who married you command a team like he’s running a war room.

“Are you going to make a statement?” a voice asked from the doorway. Marcus stood there, coat over his arm. He’d been Damian’s right hand, all business and quiet loyalty. Seeing him made the room feel smaller.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Sit down,” he said. “You have to say something. People will invent worse if you stay silent.”

We descended the stairs and the reporters were like a wall. Flashes, shouts, microphones shoved toward my face. “Elena, are you okay?” “Will you press charges?” “What happened with Lucas?”

I forced a smile so hard my cheeks hurt. “I’m fine,” I said, and the lie tasted like rust. Damian stood at my side, placid and protective. The cameras loved him. Men loved a man who could orchestrate a crisis into an image of strength. The crowd needed villain and hero packaged together. He supplied both.

After the scrum we retreated into a car. My mother clung to me in the backseat and cried into the pad of my shoulder. My father didn’t speak until we drove off, then he muttered something about “keeping the family’s head above water.”

“I don’t want that,” I said. “I don’t want to be above water in their eyes. I want to breathe in a way that’s mine.”

“You will,” Damian said.

He touched my hand once in that car, brief and purposeful. It was not the lingering touch of last night. It was a map: mine. I hated that the shape of his hand felt like home now.

At the estate, things moved fast. People circled like flies. Isabella arrived in all her elegant cruelty, perfume leaving a bruise in the room. She said the wrong thing, something about appearances, and my mother’s face crumpled. I caught Isabella watching me like a tactician, eyes sharp, lips thin.

“If anyone thinks to turn this into a scandal,” she said, “they will regret it.”

Her threat was thinly veiled. I thought of how easily she could crush me or lift me. I thought of how little I knew about the people I married into.

Later, in the privacy of a study that smelled of old money and decisions, Lucas’s name came up. Damon—no, Damian—sat across from me. Marcus stood in the doorway.

“He called earlier,” Damian said. “Left a message that he’s sorry.”

“For what?” I asked. The words felt stupid on my tongue. “For leaving me? For running away? For choosing a different life? For choosing Sophie?”

“Lucas is reckless,” Damian said. “He has vices. He has debts. He could have brought ruin to this family.”

I listened like it was a story being read to me. I kept waiting for him to add: so I saved you. I kept waiting for the confession that he’d staged the perfect betrayal to pull me where he wanted me.

He didn’t say it.

Instead he leaned forward and said, low, “Don’t speak to him. If he reaches out, give me the call. Let me handle it.”

“Why? Because you say so?” I asked.

“Because I can make the consequences smaller for you,” he said. “Because I know what they’ll try to do.”

There it was again: the promise to guide, to control, to shelter me from the storm he’d helped raise. It didn’t feel like protection. It felt like ownership varnished as care.

That night my phone buzzed with a picture from an unknown number. I opened it with shaking fingers. The photo was grainy, like someone had taken it fast with a phone. It showed Lucas and Sophie huddled together at the back of a taxi, their faces close. It was a good photo if you wanted to ruin someone.

Under it, a message: They make their own choices. —Unknown

My hands went cold. Who was sending me these? Someone trying to bait me?

I walked into the hallway and found Damian standing under a lamp. He looked like he had been carved out of night.

“You got a picture?” he asked without looking at my phone.

“Yes,” I said. “Someone just sent it.”

He glanced at the image and his mouth thinned. “Be careful,” he said.

“Who would want to bait me?” I asked. “Why now?”

He crossed to me and for the first time in a day his face softened. “Because you’re a target now,” he said. “Because those who want what I have want to tear mistakes into stories and sell them.”

“Why would someone want to hurt me?” I asked. “I’m not the one with the power.”

His hand found the small of my back, tugging me closer. Up close he smelled like safety and the danger of late-night decisions. He said, quiet, “Because you walked into our world.”

“Promise me something,” Clara said from the doorway. She held my gaze like it was a lifeline. “Promise me you won’t let them gaslight you.”

“What?” I asked.

“Promise me you’ll keep a record. Save everything. If he hurts you, if anyone hurts you, don’t let them press you into shame.”

I wanted to promise. I wanted hindsight to have power. Instead I felt like I was floating, a puppet being tugged toward campfires.

Later that night I found a folded note on my pillow. No sender. No return. The handwriting was angular, sharp.

It said: Watch who smiles at your misfortune. They might be the ones who lit the match.

The words were simple. The message was not.

Who lit the match? Lucas? Sophie? Isabella? Damian?

The house seemed to breathe around me, and for the first time since the church doors closed I felt small and shaken and dangerously alive.

I slid the note into my pocket and stepped into the corridor. At the far end of the hall, by the balcony, someone was moving in the shadows. A figure watched me.

He stepped forward and I saw his face lit by the moon. It was Marcus.

“You okay?” he asked, voice low, as if this was between us.

“No,” I said. “No, I’m not.”

He didn’t say anything else. He only handed me a sealed envelope, heavy in his hand. His fingers brushed mine; they were warm and steady. I opened it. Inside: a single photograph of the church, taken from a high window, and in the background, a shape I couldn’t identify. Someone had been watching us before the altar. The knot in my stomach tightened.

Marcus’s mouth was a line. “Keep this,” he said. “And don’t tell anyone you have it.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Because some things are safer undisclosed,” he said. “Until we know who the arsonist is.”

I stared at the picture again and again, the church frozen in a moment. I thought of Lucas’s face and Sophie’s laughter and Damian’s hands.

Someone had been watching. Someone had planned the timing. Maybe nothing made sense. Maybe everything did.

“Who?” I whispered.

Marcus looked at me like he was keeping a secret he didn’t want to break. “Not who,” he said. “When.”

I closed the envelope and slid it into my bag.

And then, almost as if on cue, my phone buzzed. A new text. No number. One sentence.

Be careful who you call family. —Unknown

Everything in me tightened. The safe line between truth and performance had snapped into a thousand strings. I stood there, in the hall, with all those strings in my hands, and for the first time really, truly, I understood I wasn’t the only thing on sale this week.

I walked back to my room and locked the door, the sound final. Outside, the world would keep guessing. Inside, I had a sealed envelope and a sinking feeling that the story I knew might be a lie.

Who had lit the match? And how far would they go to make sure I burned?