Chapter 4- The Blackwell Matriarch

The moment Isabella walked into the breakfast room, the air changed.

She moved like she always did: precise, practiced. Her suit was pale, her pearls quiet. She smiled at us the way a judge smiles before giving a sentence.

“Elena,” she said, voice soft as silk. “You look...surprising.”

I wanted to answer with a dozen things. Instead I kept my face neutral and folded my hands in my lap like I’d been taught at some finishing school I’d never attended.

Damian sat opposite us. He reached for his cup and said something small about schedules and statements and strategy. Marcus hovered in the doorway, a ghost in a coat, eyes like he kept everything he saw in a safe place.

“Your ring is lovely.” Isabella lifted her chin as if that explained everything. “Blackwell heirloom, is it not?”

“It’s…” I stopped. I didn’t want to say heirloom. I didn’t want to admit I’d become a thing.

“You must understand,” Isabella went on, unspooling words about reputation like she was laying down a map. “Scandal is a weed. Pull it now and you save the garden. Let it seed and you risk losing everything.”

Clara, who’d been perched on a chair like an honest, angry bird, slammed her fork down. “You mean you risk people seeing the truth.”

Isabella smiled like she enjoyed the sparring. “And what truth would that be, dear?”

“You know exactly what truth.” Clara’s voice shook. “This is staged, mother. Or at least, someone planned this.”

Isabella’s eyes flicked to me. “Damian made a choice that protected his family’s name,” she said smoothly. “We all make choices. Some harder than others.”

“Protect me?” I said. My voice went higher than I intended. “By forcing me in front of everyone like I was bait? By letting them think Lucas abandoned me? How exactly is that protection?”

Damian’s jaw tightened. He reached across the table and set his hand over mine. The contact was a claim. Quiet, iron, and very present. I hated that I liked the warmth of his skin against mine.

“He left you a choice,” he said, tone steady. “A choice to save yourself from ruin.”

“That’s not a choice,” I shot back. “That’s a trap.”

Isabella’s gaze sharpened. “My dear, marriage is a transaction at its core. We enter alliances that serve safety and continuity. You should be grateful to have a roof over your head and a name that can’t be tarnished easily.”

Grateful. The word stuck in my throat like dust. “I’m grateful to my mother for making sure I have a roof,” I said. “I didn’t trade my life at a table.”

“Then why marry him?” Clara demanded.

“Because in the eyes of the world, the scandal is worse than a rushed union,” Isabella said. “It’s salvage. We salvage reputations.”

I pushed back. “You’re not answering how Sophie fits into this. Why did she run with Lucas? Did she choose him?”

“Ah.” Isabella’s eyes cooled. “If Sophie made the decision to elope, she bears responsibility. We cannot control the decisions of poor opportunists.”

My mother’s eyes were wet and hollow, but she tried to hold herself like a woman remembering how to be dignified. She’d been crying and composing herself all morning. I hated it, and I loved her like an ache.

Damian was quiet for a moment, then he said, “We have statements to release and a timeline to follow. We’ll address Lucas later. Right now we’ve controlled the narrative, and we maintain that control.”

“Control.” I repeated it like a bad habit. “It feels like theft.”

He watched me. The way he watched sometimes made me think I was a puzzle he wanted to solve, and that thought made me angry in a way that was almost childish, like how dare he study me like that.

“Isabella,” he said then, when she was starting to preen, “we need to keep this internal. No leaks. No stupid tabloids getting any dirt. We handle Lucas and Sophie. Elena stays out of it.”

My stomach lurched. “So I stay quiet,” I said. “And you handle it.”

“Yes,” he said.

It was not an offer. It was an order disguised as a plea.

Later, when the breakfast had dissolved into a flurry of calls and files and statements, I found myself wandering through corridors I barely knew. The house felt like a maze built from decisions. Portraits of stern men and thoughtful women watched me as if I was a piece in their gallery, a specimen under glass.

I wanted to know. I needed proof. I needed pieces I could hold and bring out into the light. So I did something reckless. I went to Isabella’s study.

The study door was open a crack. The scent inside was faint—book glue, citrus cleaner, old paper. Isabella’s desk was immaculate, no stray pens, no crumbs, no habit left behind. But I wasn’t there to find crumbs. I was there because I wanted to find the seam in the curtain, the thread that told me all this had been stitched together.

I rifled. I know that sounds dramatic, like I turned into a thief in a costume. But this is what panic makes you do. I moved papers, felt the weight of heavy ledgers, paused at a stack of envelopes bound by rubber band. Most of them were mundane. Charity invites, stock memos. Then I found a small envelope with a glossy printout tucked inside. It was a list of hotel bookings. Names. Dates. Times.

My hands shook as I read. There, on a page neat as a ledger, was Lucas’s name and reservation for a room in a downtown boutique. The timestamp. An earlier date than the wedding.

My chest slammed against my ribs. Someone had booked a room. Someone had planned a night out. Did it mean he planned to run? Or did it mean someone was setting him up? The pencil line that connected name to date looked like ink: deliberate.

My pulse hardened. I turned the paper over and found, taped underneath, a tiny matchbook from the restaurant where Sophie worked earlier in the week. The matchbook’s logo was smudged, someone had tried to burn out a corner. It felt deliberate.

A noise made me freeze. Footsteps in the hall, close. I slipped the paper into my bag and spun, like an idiot. Marcus stood in the doorway, his silhouette dark.

“You shouldn’t be in here,” he said, but not harshly. More like an observation that had the weight of care.

“I needed to know,” I told him. I felt foolish.

He stepped into the room and closed the door. Up close his face was plain and tired and so vulnerable in a way he never let anyone see. “You can’t go dredging in people’s offices, Elena,” he said. “You’ll just upset the wrong people.”

“I thought you were supposed to be protecting me,” I said. “Damian says you’re on our side.”

“I am.” He put a hand on the desk, palms flat. “But there are lines you cross and then there are consequences.”

“Who put the matchbook there?” I asked, because I had to.

He didn’t answer right away. He looked away and when he did his jaw clicked like he was chewing through something tough. “I don’t know,” he said finally. “But if you found something in Isabella’s room it means she’s aware of who knows more than she likes.”

Isabella. The woman who smiled like a queen. The woman who’d called this marriage pragmatic and clean.

“Do you think she had something to do with Lucas leaving?” I asked.

Marcus looked at me like I’d asked him to step off a cliff. “I think someone planned things. I don’t know who. But I know this; get proof before you accuse a Blackwell.”

“What if I don’t want to be careful?” I demanded.

“You don’t get to choose not to be careful,” he said. “Not yet.”

He reached for my hand. His fingers were warm. Solid. “Give me the list,” he said. “Let me run it.”

I handed it to him.

He folded it into the inside pocket of his coat like he had folded away my secrets. “Don’t tell anyone,” he said. “Not yet.”

“Who else?” I whispered. “Who else knows?”

Marcus didn’t answer. He just looked at the window, at the distance between us and the world outside. “More than you think,” he said. “Be careful who smiles at you.”

We both heard the clack of heels on marble then. Isabella appeared in the doorway and looked at us with a kind smile that was all teeth.

“Everything alright?” she asked.

“Yes,” Marcus lied.

“No,” I said, not able to hold it. “No, it’s not. Someone planned something. I found…”

Isabella’s smile tightened, like a muscle pulling. “You’ve been searching my study?”

“I’m trying to find out what happened to my wedding day,” I said. “To my life.”

She studied me with those cold eyes and then, as if to cut the morning into neat pieces, she said: “Sometimes people choose their ruin, Elena. And sometimes they think they are free.”

It was an odd kind of comfort: a warning along with a prophecy.

Marcus’s hand tightened on the paper in his pocket. Isabella’s smile did not falter. And for the first time since I’d walked down that aisle, I realized I was standing in a house where everyone had the ability to set a match.

Who did, or would, light it next?