BOUND TO THE ENEMY HEIR

Chapter Three: Two Suitcases

The wedding took forty minutes, start to finish, and Mia spent most of it thinking about how strange it was that something meant to last a lifetime could be scheduled in between two board meetings.

There were maybe thirty people in the room, most of them there for the company rather than for either of them, cameras positioned at angles that made it obvious somebody's PR team had walked through before deciding exactly where the good shots would be. Ruth sat in the second row with her hands knotted together in her lap, not crying, though Mia could tell it was costing her something to hold that together. Julian sat in front, unreadable as ever, and Camille sat beside him looking like she wanted to be anywhere else, which Mia had started to realize might just be her default expression around her father.

Damien said his lines when he was supposed to. She said hers. Nobody's voice shook, which felt like its own kind of achievement given the circumstances, and when it was over, he kissed her once, quick and formal, the kind of kiss you'd give someone at a funeral out of obligation rather than anything resembling feeling. She didn't expect anything more than that. She got exactly what she expected.

They didn't speak on the drive to the estate. Mia watched the city give way to trees out the window and tried not to think too hard about the fact that she now legally shared a last name with a family that had spent a decade destroying hers, that somewhere in a filing cabinet in that house there might be answers about what actually happened to her father, and that she had exactly one month to figure out where to start looking before the newness of her presence stopped being enough of an excuse to wander places she shouldn't.

The house itself was bigger than made sense for the number of people who actually lived in it. A housekeeper showed her to a wing on the east side, separate from Damien's, which nobody bothered explaining because nobody needed to. Mia set her two suitcases down in a room the size of her mother's entire first floor and stood there a moment just breathing, the quiet of the place pressing in on her in a way the noise of home never had.

Camille found her within the hour, knocking on the open door before letting herself in without waiting for an answer, dropping onto the edge of the bed like she'd known Mia for years instead of one afternoon at a will reading and one very short wedding. "I know this is weird," she said, "the whole thing, all of it. I just didn't want you sitting up here by yourself on your wedding night thinking nobody in this house is going to talk to you."

"I appreciate that." Mia meant it, more than she expected to.

"For what it's worth, Damien's not actually as bad as he looked today. He gets like that around my father. Everyone does." Camille said it lightly, but something underneath it landed heavier than she probably meant it to, and Mia filed that away the way she'd started filing away most things in that house, small pieces that didn't mean much on their own yet.

Dinner that first week only happened twice, both times because Julian insisted the family needed to be seen together at the table even if nobody had much to say once they got there. Damien sat across from her both times, polite in the emptiest way politeness can be, asking about her day the way you'd ask a coworker rather than a wife, and Mia gave him just as little in return, because giving more felt like handing over something she wasn't ready to lose.

It was the second dinner where Julian asked the question.

He did it the way he did everything, casual enough that if you weren't watching closely you'd miss the intention behind it. He was cutting into something on his plate, not even looking up, when he said, "Your father. Whatever happened to him, after everything came out? I don't believe I've ever heard where he ended up."

The table went quiet in that particular way rooms go quiet when everyone senses something is happening even if they can't name what. Damien looked up from his own plate, glancing between his father and his new wife like he was trying to figure out if he'd missed part of a conversation that started before he was paying attention.

Mia kept her fork moving, because stopping would have told Julian more than any answer could. "He passed away a few years back. Health complications, mostly. It wasn't sudden."

It wasn't the truth, not the whole truth anyway, but it was close enough to something true that it would hold up if anyone bothered checking, which was more than she could say about most of what she'd told this family since the day she signed those papers. Julian nodded slowly, like the answer satisfied some private question he'd been running through his own head, and went back to his plate without another word on it, though Mia caught something pass behind his eyes right before he looked away, something that felt less like sympathy and more like calculation.

Damien didn't ask anything after that. He just watched her for a second longer than he needed to, and for the first time since the will reading, it didn't feel like he was looking at a problem. It felt like he was actually looking at her, trying to figure out what he'd missed, and Mia sat there hoping her face hadn't given away as much as Julian's expression had a moment ago, because whatever her father-in-law had just clocked about her, she had a feeling it wasn't finished.