EL Diablo's Bride

White Roses

The day my father sold me, the dining room smelled like roses.

White ones. Fresh. My mother’s doing. She ordered them every Monday without fail, arranged in a crystal vase at the centre of the mahogany table like we were the kind of family that had nothing to hide.

We were not that kind of family.

But we had the roses anyway.

My brothers were already seated when I walked in.

That should have been my first warning.

Luca, the oldest, had his phone face down on the table. He only did that when our father specifically asked him to. Marco had his arms crossed, staring at nothing, doing a terrible job of pretending he was unbothered. Dante, the youngest, was watching the door.

When I walked through it, he looked away.

He already knew, I realised. They all already knew.

I sat down. Nobody spoke.

My mother came in from the kitchen, hands fidgeting with the hem of her blazer. She sat at the far end of the table, folded her hands in her lap, and looked at the roses.

Not at me. At the roses.

Something is wrong, I thought. Something is very wrong.

My father came in last.

Senator Dorian Voss. The man whose face was on billboards across the city. Warm. Trustworthy. The kind of handsome that photographs well and lies even better.

He sat at the head of the table and looked at us.

“Thank you all for coming,” he said.

As though we had been given a choice.

He paused.

“An arrangement has been made,” he said. “Between our family and the Creeds.”

The name hit the room like a gunshot.

I felt it in my chest before I understood it.

The Creeds.

Luca’s jaw tightened. He still wouldn’t look at me.

“The two families will be joined,” my father continued, and now he looked at me directly, for the first time since I had sat down. “Isla. You will be married to the Creed heir. The contract is signed. The date is in three months.”

Three months.

The words didn’t make sense at first. I heard them individually but they refused to arrange themselves into something real.

Married. Contract. Three months.

Then they did.

I was on my feet before I knew I had decided to stand.

“You signed a contract.” My voice came out too quiet. Too controlled. “For me. Without asking me.”

“Isla,” mama started.

“Without even speaking to me.” Louder now. My hands found the edge of the table and gripped it. “You sat in a room somewhere and signed my name and it didn’t occur to you to,”

“You knew this was always going to happen, Principessa.”

The pet name.

He used the pet name.

I almost laughed.

“I knew I would marry someone you approved of.” I could hear my own heartbeat. “I didn’t know you were going to sell me to the Creeds.” I stopped. Swallowed. “El Diablo, Papà. You signed me over to El Diablo.”

Silence.

Not the comfortable kind. The kind that meant everyone in the room knew something they weren’t saying.

Marco was staring at the table. Dante had gone very still. My mother’s knuckles were white around each other in her lap.

And my father looked at me with that expression. The one I had spent twenty-one years trying to avoid.

Patience.

The patience of a man who had already won.

“It doesn’t matter who,” he said, with a finality that closed every door in the room at once. “Your husband was always going to be someone of my choosing. Now it is settled.”

“Settled.” Something broke open in my chest. “I am not a territory, Papà. You cannot just,”

“Isla.”

One word. My name. That was all.

And I stopped.

Because that was what twenty one years of being a good daughter did to you. One word from him and you stopped. Every time. Without fail.

I hate this, I thought. I hate that I stopped.

But I stopped.

I sat back down.

Slowly. Deliberately. I folded my hands on the table and looked straight ahead and told myself to breathe.

“Three months,” I said.

“Three months,” he confirmed. “More than enough time to prepare.”

Prepare.

Like I was a room being made ready for a guest.

He kept talking. Something about alliances and unity and the kind of foundation that lasts. I heard the words from a distance, like they were happening to someone else. I watched his mouth move and thought about how many people in this city believed every single thing that came out of it.

They don’t know him, I thought. They see the billboards. They don’t sit at this table.

When it was over, he picked up his phone. My brothers moved. My mother went back to the kitchen.

I stayed.

I looked at the roses.

Three months, I thought. Three months, and I become his wife. El Diablo’s wife. The property of the most feared man in the underworld, signed and sealed by my father over a table I wasn’t even sitting at.

Three months.

I stood up. Walked upstairs. Closed my studio door behind me.

And then my back hit the door, and I slid all the way down to the floor.

I didn’t cry. I wanted to, but the tears wouldn’t come. It was like my body had gone into shock and forgotten what to do next. I sat there with my knees pulled to my chest and stared at the canvas across the room.

A woman standing at the edge of something. Back turned. About to step somewhere the painting didn’t show.

I had been painting her for two weeks.

I understand you now, I thought.

After a while, I got up.

I sat at my table. Pulled my notebook toward me. Opened it to a clean page.

Uncapped my pen.

For a long moment, I sat there, the pen touching paper, not writing. My mind was blank and full at the same time. I thought about the roses. The silence. Dante’s eyes. The way Luca’s jaw had moved when he heard the name.

El Diablo.

My husband.

Then, slowly, in my small and careful hand, I wrote at the top of the page:

Things to do before I become his wife.

I stared at it.

Then I started to write.