The Bride He Didn’t Choose

Chapter 8: I Was Just An Excuse

Mia

We find her nine days later, in a rented apartment three states away, living under a name that isn't hers, and when Damian's man sends the photograph confirming it's really Claire — alive, unharmed, deliberately hidden — I cry in a way I haven't let myself cry since the church, ugly and relieved and furious all at once.

I go to her myself. Damian doesn't try to stop me, though I can see it costs him something to let me out of his sight with Kieran's people still circling — he sends four guards instead of arguing, which I've learned is as close as he comes to saying please be careful out loud.

Claire opens the door and goes the color of old paper.

"You weren't supposed to find me," she says, which isn't I'm sorry and isn't are you all right and tells me, instantly, more than she probably means it to.

"You knew," I say. "You knew what he was going to do to me. You let him do it anyway."

"I didn't have a choice." Her voice cracks, and for a moment she looks less like the sister who abandoned me at an altar and more like a frightened girl who's been running for weeks.

"Dad said if I didn't disappear quietly, he'd make sure Damian's people did something worse than send me away. He said you'd be fine — that you'd always wanted—" she stops herself, too late.

"Always wanted what," I ask, low.

"Him," Claire says. "You. You've watched Damian Cross like he hung the stars since we were teenagers, Mia, and don't tell me you haven't, because I've known for years and so has Dad. He didn't just choose me to marry off for the company. He chose you to be the one who'd actually stay, once the wedding forced the door open. Me disappearing wasn't the accident everyone thinks it was. It was always going to be you at that altar. I was just the excuse to get you there."

The floor seems to tilt under me.

"You're telling me," I say slowly, "that my own father engineered his eldest daughter's disappearance, specifically so I'd end up married to a man he knew I already loved."

"I'm telling you he's better at this than either of us gives him credit for," Claire says, wretched. "And I'm telling you Kieran was never a coincidence either. Dad needed leverage on both sides of the marriage — a plant close to Damian, and a reason for you to doubt the marriage once it started working. Kieran was supposed to pull you out before you got attached. He was never supposed to fall in love with you for real."

I sit down hard on the edge of a stranger's rented sofa, the whole architecture of the last two weeks rebuilding itself around me in a shape I don't recognize.

"Why," I say. "Why go to all this trouble. What does my father actually want out of any of this?"

Claire's face goes carefully, deliberately blank — the specific blankness of someone who knows more than she's willing to say.

"You should ask him yourself," she says.

"Before Damian's people find out the part I still haven't told either of you."