The Bride He Didn’t Choose

Chapter 4: Forty Minutes

Mia

Damian is waiting in my wing when I get back, which should be impossible — his own wing is three floors up, on the opposite side of the house — and the fact that he's here, sitting in the dark like he's been sitting there for a while, tells me everything I need to know about how much of tonight he already knows.

"Forty minutes," he says, without preamble, without looking up from the glass of scotch he's turning slowly in one hand. "Alone. At midnight. With Kieran Ashford."

My stomach drops straight through the floor. "You had me followed."

"I had you protected," he says, and finally looks up, and the flat black calm I've come to expect from him has a c***k running through it tonight, something hot and dangerous showing at the edges. "Which is a distinction you should be grateful for, because the alternative explanation for a wife sneaking out at midnight to meet another man is considerably less flattering to you."

"It isn't what you think."

"Then tell me what it is." He sets the glass down, slow, deliberate, and stands, and even across the room I feel the temperature change, feel my whole body go alert the way it's started doing whenever he moves like this — not fear, not exactly, something more complicated, something that has no business feeling as electric as it does. "Because from where I'm standing, Mia, my wife of four days just spent forty minutes alone in the dark with a man I have very good reason to hate, and I would like, very much, for you to give me a reason not to assume the worst."

"He's part of it," I say, before I can stop myself, before I can weigh whether telling him is safe. "The people who want you dead. Kieran — he came to warn me. He's involved, Damian. He's one of them."

Damian goes very still.

"Say that again," he says, quiet now, quieter than the anger, which is somehow worse.

"Kieran Ashford is part of the group planning to kill you," I say. "He told me himself. He wanted me to leave you — to get out before it happens."

The silence that follows stretches long enough that I can hear my own heartbeat in it, and when Damian finally crosses the room to me, it isn't with the fury I braced for. It's something else — controlled, focused, terrifyingly calm, a man filing a piece of intelligence into exactly the right slot in a machine that has clearly been running for a long time before I ever walked into it.

"And did you consider," he says, stopping close enough that I have to tip my head back to hold his eyes, "that a man warning you to leave your marriage, on the exact week his own plot against me starts moving, might not be doing it out of concern for your safety?"

"He loves me," I say, and hate how small it sounds out loud.

"Maybe he does." Something shifts in Damian's face — not softening, exactly, but a kind of grim, assessing respect, the look of a man revising a plan in real time. "That doesn't mean he isn't also using it. Love and leverage aren't as far apart as people like to believe, Mia. I'd have thought your family taught you that much already, this week alone."

I flinch. It lands exactly where he meant it to.

"So what happens now," I ask, voice steadier than I feel.

"Now," Damian says, "you tell me everything he said. Every word. And then you stay close enough that the next time someone hands you a warning, I hear it before you do.”

He doesn't touch me. He doesn't have to — the command in his voice does something to my whole body that scares me more than the threat against his life does, and I understand, standing there in the dark with him close enough to feel the heat coming off him, that some new and reckless part of me does not entirely want to be protected from this marriage.

I want to be claimed by it.