The Bride He Didn’t Choose

Chapter 5: The Only Mercy Either Of Us Gets

Damian

I do not sleep that night. I sit at the desk in my own wing, Mia's account of the boathouse conversation laid out in my head piece by piece, and I turn Kieran Ashford's name over like a blade I'm deciding where to bury.

I have known, for two years, that someone close to my circle has been feeding information to the coalition trying to dismantle everything my father built. I have suspected six men. I have never once suspected the son of a family my father humiliated a decade ago, quietly, patiently building himself into exactly the kind of man a lonely, overlooked girl would fall for — and exactly the kind of man who could get close enough to my new wife to use her as a door into my house.

It is, I have to admit, sitting alone in the dark, an excellent plan. It would have worked, too, on a woman less stubborn than the one currently trying to sleep three floors below me, wound tight enough that I could feel it radiating off her all the way down the hall.

I go to her at two in the morning. I tell myself it's strategy — that I need more details, that the timeline matters, that every hour I don't act on this intelligence is an hour Kieran Ashford gets to keep moving his pieces into place. I do not fully believe my own reasoning, walking down that hall, and some old, discarded part of me — the part that stopped letting itself want things a long time before tonight — recognizes, with real alarm, that strategy is not actually why I'm here.

She's awake when I open her door. Sitting up in bed, arms around her knees, staring at nothing, and when she sees me she doesn't flinch, doesn't reach for a robe, doesn't do any of the small defensive things I've watched other women do around me my whole adult life.

She just watches me cross the room like she's been waiting to find out what I'd do with what she told me.

"You should be furious with me," she says. "For going. For not telling you first."

"I am furious," I say, and it's true, and it is also, infuriatingly, not the only thing I am. "You put yourself directly in the path of a man actively working to destroy everything I've built, alone, at midnight, without a single word to anyone who could have protected you if it had gone wrong."

"I know."

"You will not do it again."

"I know that too," she says, and something in her voice — not defiance, not quite, something steadier and more dangerous than defiance — makes me stop at the foot of her bed instead of turning to leave the way every instinct built over the last decade is telling me to.

"Then why," I say, "do I get the feeling you'd do it again anyway, if you thought it would protect me?"

She looks at me a long moment, and the honesty in her face when she finally answers is the single most unguarded thing anyone has shown me in years.

"Because I would," she says. "I don't fully understand why yet. But I would."

I do not have a strategy for what happens next. That, more than anything else that's happened since the church, is what tells me exactly how much danger I'm actually in.