The Bride He Didn’t Choose

Chapter 2: A Marked Man

Nobody tells you that marrying a man like Damian Cross means learning to check the exits in every room he walks into.

I learned it on our wedding night, not from him, but from the four additional guards who fell into step around our car the moment we left the church — men I hadn't noticed at the ceremony, men who moved like they were already braced for something to go wrong.

"Is this normal," I asked, watching one of them scan the rooftops as we crossed the courtyard to his car. "For a wedding?"

"For my weddings," Damian said, not looking at me, "yes."

"That's not an answer."

He glanced at me then, and something flickered behind the flat black of his eyes — not warmth, not yet, but the beginning of something closer to reluctant respect, the look of a man recalibrating an assumption he'd made too quickly.

"There are people who would very much like me dead," he said, with the particular bluntness of a man too tired to soften a truth for a stranger's comfort. "Three rival firms my father crushed a generation ago. Two former partners I removed for skimming. A cousin who believes the company should have gone to him. And, as of about two hours ago, an entire wedding's worth of witnesses who watched my bride vanish and my new wife take her place — which means, by morning, every one of those interested parties will know exactly how unstable my position currently looks."

"So I didn't just marry a man," I said slowly. "I married a target."

"You married the target," Damian said.

"Congratulations. You're now standing considerably closer to the blast radius than you were this morning."

I should have been afraid. Some small, sensible part of me was — the part that had grown up sheltered, that had never once had to check a rooftop before crossing a courtyard.

But underneath the fear was something else, something that had been dormant in me for exactly as long as I could remember: a fierce, unfamiliar thrill at being told the truth plainly, by a man who clearly didn't think I needed it wrapped in anything gentler.

"Then I suppose you'd better teach me to watch the rooftops too," I said.

He looked at me for a long moment, and for the first time since the church, something that might almost have been the ghost of a smile crossed his mouth before he caught it and put it away.

"We'll see if you last the week," he said, and opened the car door for me himself.