The Bride He Didn’t Choose

Chapter 9: Forced Entry

Damian

Mia comes back from her sister's apartment different — quieter, harder around the eyes, carrying something she isn't saying out loud yet, and I know better than to push before she's ready to hand it to me the way she's started handing me everything else that matters.

I use the waiting to finish what my own investigation started.

Marcus Sinclair, it turns out, does not simply own a company in trouble. He owes considerably more than a failing balance sheet to considerably more dangerous people than a disappointed board — a debt structured, deliberately, to a consortium I recognize instantly, because it's the same consortium behind three of the six assassination attempts my security team has quietly buried in the last two years.

Which means Mia's father isn't merely a manipulative man who traded his daughters like currency.

He is, whether willingly or under duress I still can't tell, working for the exact people trying to have me killed.

I am still sitting with that particular piece of architecture when Mia finds me in my study, pale, resolved, a folded piece of paper held tight in one hand.

"I need to tell you something," she says, "and I need you not to do anything reckless with it until I've finished."

"That's an ominous way to open a conversation."

"It gets worse." She sits across from me, spine straight, and something in the set of her shoulders tells me she has spent the drive home rehearsing exactly how to say whatever comes next. "Claire says my father didn't just arrange the wedding to save the company. She says he's been planning this specific marriage — me, specifically, to you, specifically — for over a year. That Kieran was never supposed to actually fall for me. That the whole thing was built to put someone he controls close enough to you to finish what the consortium's been trying to do for two years."

I go very still, because I already knew half of this, and hearing the rest confirmed out loud in her voice is somehow worse than reading it in a file.

"There's more," she says, and her hand tightens around the folded paper. "Claire wouldn't tell me everything. She said I had to hear the last part from our father directly, before—" her voice catches "—before whatever's coming happens."

"Before what happens."

Mia looks at me, and for the first time since the church, I watch real fear cross her face — not fear of me, not fear of what I am or what danger follows me, but fear of something she hasn't said yet, something she's clearly been carrying alone since that apartment.

"She said," Mia says quietly, "that the wedding was never the plan that mattered. That the wedding was just the delivery method. And that whatever's actually supposed to happen — happens soon."

Behind her, on the desk, my phone lights up with a message from the security team I'd stationed outside Marcus Sinclair's estate an hour ago, the moment my own investigation gave me enough reason to distrust him.

Sinclair residence quiet. No movement. Wait — confirmed forced entry, rear service door. Two unknown men inside. Requesting instructions.

I look up at Mia, and watch her read the answer on my face before I've said a single word.

"He's already there," I say. "Whoever your father was afraid of. They didn't wait for us to ask him anything."