The Bride He Didn’t Choose

The priest asked if anyone objected, and I almost laughed, because the only person in that church who had a right to object was standing in a borrowed wedding dress two sizes too tight, being walked down the aisle by a father who wouldn't meet her eyes. Me. "Where is she," Damian Cross said, low, not to the priest, not to the three hundred guests holding their breath in pews dripping with white orchids — to me, only to me, his voice pitched so quiet it might have been mistaken for tenderness by anyone who hadn't spent the last hour learning the difference between his gentle voice and his furious one. "She's not coming," I said. I watched something in his face go perfectly, terrifyingly still. Not a shock. Damian Cross did not do shock, not in public, not ever. What crossed his face instead was worse — a fast, silent recalculation, the same look I imagined he wore in boardrooms right before he destroyed someone for a mistake they didn't yet know they'd made. "And they sent you," he said, "instead." "They didn't send me. They shoved me." My voice cracked on the word, humiliation hot behind my ribs. "I didn't want this any more than you did." That, at least, was entirely true. I hadn't wanted it like this — dragged out of the dressing room where I'd been fixing my sister's veil, stuffed into a dress that still smelled like her perfume, my mother's hand a vise on my wrist the whole walk to the church doors. Fix this, Mia. You will fix this, or your father's company is finished by Monday. I hadn't wanted a groom I'd met exactly four times in my life, at family dinners where he'd barely spared me a glance past politeness. I hadn't wanted any of this — not the dress, not the cameras waiting outside, not the particular cold weight of Damian Cross's attention finally landing on me instead of moving past me the way it always had. I should have run. Every instinct I had was screaming at me to run, down the aisle, out the doors, past the cameras, and never look back at a family that had just sold me like livestock to cover a debt I hadn't even known existed. "Three hundred guests," Damian said, voice still pitched for me alone, eyes flat and black and utterly without mercy. "My father's board. Half the city's press, waiting outside with cameras. If I walk out of this church alone today, Cross Industries takes a hit and my shareholders will smell blood by Monday morning." He looked at me then — really looked, assessing, weighing, the way you'd weigh a blade you hadn't chosen but might still find a use for. “Do you understand what I'm about to do?” "No," I said, honestly. "I'm going to marry you instead," he said. "Not because I want you. Because your family just handed me the perfect weapon to burn them down with, and I have never once in my life turned down a good weapon." I didn't run. "Fine," I said instead, and watched his eyes narrow, surprised despite himself. "Marry me. But you'll regret deciding I'm just a weapon, Damian Cross." I didn't know, saying it, how right I'd turn out to be — or how much it would cost both of us to find out. The priest, deciding three hundred guests had waited long enough, cleared his throat and asked if we were ready to proceed. Neither of us answered. We just turned, together, to face the altar none of this was ever supposed to lead to.