Bound by Contract, Claimed by Fire

Chapter Three

The dress didn’t fit. Eleanor stood on a small pedestal in the middle of a fitting room that smelled like fresh lilies and money, while a seamstress knelt at her feet, mouth full of pins, tugging at fabric that had clearly been made for someone else’s measurements and adjusted in a hurry.

“Hold still,” the seamstress mumbled around the pins.

Eleanor held still. She’d gotten good at holding still over the last three days, the way you still go when you’re waiting for something to be over, when moving might make it more real.

“It’s beautiful,” her mother said, from the velvet chair in the corner, dabbing at the corner of her eye with a tissue she hadn’t actually used yet.

“It’s a wedding dress, Mom. For a wedding that’s happening in less than twenty-four hours, to a man I’ve spoken to exactly once.”

“Eleanor.”

“I’m just saying it like it is.”

Her mother’s mouth pressed into a thin line, the same look she’d worn for three days now, somewhere between relief and guilt, like she couldn’t quite decide which feeling deserved more of her attention. “This is going to fix everything. You know that, right? Your father, the house, “

“I know what it’s going to fix.” Eleanor’s voice came out flatter than she meant it to. “I read the contract, Mom. Twice.”

Her mother looked away first.

The seamstress finished, stood, and stepped back, and for a moment Eleanor caught her own reflection in the wall of mirrors surrounding her. White silk. Lace sleeves. A woman who looked like she belonged in a magazine, getting ready for a wedding that looked, from the outside, like every little girl’s dream.

She didn’t recognize the woman in the mirror at all.

The morning of the wedding arrived gray and overcast, the kind of sky that couldn’t decide whether to rain or not, and Eleanor sat in the back of a car she didn’t recognize, in a dress that cost more than her father’s old car, staring out the window as the city blurred past.

Priya’s voice crackled through her phone, tinny and worried. “Are you okay? Tell me you’re okay.”

“I’m in a car,” Eleanor said. “On the way to my own wedding. To a man I’ve met once.”

“That’s not okay, Ellie, that’s the opposite of okay, “

“I know.”

“You can still walk away. Right now. I’ll come get you, we’ll figure something out, “

“And then what?” Eleanor closed her eyes, leaning her head against the cool glass of the window. “My dad loses everything. The house. The business. All of it. And he’s already so, “ Her voice caught. “He’s already so tired, Priya. I can’t be the reason he loses the last of it too.”

There was a long pause on the other end.

“Okay,” Priya finally said, softer now. “Okay. Then I’m coming to the wedding. And if that man breathes so much as breathes wrong in your direction, I will personally ruin his entire life.”

Despite everything, Eleanor laughed, a small, watery sound, but real.

“I mean it,” Priya said.

“I know you do.”

The venue was a private estate just outside the city, all stone and ivy and manicured gardens, the kind of place that probably had its own zip code. Eleanor barely had time to take it in before she was swept inside by a team of women in matching black dresses, hair and makeup finished in record time, the whole process feeling less like preparation and more like assembly.

Through a crack in the door, she caught her first glimpse of the room where it would happen. White flowers everywhere, rows of chairs filled with people in suits and gowns, faces she didn’t recognize, names that probably mattered to someone.

And near the front, talking to an older woman with silver blonde hair pulled into a severe updo, stood Damian.

He looked exactly like he had in his office.

Unbothered. Untouchable. Like getting married in less than an hour was just another item on his calendar, sandwiched somewhere between a board meeting and lunch.

The older woman said something to him, and Damian’s jaw tightened, just slightly, the only crack Eleanor had seen in his composure since she’d met him.

“That’s his mother,” whispered one of the women fixing Eleanor’s veil. “Vivian Cole. She’s, “ The woman hesitated, glancing toward the door like she’d said too much already. “She’s particular.”

Eleanor didn’t have time to ask what that meant.

The walk down the aisle felt like it happened to someone else.

Eleanor remembered fragments of it later. The weight of her father’s arm under her hand, trembling slightly, more than hers was. The blur of faces turning to watch. The sound of a string quartet playing something slow and beautiful that felt completely wrong for what was actually happening.

And Damian, waiting at the end of it, watched her approach with an expression so carefully blank that Eleanor almost couldn’t look at him.

Almost.

When her father placed her hand in Damian’s, Eleanor felt the brief, almost imperceptible tightening of Damian’s fingers around hers, there and gone so fast she might have imagined it.

The officiant’s voice droned on, words about commitment and honor and forever that meant nothing to either of them, and Eleanor found herself staring at a small muscle in Damian’s jaw, the only sign that he was even listening at all.

“Do you, Damian Cole, take Eleanor Hayes, “

“I do,” Damian said, before the officiant even finished the sentence, his voice clipped, final, like he was signing off on a memo.

A few people in the crowd laughed softly, like it was charming. Eleanor’s stomach turned.

“And do you, Eleanor Hayes, “

She opened her mouth.

And that was the moment the doors at the back of the room slammed open.

A man Eleanor had never seen before stumbled in, disheveled, out of breath, his eyes scanning the crowd with something close to panic. Several guards moved toward him immediately, but he was already shouting, his voice cutting through the quiet ceremony like a gunshot.

“Stop the wedding!”

The room erupted into gasps and murmurs, chairs scraping as people turned to look, and Eleanor felt Damian’s hand tighten around hers again, this time hard enough to hurt, his entire body going rigid beside her.

The man’s eyes locked onto Damian, and whatever he said next, Eleanor barely heard it over the sound of her own heartbeat, except for one name, screamed loud enough for the entire room to hear.

“This man already has a wife!“​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​