I Married My Father's Worst Enemy

Chapter 4: The Performance

The wedding moves up to Saturday.

Three days. Not nineteen.

"There's a reporter sniffing around the Ashford-Hartley history," Damon tells me over the phone, voice clipped, all business, nothing like the man who almost touched my face four nights ago. "If this breaks before the wedding, the deal falls apart and your father loses everything with none of the protections we built in. We move now, or we lose our window."

We, like we're a team. Like I'm not the collateral holding the whole arrangement together.

"And if I need more than three days?" I ask, even though we both already know the answer.

"Then the story runs, the deal collapses, and your father spends what's left of his freedom finding out what happens to men who used to be rich." He says it gently, which somehow makes it worse. "I'd rather not find out either way. Saturday, Elena."

I don't have time to be angry about it, because by Thursday morning there's a photographer camped outside the house and a stylist in my bedroom holding up three dresses and asking which one says "in love" the most convincingly. Apparently when you're marrying the man who owns half of Manhattan, three days is plenty of time — his people keep florists and string quartets on retainer for exactly this kind of emergency. I wonder, not for the first time, how many other women's lives he's rearranged on forty-eight hours' notice.

I pick the blue one because it's the one that doesn't feel like a costume. The stylist asks if I want my hair up or down, and I realize I don't actually care — that somewhere in the last week I stopped being a person with preferences and became a set piece in someone else's story. I say up. It doesn't matter.

The engagement dinner is Thursday night, forty of Manhattan's ugliest kind of powerful people crammed into a ballroom on top of a hotel Damon apparently owns a piece of, floor-to-ceiling windows turning the whole room into a glass box hanging over the city. Waiters circle with champagne I don't drink and appetizers I don't taste. My father stands in the corner the entire night, drinking too much, saying too little, looking like a man attending his own funeral in a good suit. I catch his eye once, across the room, and for a second the mask slips and I see something like an apology there. He looks away first.

Damon's hand finds the small of my back the second we walk in, and it stays there all night, warm through the silk of my dress, and I hate how much I notice it. A board member's wife corners us near the dessert table, diamonds on every finger, and asks how we fell in love.

"She had my whole heart before she knew it," Damon says, and his thumb moves once against my spine, and something in me lights up like a struck match even though I know — I know — that everything about tonight is a performance built on a dead man's grave.

"How romantic," the woman says, and means it, and I have to look at my champagne glass so my face doesn't give me away.

My father finds me once, near the bar, while Damon is pulled into a conversation with two board members who laugh too loud at everything he says.

"Elena—"

"Don't." I don't even look at him. "Not here. Not tonight. Not until you tell me the rest of it."

"There's nothing else to tell."

"You're a liar, Dad. You've been a liar for twenty years. I don't have room in me tonight to listen to you be one more time."

He doesn't argue. He just nods, the way a man nods when he's not used to being told no by people he used to control, and disappears back into the crowd before Damon returns.

Later, on the terrace, away from the noise, he finds me alone.

"You did well tonight," he says.

"I lied to forty people for you."

"You lied to forty people for three hundred families." He steps closer. The city is loud and gold behind him, and up close his eyes aren't cold at all, they're just guarded, the way mine probably are. "That's not the same thing."

"Isn't it?"

For a second neither of us says anything. The band inside shifts into something slower. Forty stories down, the city doesn't care that my whole life is being decided on a strip of cold concrete.

"What did you want to say?" he asks, quiet, like he's been waiting all night and is finally out of patience for the wait. "Back there. When she asked how we fell in love. You had a whole different answer on your face."

"I wanted to say we didn't. That there's no love here, just two people using each other for different kinds of survival."

"Is that what you still think?"

"No." The word comes out before I can stop it. "That's what scares me."

He goes very still, like my honesty caught him somewhere he wasn't guarding. Then his hand comes up, slow, and this time he doesn't stop an inch away. His fingers brush my jaw, tilt my face up to his, and for one long, suspended second, I think he's going to kiss me, and worse, I want him to.

"Damon—"

"I know," he says quietly, like I've said something instead of just his name. "I know exactly what I'm doing to you. I don't know how to stop."

His phone rings.