Chapter Two :The Man at the Altar
740 Words
The wedding took place in a room that cost more than her father's house.
High ceilings, Tall windows, White roses arranged in enormous displays along every wall — perfect, deliberate, identical. Not a single bloom was open. Every flower was tight and closed, like something that had been told it wasn't allowed to.
Sienna walked down the aisle alone.
There was no music she had chosen, no face in the crowd she recognized, no hand to hold. Just the whisper of ivory silk against marble floor and the polite, assessing eyes of strangers dressed in clothes that whispered money , people who already knew everything about her and had already decided what she was worth.
A transaction;
She felt it the moment she entered the room.
She kept walking.
She picked a point at the far end of the room and she walked toward it and she did not look anywhere else until she saw him.
Damien Voss stood at the altar with his hands clasped in front of him and his shoulders perfectly straight. He was tall , taller than she expected -broader, with dark hair that fell slightly across his forehead in the one detail about him that looked remotely uncontrolled. His jaw was sharp. His suit was black.
And his eyes _
Grey.
Pale, still, watchful grey.
They found her the moment she entered the room and they did not move from her face for a single second as she walked toward him.
Sienna's breath tightened in her chest.
She kept walking.
She reached the altar and stopped.
They were three feet apart.
He looked at her — his grey gaze moving across her face slowly, the way you study something you're trying to understand and then, with the same unhurried precision, he looked away.
Back to the officiant.
Done.
Assessed. Filed. Finished.
As though she were a document he had already read.
Something happened in Sienna's chest. It wasn't pain exactly. It wasn't anger — not yet. It was something quieter and somehow worse than both. Something that started just below her sternum and spread outward slowly.
She had prepared for this.
She had spent three nights telling herself he will not be kind, he will not be warm, you are a transaction and he will treat you like one.
She knew.
And yet.
Her throat tightened.
The back of her eyes went warm.
Don't, she told herself.
She blinked once. Slowly.
The warmth receded.
She breathed in through her nose, held it for three counts, and released it quietly through her lips. Nobody in the room saw any of it.
The officiant began to speak.
Sienna heard the words the way you hear sound underwater present but weightless. She watched the roses instead. The tight, closed, white roses that lined the room in perfect rows.
I will not disappear inside this, she thought. Whatever happens. I will not.
"Do you take this man —"
She turned to look at Damien.
He was already looking at her.
Not the way he had looked at her before — not that brief clinical assessment. This was different. His grey eyes were steady , still and trained on her face with an attention that felt, suddenly, like weight.
She held his gaze.
One second.
Two.
"I do," she said.
Her voice came out steady. She had no idea how.
Damien's response came in a voice that was low and even and gave nothing away.
"I do."
Two syllables.
They landed in Sienna's chest like stones dropped into still water and she felt the ripple move outward and she stood completely still and let it because she was learning already, in this room, beside this man, that the only thing she could control was her surface.
Underneath it, everything was moving.
When it was over Damien turned to her and extended his hand.
Formal,Practiced.
Sienna looked at his hand , long fingers, a scar along the inside of his wrist, a watch that probably cost more than her father's car.
She placed her hand in his.
His grip was firm and warm.
And as he led her out of that room — her back straight, her chin level, her face completely still — she felt something shift deep inside her chest.
Small. Quiet.
Like a door in a dark house swinging open just an inch.
She had no idea how much that one inch was going to cost her.
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