Chapter 2 Isla's Pov
1539 Words
It was crazy how the veil was the highlight of it all.
For several seconds, I stood in the doorway and stared at the ivory tulle spilling over Vivian’s honey-blonde hair, unable to understand why that detail hurt more than Marcus’s naked body in my bed.
“Take it off,” I said.
Vivian touched the veil lazily. “This?”
My voice shook. “Take. It. Off.”
Marcus sighed like I had interrupted a meeting rather than walked in on the funeral of my own life. “Isla, don’t make this dramatic.”
The words were so absurd that I almost laughed. “Dramatic?”
For six months, I had helped him shower, iced his knee, managed his rehab, defended his anger, swallowed his silence and told myself grief made people ugly before it made them whole again.
Now he sat against my pillows, handsome, calm and unremorseful.
“I came home early to surprise you,” I said because I didn't know what else to say.
Vivian smiled. “You really did.”
Marcus rose from the bed just then and he did so easily. Too easily in fact.
The room went still inside me as I continued to watch him.
He stood without reaching for the brace. Without wincing. Without the careful performance of pain he made whenever I was watching.
My eyes dropped to his leg. His ruined knee bent smoothly as he stepped toward me. And something colder than betrayal slid through my stomach.
“You’re not limping,” I said.
His expression flickered out of fear only for a second but I saw it.
“Don’t start,” he said uneasily.
“How long have you been walking normally?” I asked him with a hard stare.
Vivian laughed softly. “Oh, this is my favourite part.”
I turned to her. “What does that mean?”
“It means you were always so busy being his nurse that you forgot to be interesting.”
I crossed the room before either of them could breathe. My hands caught Vivian’s hair and ripped the veil from her head.
She screamed in response.
Pearls snapped from the edge and scattered across the floor. She grabbed my wrist, cursing but I shoved her back against the pillows with the ruined veil clenched in my fist.
Then Marcus caught me from behind. His arms locked around my waist with brutal strength.
I froze.
Too much strength, I thought. Too much.
“Let me go,” I said.
“Calm down.”
I laughed but there was no humour in it. “You really can hold me like this?”
His grip loosened. “That’s not—”
“You can stand. You can restrain me. You can sleep with my sister in our bed. But you needed me to bring your medication to the couch? Really?”
His mouth hardened. “I was miserable.”
I almost choked. “Miserable?”
“Yes,” he snapped. “I hated the game. I hated the pressure. I hated your father watching every move I made like I was an asset he could sell. After the injury, he gave me a way out.”
My chest tightened. “What way?”
“A senior position at Bennett Sports. Equity later. Real money. Real power.”
Vivian sat up, pulling the sheet over herself, smiling like she had rehearsed this scene.
“He said Marcus deserved better,” she said. “And he was right.”
I stared at Marcus.
“The hit,” I whispered.
His silence answered too quickly and my breath caught just then.
“You were with her the night before the championship game,” I said with pain brewing in my chest.
Marcus looked away but Vivian did not.
“Among other things,” she said coyly.
The room tilted just then as memories flashed in front of me.
“Did Cade know you had a way out after the injury?” I asked.
Marcus’s jaw tightened and Vivian’s smile faded just enough.
That was when I understood there was more.
“What did you do?” I demanded.
Marcus moved toward me and I stepped back.
“Isla, leave it alone.”
“No, Marcus.” My voice rose. “You do not get to stand in my bedroom, wearing the body I nursed back to strength and tell me what to leave alone.”
Vivian rolled her eyes. “Still so righteous.”
I turned on her. “And you…you wore my mother’s veil while f*****g my fiance. How dare you speak?”
For the first time, her face changed slightly. I looked at them both and felt something inside me break.
“You can keep each other,” I said calmly as if I wasn't dying inside. “You are exactly the kind of people you deserve.”
Marcus scoffed. “Where are you going?”
I lifted the ruined veil.
“To bury the last thing in this room that mattered.”
Then I walked out with the veil.
I blocked them both before the elevator reached the ground floor.
To hell with them, I thought with tears in my eyes.
To hell with all of them.
***
By the time I reached a hotel bar downtown, my hands had stopped shaking.
That frightened me more than the shaking had.
I should have gone to Tessa, my best friend.
Instead, I walked toward the back of the bar where a velvet rope guarded a private lounge and a host in black asked for my invitation.
“I don’t have one,” I said.
His eyes flicked over my face, then to the ruined veil half-visible in my bag.
“Mask required,” he said, holding out a slim black mask.
The gesture felt like permission to disappear and I took it.
Inside, everyone wore masks. Half faces. Hidden eyes. Painted mouths. No one looked entirely real and for the first time all day, unreality felt merciful.
I ordered whiskey even though I hated whiskey.
The first sip burned.
The second made me care less.
I was staring into the third when a man sat beside me.
“Rough day?”
His voice was low, tired and rough around the edges.
I turned.
He wore a black mask but it did not hide the strong line of his jaw, the scar cutting through one eyebrow or the dangerous stillness in the way he held himself.
He looked like trouble.
Tonight though, trouble looked easier than grief.
“You could say that,” I answered.
He lifted his glass. “Whoever it was, I hope they choke on their own excuses.”
A laugh escaped me. “That is oddly specific.”
“I have experience with people who deserve worse than they get.”
“Love?”
His mouth twisted. “Among other crimes.”
We drank to that.
For hours, we spoke without names.
It was easier that way. He told me love was only leverage with better lighting. I told him loyalty was a disease people romanticized until it killed them. I told him I had already been stabbed and the knife had family fingerprints on it.
He did not ask me to explain.
That was why I stayed.
At some point, his hand brushed mine. And neither of us moved away.
“Feelings are overrated,” I said softly.
“They usually arrive with problems.”
“One night, then,” I said, reckless and aching in a way that surprised me. “No names. No numbers. No consequences.”
His expression shifted. For a moment, he looked almost sorry.
“You should choose better than me,” he said.
I smiled without warmth. “Tonight, I am done choosing better.”
He nodded and stood.
So did I.
And that was how the night ended in a blaze of passion and sin.
***
Morning arrived like a punishment.
I woke in a hotel room I did not recognize, tangled in white sheets, my body sore, my mouth dry, my mind full of broken flashes.
His hands at my waist.
My fingers in his hair.
His voice in the dark, saying something like, I’m sorry, while I clung to him as if ruin could be survived by becoming someone else for a night.
The other side of the bed was empty.
On the pillow was a note.
You deserve better than whoever made you cry. Forget about me.
No name.
No number.
Exactly what I had asked for.
I should have left it there.
Instead, I gathered my clothes with shaking hands and found a black leather wallet half-hidden behind the nightstand.
I froze.
Then I picked it up.
Inside, an ID stared back at me.
Cade Harrington.
It was the same face from the ice. The same scar. The same cold grey eyes. The same man I had sworn to destroy for shattering Marcus’s life.
The wallet slipped from my hand just then.
I ran to the bathroom and vomited until my throat burned.
I told myself it was because of shock.
I did not know yet that my body had already begun keeping another secret.
- Writer
