Episode4
1501 Words
Chapter 4
Stephanie pov
"The Marks are prepared — prepare my daughter for her wedding!"
"Gracias."
"Thank you for the gift. She will be ready shortly."
"Esther! What are you doing here? My daughter's wedding will not be disorganized, and you of all people — how did you even find out about this?"
The name hit me before I was fully awake.
Esther.
I sat up slowly, blinking against the morning light bleeding through the curtains. My alarm was going off beside me, 6:10am. I had set it for six. Ten minutes later I had already lost sleep that hadn't been nearly deep enough.
The voices outside my door were getting louder. I pressed my palm flat against my stomach and stayed still for a moment, listening to the quiet beneath the noise.
“My angel.” I rubbed slow circles against the fabric of my nightgown. “Mom loves you. Whatever I'm walking into today, I'm walking into it for you. You and I are going to be just fine.”
I held that thought for as long as I could.
Then my mother's voice rose sharply in the hallway and the moment passed.
I reached for my silk robe from the edge of the bed, pulled it on, and stood.
Esther. My mother. My father's ex-wife and a woman who had not looked back once when she walked out of this house twenty years ago. I was ten years old the day she left. She didn't explain cos dad caught her cheating with his business partner in a guesthouse. She simply gathered what was hers and disappeared from our lives with the same ease she brought to everything that required no emotional cost.
She hadn't called. She hadn't visited, she didn't even tried to know how her little girl was faring.
And now she is standing in my father's hallway on the morning of my wedding, accepting gifts and greeting guests like she had never left at all.
I crossed the room, opened my door and stepped out. They turned simultaneously, my father with a tight jaw and apologetic eyes, my mother with the composed, unbothered expression of a woman who had rehearsed this moment.
"I did not invite her," my father said immediately, his voice low and firm, directed at me like a confession he needed me to hear first.
I looked at him once. Then I turned my gaze to her.
She hadn't changed. Same posture. Same careful elegance. Same way of standing in a room like she was entitled to whatever space she occupied. She reminded me, in that exact moment, of Kain, the easy confidence of someone who causes damage and never quite grasps why the wreckage is still there when they return.
"And?" I said quietly.
Her expression softened or at least attempted to. She took a small step toward me.
"Come on, sweetheart. Today is your day." Her voice was warm, practiced. "Whatever is between your father and I…. that is not what today is about. I came because…"
I raised my hand.
She stopped.
We looked at each other across the hallway, my mother, who had been absent for every significant moment of my life, standing in a hallway she no longer had any claim to, asking me to set something down I had never chosen to pick up.
I lowered my hand slowly.
"Fine," I said. Flat.
She exhaled, a quiet relief she tried to hide and didn't quite manage.
"Let's just make this day something worth remembering, Steph."
I held her gaze for one long moment.
Then I turned toward my room to get ready, without another word because some things didn't deserve a response, and my mother, on this particular morning, was one of them.
*********
After the whole drama with my parents, my wedding preparation started, the makeup artist worked in silence, which I appreciated.
The room smelled of powder and fresh flowers, white roses my father had ordered, arranged in tall vases along the windowsill like a quiet declaration of how seriously he was taking this. Someone had laid my dress across the chaise in the corner, covered in a protective cloth. A second attendant was somewhere behind me, working through my hair with careful, practiced hands.
I kept my eyes closed and let them work.
I wasn't thinking about the wedding. I was thinking about last night — the parking lot, the envelope on the ground, I was thinking about how twenty four hours could dismantle a life and rebuild it into something completely unrecognizable.
A soft knock broke through my thoughts.
Then the door opened without waiting for an answer which meant it was my father.
"Give us a moment," he said.
The two women stepped back quietly. The door clicked behind them.
I opened my eyes and met his reflection in the mirror. He was dressed already in a dark suit, silver tie, every inch the man who had built an empire from patience and precision. He looked at me the way he sometimes did, like he was calculating something behind his eyes that he wasn't quite ready to say aloud.
Then he reached into his inner breast pocket and produced his phone.
He leaned forward, holding the screen toward me without a word.
I looked at it.
The man in the photograph was tall. Broad shouldered. He was captured mid-conversation at what appeared to be a formal dinner, dark suit, one hand resting on the table, jaw sharp, eyes focused on something just beyond the camera.
He also looked nothing like what I had been bracing for.
I studied the photograph for a moment longer than I intended to.
"This is him?" I asked carefully.
"That is Damien Mark," my father said.
"This is the man I am marrying today."
"Yes."
I looked at the photograph one more time. There was something quietly commanding about him.
"He's…." I stopped myself.
My father raised an eyebrow.
"Nothing," I said, handing the phone back. "Tell them they can come back in."
The faintest trace of a smile crossed his face before he straightened up and did exactly that.
…………
We arrived at the church in Paris, it was enormous.
I had been inside it once as a child, holding my father's hand during Christmas service, craning my neck back to find where the ceiling ended. I remembered thinking it went all the way to heaven. Standing outside it now, in a dress that was not chosen for comfort, with a veil drawn over my face and a bouquet held in hands that were perfectly steady through sheer determination alone it looked exactly as I remembered.
My father offered his arm at the entrance. I took it.
The doors opened.
The organ filled every corner of the space instantly, deep and sweeping, and every head in the building turned. There were more people than I had expected, far more — seated in rows that stretched the full length of the nave. Flowers lined every pew. Candles burned in clusters along the walls, throwing warm light across the stone.
I walked.
Slowly. Deliberately.
The whispers started almost immediately.
“Who is she?”
“Has anyone seen her before?”
“She carries herself well… look at her.”
I kept my chin level and my gaze forward, letting the veil do its work, letting the whispers fall where they fell.
The altar was ahead.
And standing at it was a man I didn't recognize from the back, tall, still, facing forward with the particular composure of someone entirely unbothered by the weight of the room behind him.
Damien.
My pulse was steady. My steps were even. I was doing this. And then my eyes moved, the way eyes do when something pulls at them before the mind gives permission and I saw him.
Standing to the right of the altar.
Best man's position.
Kain.
He was looking straight ahead, jaw set, hands clasped in front of him and then something shifted and his eyes found me. Even through the veil, I felt it. That particular stillness that came over his face when he was trying to work something out.
He didn't know it was me.
Not yet.
I kept walking.
One step. Then another. The organ continued. The candles held their light. I reached the altar and came to a stop beside the man I was about to marry, and I did not look to my right, did not give Kain the satisfaction of a single glance, did not allow my hands to tremble around the bouquet.
Then my father's hand found my arm from behind.
He leaned in close, his voice dropping beneath the music, beneath the whispers, beneath everything — meant only for me.
"You can do this, Steph." A quiet pause. "Kain is not worth the stress. Choose Damien. And set your revenge on a straight line."
He squeezed my arm once.
Then he stepped back.
“The ceremony had just begun.”
- Writer
