The Billionaire’s Reluctant Bride

CHAPTER5

Damian‘s pov

The party was noise.

Flashbulbs, champagne, a blur of glittering gowns and hungry eyes that saw me the way everyone always did, asset first, man second.

It was nothing new. People had been looking at me that way since I was old enough to stand beside my father in a boardroom. Tonight was no different, except for the girl standing at my side with her trembling hands and pale face.

Alina Hayes.

The sacrificial lamb dressed in silk.

I didn’t bother hiding my disdain when the announcer’s voice carried over the crowd, introducing us as if this was a union forged from love instead of desperation.

I shook hands, accepted congratulations, tolerated the endless parade of social climbers who saw this as an invitation to inch closer to me, to my family, to the power they could never hope to reach on their own.

Beside me, Alina wilted like a fragile flower in the heat of it all. Her father hovered nearby, his forehead shining with sweat, pretending the tremor in his hands was from excitement instead of guilt.

Eleanor Hayes lingered like poison in the corner of my vision, her eyes sharp, calculating, smug.

But it was Alina I kept looking at, against my will.

Not because she impressed me. She didn’t. She was soft where the world demanded steel. Timid where it demanded fire. A doll dressed up to be placed in my world, and she knew it. Everyone knew it.

And yet, there was something in the way she tried to hold her chin high, in the way her lips trembled but pressed together as if she was determined not to let the cracks show. Weak, yes. But not oblivious.

I hated that it caught my attention at all.

Amber Hayes, her half-sister, would’ve been the smarter match. Amber was sharp, hungry, the type of woman who thrived under scrutiny.

She smiled at me like she’d already won, like she believed she should’ve been the one wearing Alina’s ring. I caught her gaze more than once tonight, lingering, waiting for me to acknowledge her.

I didn’t.

Because this wasn’t about her. It was about control.

When I leaned down earlier and whispered in Alina’s ear “this isn’t love, this is business, and I don’t lose”

I hadn’t been trying to frighten her. Not exactly. I’d been reminding her of reality, the same way I reminded myself. This wasn’t personal. This was a necessity.

Except as the night dragged on, I kept noticing things I shouldn’t.

The way her dress slipped slightly off her shoulder when she turned away. The curve of her profile, delicate and breakable, but lit by the chandeliers in a way that made her look like she didn’t belong in the same rotten room as the rest of us. The flicker of defiance in her eyes when she thought no one was watching, as if she resented the cage she’d been forced into.

Resentment I understood.

I should’ve dismissed it. I should’ve dismissed her. But my attention kept circling back, drawn to her the way a predator is drawn to movement in the dark. Not admiration. Not attraction. Just curiosity.

Still, curiosity was dangerous.

I excused myself from another round of empty congratulations, ignoring the men who tried to pull me into talk of mergers and the women who fluttered their lashes like I might pick one of them up and carry her off. I didn’t pick. I never picked. Everything was chosen for me, measured, weighed. Tonight was proof of that.

I found her near the balcony doors, half-hidden behind a group of laughing women. She wasn’t laughing. She looked like she was struggling to breathe.

For a second, I almost stepped toward her. Almost.

But then Eleanor appeared, her hand resting lightly on Alina’s arm, nails painted blood-red, grip deceptively gentle. Alina flinched at the contact, but she didn’t pull away. She never pulled away. That, more than anything, irritated me.

If she was going to be my wife, even in name only, she needed to learn that weakness was blood in the water. And my world was filled with sharks.

When she finally caught my gaze across the room, her lips parted, eyes wide like a deer staring down a hunter. My jaw clenched. I held her stare until she looked away, until she remembered her place.

Because that’s all she was, wasn’t she? A pawn. A means to an end.

And yet, as the night wound down and guests began to leave, I couldn’t stop replaying the image of her standing there with her chin lifted, fragile but unwilling to break completely.

I told myself it didn’t matter.

But as I signed the last toast of the night and slipped into the waiting car, the ghost of her defiance stayed with me—quiet, unwanted, and sharp as glass.