Claimed By The Ruthless King

Chapter 5 — The Vows We Didn’t Choose

The ceremony took eleven minutes.

Sofia counted them, standing in the same dress she’d been fitted for two days earlier, in a small chapel attached to the estate that she hadn’t even known existed until that morning. There were not three hundred guests this time. No lilies drowning the air in sweetness. Just a priest who kept his eyes down like he’d learned long ago not to ask questions in this house, Enzo standing near the door like a sentry, and a handful of men in dark suits who watched the proceedings with the flat expressions of people attending a business transaction rather than a wedding.

Which, Sofia reminded herself, was exactly what this was.

Luca stood beside her in black, unreadable as ever. When the priest asked if he took her to be his wife, he answered, “I do,” with the same even tone he might have used to confirm a delivery address. Sofia’s own voice, when her turn came, felt like it belonged to someone else entirely, steady, quiet, final. She didn’t recognize the calm in it. She wondered, distantly, if that calm was a kind of surrender, or just the last thing left standing after two days of shock.

There was no kiss. Luca didn’t reach for her or perform affection for an audience that clearly didn’t need convincing of anything. He simply took her hand once the priest pronounced them married, laced his fingers through hers with a grip that felt less like tenderness and more like a signature on a contract, and turned to face the small gathered room.

“It’s done,” he said, to no one in particular.

And that, apparently, was the whole celebration.

Afterward, he walked her through the house to a wing she hadn’t seen before, quieter than the rest of the estate, set apart by a heavy door that required a keypad code Luca entered without letting her see the numbers.

“This is my wing,” he said, pushing the door open. “Yours, now, too.”

The rooms beyond were larger, darker, and more obviously his than the rest of the house, masculine in a way that felt deliberate rather than accidental. Dark wood. Low lighting. A study she could see through a half-open door, shelves lined with books that looked real rather than decorative, their spines cracked, some with paper markers still tucked between the pages like he’d meant to come back to them and never had.

“I assumed I’d stay in the room from before,” Sofia said.

“That was for a stranger,” Luca said. “You’re not a stranger anymore. You’re my wife.”

He said the word without warmth, but also, she noticed, without mockery, like he was simply naming a fact and expecting the world to rearrange itself around it.

He showed her to a bedroom down the hall from his own, separate, she noted, with something that might have been relief. Sofia had braced herself for a different conversation the moment the ceremony ended. That he hadn’t pushed for it yet felt like the only mercy she’d been offered since the moment they’d met.

“There’s a difference,” Luca said, watching her take in the room, “between owning something and demanding everything from it at once. I’m capable of patience, Sofia. Contrary to what you probably think of me.”

“I think several things about you,” Sofia said. “Patience isn’t the first one.”

The corner of his mouth moved, almost a smile, gone before it fully formed.

“Get some rest. Tomorrow the house goes back to normal business, and you’ll need to learn how to exist inside it without either of us getting killed.”

He left her alone in the new room, the door clicking shut behind him, unlocked this time. Sofia noticed that immediately. No lock. No keypad. Just an ordinary door she could, theoretically, walk through any time she wanted.

She didn’t trust it.

Not yet.

Restless despite the exhaustion sitting heavily in her bones, Sofia paced the unfamiliar room, running her hands along windowsills and shelves the way she had in her old room, cataloging, searching, refusing to simply exist inside a space without understanding its edges. The habit had started as fear. Somewhere in the last two days, it had become something closer to instinct.

It was the floorboard near the window that gave her pause. A slight unevenness beneath her bare foot, almost nothing, the kind of detail most people would never notice. But Sofia had spent two days learning to notice things, and she crouched down, running her fingers along the seam until she found the give.

The board lifted with a soft creak, louder in the silence than it had any right to be. Sofia froze, listening for footsteps in the hallway.

None came.

Beneath the board, wrapped in a scrap of faded cloth, was a photograph, old and torn clean in half, one side missing entirely. What remained showed a woman, dark-haired, smiling faintly at whoever held the camera, one hand resting protectively over a rounded belly. The edges of the photo had softened with age, the color gone slightly warm and yellow, the way old pictures do.

On the back, in handwriting gone soft with time, was a single line:

For when she’s old enough to know the truth.

Sofia sat back on her heels, heart hammering, staring at half a photograph that clearly wasn’t meant for her, hidden in a room that had, until an hour ago, belonged to no one she knew.

Whoever had hidden this had done it carefully. Deliberately. And whoever she was, the woman in the photo or the “she” the note referred to, this room had been waiting a long time for someone to find it.

Sofia’s mind raced back to Enzo’s words in the hallway two days earlier.

The last woman this family claimed.

She turned the torn photograph over in her hands, studying the woman’s face for any resemblance to Luca, to his mother, to anyone she’d met inside these walls.

She found none.

And somehow, that made it worse.

Whatever secret this house had been built to hide, Sofia understood, kneeling on the floor of a bedroom that was supposedly hers now, she had just found its first loose thread.

She wrapped the photograph back in its cloth, tucked it beneath the floorboard exactly as she’d found it, and pressed the wood back into place.

For now, this secret was hers alone.

But as Sofia stared at the floorboard, one thought refused to leave her mind.

If the photograph had been hidden for so long, why had she been the one to find it now?