married to the enemy

Alina Volkov

The heavy front doors slammed shut, their echo rolling through the halls like the final strike of a gavel.

I stood frozen. Hands clenched. Mind racing.

Drey was gone.

I had barely known him—barely spoken to him beyond our vows—yet his absence settled over me with a suffocating weight.

He hadn’t even looked back.

The carriage that had brought us here had rolled away, taking him with it, leaving me stranded in the same place I had spent years trying to escape.

I turned slowly, taking in the grand foyer of my father’s house. The walls that had once felt cold and indifferent now seemed like a cage. It was as if nothing had changed, as if I had never walked down that aisle, as if I had never whispered I do to a man who barely acknowledged me.

But I had changed.

And that was the problem.

I was no longer just my father’s daughter—the unwanted stepchild, the family’s convenient punching bag.

I was Alina Volkov now.

And still, I had been left behind.

I swallowed against the lump rising in my throat, my fingers curling into the fabric of my dress. The same dress my stepsisters had sneered at—until they saw him.

Until they realized the monster everyone feared was, in fact, beautiful.

Yet even as my traitorous heart pounded at the memory of his piercing gaze, another emotion rose inside me.

Not longing.

Not fear.

But anger.

For the longest time, I had told myself I didn’t care.

I didn’t care when my father stopped looking at me like his daughter.

I didn’t care when my stepmother treated me like an outsider.

I didn’t care when my stepsisters humiliated me, laughed at me, made me feel like I was nothing.

I had convinced myself I was beyond their cruelty. That I had built walls high enough to keep them out.

But this?

This felt different.

I hadn’t even wanted this marriage. I had fought against it. Dreaded it. And yet, now that it had happened—now that I had been stripped from one prison and placed into another—I realized something terrible.

It hurt.

Not because I had dreamed of love and had those dreams shattered.

But because he had walked away as if I wasn’t even worth the trouble of taking.

Like I wasn’t even worth rejecting properly.

Did he regret it?

Did he see me and decide I wasn’t even worth pretending for?

A shaky breath left my lips. My hands pressed against my stomach, as if bracing myself.

I had been holding it together. Trying to stay numb. But the numbness was cracking, and beneath it, a storm brewed.

I wasn’t wanted here.

I wasn’t wanted there, either.

Where the hell was I ever wanted??.

The silence in the house had never been comforting, but now, it felt unnatural.

Before, the air had always been filled with something—footsteps, murmured conversations, the distant clatter of dishes. Even if no one spoke directly to me, I had never felt like a ghost drifting through the halls. But now, something had shifted.

The maids, who once whispered freely while dusting the furniture, now fell silent the moment I entered a room. Their voices cut off mid-sentence, as if afraid I might hear something I wasn’t supposed to. Their movements were different—quieter, more deliberate, as though they had suddenly remembered that the floors beneath them could creak.

I tested it the first night.

I walked into the kitchen under the pretense of looking for something. The two maids at the counter froze. One turned away so abruptly that she nearly knocked over a tray of dishes. The other, caught in my gaze, stammered an excuse before practically fleeing from the room.

I wasn’t sure what disturbed me more—their fear or the fact that I was starting to notice it everywhere.

When I walked down the halls, I could feel it in the way people avoided my gaze, how they found excuses to be somewhere else. Even my stepmother, who had never missed an opportunity to sneer in my direction, now barely acknowledged my existence.

And then there was my father.

The same man who had spent years looking through me rather than at me. The same man who had signed away my life with barely a moment’s hesitation.

He was nervous.

Not for me. No, never for me.

But for the first time, it seemed like something had unsettled him, shaken him enough that it bled through the cracks of his usual indifference.

I saw it in the way he stiffened when I entered a room. The way he paused before speaking, as if weighing his words more carefully than before. I wasn’t sure he even realized he was doing it.

But I did.

It was late when I finally understood just how deep the change had gone.

I had been preparing for bed when there was a knock at my door. The sound was soft, almost hesitant, which in itself was strange. No one knocked for me. If someone needed to speak to me, they simply entered, knowing I had no authority to turn them away.

But tonight, my father hesitated.

"Come in," I said cautiously, already bracing myself for whatever conversation he was about to force upon me.

The door opened just enough for him to step inside. He didn’t move further than necessary, standing stiffly near the threshold as if he might change his mind at any moment.

In his hand, he held something.