Chapter 3 — Under One Roof
808 Words
AUDREY'S POV
The wedding lasted forty minutes. My old life took longer than that to pack.
I stood in a dress I hadn't chosen, in a chapel I'd never seen before, and watched Richard Voss slide a ring onto my finger with the same efficient precision he probably used to close a business deal. No hesitation. No warmth. Just a job done correctly.
"You may kiss the bride."
He didn't ask. He gripped my chin, tilted my face up, and kissed me like he was signing a contract — brief, controlled, over before I could decide how to feel about it. When he pulled back, his eyes swept over me once, assessing, the way you'd check a delivery matched the invoice.
"Convincing," he said, low enough that only I could hear. "Try to look less like you're calculating an exit route. It's bad for optics."
"I'll work on it," I said flatly. "Once you stop looking at me like inventory."
He didn't respond. He didn't need to. The photographer called for another shot, and he simply turned, expecting me to follow — which, humiliatingly, I did.
By evening, I stood in the entrance hall of a house that made my father's estate look modest. A woman in a tailored uniform introduced herself as Mrs. Calloway and handed me a set of keys the way you'd hand someone a work badge.
"Your wing is through there," she said. "Mr. Voss's instructions were clear — you keep to it unless summoned. Staff will bring meals. He is not to be disturbed after nine."
Unless summoned. I said nothing, though the word sat in my chest like a stone.
—--
I didn't see Richard again that night. Not for dinner, not for any acknowledgment that six hours earlier he'd made me his wife in front of two hundred people. A tray was brought to my room at some point — I didn't ask by whom — and I stared at it for a long time without touching it, some stubborn, wounded part of me refusing to accept a single thing from this house until I understood what I actually was inside it.
I told myself I wasn't hungry. I told myself it didn't sting, sitting in a dress I hadn't been told where to put once it came off, in a house that felt less like a home and more like a very expensive holding cell.
I was lying, and I hated that I was lying.
—----
RICHARD'S POV
Detective Ellis Marsh called three hours after my wedding, which told me everything I needed to know about how the next few months were going to go.
"Convenient timing," he said, once the pleasantries were finished. "Marrying into land like that, right after we take your warehouse."
"I got married because I fell in love, Detective. You should try it. Might soften you up."
"I'll pass." A pause, deliberate, the kind cops used when they wanted you to fill the silence yourself. I didn't. "I'll be around, Mr. Voss. Enjoy the honeymoon."
I hung up without confirming or denying anything and turned my attention back to the ledgers spread across my desk — the real work, the work that mattered, the work that didn't stop just because I'd acquired a wife that afternoon.
Mrs. Calloway knocked once, informed me Mrs. Voss hadn't touched her dinner, and asked if I wanted anything else sent up.
"She'll eat when she's hungry," I said, not looking up. "She's not a guest. She doesn't need managing."
That was true. It was also, I noted with some irritation, not the reason I said it. The reason was that I didn't want to walk down that hallway and see her sitting alone in a room she hadn't asked to be given, in a house she hadn't asked to live in, married to a man who'd bought her like the land that came with her. I didn't want to see that, because I didn't have the first idea what I'd do about it, and I'd built eleven years of control around never being in a position where I didn't know what to do.
So I stayed at my desk. I worked through the ledgers twice. I did not think about which room was hers, or whether the lock I'd ordered installed — her side only, an instruction I'd given without examining why — had actually been fitted correctly.
I told myself checking would be weakness. I told myself a lot of things that night I didn't examine too closely, and when I finally passed her door on my way to bed, I didn't stop. I didn't listen for anything.
I told myself that was discipline.
It didn't feel like discipline. It felt like the first thing in eleven years I'd had to force myself not to do.
- Writer
