chapter two
704 Words
The suite was a cathedral of wealth. Velvet drapes pooled across the marble floor, golden sconces painted the walls in honey light, and the bed—massive, impossible, draped in silk—looked less like a place to rest and more like a throne. Amara stood at its edge, the satin of her slip brushing her thighs, her bare feet cool against the stone.
Ethan had fallen into sleep quickly, his chest rising and falling in shallow rhythm. She should have joined him. She should have closed her eyes and drifted into the dream every girl in the ballroom imagined for her. But Amara could not sleep.
Her body was restless, her mind louder than the silence that pressed in on her.
Something was wrong.
She rose from the bed and moved to the window. The gardens below were silvered in moonlight, fountains gleaming like veins of glass, hedges carved into shapes too perfect to be real. Beauty and control. Everything about Ethan’s world was beauty and control.
And yet she had seen the falter. The shift in his eyes when the phone had buzzed. The way his smile had cracked for the smallest fraction of a second.
She wrapped her arms around herself. Ethan had given her everything—status, wealth, the security she had never dared dream of. But what good were silk sheets if they carried the scent of someone else’s perfume?
The thought startled her. She pressed a hand to her mouth, as though she could catch the words before they formed. Someone else. Why had that even crossed her mind?
She turned back toward the bed. Ethan shifted in his sleep, muttering something she couldn’t hear, his brow furrowed, his jaw clenched. His hand reached instinctively for the other side of the bed—not for her, but for some phantom that haunted his dreams.
Her throat tightened.
She crossed the room and opened the silver box on the vanity. Inside lay a letter from her father, written in his uneven scrawl: You’ve secured a future none of us could give you. Don’t let it slip.
Her father had cried when Ethan proposed. Not from joy, but from relief. Relief that his debts would no longer be hers, that the weight of his failures could be buried under Ethan Blackwell’s empire.
Amara closed the letter, the paper trembling in her hands. Was that all she was to Ethan? A symbol. A pawn. A wife to polish his public image while his empire spread its roots deeper into the world?
Her reflection in the mirror seemed to answer her: a woman draped in satin, hair tumbling in dark waves, lips painted like roses—and eyes full of doubt.
A sound broke the silence.
Ethan shifted again, this time muttering clearer, his voice low and rough with sleep. Amara stilled, her breath caught, her body leaning toward him without thought.
One word.
A name.
Not hers.
Her heart stuttered violently in her chest. She stared at him, frozen, the whisper echoing in her ears. He hadn’t said Amara. He hadn’t even said something vague. He had said a name she knew, a name far too close, a name that should never have crossed his lips in the sanctity of their wedding night.
Her brother’s name.
The room tilted, shadows stretching long and monstrous as her knees threatened to give way. She pressed a hand to her stomach, bile rising, disbelief roaring in her ears.
No. She had misheard. She had to have misheard.
And yet Ethan’s lips parted again, and this time the sound was unmistakable. Her brother’s name, drawn out in a groan of longing, as though the dream clutched him tighter than reality ever could.
Amara stumbled back, the world suddenly colder, sharper, poisoned. The roses on the bed no longer looked romantic—they looked like blood.
Her wedding night had become a funeral.
Not for her love, not even for her trust. But for the woman she had been when she walked down that aisle hours ago.
That woman was gone.
And in her place stood someone else. Someone who had just glimpsed the edge of a truth she could not yet bear to face.
- Writer
