MARRIED TO THE DEVIL CEO

CHAPTER ELEVEN: FIVE MONTHS

Five months.

That’s how long I’ve been Mrs. Blackwood now, if you believe the version of my life the world has been told. Five months since I stood in my sister’s dress and said two words that changed the shape of everything I used to call my own. Five months of waking up in a house that still doesn’t feel like mine, answering to a name that still doesn’t feel like mine, married to a man who made it clear from the very first night that none of this was ever supposed to feel like anything at all.

I’ve gotten used to the routine of it, the way you get used to anything if you have no other choice. Breakfast at seven. The right clothes for the right event. Smiling at strangers who call me Amelia and mean it, who have no idea the real Amelia is somewhere out there living a life she chose, while I live one she left behind.

She still texts sometimes. Not often. Just enough to remind me she’s alive, safe, done with all of this. I’m sorry, Ava. Live your life. As if that’s a thing I still have the ability to do.

I paint now, in a small room on the third floor that nobody else uses. Nobody knows about it except me. It started as a way to get the anger out of my body without saying anything I couldn’t take back. Somewhere along the way it became the only place in this whole house where I don’t have to be anyone’s wife, anyone’s cover story, anyone’s convenient solution.

Damien and I are worse than we were in the beginning. That’s the part that surprises me most, if I’m honest with myself. I thought two people forced together might soften eventually, the way things do when you’re stuck with someone long enough. Instead he’s grown colder. More clipped. More condescending with every week that passes, like something in him decided somewhere along the way that softness was a mistake he wasn’t going to make twice.

There was a morning, back in month two, when he made me coffee without being asked. There was a night at a dinner party when he defended me in front of a room full of people who were cruel to my face. I used to think about those moments more than I probably should have.

Lately I don’t think about them at all, because they’ve stopped happening, replaced instead by a man who corrects the way I pour tea in front of guests, who tells me to manage my expression in meetings I’m not even allowed to speak in, who treats every ounce of warmth from those early weeks like it never happened at all.

I count the days left the way some people count calories, obsessive, constant, a private ritual that gets me through. Two hundred and ten to go. Two hundred and ten days until this contract ends and I can finally go back to being just Ava again, whoever that turns out to be after all of this.

Valeria is the only reason I haven’t completely lost myself in this house. We’ve texted almost every single day these past five months, some days just a meme to make me laugh, other days long paragraphs where I finally say out loud everything I’ve been swallowing since breakfast. She’s the only person who still calls me by my real name without hesitating first. My own mother has started slipping sometimes, calling me Amelia by accident, like even she’s starting to forget which daughter she’s talking to.

That’s the part that breaks something in me quietly, every single time it happens.

My parents don’t ask how I’m doing anymore, not really. My father talks about the company, about how well things are going now that the merger held, about how grateful he is that everything worked out. Nobody in my family seems to remember that everything working out cost me an entire year of my life, my name, my freedom, all of it handed over so easily on their behalf, like it was never really mine to keep in the first place.

I understand now why Amelia ran. Some days I think about running too.

I’m up in the painting room tonight, the way I am most nights now, working on a canvas I don’t have a name for yet, something dark and unfinished, the kind of thing I’d never let anyone else see. The house is quiet below me. Damien has been gone since early morning, some emergency at the office nobody explained to me, which is normal enough that I didn’t think twice about it.

I hear the door open behind me.

“You’re up here again,” Damien says.

I don’t turn around right away. “Could you knock next time.”

“The door was open.”

“That’s not the same as an invitation.” I set my brush down, finally turning to face him. He looks different tonight, tired in a way I haven’t seen on him before, his tie already gone, his jaw tight like he’s been holding something in for hours and is running out of room to hold it.

“What do you want, Damien.”

He doesn’t answer right away. He looks at the canvases stacked against the wall instead, dark colors, angry lines, five months of everything I haven’t said out loud finally out in the open for him to see.

“I didn’t know you painted,” he says quietly.

“There’s a lot you don’t know about me.” I cross my arms, done pretending I’m not exhausted by him. “You didn’t come up here to talk about my hobbies. What is it.”

Something shifts in his face. For the first time in weeks, the coldness slips, just slightly, and underneath it is something that looks almost like fear.

“There’s something I need to tell you,” he says. “Before anyone else does.”

My stomach drops the way it did the morning Amelia disappeared, that same old instinct rising up fast and sharp.

“Tell me what.”

He opens his mouth to answer.

The lights cut out.

The whole house goes dark at once, every hum and buzz of electricity dying in the same second, too sudden to be an accident, too complete to be a simple outage.

Somewhere far below us, the front gate alarm begins to scream into the night.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​