The bride He blackmailed

THREE DAYS

“Hold still, or I will put a pin through your rib.”

Aria winced as the seamstress yanked the bodice tighter, three women circling her like she was a mannequin instead of a person who had agreed to marry a stranger seventy two hours ago. The dress was white and enormous and not hers in any sense that mattered. Someone else had chosen it. Someone else was paying for it. She was only the body it had to fit.

“Can we take a break,” Aria said.

“No breaks. The alterations close at six.” The seamstress spoke around a mouth full of pins.

Her father knocked on the dressing room door before she could argue further. When she waved him in, the seamstress and her assistants filed out, and for the first time in three days Aria was alone with him.

Robert Whitmore looked older than he had a week ago. Grey had crept fully into his hair overnight, or maybe she had simply never looked closely enough to see it happening.

“You don’t have to do this,” he said. “I can still call the DA myself. Confess to something I didn’t do. Take the years. You’d be free.”

“Stop.” Aria turned to face him in the mirror instead of directly, because it was easier to say hard things to a reflection. “You didn’t do this to me. He did. I’m not going to let you disappear into a cell so I can feel less guilty about a decision that was never mine to avoid.”

“I raised you to fight, not to surrender.”

“I am fighting.” She met his eyes in the glass. “I’m just fighting from inside the house now instead of outside it.”

Her father sat down heavily in the small velvet chair by the dressing room mirror, and for a moment he looked less like the man who had run Whitmore Holdings for thirty years and more like someone waiting for a diagnosis. “When your mother was sick, I promised her I would never let this family fall apart. I have spent four years watching it fall apart anyway. And now I’ve traded my daughter to stop it.”

“You didn’t trade me. I chose this.” Aria crossed the small room and knelt in front of him, taking both his hands in hers, feeling how cold they had gone. “You didn’t sign anything. I did. Whatever happens next, it’s mine to carry, not yours.”

“That’s the problem.” His voice broke on the last word. “It should have been mine to carry. That’s what fathers are for.”

Aria didn’t have an answer for that, so she said nothing, only held his hands until the seamstress knocked twice and called through the door that the fitting had to continue.

Her phone buzzed on the dressing table. Nora’s name lit up the screen, and Aria answered before her father could ask who it was.

“Please tell me you have not signed anything yet,” Nora said, no greeting, straight into it the way she always did.

“Too late.”

“Aria.” Nora’s voice dropped, careful in a way that made Aria’s skin prickle. “I have been digging into Cross Enterprises for a piece I’m writing. There is a pattern with that company. People who get close to Damien Cross, especially women, they do not stay close for long. One executive assistant left the country overnight two years ago and never came back. Nobody I’ve spoken to will say why.”

“You’re supposed to be calming me down right now.”

“I’m supposed to keep you safe. Sometimes that means scaring you a little first.” Nora exhaled. “Just watch him. Watch everyone in that house. Call me the second something feels wrong.”

Aria promised she would and hung up as her father watched her with the particular worry of a man who no longer had the power to protect his daughter and knew it.

The wedding happened two days later in a private chapel with sixty guests Aria had never met and a photographer hired by Damien’s publicity team. There was no music she chose, no flowers she picked, no vows written by her own hand. She walked down an aisle toward a man she had known for three days and repeated words a wedding planner had handed her on an index card that morning.

Damien’s hand was steady when he slid the ring onto her finger. Hers was not. He noticed. He said nothing, but his thumb pressed once against her knuckles, brief and deliberate, and she could not decide if it was meant as comfort or warning.

“You looked terrified up there,” Damien said quietly during the first dance, his hand steady at her waist while hers sat stiff on his shoulder.

“I was marrying a stranger in front of sixty people who all know each other and none of them know me. Terrified feels accurate.”

“You didn’t look it to anyone but me.” He turned her smoothly, the way a man does when he has done this a hundred times and felt nothing any of those times either. “That’s useful. People will underestimate you if you keep that face.”

“Is that a compliment?”

“It’s information.” But something in his tone had softened just enough for her to notice, a fraction of warmth she hadn’t expected and didn’t trust. The song ended before she could decide what to do with it, and he stepped back, already scanning the room for whichever guest required his attention next, leaving her standing alone on the dance floor in a dress that wasn’t hers, in a marriage that wasn’t real, in a life that had stopped belonging to her three days ago.

The reception blurred past her in champagne and small talk with strangers who called her Mrs. Cross like the name already fit. She was reaching for a glass of water at the edge of the room when a woman in a deep green dress stepped into the space beside her, close enough that Aria could smell her perfume before she saw her face.

“You must be exhausted,” the woman said, smiling with teeth too white to be entirely friendly. “Weddings are so much work, especially when you only had three days to prepare for one.”

“I don’t think we’ve met.”

“Camille Voss.” She said it like the name should mean something, and from the way the room’s temperature seemed to drop around them, it clearly did to everyone but Aria. “I was engaged to Damien for two years before you existed to him. We’re practically family.”

“Congratulations on the almost,” Aria said.

Camille’s smile did not move, but something behind her eyes hardened. “You’re clever. That’s new. He usually prefers women who know their place.” She leaned in, voice dropping low enough that only Aria could hear. “You should ask him about Sienna sometime. His assistant, before me. She was clever too. Now nobody in this city has heard from her in two years, and Damien has never once mentioned her name since.”

Aria’s stomach turned to ice. “What are you talking about?”

Camille straightened, smoothing invisible wrinkles from her dress, already turning to leave. “Ask your husband,” she said over her shoulder. “See if he even blinks.”

She walked away into the crowd, and Aria stood alone at the edge of her own wedding reception with a champagne glass shaking in her hand, staring across the room at the man she had married three days ago, wondering exactly what kind of house she had just agreed to live in.