SOLD BY MY HUSBAND CLAIMED BY HIS ENEMY

CHAPTER 5: NO WAY OUT

# Chapter 5: No Way Out

Morning came grey and quiet, the kind of light that makes a strange room feel even stranger.

I hadn't slept, not really. I'd drifted in and out of something close to it, waking each time to the unfamiliar creak of the house settling around me, and by the time the sky outside my window turned the color of old paper, I'd already decided I wasn't going to spend a month simply waiting to see what this house wanted from me.

I dressed quickly. Plain clothes. Flat shoes.

If I was going to find a way out, I wanted to be able to run in them.

The hallway outside my room was empty when I stepped into it, long and silent in the early light, portraits watching from the walls the way they had the night before. I moved carefully, listening for footsteps, for voices, for anything that might tell me where the house's attention was gathered at this hour.

I found the back stairs by accident, tucked behind a door I hadn't noticed the night before, and followed them down into a corridor that led, eventually, toward daylight.

The garden opened up wide and green beyond a set of glass doors, mist still clinging to the grass, and beyond that, distant but visible, the iron gates I'd watched close behind me only hours ago.

I told myself I was only getting air.

I didn't believe myself for a second.

I crossed the garden slowly, deliberately unhurried, the way you walk when you're trying very hard to look like you have nowhere urgent to be. Roses lined one side of the path, heavy with morning dew, and I let my fingers trail across them as I passed, buying myself the appearance of a woman simply enjoying her surroundings.

I made it halfway to the gates before I noticed the man standing near the hedge line.

He wasn't looking at me directly. He didn't need to. His posture alone told me everything — feet planted, hands loosely clasped, the particular stillness of someone whose entire job was standing exactly where he was standing.

I changed direction, casual, unbothered, and walked instead toward the fountain at the center of the garden.

Another man stood near the fountain.

I hadn't seen him arrive. He simply was there, the way the first one had simply been there, watching the garden with the same patient, unreadable attention.

Two of them.

I turned in a slow circle, pretending to admire the shape of the hedges, and counted a third figure near the far wall, half-hidden by an old oak tree, close enough to the gates that reaching them without being seen would have required a plan I didn't have and a head start I definitely didn't have either.

I tried the far side of the property next, drifting toward a low stretch of wall near the greenhouse where the hedges grew wild and unkempt, thinking perhaps the coverage thinned out somewhere the house didn't consider worth guarding.

It didn't.

A fourth man appeared from somewhere near the greenhouse door before I'd taken ten steps toward it, unhurried, unbothered, falling into step at a distance that made it clear he had no intention of closing the gap unless I gave him a reason to.

I stopped pretending to admire the greenhouse.

He stopped too, exactly where he was, watching me with the patient indifference of a man who had done this exact job on this exact morning more times than I wanted to imagine.

My heart sank slowly, the way water sinks into dry ground, quiet and total.

There was no path through this garden that didn't pass within sight of at least one of them.

I kept walking anyway, unwilling to let them see how quickly the idea had already died in my chest, tracing the edge of the property like a woman taking a morning walk and nothing more. Every turn I took, one of them adjusted position slightly, never approaching, never speaking, simply making sure I understood, without a single word being exchanged, exactly how far my freedom in this garden actually extended.

It extended exactly as far as they allowed it to.

By the time I reached the fountain again, I'd stopped pretending, even to myself, that I was simply getting air.

I sat down on the stone edge instead, staring at the water, my reflection fractured across the surface every time the breeze moved through it, and let myself feel, fully, for the first time since stepping out of that car, how completely and quietly trapped I actually was.

Running wasn't a plan.

It was a wish I couldn't afford to keep having.

I thought of Damien, back in that house, presumably waking up to an empty side of the bed for the first time in three years. I thought of the fifty million dollars still standing between this garden and whatever life I used to have, and I made myself a promise, sitting there with my reflection scattered across the water.

One month.

I would give this house one month, exactly as Kael had said, and not one day more than that.

I would not seek him out. I would not ask more questions than I had to. I would not give this place, or the man who ran it, anything beyond what the contract already demanded of me — my presence, my patience, and nothing else.

If I kept my head down. If I stayed out of his path as much as this house allowed. If I simply survived the weeks the way you survive weather, waiting it out rather than fighting it, then surely — surely — Damien would find a way to pay what he owed, and this would end the way Kael himself had promised it would.

It wasn't hope, exactly, what I felt sitting there. Hope required believing in something. This was closer to arithmetic — thirty days, one contract, one debt, and a husband who had at least three good reasons of his own to want this settled before it cost him anything more than money. Reputation. His mother's approval. Whatever remained of the life he'd built around pretending to be a good man.

Surely that was enough to make him move quickly.

Surely that was enough to make this short.

A month.

That was all this was.

I stood from the fountain's edge and walked back toward the house without looking at any of the men stationed around its edges, my spine straight, my face carefully arranged into something that gave away nothing, and by the time I reached my room again, I had built a version of the next thirty days that I could, just barely, convince myself to survive.

I would not leave this room more than I had to.

I would not cross his path if I could help it.

And somewhere, on the other side of all this silence, my husband would finally do the one thing he had never quite managed in three years of marriage.

He would keep a promise.

*******

(Damien's Mansion)

Morning had not yet reached the curtains of the master bedroom.

The door opened just after nine, and a woman stepped through it in a short red dress, her heels loud against the marble, a bottle of wine swinging loosely from one hand. She moved like she already owned the room she was walking into — hips unhurried, a smile already waiting before anyone had said a word to earn it.

Damien looked up from the edge of the bed.

Whatever exhaustion had been sitting on his face all night disappeared the moment he saw her.

He crossed the room in three strides and kissed her before she'd even set the bottle down, deep and certain, his hands finding her waist like they'd done it a hundred times before, like the last twelve hours hadn't happened at all.

She laughed against his mouth when they finally broke apart, low and pleased with herself.

"Careful," she said, setting the bottle down on the nightstand. "Someone might think you missed me."

"I did."

"Even with your wife's little going-away party happening last night?" She traced a finger down his collar, watching his face carefully. "How did she take it?"

"Badly."

"Good." She smiled, slow and satisfied, the kind of smile that had clearly been practiced somewhere in front of a mirror. "Finally. She's out of the way."

Damien pulled her closer, his mouth finding her neck, already half-lost in whatever the rest of the morning promised to become.

"She's not coming back from that mansion," the woman murmured, tilting her head to give him better access, her voice dropping into something almost lazy with satisfaction. "Men like that don't let go of what they collect."

"You sound very sure of that."

"I am." She pulled back just enough to look at him properly, something bright and cold flickering behind her eyes. "Trust me. I made certain of it myself."