THE ILLEGITIMATE BRIDE

Chapter 4:Elena

I watched the car pull through the gates from behind my curtain, sleek and black and moving like it already owned the ground beneath it.

I didn't need to ask who that was.

Ever since I'd heard that this was the man I'd be marrying, I'd been doing my research about him. All I could come up with is that he's extremely rich, cold, and ruthless when it comes to business.

Nobody had told me he was coming.

Nobody ever told me anything. Not about the wedding, not the date, not the fact that the man I was being handed to like a business card was apparently welcome to show up on a random afternoon unannounced, while I found out the same way the staff did ,by watching him arrive.

Something in me went still and hard at that thought.

If nobody was going to ask what I wanted, then fine. There was exactly one thing left in this entire arrangement that was still mine to decide, and I decided it right there at the window, watching my father hurry down the front steps to fawn over a stranger.

I wasn't going to meet him.

It wasn't much. It wouldn't change the wedding, wouldn't change my father's mind, wouldn't undo a single thing that had already been decided without me in the room. But it was mine. My one small, useless act of resistance, and I intended to keep it.

I went to the garden instead of waiting in my room like a girl expecting to be summoned. The day was bright, almost obnoxiously so, sunlight spilling gold over everything, warm on my shoulders , a complete contrast to whatever gray, heavy thing had settled behind my ribs and refused to leave. I knelt by the flower beds along the east wall and pulled weeds I didn't need to pull, just to give my hands somewhere to go while my mind sat trapped in that study, replaying my father's voice.

I stayed longer than I meant to. Long enough, I thought, that Damien Ashford would be gone by the time I went back inside.

I was wrong.

As I was going back into the house, I bumped into something hard, and when I looked up, I saw him.

He was taller than I'd expected, broad enough that the doorway seemed smaller with him standing in it. Black hair, a jaw cut sharp enough to look carved rather than grown, eyes so pale a blue they seemed to catch the light differently than everyone else's did.

He was more handsome than the tabloids let on.

The thought arrived before I could stop it, unwelcome and immediate, and I hated it the second it formed. He was, without question, the most striking man I had ever stood this close to, and I already hated him for it.

He didn't look away first. Neither did I.

"I assume," he said finally, his voice low and unbothered, "your father has briefed you."

Something in me finally caught up to itself.

Great. Another asshole like my father.

My chin lifted before I gave it permission to. "Briefed me? Is that what we're calling it? Because from where I was standing, nobody briefed me on anything. I was told. There's a difference between being informed and being consulted, and I wasn't given either."

His expression didn't move. Not a flicker.

"And who exactly," I pressed, my voice steadier than I felt, "gave either of you the right to decide the rest of my life over a conversation I wasn't even in the room for?"

For one brief second, something shifted behind those pale eyes interest, maybe, or something close enough to it that I almost mistook it for warmth.

Then it vanished completely.

"If your input on the matter was so important, I'm sure your father would have asked for it," he said, evenly, without cruelty, which somehow made it worse. "The wedding will happen. Your father agreed to the terms. You agreed the moment you were born into this family."

"I didn't agree to anything."

"No," he said. "You didn't. It happened anyway. I'd suggest you get used to that distinction quickly. It will serve you far better than fighting it."

He stepped past me without waiting for a response, unhurried, already finished with the conversation.

I hate him already.

I stood in that doorway long after the car pulled away, my pulse still uneven, my chest still tight with something I didn't have a name for.

I had told myself, not an hour earlier, that refusing to meet him was the one thing I still had control over.

I hadn't accounted for the fact that meeting him might cost me something else entirely ,something I didn't yet know how to protect.