Chapter 1:Elena
I knew it was odd when Marcus said my father wanted to see me.
Not the sitting room. Not the kitchen. The study.
I found him at the door, hands folded the way they always were when he'd been sent to say something he didn't want to say. He didn't meet my eyes.
"Your father wants you. In the study."
That was it. That was all he gave me.
I'd been in that room four times in my life, and none of them ended well. Once, at nine, when he told me I'd be attending a different school than Camille without bothering to explain why. Once, at fourteen, when he cut my allowance because I'd embarrassed him by simply showing up to a dinner he hadn't wanted me at. I stood outside the door longer than I should have, smoothing a dress that didn't need smoothing, some stupid part of me still hoping he'd look at me differently this time.
He didn't look up when I walked in. He never did. He never had, not once in twenty-six years, not at a single dinner, not on a single birthday I'd stopped expecting him to remember by the time I turned twelve.
"Sit," he said.
I sat.
He kept signing whatever was in front of him, unhurried, the scratch of his pen the only sound in the room. I counted the silence the way I always did. I was somewhere past twenty seconds when he finally set the pen down and looked at me.
"You're getting married."
I didn't move. My heart was suddenly loud in my own ears. The words just hung there, refusing to make sense.
"Damien Ashford."
"It's already arranged."
I laughed. A short, broken sound. "Married," I repeated, like saying it slower might change the shape of it.
"The wedding is in three weeks."
"I don't even know him." My voice cracked. "You can't just—"
"I can." He said it flatly, the same tone he used to end board calls he was tired of. "And I have. Ashford Holdings needs this. It secures what I need."
"Then find another way."
That's when he finally looked at me properly. Not anger. Nothing. Just flat, total indifference, the look of a man watching a number finally balance.
"You'll do this, Elena. And if you're thinking about saying no, you should know exactly what that costs you."
My stomach dropped before he'd even said the rest.
"Your mother's care isn't free," he said. "The specialists. The medication. All of it comes from accounts I control. Accounts that stop the moment you decide you're too good for this family."
"You'd let her—"
"I'd simply stop paying for something I have no obligation to fund." Even. Calm. "Whatever happens to her after that isn't my concern."
"She's a person."
"She was a mistake." No weight behind it at all. "So were you. I've been generous cleaning up after both of you. I'd think you'd be grateful."
My eyes burned. I wouldn't give him the tears. I never had, not once, not even the day he told a room full of his associates I was "a family friend's daughter" while I stood three feet away holding his coat.
"You don't have a choice here," he said, already reaching for the next paper on his desk. "Save your energy. Learn to be useful to your husband instead."
Husband.
The word sat wrong in my mouth, foreign, like something I hadn't agreed to.
I don't remember standing up. I don't remember the hallway, the same hallway lined with portraits of people who shared my blood but had never once shared their name with me. I don't remember reaching my door. I only remember the click of the lock, and my back sliding down the wood until I hit the floor, knees pulled to my chest.
There was no version of that conversation where I walked out with anything except exactly what he'd already decided to give me.
I sat there until the light outside my window went from gold to gray to nothing, and somewhere in that darkness it finally landed all the way through me.
I had no options. None. No door left to run through.
And just like that, my father and a man I had never met had already decided my fate, in a room I wasn't even standing in, without a single thought spared for what I might have wanted.
I wondered, sitting there in the dark, if Damien Ashford even knew my name yet.
Or if, to him, I was simply a means to an end.
Just like I was for my own father.
