"You Rejected Me, Now Beg"

The Morning After

Morning arrives before I'm ready for it, sunlight cutting through curtains I didn't choose in a room that still smells faintly like him.

I lie there for a moment, staring at the ceiling, cataloguing everything that happened in the last twelve hours like I'm building a case file instead of living my own life. The rejection. The overheard conversation. The knock at my door that turned into something almost tender before it wasn't.

The bond hums quietly under my skin, patient, unbothered by any of it, like it already knows something I haven't caught up to yet.

I get up. I dress plainly, nothing borrowed from the wedding trousseau, something of my own instead, a small rebellion nobody else will notice but me.

Downstairs the estate is already awake, staff moving through their routines like nothing happened, like the new lady of the house wasn't handed a public humiliation less than a day ago. I find the dining room mostly by instinct and find Raya already seated there, coffee in hand, entirely too comfortable for someone who doesn't belong to this family.

"Sleep well?" Her voice is pleasant. Her eyes are not.

"Better than expected."

"I imagine so. Damian usually does clear his head before making decisions." She sips her coffee, unhurried. "He came to see you last night, didn't he."

It isn't really a question. She already knows. Someone in this house always knows.

"Careful," I say, taking the seat across from her, refusing to let her enjoy watching me flinch. "You sound like a woman keeping score on a marriage that isn't yours."

Something flickers across her face, gone as fast as it came, replaced by that same lazy satisfaction from the reception. "I've known Damian a long time. Long before you existed to him. I'm not worried about a piece of paper."

"Then you should be." I keep my voice even, pleasant even, the way you'd discuss weather instead of war. "Paper isn't what bound us last night."

That lands harder than I expect. Her jaw tightens, just slightly, just enough to tell me the bond isn't a rumor to her, it's a threat, and she's spent longer preparing for this conversation than I have.

Before she can answer, Damian walks in, and the room shifts the way it always seems to when he enters it, attention bending toward him without permission. He glances between the two of us, reading the tension instantly, and something in his expression tightens.

"Raya." His voice carries a warning I recognize even if she chooses to ignore it.

"Just welcoming the new wife to the family," she says smoothly, rising, coffee cup in hand. "I have work to attend to. Congratulations again, Selene. Truly."

She leaves without waiting for a response, and the silence she leaves behind is worse than anything she could have said.

Damian doesn't sit. He stands near the doorway like a man deciding whether he's actually staying.

"You shouldn't let her provoke you," he says finally.

"I'm not the one who needs that advice." I meet his eyes, refusing to look away first. "She seems very confident about her place in your life, for a woman who isn't your mate."

Something crosses his face, quick and unreadable, and he doesn't answer that directly.

"I have a meeting this morning," he says instead. "With Lucian. About the merger terms tied to the marriage."

"The debt my family supposedly owes yours."

"Yes."

"Funny," I say, watching him carefully now, "I overheard something last night that made me wonder how much of that debt is real, and how much of it was invented to make sure the two of us ended up exactly where we are."

His whole body goes still.

"What did you hear?"

"Enough to know your uncle built this marriage on purpose, knowing exactly what we were to each other before either of us stepped foot near that altar."

For a long moment he says nothing, and I watch something shift behind his eyes, some old certainty cracking under a weight it wasn't built to hold.

"That's not possible," he says, but his voice doesn't carry the confidence the words are supposed to.

"Ask him yourself," I say quietly. "Watch his face when you do. And then ask yourself why a debt that was supposedly so urgent, so necessary to settle immediately, happened to require a marriage between the exact two people fate had already chosen for each other."

I rise from the table, leaving my coffee untouched, because I've said enough for one morning and I want him sitting with it, uncomfortable, unable to shake it off the way he shakes off everything else.

At the doorway I pause, glancing back at him one last time.

"You should go find out what your family actually did to you, Damian. Before it's too late to matter."

I walk out before he can respond, and for the first time since that altar, I feel something other than grief.

I feel the beginning of a plan.