Novels by Aveline Kryss

The floor seemed to shift beneath me. Before I could speak, Damien folded the document closed.“Then they take it.”No hesitation. No pause to calculate what that meant.His grandmother’s eyes widened slightly. “Damien, think carefully.”“I have.” He looked at me when he said it.The clause was simple enough to understand, even through my shock. The trust his mother had spent years fighting to protect sat under trustee control. If Damien married someone the trustees rejected, his claim to it transferred permanently to whoever had benefited from his grandfather’s original mistake. Marrying me meant possibly losing, for good, the one thing he’d spent his adult life trying to win back for her.My fear came faster than any happiness. I thought about his mother, a woman who had paid for a choice that was never hers to begin with. I refused to become another woman standing in the center of that same sacrifice.“You cannot lose what she fought for because of me,” I said.“This is not because

I called him the moment I set the box down. No hiding it, no carrying it alone the way I would have once.“I received another delivery.”His voice changed instantly. “What did it say?”I looked at the note again. “Ask him who paid the price.”Silence on the line, brief and heavy.“I’m coming back,” he said.He arrived fast, but his control never slipped. I handed him the box, the stained lace, the folded note. He studied all three carefully, his jaw tightening, his fingers going still in a way that told me more than his face did. His voice dropped lower when he finally spoke.“Did anyone touch this before you? Did you see the courier?”“No. It was just there, like the first one.”He set the box down and looked at me properly for the first time since walking in. “Did this frighten you?”“Yes,” I said. No pretending. No performance of strength I didn’t feel.I asked the question that had been sitting in my chest since I read the note. “Was it your mother? The one who paid the price?”He

I almost let the call ring out. Then I remembered what he’d said in the car. You don’t have to believe me today. I answered.“Who is she?” No greeting. Just the question, sitting between us like the photograph still in my hand.Silence. For one second it frightened me more than anything the woman at the luncheon had said.“Where did you get that photograph?” Damien asked.He knew exactly which woman I meant.“Don’t move,” he said. “I’m coming over.”He arrived faster than I expected, calm but unmistakably tense, the kind of controlled urgency I hadn’t seen from him before. I set the photograph on the table between us before he’d even taken off his coat. It sat there like a third person in the room, watching us both.I watched his face when he saw it. Not longing. Not the soft regret of a man looking at someone he used to love. Pain, deeper than that, the kind that belonged to family.“She was my mother,” he said quietly.Shame moved through me fast, hot and immediate. I had built an e

I looked at Damien, waiting for him to deny it.“That is enough,” he said to the woman, his voice flat and final. He didn’t explain anything beyond that, didn’t tell her she was wrong, didn’t say a single word in his own defense.She gave me one last look, something close to pity, then walked away without finishing what she’d started.He had defended me. He hadn’t answered her.That silence sat heavier than the insult itself.Damien stayed close as we left, opening the car door for me, making sure I was settled before he walked around to his side. He’d done this same thing after the luncheon at his grandmother’s house, and it had felt like care then. Now it felt like something I couldn’t quite trust, like every careful gesture might just be part of whatever this was.I thought about the contract. The dress. His grandmother’s warmth, the recipe book, because you were worth choosing. Had any of it been real, or had I simply been the next piece in something that started long before I eve

“What did they get?” I asked, the question still hanging in the car between us.Damien’s jaw stayed tight, his eyes back on the road. “Not tonight.”I wanted to push, but something in his face stopped me. He wasn’t being difficult. He looked genuinely troubled, in a way I hadn’t seen from him before, and I decided the question could wait.The next morning he told me we had a luncheon to attend, a small family gathering, nothing formal. I let myself hope it might feel like his grandmother’s house again, warm and easy, another place where I might start to belong.The house was beautiful, full of polished tables and quiet conversation, but it didn’t feel like his grandmother’s home at all. The warmth was missing. People glanced at me as we walked in, then glanced at each other, the way people do when they already know something about you that you don’t know about yourself.I tried to settle into it anyway. I smiled when introduced, answered the small questions people offered without reall

The recipe book stayed in my lap the whole drive home. I kept touching the cover without meaning to, like I needed to check it was still real.Damien drove in silence, but it wasn’t an uncomfortable one. It was the kind of quiet that didn’t ask anything of me, the kind I hadn’t realized I’d been missing until I had it.“What did your grandmother mean?” I finally asked.He didn’t need me to repeat the line. I watched something flicker across his face, brief and controlled, before he answered. “Nothing you need to worry about.”He wasn’t dismissive about it. He simply refused, calm and certain, the same way he handled everything else. But it was the first thing he had ever truly refused to give me, and I felt the shape of that refusal more than I expected to.I opened the recipe book instead of pushing further. Inside the worn pages were small handwritten notes tucked between recipes, little memories scribbled in the margins. One page near the middle caught my eye, the ink faded but sti