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Chapter Twelve: Ash Her
publish date:
2026-05-15 01:00:12
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A Bride for the Wrong Brother Chapter Twenty-Four: Between Vows
(Alondra's POV)I do not know what woke me.The bedside lamp was still on low from the night before. My phone said three forty-seven. I lay there for a moment.Then sat up and pulled the silk robe off the foot of the bed and tied it around my middle. My hair came loose out of the messy braid I had slept in. I crossed the cold floor in bare feet and I opened my door before I could talk myself out of it.The hallway was dim. The wall sconces had been turned all the way down. At the far end, near the head of the staircase, Dante and Miguel stood together by a small leather travel bag. Dante was in a dark grey shirt and dark trousers, his sleeves already rolled back. Miguel had his coat over one arm and a phone pressed to his ear, speaking in soft fast Spanish.They both looked up when my door opened.Miguel's eyes flicked from me to Dante and back, and then a small slow grin spread across his face. He said something quietly into the phone, ended the call, and lifted the bag onto his sho
A Bride for the Wrong Brother Chapter Twenty-Three: Mine to Keep
(Alondra's POV)The spoon sat in the sauce.A small dark stain was spreading slowly into the white linen around it. I could not lift my eyes from the place where it had landed. I could feel three sets of them on me at once, the patriarch's slow and weighing, Carmen's bright with her own cruelty, Dante's I could not read because I was not brave enough yet to look up.The room was so quiet I could hear the wine settle in Carmen's glass.She lifted it to her mouth.I watched the small motion from under my lashes, and I watched her swallow, and set the glass back down with a small satisfied click.Then I heard the soft sound of a fork being laid down on the edge of a plate. It was only that the room had gone so still around it that everyone in it heard it as if he had thrown the fork against the wall. Dante set the fork down at a clean exact angle on the white china, he lifted the napkin from his lap, and folded it carefully along its existing creases, and he laid it down beside his plat
A Bride for the Wrong Brother Chapter Twenty-Three: Dinner
(Alondra's POV)The driver pulled up to the front of the estate and I let myself sit in the car for one extra breath before I got out.The warmth of the morning was still on my skin. Camille's laugh was still in my ears. I did not want to walk through those doors and feel both of them go cold, so I held them in my chest for a second longer, like a hand cupped around a small flame, and then I opened the door and stepped out and let the gates of my real life close behind me.The hall was quiet.I crossed it on soft feet and turned toward the staircase that led up to our wing, already mentally untangling the messy bun from my hair and looking forward to the cool of my own room. I made it three steps past the open door of the living room before a voice stopped me."Alondra."I turned.Dante was sitting in the dim of the living room. He was on the long couch, and his suit jacket was off, draped over the arm beside him, and the top two buttons of his shirt were undone. His hair was slightly
A Bride for the Wrong Brother Chapter Twenty One: Coffee
(Alondra's POV)The cafe was on a small side street off the Gran Vía.It was the kind of place I had loved before my life had a "before" and an "after." A wide window full of soft morning light. Wicker chairs out on the pavement. A blackboard propped by the door with the day's specials written in a curling hand. The smell of fresh bread reaching out into the street the way my father's bakery used to reach out into our own.The driver pulled up at the corner and I told him I would walk the last block.He did not like it. I could see him not liking it in the small set of his jaw. But I had been Dante's wife in name for over a month now, and somewhere along the way I had learned the small trick of holding a man's eye until he understood that "no" meant "no", and he nodded once and let me out without an argument.I walked the last block on my own.The morning air was cold and clean on my face. The pavement was busy in the way Madrid is busy at that hour, women with bags, men with coffees,
A Bride for the Wrong Brother Chapter Twenty: Never mind
(Alondra's POV)I blinked my eyes open and the morning was already too bright.I felt tired.My limbs were heavy. My head was thick. The phone on the bedside table chimed.I reached for it."Babe still alive in there?? Coffee, this morning, no excuses. Eleven. Or I will personally drive to that scary mansion and bang on the gate xx"A smile pulled at my mouth before I had decided to let it.Camille.We had reconnected a week ago. I had opened a new social media account, quietly, on a small old tablet I had found in the back of a drawer in this room. And somehow Camille had found me. Camille had been finding me since we were seven years old, when she had decided across a school playground that I was going to be her best friend and had not let me have a say in the matter since.I had typed back to her then, my hands shaking, "yes. it's me. don't tell anyone."She had not asked a single question I was not ready to answer. That was Camille. She had only said, "coffee soon when you're rea
A Bride for the Wrong Brother Chapter Nineteen: Drama Queen
(Dante's POV) "Fuck." I pushed the paper away from me across the kitchen table. The numbers on it had stopped being numbers an hour ago. They had become marks. Shapes a man stares at long enough that they forget how to mean anything. The shipment my father had handed me was not complicated, not really, it was the kind of work I had done a hundred times in my old life, but my old life had been a life with a quiet head, and the head I had now would not go quiet for anything. I had come down to the kitchen at one in the morning because I could not sleep. The kitchen was the one room in this house with no memory in it for me. Just the long wooden table the staff used for their own meals, and the cold range, and the row of copper pots that the night caught and held in a soft dull shine. I had brought the papers down here and and grabbed a glass of chilled water from the refrigerator. I clicked my phone face up against the wood. Three in the morning. I had been at it two hour
A Bride for the Wrong Brother Chapter Eight: Crystal Clear
(Dante's POV)I stepped forward.My boots struck the marble in a way that carried. The whole hall heard it. Heads turned. The guard with the gun against her forehead glanced sideways toward me without lowering his weapon, and somewhere behind my left shoulder my mother made a small wounded sound th
A Bride for the Wrong Brother Chapter Six: Claimed by Him
(Alondra's POV)The first person to reach the door was the maid.For one stupid second, my whole chest filled with relief.She came through the doorway with her dark braid swinging, her white apron crooked, her eyes wide. The same girl who had slipped a key into my palm and told me to run. She wou
A Bride for the Wrong Brother Chapter Five: Bridegroom's Secret
(Alondra's POV)They laced me into the dress so tightly I could barely breathe.Three women circled me like birds, tugging at ribbons, pinning lace, smoothing the long white skirt over my hips. The corset cinched my waist until my ribs pressed against each other and a small dizzy feeling settled be
A Bride for the Wrong Brother Chapter Four: Smoke and Pine
(Alondra's POV)He dragged me back through the hallway like I weighed nothing.My feet barely touched the carpet. One of his arms was still locked around my waist, the other pressed flat against my mouth, and my whole body had gone limp in a way that horrified me. I had spent the whole walk through
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