Caged By His Love

I thought I was different.

I thought maybe, just maybe, my case would turn out differently from Melissa's. I knew my life, my relationships, were never really mine to decide — but I had let myself hope that my parents would understand this is the twenty-first century. Coming from old money is one thing. Coming from old money that trades its daughters like company shares is another.

My parents knew I hated Jethro Blackstone. They knew it, and yet here I am, staring at my wedding dress five feet away from me like it belongs to a stranger.

"Stop crying," Melissa said, dabbing under my eyes with a tissue. "You're going to ruin your makeup."

I don't care about my makeup. If crying could stop this wedding, I would cry until there was nothing left in me. It's too late for that, though, and I hate how much it hurts to admit it.

"I don't care, Lissa." I sniffed, my voice cracking down the middle. "Why do they always have to sacrifice our happiness for their own selfish interests?"

She went quiet. I don't blame her — there's no good answer to that question, not when she's already lived it. "First it was you," I said, "and now me."

She managed a small smile anyway. "Kane and I are happy. It wasn't a bad decision, marrying him. You might be happy too."

"You know I hate Jethro. How exactly am I supposed to be happy?"

"Why do you hate him?" she asked, and I went silent, because that silence is the only honest answer I have. No one but me knows the real reason. "Look at me," she said gently, and I turned to face her. "Whatever your reasons are — he might not be what you think he is."

I scoffed. "You don't understand it, Lissa." I stood from the makeup stool, my dress pooling like spilled milk around my feet. "I know him better than you think I do, and he is exactly what I don't want. I love Preston. And Dad using him as leverage is *satanic*."

"I don't care what you think of me," a familiar, gravelled voice said from the doorway. Melissa and I turned together to find our parents standing there, my father's face carved from the same stone it always was. "If looking out for my daughter makes me satanic, then so be it. But one thing is certain — you are marrying Jethro Blackstone today."

"Looking out for me?" I laughed, and it came out uglier than I meant it to. "Or looking out for yourself?"

"Melanie, that is no way to speak to your father." My mother's voice — soft, obedient, the voice of a woman who had learned long ago which battles were worth losing.

"Father?" I shot back. "When has he ever been a father to us? The only thing he has ever cared about is his company." I held his gaze even as my chest caved in on itself. "The moment things turn south, he sells his daughters for assets."

"Melanie." My father's hand rose, half-formed, like the threat alone should have been enough to silence me.

"Why did you stop?" Tears ran freely now, hot tracks down my cheeks. "Hit me. Go on. It won't keep me quiet today. I'll marry Jethro — I'll say the words — but the second I say *I do*," I paused, letting it land, "that is the second you stop being my father."

"What do you think you're saying?" My mother was already at the edge of tears herself.

"I'm not Melissa, Mum. You know that. Because I refused, he *kidnapped* Preston and threatened his life to make me comply. What kind of father does that to his own daughter?"

"Rebecca — stop crying," my father said, and I flinched, because it wasn't even my name he used, and somehow that was its own small cruelty. "Get married, and you'll see Preston grow old and grey. Whether I'm your father or simply Mr. Wright to you from now on — it changes nothing." He turned and walked out, my mother trailing behind him like a shadow that had long since stopped arguing with the light.

"You shouldn't have said that to Dad," Melissa murmured once they'd gone.

"Should I have sat there quietly, being the filial daughter?" I asked, my voice raw. "I'm not you."

She didn't answer. She just crossed the room and pulled me into a hug, and for a moment, that was the only mercy either of us had left to give.

***

The doors of the church yawned open, and every eye in the room turned to me at once. I was shaking — crying, even — but the veil hid it well enough. Somewhere behind me, a string quartet began Beautiful in White, and every line of it felt like a lie being told about the wrong relationship. I had chosen this song. For Preston. It would have been the best day of my life. Instead, I was walking down the same aisle, to the same music, toward the man I hated most in the world.

*Not sure if you know this, but when we first met*

*I got so nervous, I couldn't speak*

*In that very moment, I found the one, and*

*My life had found its missing piece*

The song wrapped itself around memories of Preston instead — the way he used to laugh with his whole chest, the late nights we spent mapping out a future my father had already burned to the ground. For one dizzying second, I let myself imagine running. Out the side door, out of this dress, out of this life. Then reality caught up to me, cold and absolute: running would cost Preston more than it would ever cost me.

Jethro's pale green eyes found me before I even lifted my head — I could feel them, the way you feel a storm before you see it. He is, by every objective measure, the man every girl is supposed to dream about. Tall, composed, terrifyingly beautiful in the way glass is beautiful right before it cuts you. But there is a difference between wanting a man for what he looks like and wanting him for who he is, and Jethro's arrogance, his pride, his cold and absolute dominance, are things I have never wanted in a partner — not once, not even before I had a reason to hate him.

By the time I blinked again, I was standing at his side. My father placed my hand in Jethro's the way a man hands over a signed contract. "Look after her," he said — the only words he offered — before taking his seat.

The vows passed in a blur. We both said I do. "I now pronounce you husband and wife," the priest said. "You may kiss the bride."

I'd forgotten that part was coming. Jethro lifted my veil and leaned in, and I turned my head at the last second so his mouth caught my cheek instead. The room erupted into applause, no one noticing — or no one caring to notice — the small act of defiance I'd just committed in front of two hundred guests.

I looked up in time to catch it: displeasure, flickering across his face like a struck match. And then it was gone, replaced by the expression I'd come to know as his default — unreadable, composed, utterly closed. In the years I'd known Jethro Blackstone, I could count on one hand the number of times I'd seen anything real cross that face. This had almost been one of them.

***

The day stretched longer than the year that preceded it. Six hours since we'd left the church for the reception, in a hall designed to impress two families who had never once needed impressing — the kind of wedding that would win some magazine's award for *Best of the Year* while the bride sat quietly beside her new husband, hollowed out.

I hadn't been this quiet in all twenty-four years of my life.

"Smile," Jethro murmured against my ear, and I realized only then that my rehearsed smile had slipped into a frown somewhere between the toasts and the cake. I turned to look at his blank, composed face. "I'm done pretending," I said, low enough that only he could hear.

"You shouldn't be, darling. You have the rest of your life to pretend." An ordinary man might have tried to cheer up his new wife on their wedding day. Jethro wasn't interested in ordinary, and he certainly wasn't interested in cheering me up.

"I'm not your darling."

"Get used to it. I won't be calling you by your name anymore." He said it the way other men might comment on the weather.

"I'm only your wife on paper, Jethro. The world can call me Melanie Blackstone all it wants — to you, I will always be Melanie Wright." I made myself hold his gaze. "My heart belongs to Preston. Not you."

I wanted, more than anything in that moment, to know what was happening behind his eyes. But nothing in his expression shifted — no hurt, no anger, nothing. A man whose wife had just confessed feelings for someone else, and he looked like he was reading a weather report.

"Are you finished?" he asked. Then he leaned in, his voice dropping to something quiet and level and far more frightening than shouting would have been. "Melanie. I have a problem with sharing. I don't repeat myself on this — I don't share what belongs to me. The next time you think of another man, I might have him killed and served to us for breakfast. So the sooner you forget him, the longer he lives. And trust me when I tell you, I don't bluff."

The threat landed harder for how quietly he delivered it.

"I don't belong to you," I said.

He smiled — the kind of smile that never once touched warmth. "Not yet. After tonight, your name is already mine. Your body will be mine soon enough. Delayed. Never denied."

"I won't let you anywhere near me."

"If you say so." But Jethro doesn't make empty promises. Two years ago, he told me he'd marry me whether I wanted it or not — and here I am, in his ring, in his name. I hadn't believed him then either. Looking back at everything he's said and delivered on since, that's what terrifies me most: not that he threatens things, but that he *finishes* them.

"Mrs. Blackstone?" The photographer's voice cut through my spiraling thoughts. "Could you smile for the camera?"

I did.

"Mrs. Blackstone suits you," Jethro said, watching me force the expression. He is, without question, the most infuriating man I have ever had the misfortune of knowing.

***

We'd been seated for over an hour, Jethro absorbed in his phone like the wedding — *his own wedding* — bored him. "Let's dance," he said suddenly, not even glancing up.

"I'm not dancing with you."

"I wasn't asking." He stood, pulling me up by the hand before I could protest. "Stand, or I carry you."

"You wouldn't." He lifted me into his arms, bridal style, without so much as a change in his breathing.

"Put me down." I struggled, but he held me like I weighed nothing at all.

"Stop moving, or I'll drop you," he said, and I stilled instantly — I'd learned that particular lesson the hard way once already. "I didn't realize you enjoyed being this close to me," he added, and I hated that I couldn't tell if he was mocking me or not.

Every eye in the room followed us to the dance floor, some soft with admiration, some sharp with envy. He set me down gently as the spotlight found us, one hand settling at my waist and drawing me in until there was barely air between us. The music slowed. I let my arms rest around his neck, refusing to acknowledge the small, satisfied curve of his mouth.

"I hate you," I muttered.

"It didn't stop you from marrying me, did it, darling?"

"You know exactly why I did it. If you and my father hadn't taken Preston, I never would have agreed to any of this."

"Taken him?" He laughed once, low and humorless. "I don't take people, Melanie. If I wanted him gone, I would kill him and remove him from your life permanently." He said it the way most people discuss the weather — a fact, nothing more.

"So it was just my father, then."

"For the record," he said, "Preston was never taken anywhere. Your father sent him on a business trip. A remote island. Nothing more sinister than that."

I stopped moving entirely.

"What did you just say?" My mind raced backward, replaying every conversation with my father, and I realized — he had never once used the word *kidnapped*. He'd only ever said that if I wanted Preston to come home alive, I would marry Jethro. I had filled in the rest myself.

"So it was all a lie? But Preston wasn't answering my calls. He's been gone three months—"

Jethro said nothing. He simply watched me piece it together, offering no comfort, no explanation, nothing at all — leaving me alone with the question that would define everything after this: what would I say to Preston, when he finally came home to find me married to someone else?

"Fuck.”