CHAPTER FOUR

Zahara's POV

The wedding took place six days later in a private hall with more security guards than guests.

My wedding dress and flowers were never picked by me…just a fitted ivory gown Susan chose specifically because she knew I would hate it, but I did not care.

Outside the gate were a string of cameras kept carefully to protect Armando's business interests rather than my dignity.

The hall itself was beautiful in the cold, curated way…white orchids that cost more than my old monthly rent, a string quartet playing music nobody in the room actually wanted to hear.

I stood at the back of the aisle with my father's arm under mine...feeling less like a bride and more like cargo being delivered to its rightful owner.

"You do not have to smile, nobody here expects it." My father murmured as the doors opened.

"Good, because I could not manage one if I tried."

I said my vows to a man I had shared one reckless night with and had had a handful of cold conversations since…and he said his back with the same flat control he used in every sentence I had heard him speak.

His voice did not waver once but mine nearly did, on the word love…a word neither of us meant and both of us had to say it anyway, for the sake of the cameras waiting just outside the gate. 

When the officiant told him he could kiss his bride, he brushed his mouth against my cheek instead, brief and clinical…and something in my chest ached in a way I refused to admit it hurts.

Fiona was the only person at that wedding who looked at me like I was a person and not a transaction.

Armando's aunt, small and elegant, dressed in a soft blue dress, she squeezed my hand after the ceremony and said…"Whatever this marriage is built on, I hope you both find something real underneath it." 

I did not have the heart to tell her that real was the only thing I could never afford to want from her nephew. Her kindness caught me off guard...so completely that I had to look away before she saw my eyes fill.

"You have kind eyes and you remind me of someone." she added, tilting her head...like she was studying a painting she could not quite place.

"I have one of those faces," I said quickly, as I felt my pulse jumping.

"Perhaps." She smiled and did not push further...though something in the way she held my gaze a moment too long told me the resemblance had struck her harder than she let on.

That night, Armando led me into his study instead of his bedroom...and I understood immediately that this marriage would not begin the way most did.

"Three rules," he said, standing by the window with his back half turned to me, the city lights glittering behind him like something out of a painting he did not care to look at.

"No children. I built this life alone...and I intend to keep it that way. No affection, real or performed, beyond what is necessary in public. And there is a room on the east wing you are never to enter."

"Why?" I asked.

"Because I said so. Will you be willing to follow the rules, Zahara?" His voice left no room for argument.

I almost laughed, because two of his rules were already broken… had been broken for five years, sleeping soundly at Priya's apartment with my last name and his eyes.

He had no idea he was standing in front of the mother of his children…laying down a law that the universe had already shattered before he ever spoke it.

"Certainly, I will." I said instead, because the truth would end everything before it even began, and I was not ready…not yet, to lose the twins over a man who had just told me plainly he never wanted them.

"Good." He finally turned to look at me, and for one unguarded moment something moved behind his eyes…something that looked almost like Curiosity. Hunger, or both. Then it vanished, folded back into the careful stillness he wore like armor. 

"Your room is down the hall. I will have your things moved from wherever you were staying."

My chest tightened. Wherever I was staying? If his people searched my apartment, they would find…Toys. Small shoes, and even a crib pushed against the wall of a room he must never learn existed.

"I would prefer to move my own things, there are some things I do not trust to strangers.” I said quickly.

He studied me for a long moment, and I held perfectly still under the weight of it…terrified he could somehow read the shape of the secret sitting behind my ribs. "As you wish...you have three days," he said finally. 

I turned to leave but his voice stopped me at the door.

"One more thing." I glanced back. He was turned again facing the window, his reflection ghosted over the glittering skyline.

"The room on the east wing. If you hear anything from it at night, you are not to investigate. Whatever you think you hear, you leave it alone."

A chill moved through me. "What is in that room, Armando?"

"That is not part of the contract you signed," he said.

I left his study with my heart hammering so hard I was certain he could hear it through the closed door behind me…and as I walked down the long, unfamiliar hallway of my new home.

I passed a heavy door near the end of the east corridor...its wood darker than the rest and its handle worn smooth in a way that told me it was opened far more often than a forbidden room should be. I did not stop neither did I touch it.

But I understood, with a cold…sinking certainty, that this contract was never going to hold, not with two small hearts already tangled in the middle of it, and not with a locked door already whispering secrets of its own before I had even spent a single night under this roof.