Chapter Three: The Marriage

They told me I was getting married three days after the auction.

Not as a question. Not as news. As instruction.

The words were delivered the same way everything else was in that place, flat, efficient, without room for reaction. As if my response had already been accounted for and deemed unnecessary. I stood there while the woman spoke, hands folded in front of me, eyes lowered, practicing the stillness that had kept me alive so far.

Marriage, I learned, was the word they used when ownership needed a respectable shape.

It sounded cleaner than purchase. Safer than acquisition. Something people could nod at without asking too many questions. Something that could be explained away at dinner tables and behind closed doors without anyone needing to confront what it truly was.

I was moved from the house before dawn.

The sky was still dark when they brought me outside, the air sharp against my skin. I inhaled deeply, instinctively, as though I could store the outside world inside my lungs before it disappeared again. The car waited with its engine running, headlights cutting through the early morning mist.

The car that took me away was quieter than the one that had brought me there years ago.

No shouting. No struggle. No explanations. Just doors opening, doors closing, the steady hum of tires against the road. No one spoke. No one explained what kind of man I was being given to. That information, I suspected, was unnecessary. Whatever he was, he had paid enough to deserve silence.

I watched the city fade as we drove. Buildings thinning. Streets widening. Everything familiar dissolving into distance. It felt less like being taken somewhere new and more like being erased from where I had been.

The estate was large in the way power always is—measured, intentional, designed to intimidate without effort.

Tall gates opened before the car fully stopped. Guards nodded once, recognizing the vehicle without needing to see who was inside. Inside, everything was orderly. Polished floors. Controlled air. A place where nothing happened without permission and nothing existed without purpose.

They dressed me again.

Hands moved around me with practiced ease. Fabric was chosen, adjusted, smoothed. Jewelry placed where it belonged. Shoes fitted precisely, neither too tight nor too loose. No one asked my preference.

Not in white.

White suggested beginnings. This was not one.

The ceremony was brief.

It took place in a room that felt more administrative than sacred. No music. No flowers. No gathering meant to witness joy. Words were read aloud from paper, their meaning reduced to procedure. Signatures were collected. Dates recorded. Witnesses stood nearby who did not look at me long enough to remember my face.

When it was over, I belonged to him legally as well as practically.

My husband was sixty-two.

I learned that number before I learned anything else about him. It framed the way I saw his body when he finally stood before me. He was not grotesque. That would have been easier. He was heavy, comfortable in his body, dressed well. His face held no cruelty, only expectation.

He looked at me the way one looks at something newly acquired, evaluating whether it would perform its function without issue.

He did not smile.

“You will be provided for,” he said, like that was generosity.

His voice was calm, practiced, unused to contradiction.

I nodded.

That was the extent of our introduction.

I learned about the other wives slowly.

Not because they were hidden, but because nothing about this house was explained outright. You were expected to observe. To adjust. To understand without being told. Information here was not offered freely; it was earned through attentiveness.

There were three of them.

They existed like carefully placed furniture. present, functional, rarely moved. None shared his bed the way a wife was supposed to, not regularly. They lived in separate wings. Their schedules did not overlap unless necessary. They were not friends. They were not enemies. They existed in careful parallel, each aware of the others without acknowledging it openly.

One had once been his assistant.

Another, a different assistant years later.

The third came from a family that had needed favor more than pride.

None of them were loved. That word had no place here.

I learned that his only love had died years ago.

The mother of his son.

She had died bringing the heir into the world, and whatever tenderness he had once possessed had been buried with her. Everything after that had been practical. Strategic. Controlled.

Marriage became a habit, not a feeling.

I understood then that I was not special.

That realization did not hurt as much as I expected. There was a strange comfort in it. Being ordinary meant being predictable. Predictability meant safety.

The first night passed without ceremony.

I will not describe it.

There are moments that do not deserve language. They exist only to be endured and forgotten as quickly as possible. I learned how to leave my body without leaving the room. How to make myself small and distant and unremarkable.

When it was over, he slept easily.

I lay awake and stared at the ceiling, listening to the quiet authority of the house settling around me. Thinking of my sister’s face. Thinking of how old she would be now. Thinking of how many years I had left to make sure she never stood where I was standing.

In the days that followed, I learned the rules of the house.

They were not written anywhere. They were absorbed through repetition. Through correction. Through watching what happened to those who forgot themselves. I was polite. Quiet. Invisible unless summoned. I did not ask questions. I did not make demands.

I watched how power moved through hallways. How servants lowered their eyes. How names were spoken with care. How silence could mean approval or warning depending on who wielded it.

This was not a home.

It was a system.

And systems, I knew, could be studied.

One year passed like that.

By the time his son returned, I had already learned how to survive here.

What I did not yet know was that survival would soon become the least of my problems.