Chapter 5: First Morning, Foreign House

I woke up in a bed that wasn’t mine, in a house that wasn’t mine, married to a man I still couldn’t call a stranger and couldn’t call anything else either.

For a second, before my eyes fully opened, I forgot. That brief, merciful blankness where the body hasn’t caught up yet, and I almost reached for the other side of the bed out of old habit. My hand found cold sheets instead. Empty. I pulled it back like I’d touched something hot.

Sunlight cut through gauzy curtains I hadn’t chosen, in a room that smelled like cedar and lavender polish instead of my old apartment’s stale coffee. I lay there, staring at an unfamiliar ceiling, running my thumb along the ring still foreign on my finger, letting the truth settle in one slow inch at a time.

I was married. Again. To a man who owned half of New York and apparently none of his own face, a man the papers called untouchable, though nothing about the warmth of his hand yesterday had felt untouchable at all.

I found my way downstairs, following the smell of coffee through hallways too grand to feel like home yet, past art I didn’t recognize and doors I didn’t dare open. The kitchen was warm and bright, pale stone and morning light, and a woman stood at the counter with flour dusted across her apron, humming under her breath.

She turned when she heard me and startled, hand flying to her chest. “Oh! Mrs. Blackwood, I didn’t hear you come in.”

The name hit strange, a coat that didn’t fit yet. “Please, just Evelyn.”

“Marta.” She smiled, warm and a little nervous, wiping her hands on her apron. “I’ve worked for this family fifteen years. Never thought I’d see the day Mr. Blackwood brought a wife home.”

“I imagine that makes two of us,” I said, and something in her face eased, like my honesty had given her permission to relax too.

She poured me coffee without asking, set a plate in front of me that I hadn’t requested, and I found myself grateful for the small, ordinary kindness of it, someone feeding me without needing anything back.

“Is he,” I started, not sure how to finish the question. “Is Damian usually gone this early?”

“Mr. Blackwood leaves before sunrise most days.” Marta said it like weather, not worth commenting on. “Comes back late too, most nights. House feels quieter with just him in it.”

I turned that over while I ate, the image of a man who left before light and came home after dark, filling a mansion with nothing but silence. It didn’t match the man from Oliver’s office, whose thumb had lingered on my knuckle, whose jaw had tightened at the mention of stolen love.

I spent the morning exploring the wing he’d given me, unpacking sketchbooks I hadn’t touched in weeks, because touching them used to mean thinking about designs Adrian had made sure weren’t mine anymore. In this quiet room, door locked from the inside, I picked up a pencil for the first time in nineteen days.

The first line came out shaky. The second, steadier. By the third, something in my chest loosened, an old rhythm returning to my hand like it had never left, like nineteen days of grief hadn’t nearly convinced me I’d never draw again.

I lost track of time. Drawing used to swallow hours whole, and today it swallowed the entire afternoon before I noticed the light outside had gone from gold to orange to gone.

A knock startled me out of it.

“Come in,” I said, before remembering this was supposed to be my private space, that even Damian himself had said no one entered without permission. I half expected Marta.

It was Damian.

He stood in the doorway, suit rumpled from a long day, tie loosened, exhaustion faint around his eyes. He looked, for the first time, less like a myth and more like a man.

“You’re working,” he said, glancing at the sketches scattered across the table.

“I didn’t hear you knock the first time.” It wasn’t quite an accusation, but it came out close to one.

“I did knock. You didn’t answer.” The corner of his mouth twitched, almost amused. “You were somewhere else entirely.”

I looked down at what I’d drawn without fully realizing it, a dress with sharp, architectural lines, a bodice that curved like it had been carved rather than sewn. Something unfamiliar bloomed in my chest. Pride, maybe. Or the ghost of it, returning slowly, the way feeling comes back to a limb asleep too long.

“It’s good,” Damian said, stepping closer, studying the sketch with an attention that felt different from Adrian’s, less possessive, more genuinely curious. “You designed the Phoenix collection, didn’t you. Before Collins.”

My chest tightened at the name. “How do you know about that specifically?”

“I told you. I make it my business to know things.” He straightened, some of the softness in his face folding back into careful neutrality. “There’s a gala in three weeks. Blackwood Global’s annual event. Half the fashion industry attends because half of them do business with us.”

“Okay,” I said slowly, not sure where this was going.

“Wear something of yours.” He said it simply, like it wasn’t a small earthquake of a suggestion. “Not borrowed. Not commissioned. Something you designed yourself.”

My throat went tight. “Damian, I don’t have time to build an entire look in three weeks, I don’t have a studio, I don’t have—”

“You have three weeks and a room no one can take from you,” he said, cutting through my spiral with a calm that somehow made it worse and better at once. “Everyone in that room will know exactly who you are within one hour of walking in. I’d rather they know you as the woman who built something, not the woman my father traded a debt for.”

I stared at him, something complicated twisting in my chest, gratitude and fear and a stubborn, dangerous flicker of hope all tangled together.

“Why does it matter to you what they think of me?”

Damian’s eyes held mine a beat too long before he answered, and when he did, his voice had dropped low enough that I had to lean in slightly to catch it.

“Because the last time someone underestimated a woman in my family,” he said, quiet, careful, like each word cost him something, “it nearly destroyed us.”

He left before I could ask what he meant by that, the second time in five days he’d handed me half a truth and walked away before I could reach for the rest.