Chapter 2 — The Morning After

I didn’t sleep.

Not for a single hour. I lay in the guest room of the Bellington penthouse staring at a ceiling that cost more than my family’s entire apartment, listening to the silence on the other side of the wall and trying to convince myself that I was fine. That this was just another night. That tomorrow would simply be another day to endure, and the day after that, and the day after that until the clock ran out and I could finally walk away from all of this with my family’s name and dignity intact.

But the silence kept pressing in. And Adrian Bellington’s voice kept finding its way back to me.

Of yourself.

I turned onto my side, pulling the sheets tighter. The guest room was beautiful in the way that all things Bellington were beautiful cold, deliberate, designed to impress rather than comfort. The linens were thread counts I couldn’t name, the furniture dark mahogany with clean, architectural lines. A painting on the wall abstract, expensive, soulless. Everything about this place felt like a statement. Everything about this place felt like a cage with very good taste.

I gave up on sleep sometime around five in the morning and sat at the edge of the bed in the dark, going through what I knew.

Selina Okoye lost everything when her father was falsely accused of fraud by Raymond Bellington the powerful CEO of Bellington Holdings. The scandal sent her family into ruins and took her father’s life. 

That was the truth that lived beneath everything. Beneath the silk gown and the chandelier and the vows I had spoken through gritted teeth. My father had been a good man meticulous, honest, proud and Raymond Bellington had dismantled him piece by piece, publicly and without mercy, because it served his empire to do so. The charges had been fabricated. The evidence manufactured. By the time anyone thought to question it, my father was already gone not to prison, but to the ground. The stress had taken him within eighteen months of the accusation. A heart attack at sixty-one. A man who had never been sick a day in his life, killed not by illness but by humiliation.

And now I was sleeping or trying to in his son’s home.

The irony of it sat in my chest like a hot coal.

When grey morning light finally began to seep through the curtains, I rose, washed my face, dressed simply dark trousers, a white blouse, my own clothes, not anything the Bellingtons had provided and walked into the kitchen to make coffee. I needed something ordinary. Something that felt like mine.

I had barely found the machine when I heard him.

Adrian was already awake. He stood at the far end of the open-plan space near the floor-to-ceiling windows, dressed in grey sweatpants and a dark shirt, one hand wrapped around a mug, his gaze fixed on the city below. He hadn’t heard me come in, or if he had, he didn’t show it. For a moment I just stood there, watching him in the early light, and thought that he looked nothing like the monster I had spent years imagining.

That was dangerous. I knew it was dangerous. I filed it away and moved toward the coffee machine.

“There’s a cup already made,” he said, without turning around.

I stopped. “I can make my own.”

“I know you can.” He finally looked at me over his shoulder. His expression was unreadable, as it had been at the altar, as it had been in every interaction we’d had in the three weeks between the agreement and the wedding. “I made extra.”

A small thing. An absurdly small thing. I told myself it meant nothing as I crossed to the counter and poured from the pot he’d already prepared.

The silence between us was different in the morning. The charged electricity of the night before had settled into something quieter, more careful. Like two people deciding, without words, how much space to give each other.

I turned to him. “Why me?”

He looked at me steadily.

“You could’ve married anyone,” I continued. “Any socialite. Any model. Why the daughter of your father’s enemy?”

Adrian exhaled. “Because unlike them, you have something to lose.” 

The words landed with quiet precision. I set my mug down on the counter and looked at him for a long moment, turning them over, examining them from every angle the way you examine something you suspect might cut you if you hold it wrong.

He wasn’t wrong. That was the worst part of it. He was entirely, brutally correct. Every socialite, every model, every woman from his world who might have agreed to this arrangement they would have done it from a position of comfort. They had nothing riding on it beyond social currency and ambition. I had agreed because my family’s survival depended on it. Because refusing had consequences none of us could afford.

He had chosen me precisely because I was cornered.

“At least you’re honest about it,” I said finally.

Something shifted in his expression. Not guilt exactly, but close to it. “I didn’t design the situation, Selina.”

“No,” I agreed. “Your father did. Just like he designed everything else that happened to my family.”

The name hung between us like smoke. His father. Raymond Bellington. The man who had lied, cheated, fabricated, and destroyed and who was now, according to the terms of the agreement, no longer in a position of direct power over Bellington Holdings. Adrian agreed to the union for his own reasons an inheritance clause that demanded he marry before taking over the company. 

So we had both been maneuvered. That was something, I supposed. Cold comfort, but something.

“I’m not my father,” Adrian said. His voice was quieter now, stripped of the controlled neutrality he usually wore.

“You keep saying that.”

“Because you keep looking at me like I am.”

I picked up my mug again. “Give me a reason not to.”

He held my gaze for a moment that stretched just long enough to feel like something. Then he turned back to the window, and the conversation closed like a door swung gently shut.

We stood in the kitchen together for another ten minutes, drinking our coffee in silence, watching the city come alive below. It was strange not comfortable exactly, but not unbearable either. Less like enemies and more like two people in the early stages of a very cautious negotiation.

When he finally moved to leave the kitchen, he paused at the doorway.

“There’s a car available to you whenever you need it,” he said. “The driver’s name is Marcus. You don’t need to ask my permission to go anywhere.”

I blinked. “I didn’t think I did.”

“No,” he said. “But I wanted you to know I agree.” He looked at me one last time. “This is your home now, Selina. Whether either of us likes it or not.”

Then he was gone, and I was left standing in a kitchen that smelled of coffee and expensive restraint, with the distinct and uncomfortable feeling that Adrian Bellington was going to be far more difficult to hate in practice than he had ever been in theory.

I had come into this marriage with a plan. A clear, simple, three-part plan: endure, observe, and escape.

He was already complicating part one.

And we hadn’t even made it to the second morning.