CHAPTER 1: The Name I Never Chose

ARIA POV

The coffee cup was still rattling when Silas called my name.

I froze with the tray in my hand, balancing it with two of my fingers gripping the edge and my thumb pressed flat against it. That was how I had learned to hold it steady, even when my hands wanted to shake. But right now, they were trembling for a different reason. I just knew that hearing him say my name this early in the morning never brought anything good.

“Aria.” He said, his eyes remaining glued to his phone. “My study. Now, please.”

Please was not a word Silas usually used. But when he did use it, it was a reason for concern, a quiet warning that something urgent was about to come up. I carefully placed the tray down on the table close to me without making a sound, because another lesson I had learned living in this house was that you never let anyone see when you were scared. My stomach tightened as I followed him down the hall. Something was coming, and I could already feel it.

His study had always been the coldest room in the entire house. It had dark wooden shelves that stretched all the way to the ceiling, while a fireplace that had never seen a flame for once in its life sat against the wall. The desk took up so much space that it seemed like it was specially designed to make anyone sitting across from it feel disadvantaged, as though they were asking for a favor instead of simply having a conversation. On one wall hung a single photograph of the Calder family from a reunion I barely remembered. I was in the back row, mostly hidden. And you could see only a sliver of my face visible if you knew where to look.

I had stood in this room countless times, but right now, for the first time, I found myself wondering why it felt so intimidating and different.

“Sit,” Silas said.

I complied without protest. He didn’t take his seat immediately. Instead what he did was that he walked over to the window, his hands clasped behind his back as he stared outside. When he finally spoke, it wasn’t about anything happening now. He sounded as though he had gone back years, digging through a history I had never been allowed to know.

“The Calder name used to carry weight,” he said. “Before my time. There was a debt between our family and another. It’s the sort of debt that continues quietly for years because no one wants to be the first to let it go unpaid.”

“Silas, what are you talking about?”

“I’m explaining,” he said, quietly, yet firmly enough to silence me.

So I do the one thing which I know best. I zipped my mouth and stayed silent.

“It was managed quietly for a long time. But that’s changed,” he said, turning back to face me now and I could just see the expression on his face which made a chill run through my body. “We’re dealing with the Morettis now.”

He said the name so carefully, and something in the way he said it made my stomach twist again.

“I don’t know who that is,” I replied, my voice coming out smaller than I had intended.

“You don’t need to know yet.” He said, and finally he took a seat across from me, folding his hands on the desk. That posture unsettled me, because it was the posture he used when he was finishing something rather than beginning it. “There’s a settlement. And it requires a marriage.”

For a moment, everything around me seemed to pause. I could hear Mrs. Halloway running the tap from down the hall, her normal morning routine continuing without interruption, completely unaware of what Silas had just said.

“A marriage?” I repeated his last words, because I needed to hear it out loud before I could believe that he’d actually said it.

“Yes.”

“Whose?”

He looked at me as if he couldn’t believe I had to ask. “Yours.”

A ragged laugh suddenly slipped out of me. It was too loud, too sudden, and died down almost immediately when his expression didn’t change.

Oh. He was serious.

“You’ll marry into the Moretti family,” he explained. “This will settle the debt. It’s the only clean way to do it. The son, Dorian Moretti. He’s the heir.”

“I’ve never even met him,” I protested. “I just learned about him a second ago, and you expect me to marry him?” I said, slightly tilting my face in disbelief.

“You aren’t marrying him because you know him.” His tone remained patient, the kind he used when someone kept repeating the same thing. “You’re marrying him because it’s owed.”

“Owed by who? I didn’t create this debt! I didn’t do anything to…”

“It doesn’t matter who made it,” he interrupted me, his voice tightening slightly. “What matters is that it gets paid. And it will be settled by someone carrying the Calder name. You’re all that’s left.”

I sat there, unable to move. My pulse hammered against my ears while my hands turned cold and pale white in my lap. But beneath the fear, something else began to rise within me. Anger. It felt unfamiliar inside me, and almost uncomfortable. I had spent so much of my life swallowing the things I didn’t like, and accepting whatever was handed to me without making a fuss about it. But this was different. This was my life for Christ's sake.

“I don’t accept this,” I said, the words coming out thinner than I wanted them to, lacking the force I had hoped they would carry.

Silas held my gaze for what felt like forever. His expression wasn’t cruel. Somehow, that made everything worse. He looked as though he had expected this reaction and had already prepared himself for it.

“It’s decided, Aria.” He reached for his phone, already withdrawing from our conversation while I was still trying to process what he had just told me. “This was decided before you were old enough to have a say.”

“That’s not fair! That doesn’t justify any of these things!” My voice rose before I could stop it. “You can’t just drop this on me like it’s already a done deal!”

He picked up the phone completely ignoring me. Without even glancing in my direction, he moved at his own relaxed pace. It was the same hand that poured his scotch every evening at six, and he looked so indifferent, as if none of this mattered in any way, not to him, and certainly not to me.

I tried to speak up. To say anything, really. But nothing came out.

In my entire twenty-four years of living, I had never for once needed and struggled to say no to anything. It sat somewhere inside me, trapped behind everything I had spent years learning not to say.

I felt completely lost.

“Yes,” Silas said into the phone. “Tell the Morettis she accepts.”

I had been completely silent during the whole exchange.

“We’ll have her ready in six days.” He continued.

Then he hung up after a while, never even looking my way. He simply returned to his papers as if I had already vanished into thin air, and as if the part of me that had just been pushed into a marriage I never wanted had quietly slipped away, leaving no trace behind.

Six days.

And I didn’t even know what the man I was supposed to marry looked like.