CHAPTER 6: Smile Like It Doesn’t Cost You Anything

ARIA POV

“Smile a little wider, Mrs. Moretti.”

The photographer said, and the way in which he said the words hit me hard, and I felt my stomach tighten beneath the weight of my dress. I couldn’t seem to take a proper breath. My mind had already gone somewhere else, back to that reckless night just two days before my wedding. I’d spent it with my husband’s brother, and now here I was, smiling for a camera while every part of me was screaming at me to get away from the room.

“Beautiful. Hold that.”

The camera flash went off, blinding me for a moment. Dorian’s hand rested confidently on my waist, and I stood there with a smile fixed on my face while my mind refused to let go of the one secret I desperately needed to forget.

“You’ve gone very quiet,” Dorian said softly once the photographer moved to adjust his lights.

“Big day,” I replied, my voice coming out barely above a whisper.

“Mm.” He responded, not seeming convinced. Something in the way he looked at me made it clear he had noticed my unease, but instead of pressing me for a reason, he seemed to put the thought aside. And that bothered me more than it should have.

The reception party passed in a blur of faces I wouldn’t remember, hands I shook, and warm cheeks pressed against mine as people congratulated me, telling me how lovely I looked and how lucky I was to be married to the Moretti heir. Every time someone said it, I smiled because that was what I was supposed to do. Then, despite myself, my eyes kept searching the room for him.

Damian.

He stood across the room with a drink in his hand, talking to someone I didn’t know. He laughed at something they said, but the way he did it didn’t quite seem to reach his eyes. The fact that he wasn’t looking at me should have made things easier. Instead, it made me painfully aware that he was avoiding me too. Good. He should. I should have been relieved. That was what I wanted after all. But no I wasn’t.

“Aria.” Dorian’s hand slid to the small of my back, gently guiding me. “Family line. This way.”

I felt as my stomach suddenly dropped.

“Family line?” I asked, panic beginning to creep into my voice.

“Introductions. It’s tradition.” He said, explaining it to me as though I were missing something obvious. “You’ll meet everyone properly. Try not to look like you’re being led to your own execution.”

I forced a laugh, but even I could hear how thin it sounded. Then I let him guide me toward a group of Morettis I hadn’t met yet. The first was an older man with cold eyes who had to be their father. Beside him stood a younger woman, who was sharp and observant, her expression carrying an amusement that immediately made me wary. I wasn’t able to meet all these people after Silas locked me in my room for those two days.

And then, at the end of the line, as though someone had deliberately arranged this moment to test how long I could keep breathing normally, was Damian.

“Father, you remember Aria,” Dorian said, and the older man reached out a hand that felt more like an inspection than a greeting for me to take.

“Congratulations.” Victor Moretti said, his voice matching the chill in his eyes. “You’re smaller than I expected.”

“Thanks,” I said, because I genuinely had no idea what else I was supposed to say to that.

“This is Celine, my sister,” Dorian said, and the woman with the sharp and observant eyes took my hand in a warm grip, and her smile was surprisingly genuine.

“Finally, someone interesting joins this family,” Celine said. “You have opinions, right? Because Dorian can be exhausting when he’s the only one sharing his thoughts.”

“I heard that,” Dorian chimed in.

“That was the point,” Celine shot back.

Under any other circumstances, I might have laughed at their banter. Instead, I could barely focus on them as my pulse had already started climbing because I knew exactly who was coming next.

“And this is my brother,” Dorian announced, and the way his tone sounded felt entirely different and didn’t quite sit right with me. It wasn’t warm, but it wasn’t entirely distant either. There was a carefulness to it, and I didn’t know whether I was imagining that because I was already panicking. “This is Damian.”

Damian stepped forward and for one awful second, my body literally forgot how to react.

In the bright light, I could see the family resemblance more clearly than I had at the chapel. The same strong jawline, similar ody build, dark hair. But where Dorian’s green eyes carried that cold, calculating focus, Damian’s own seemed calmer. Way too calm, considering I knew exactly what those eyes had looked like back when they had been fixed on me two nights ago.

Then he reached out his hand. I stared at it for a second too long until my fingers finally moved, and I placed my hand in his. His grip was warm and firm and completely polite. Exactly the way a man would greet the new wife of his brother when he had never met her before in his entire life. I tried to match his calm, but every part of me had suddenly become aware of my own hand inside his. I concentrated on keeping it steady, on not pulling away too quickly, on not looking at him the way I had looked at him that morning, but I could just feel the heat rising onto my cheeks.

“Congratulations,” Damian said evenly. There was something underneath his voice that was so slight that I think nobody around us would have heard it, but I did.

“Thank you,” I managed to say. My voice was coming out steady, and somehow to me that alone felt strange.

For a brief moment, something shifted across his face. A flicker of an expression so small that I nearly convinced myself I had imagined it. Guilt. Recognition. Maybe something else I didn’t want to name because standing there with Dorian beside me, I had absolutely no right to want there to be anything else. Then it disappeared almost immediately.

“Welcome to the family,” Damian said, releasing my hand and stepping back into the easygoing version of himself everyone else and I seemed to know. “I imagine we’ll be seeing quite a bit of each other.”

I felt a knot form in my stomach.

“I’m sure we will,” I replied, hoping my voice sounded as steady as it had a second ago, even though my fingers had begun trembling the moment his hand had left mine.

A moment later, Dorian wrapped his arm around me and ushered me toward the next group of guests. They were warm and relaxed, and completely unaware of what had just happened, or what hadn’t happened yet. Everyone kept smiling at me, speaking to me, and welcoming me, while the only thing I could think about was the fact that I had just shaken Damian’s hand and pretended I didn’t know what it felt like to be held by him.

I let Dorian guide me because, at this moment, I wasn’t entirely sure I trusted my legs enough to carry me on their own.

As we moved through the reception, laughter and the clinking of glasses surrounded us. Someone started a toast from a few tables away, and people began turning in that direction. Dorian’s hand remained at the small of my back, relaxed and confident, as though he completely believed he knew me and the life we were beginning together. He didn’t. And I still was not going to forget the fact that he had been cruel to me.

Standing there in the middle of all that cheerful noise, smiling because that was what I had been trained to do my entire life, a strange feeling settled inside me with a sickening clarity. This man was about to spend every day beside me. He was going to have to trust me without knowing what I had done two nights before our wedding happened, without knowing that the stranger I had chosen for one reckless night in my life had been his brother all along.

And I had no idea yet how long I would be able to let him.