Groom Execution

Stella's POV

"Now, little miss... you have to choose."

The voice sounded like heavy stones grinding together in a dark pit. A massive, calloused hand reached down and grabbed a fistful of my hair, yanking my head back so fast and hard that my spine cracked in protest.

"Your parents, or your fiancé? Who gets the absolute honor of answering your final call?"

I struggled against the coarse, fibrous ropes binding my wrists and ankles, but the coarse fibers only ate deeper into my raw skin. Every shallow breath I took was a agonizing war against my bruised ribs. My face was swollen and slick with a nauseating mix of cold sweat, dirt, and drying copper blood.

Just eight hours ago, I was sitting in front of a grand mirror in a silk robe, surrounded by florists and makeup artists. Today was supposed to be the day of my lavish bridal shower.

Tomorrow morning, the heavy carved oak doors of the cathedral were scheduled to swing open for the high-society wedding of the century.

My bridal hair had taken five meticulous hours to style, pinned up with freshwater pearls and delicate lace. Now, those same strands hung around my bruised face in filthy, blood-soaked clumps.

I was lying like a slaughtered animal on the freezing concrete floor of an abandoned warehouse, stripped of every shred of dignity, bleeding out into the dirt.

How did I even end up here?

My mind spun in a frantic, terrifying loop, trying to piece together the shattered fragments of my memory.

I remembered leaving the estate in the afternoon, smiling at my reflection in the car window. I remembered the heavy black SUVs suddenly swerving out of nowhere, boxing my limousine in on the quiet coastal highway.

I remembered the deafening crack of shattering glass, the scream stuck in my throat, the sharp sting of a needle entering my neck... and then pitch darkness.

I had woken up in this hellhole hours ago to the sound of steel hitting bone. They had tortured me relentlessly, asking me nothing, offering no explanations, giving me no demands for ransom. I hadn't understood it.

I couldn't comprehend why anyone would do this to me. And worst of all, I had been praying every single agonizing second that my phone would ring. I thought my security detail would have raised the alarm.

I thought my family would be scouring the state with helicopters. I thought Karl would be tearing the city apart to find his missing bride.

Instead, my phone sat quietly in the scarred man's heavy pocket, its screen dark, untouched, and unbothered. Nobody was looking for me.

"Please..." I choked out, the thick taste of rust and iron coating my swollen tongue. "Call... call my fiancé... please..."

I didn't even consider calling my parents. In my heart, there was no choice to make. Karl was my world, my shield, my entire future.

For five years, he had been the only person in the world who truly saw me, who held me when the silence in my family's mansion became too suffocating to bear.

Tomorrow, I was going to become his wife. I loved him with every fiber of my broken body, and I knew—I knew with absolute certainty; that hearing my voice in the hands of brutal kidnappers would drive him insane with panic. He would bring down heaven and earth to save me.

The man holding my hair; a broad, thick-necked brute with a jagged white scar carving from his temple down to his jawline—didn't laugh. He didn't mock me or put on a show. His expression remained utterly flat, devoid of any human emotion. He pulled my custom, diamond-encrusted phone from his leather jacket, hit the speaker button, and held it floating over my face like a sentence of execution.

Ring... ring...

I held my breath, squeezing my eyes shut as tears burned hot tracks through the dirt caked onto my cheeks. Every nerve in my body was screaming, waiting frantically for the sound of his panic, his anger, his desperate promises that he was on his way with the police.

Click.

The line opened.

"Karl!" I gasped out, my cracked voice breaking under the suffocating weight of desperate hope. "Karl, please... oh God, help me! I was ambushed on my way to the shower! I don't know where I am... these men, they're hurting me—"

Before I could finish my sentence, a faint, soft sound echoed clearly through the phone’s high-definition speaker.

It was the wet, deliberate sound of a kiss.

I froze. The frantic plea died instantly in my throat. My heart gave a violent, painful thud against my broken ribs, then seemed to stop beating altogether.

Karl...?

Then, a light, familiar female voice chimed in over the speaker, dripping with lazy annoyance.

"Can you stop bugging him, you pest? What do you want now?"

Ice, thick and suffocating, flooded straight into my veins. My breath hitched, trapping the air in my lungs. Shock rendered me completely mute. That voice... I knew that voice better than my own.

It wasn't a stranger. It wasn't a random woman.

It was Claire. My adopted sister.

"Claire...?" My lips trembled violently, a fresh wave of scalding tears spilling over my raw, bloodied skin. "Claire... why are you with Karl? What... what is going on?"

My brain desperately tried to build excuses for them.

'She's just comforting him,' I tried to tell myself.

'She's at his house helping him organize the search party. They're together because they're worried about me.'

I waited for her to drop the cold act. I waited for her to gasp, to panic, to tell me that Karl was frantically tracing my cell signal.

Instead, her sweet, tinkling laughter bubbled softly over the speaker. Moments later, Karl’s rich, velvety baritone joined hers. They laughed together—a soft, intimate, comfortable sound that echoed off the cold concrete walls of the warehouse. It was the sound of two people sharing a quiet, cozy evening together. Unbothered. Relaxed.

"Is the girl still breathing?" Karl’s voice finally came through the line.

The physical agony of my beaten, bruised body was instantly incinerated by a blinding, soul-crushing tear in the center of my chest. The world around me tilted on its axis, spinning out of control into a dark, bottomless abyss.

"Karl?" I sobbed directly into the dusty floorboards, my body shivering uncontrollably. "Karl, please... tell me this is a sick joke! I'm your bride! Tell these men to let me go! Tell them to stop!"

"Bride?" Karl scoffed.

The warmth, the tenderness, the gentle adoration he had lavished on me for five long years was entirely gone. In its place was a dry, mocking tone that made my blood run cold.

"You were never my bride, Stella. You were just a convenient tool to merge our family businesses. A naive, gullible little pet I’ve had to tolerate since high school."

A pet.

The word echoed in my ears like a physical blow. Five years of late-night phone calls. Five years of promises under the starlight. Five years of holding my hand and telling me I was his soulmate. All of it... fake? All of it a calculated, disgusting act?

"No..." I whispered, shaking my head violently against the dirt, my voice cracking into pitiful fragments. "No, Karl, you love me... you swore you loved me..."

"Did you really think I could ever love someone like you?" Karl let out a smooth, pitying sigh, as if he were explaining something tedious to a slow child.

"You're pathetic, Stella. So soft. So easily fooled. Did you honestly believe I’d choose a broken, needy girl like you over Claire?"

"He never loved you, darling," Claire cooed over the line, her sweet voice dripping with pure, venomous triumph.

"Every touch, every kiss, every sweet word he ever gave you... he was thinking of me. He came to my bed right after he gave you that ugly engagement ring."

Another wet, lingering kiss sounded loudly over the speaker.

My chest caved in. I couldn't breathe. I couldn't scream. The agony tore through my soul so violently that I wished the kidnappers had just put a bullet through my brain the moment I woke up. I was drowning in the sheer, unimaginable cruelty of it all.

"Is the job almost finished?" Karl asked the scarred man, his tone shifting back to businesslike indifference, completely detached, as if he were asking his assistant about a missed appointment. "The merger agreement was signed an hour ago. I don't want any loose ends dragging into tomorrow morning."

The scarred man bowed his head slightly toward the phone, his face void of any pity. "Understood, boss. We're wrapping it up now."

Boss.

The word struck me like a bolt of lightning, shattering the final lingering pieces of my mind.

Karl hadn't just ignored my abduction. He hadn't just taken advantage of my absence to sleep with my sister.

*Karl had ordered my kidnapping. Karl was paying them to murder me.*

The ambush on the highway... the dark SUVs... the hours of silence... it was all him. He had orchestrated my execution on the very eve of our wedding so he could take my family's wealth, marry Claire, and erase me from the world forever without leaving a single trace.

"Wait—Karl, please!" I shrieked, a surge of adrenaline forcing my broken body forward as far as the ropes would allow.

I dragged myself through the dirt, reaching uselessly toward the sound of his voice. "Don't do this to me! I gave you everything! Karl!"

Click.

The line went dead. The screen on my diamond-studded phone went dark.

I collapsed face-first onto the cold concrete, weeping violently, my chest heaving with dry, agonized sobs.

Five years. My youth, my trust, my absolute devotion... I had handed my whole life to a monster who had been planning my slaughter from the very beginning.

"Want to try your parents now?" the scarred man asked coldly, his expression entirely unbothered by the horror he had just facilitated. He didn't even wait for my answer. He tapped the screen, dialed my father's private line, and set the phone back down on the ground.

It picked up on the second ring.

"What is it now?!" my father’s furious, booming voice exploded through the speaker, laced with extreme irritation. "We are in the middle of an extremely important private family dinner!"

"Dad..." I rasped, my voice barely a thread, choking on my own blood and tears. "Dad... please listen to me... Karl and Claire... they set me up... they hired these men... they're going to kill me—"

"Shut your disgraceful mouth, Stella!" my father snapped, cutting me off with absolute, terrifying disgust.

"Claire already called us an hour ago and told us everything! She told us you threw a hysterical tantrum, ran off with some lowlife street thug, and now you're pulling a pathetic, fake kidnapping scheme to embarrass this family on the eve of your wedding!"

"No! Dad, please, no! She's lying!" I screamed, pulling at my bindings until my wrists bled freely onto the floor.

"She's lying to you! Check my location! Call the police! Dad, please save me!"

"I am sick and tired of your attention-seeking, jealous lies!" my father roared back, his tone thick with pure hatred. "Claire is ten times the daughter you will ever be! You are a stain and a disgrace to the Sinclair name!"

"Drag yourself back home right now and beg your fiancé for forgiveness, or don't bother coming back at all!"

Click.

The line went silent. The screen went dark once again.

The silence that settled over the cavernous warehouse was heavy, suffocating, and absolute.

I lay there in the dirt, completely still. My mind went blank. The frantic panic, the burning tears, the desperate desire to survive—all of it drained out of me, leaving behind a cold, hollow void. My fiancé had traded my life for a business merger. My sister had stolen my whole existence with a smile. My father had thrown me to the wolves without a second thought.

I had no one. I was entirely, completely alone.

The scarred man pocketed my phone without a word. He reached down to his belt, unbuckled a heavy, solid steel pipe, and raised it high above his head, his shadow stretching long and dark across the concrete wall.

I didn't scream. I didn't beg.

As the cold steel came swinging downward toward my temple, I closed my eyes, letting out one final, ragged breath, burning their names into my soul so I would never forget them in hell.