Chapter 4: A Wedding Without a Marriage

AMARA’S POV

The dress they gave me fit too well for something chosen by strangers.

It arrived two days before the ceremony, wrapped in tissue paper and delivered by a woman who introduced herself only as "part of Mr. Morretti's household staff," as though the house itself were a small country and she merely one of its diplomats. She helped me into it without much conversation, adjusted the shoulders, and stepped back to study the result with the flat, professional eye of someone paid to notice flaws rather than admire outcomes.

"It'll do," she said, which I understood, in that house, to be the highest compliment available.

I stood in front of the mirror longer than I meant to. The woman looking back at me didn't look like a bride. She looked like someone dressed carefully for a transaction, which, I supposed, was the truth of it.

Kally called that night, breathless with the kind of forced cheer she used when she didn't want me to hear how worried she actually was. "You'll call me right after, won't you? The second it's done?"

"The second it's done," I promised, and meant it, though some small, tired part of me already understood how little control I had over what came after any of this.

The ceremony itself was smaller than I expected.. no crowd of investors or photographers, no performance for an audience beyond the handful of people whose presence was apparently required. An officiant with a practiced, neutral expression. A small cluster of staff standing at a respectful distance. And Adrien's grandfather, seated in the front row in a wheelchair I hadn't been told to expect, watching the proceedings with an intensity that made the whole event feel less like a wedding and more like an audit.

Adrien was already standing at the front when I was walked in by the man who practically sold me off for his own gain. No music, no procession, just a short, silent stretch of stone floor between the door and the altar. He wore black, unsmiling, his hands loosely clasped in front of him, and when I reached him, he looked at me the way he might have looked at a delivery arriving exactly on schedule. Not unkind. Simply unmoved.

"You look well," he said quietly, once the officiant had begun the opening words neither of us was listening to.

"So do you," I said, which wasn't a lie, though it wasn't the compliment it would have been in any other wedding.

The vows were shorter than I expected.. clipped, formal, more legal document than declaration. I said the words I was meant to say. He said his. Neither of us reached for the other's hand until the officiant instructed it, and even then, his grip was careful, deliberate, the kind of contact that had clearly been calculated rather than felt.

It was his grandfather who broke the stillness of the room, once the rings had been exchanged and the officiant pronounced us married. The old man's face split into something genuinely delighted, and he clapped once, sharply, the sound startling in a room that had otherwise been conducted like a business meeting.

"Finally," he said, loud enough for the whole room to hear. "Something in this family done properly."

Adrien's jaw tightened, almost imperceptibly, but he said nothing. I got the sense, watching him, that arguing with his grandfather in front of witnesses was a battle he'd learned long ago not to fight.

There was no reception, no dancing, no crowd of well-wishers lingering over champagne. Staff cleared the room with quiet efficiency almost the moment the ceremony ended, as though the entire event had simply been a box that needed checking before the household could return to its normal rhythm. Adrien's grandfather insisted on a photograph, one, brief, the two of us standing stiffly beside each other while a member of staff operated the camera and then he was wheeled away by an attendant, still smiling to himself like a man who'd finally won an argument he'd been having for years.

Adrien and I stood alone in the emptying room for a long, strange moment neither of us seemed to know how to end.

"That's it, then," I said, mostly to fill the silence.

"That's it." He glanced toward the door his grandfather had disappeared through, something unreadable passing over his face. "He'll be easier to manage now. That was the point of all this."

"I'm glad I could help," I said, and I hadn't meant for it to come out as dry as it did, but something in his expression flickered, not quite a smile, but close enough to one that I noticed.

"You have a sense of humor," he said, sounding faintly surprised by the discovery. "I wasn't expecting that."

"You didn't ask."

"No," he agreed. "I suppose I didn't."

He offered to have someone show me to the room that would be mine separate from his, he clarified, in a tone that made clear this wasn't a negotiation so much as a fact he assumed would relieve me and I found, standing there in a dress too well-fitted for a marriage built on paperwork, that I was grateful for exactly that. Whatever this was, at least it came with walls I could close.

"The children will want to meet you properly tomorrow," he added, almost as an afterthought, already turning to leave. "My daughter, especially. She's been asking since she heard there'd be a wedding."

Something in my chest tightened again at the mention of them… that same strange, persistent pull from the moment in his study, sharper now, impossible to name. "I look forward to it," I said, and found, to my own surprise, that I meant it more than anything else I'd said all day.

He nodded once, the closest thing to a goodbye he seemed inclined to offer, and left me standing alone in a hall still smelling faintly of flowers no one had bothered to keep.

I called Kally the moment I reached my room, exactly as I'd promised.

"It's done," I told her, sinking onto the edge of a bed too large for one person. "I'm married."

"How do you feel?"

I looked around the unfamiliar room, the fine furniture, the closed door separating me from a husband who felt more like a stranger than ever, the quiet, cavernous house waiting beyond it, full of two children I hadn't yet properly met and a past I couldn't quite place no matter how hard I tried.

"I don't know yet," I said honestly. "Ask me again tomorrow."