CHAPTER 5- THE BILLIONAIRE CHOOSE ME

CELESTE'S POV

"I'm so sorry," I said, moving to the sideboard to set the wine down because I was getting tired of holding it.

"The merchant didn't have the 2018 immediately, they had to go to the back, it took longer than I expected and I should have called ahead to check the stock before going and I—"

"Sit down," my father said, cutting me off.

I sat down in the empty chair, the one that had clearly been set for me, which meant I had been expected at this table tonight and nobody had thought to tell me that until the wine errand. I kept my eyes away from the man across the table and fixed them on my father.

"This is Damien Chen," he said. "He's here to discuss a business arrangement. A merger. And a marriage proposal."

I nodded like that made sense.

And then, slowly, i began to put the pieces together.

The wine. The way Vivienne had been vibrating with excitement all morning. The announcement at dinner last week about an arranged marriage to one of the wealthiest men in the state. He was the one.

He was the man they had arranged for Vivienne.

I looked at Damien Chen properly for the first time since walking into the room and found him already looking at me with an expression that was completely calm and completely unreadable, the same calmness he'd had standing in the rain with an umbrella, like a man who was very rarely surprised by anything.

My father cleared his throat.

"The agreement," he said, "stipulates that Mr. Chen will marry the eldest Harrington daughter. We had naturally assumed—"

"I want to marry you, Celeste."

Damien said it without doubt in his eyes, like he had already made up his mind on what he wanted.

I stood up abruptly.

The chair scraped back behind me and I was on my feet within seconds, my hands finding the edge of the table, my head shaking before I had formed any words.

"No," I said. "No, that's—no. That's not—"

I stopped because I did not know how to finish the sentence.

Nobody had ever done this before. That was the thought that kept surfacing above everything else, strange and disorienting and almost impossible to hold onto. In twenty three years of existing in this family nobody had looked at both of us and chosen me. Nobody had been presented with the beautiful, well mannered Vivienne and then decided to choose a house maid.

I looked at Vivienne and if looks could kill I would have been on the floor already gasping for air. She was sitting very still with her hands flat on the table and her jaw set and her eyes doing something I had never seen in them before, something past anger, something that had crossed over into a territory that was colder and more frightening than anger, like she could just stand up and strangle me to death for taking away the man she wanted to marry.

There had to be a misunderstanding somewhere.

Her right hand was wrapped around the handle of her table knife. It wasn't moving, just wrapped around it, her knuckles pale, like she was reminding herself to stay in the chair.

I looked away.

"Celeste," my father said. "You are the eldest. By six months. That is what the contract specifies. Mr. Chen's team confirmed this by themselves."

"I didn't know anything about this," I said.

"You don't need to have known about it," he said. "The arrangement is made. We are indebted to Mr. Chen in ways that I am not going to detail at this table. The wedding will take place in a few weeks. It has already been decided and it's not up for discussion."

I stood there with the table edge under my hands and the candles burning between us and tried to locate a version of this moment that made sense. There was not one. There was only my father looking at me with the expression of a man asking me to play along with his terms one more time, and Damien Chen sitting across the table watching me with that unreadable calmness, and Vivienne's hand around the knife.

"She is not to do any housework between now and the wedding," Damien said, addressing my father directly. "She is not a staff. I would like that to be clearly understood before I leave this evening."

The silence that followed was deafening

Margaret stood up immediately.

She did not say anything. She did not need to. She pushed her chair back with force and it communicated everything she was choosing not to say out loud and walked out of the dining room, she looked like someone who has been holding in her fury for far too long and obviously can't take it anymore you could tell from the way she slammed the door after leaving.

I did not go back inside after dinner.

I went up to the balcony.

The balcony was like a place I went to when my head was full and I just needed to let it out.

I went there to cry most times or to scream at the world for being cruel and unfair.

I stood at the railing and looked out at the dark garden below.

I was getting married.

I was getting married to a man I did not know, in few weeks my life would completely change, from the underpaid servant to the wife of one of the wealthiest men in the state. This was crazy.

I was getting married and Vivienne was going to—

"You absolute witch."

Her voice came from behind me, low and shaking with anger that had been building up all evening.

I turned

She was standing in the balcony doorway, still in her dinner clothes, and her face was damped with tears. This wasn't just one of her performances, this looked real.

And something about the way she looked at me made guilt rise up in my chest despite the fact that I did nothing wrong.

She crossed the balcony in four steps and her hand connected with my face before I had time to move.

The slap cracked across the night air.

"You took everything," she said, her voice breaking on the last word. "My father…This house. Everything I was supposed to have. And now him. You took him too."

"I didn't take anything," I said, my hand going to my cheek. "Vivienne, I don't know what's going—"

"Don't." Her voice dropped to something quieter that was somehow more frightening than the shout. "Don't tell me you didn't know. You obviously bewitched him, because why on earth would he choose you over me."

She grabbed my throat.

Her hands were stronger than I expected and I stumbled backward with the force of it, my back hitting the railing, my hands coming up to find her wrists and pull and she was not letting go, she was not letting go and I could feel the railing pressing into my spine and her face was very close and she was crying, I realized, she was actually crying, tears running down her face while her hands tightened.

I grabbed her wrists, I tried holding onto her but she gave one last push and I began to fall off the balcony, the cold night air hitting my face.