CHAPTER NINE: First Night, Separate Rooms

Sofia

My new bedroom was larger than the entire apartment I’d grown up in, and I hated how much that fact unsettled me more than the wedding itself had.

I stood in the doorway for a long moment before I made myself walk in, running my hand along furniture that probably cost more than a year of the restaurant’s profits, feeling like an intruder in a life I’d technically agreed to but hadn’t yet learned how to actually occupy. Somewhere down the hall, behind a door I had no intention of opening, Damian was presumably doing whatever ruthless billionaires did on their wedding night when the marriage wasn’t real and the bride wasn’t speaking to them.

I wasn’t speaking to him because I didn’t trust myself to, not because I had nothing to say. There was something underneath his careful explanations, some weight he was carrying that had nothing to do with security details or board functions, and I’d spent three years reading people across a restaurant counter well enough to know when someone was telling me true things in the wrong order specifically to keep me from noticing what they’d left out entirely.

A soft knock interrupted the thought. Damian stood in the hallway when I opened the door, out of his jacket now, collar open, looking considerably less like the composed stranger from city hall and considerably more like a man who hadn’t slept properly in longer than tonight.

“I wanted to check that the room suits you,” he said. “If something’s wrong, the staff can adjust it before morning.”

“The room is fine, Damian. It’s bigger than my entire childhood.”

“I know. I’m aware that must feel strange.”

“Strange is generous.” I leaned against the doorframe, not quite ready to let him in, not quite ready to close the door either. “You said we’d maintain basic civility. Does basic civility include actually answering a question when I ask you one.”

“It depends on the question.”

“Why did my father look terrified when I told him your name. Not worried about the money. Terrified, like he recognized something personal in it.”

Something moved across his face, quick, deliberate, the same careful stillness I’d caught him in twice already since we’d met. “Your father and my family have history that predates this contract,” he said finally. “I’d rather explain that to you properly, when I’m certain you’ll hear the whole story rather than the version that sounds worst out of context.”

“That’s not an answer. That’s a delay.”

“It’s both,” he admitted. “I’m not proud of that, Sofia. I’m asking for time I haven’t earned yet, and I know it.”

I studied him for a long moment, searching his face for whatever he was so carefully not saying, and found instead something that looked almost like fear, an expression that didn’t match anything I’d expect from a man who held this much power over every room he walked into.

“Fine,” I said finally, though it cost me something to say it. “Time. But Damian, if I find out you’ve been hiding something that affects my father, or affects me, before you’ve told me yourself, I won’t forgive the delay. I don’t care how generous the contract terms are.”

“I understand.” He held my gaze a moment longer than necessary, something unreadable passing behind his eyes. “Goodnight, Sofia.”

He turned to go, and I almost let him, almost closed the door on the strange, suspended tension of our first night as husband and wife spent in separate rooms with a secret sitting unspoken between us. But something made me call out before he’d taken more than two steps down the hall.

“Damian.”

He turned back.

“Whatever it is,” I said quietly, “I’d rather hear it from you than find it on my own.”

For a moment, I thought he might actually tell me right there in the hallway, four days into a marriage neither of us had wanted and both of us were apparently already in danger of wanting too much. Instead, something closed behind his eyes, deliberate and final.

“Soon,” he said. “I promise you that much.”

Then he was gone, and I stood alone in a bedroom bigger than my childhood home, married to a man who was keeping something from me that had already cost my father his composure once tonight, and understood, with a cold certainty that had nothing to do with the luxury surrounding me, that whatever Damian Castellano was protecting me from, it was going to find its way to the surface whether either of us was ready for it or not.

I didn’t sleep well that first night, not from any real fear but from the strangeness of a bed too large for one person, sheets that smelled faintly of a laundry service rather than home, the unfamiliar silence of a house built to swallow sound rather than carry it the way the apartment above the restaurant always had, creaking floors and street noise and my father’s radio playing softly down the hall. I lay awake running through everything my father had said, everything Damian hadn’t, searching for the shape of a secret I couldn’t yet see the edges of.

Somewhere past two in the morning, I heard him. Footsteps in the hallway outside my door, pausing, then continuing past toward what I assumed was his own room. He hadn’t knocked. I found myself disappointed that he hadn’t, and furious at myself for the disappointment, and lay there a long time afterward, listening to a house full of expensive silence, waiting for a sleep that didn’t come easily.

I finally gave up around three and made my way down to the kitchen, hoping tea would do what nothing else had managed, and found Damian already there, sitting at the island in the dark, a glass of something amber untouched in front of him.

“Couldn’t sleep either,” he said, not quite a question, like he’d already heard me moving around upstairs.

“New bed. New house. New name, apparently.” I filled the kettle, grateful for something ordinary to do with my hands. “You’d think I’d have adjusted to stranger things by now, given the last week.”

“I could have the staff move anything you need. The room doesn’t have to stay exactly as it was decorated when I bought the house.”

“It’s not the furniture, Damian.” I turned to look at him, caught off guard by how tired he looked without the composed boardroom version of himself holding everything together. “It’s all of it. Being here instead of above the restaurant. Being married to someone I’ve known for four days. Knowing you’re hiding something and not being able to do anything about it except wait for you to decide I’ve earned the truth.”

“You have earned it,” he said quietly. “I’m the one who hasn’t earned the right to tell it yet.”

“That doesn’t make any sense.”

“I know.” He looked down at his glass, turning it slowly between his hands. “Give me a little more time, Sofia. I know I keep asking for that. I promise you it isn’t indefinite.”

I didn’t have an answer that wouldn’t have cost us both something, so I made my tea in silence and carried it back upstairs, leaving him alone with whatever he still wasn’t ready to say, and lay awake a long while longer, listening for footsteps that never came back down the hall.

In the morning, I found him already gone, a note from the housekeeper saying he’d left early for a board matter that couldn’t wait. I spent the day at the restaurant instead, grateful for the ordinary rhythm of it, the regulars who had no idea their favorite waitress had quietly become one of the wealthiest women in the city overnight. My father watched me work the lunch rush with an expression I couldn’t quite place, somewhere between relief that the restaurant was safe and worry that hadn’t fully settled since the wedding.

“You look tired,” he said, during a lull, setting a cup of coffee in front of me without being asked. “New house keeping you up.”

“Something like that.” I wrapped my hands around the cup, grateful for the warmth. “Papa, has Damian reached out to you since the wedding. Said anything, asked anything.”

“No. Why.”

“No reason.” I didn’t tell him about the hallway conversation, about the careful way Damian kept asking for time without explaining what the time was actually for. Some worries felt too fragile to say out loud before I understood them myself, and I spent the rest of the shift turning the conversation over and over, no closer to an answer by closing time than I’d been at three that morning.