The Substitute Bride Of The Blackwood

I heard my mother’s voice before I saw her face.That short, serious tone she used when something was wrong but she didn't want the staff to know yet. I had grown up listening to that voice. I knew exactly what it meant.I left the seating cards and walked back toward the main staircase.My mother was standing at the bottom of the stairs with her phone pressed to her ear, one hand flat against her chest like she was trying to hold something in. Her face was the kind of still that meant the opposite of calm.“Try again,” she said into the phone. “Just keep trying.”“Mom.” I touched her arm gently. “What happened?”She held up one finger without looking at me. The finger that meant not now Charlotte.I waited.She ended the call and stood for a moment, just staring at the floor. Then she looked up and her eyes met mine and for just a second she looked genuinely frightened. Not worried. Frightened.“Where is your father?” she said.“I don’t know. He was near the entrance hall a while ago

Victoria’s wedding dress was a little over my size.Not by much. An inch maybe, less even. But I felt it the moment my mother finished fastening the back, the way the bodice sat slightly loose against my ribs like the dress itself knew it was on the wrong person and was quietly refusing to cooperate.“Stand still,” my mother said from behind me.“I am standing still.”“You’re breathing too hard. It’s making the fabric shift.”“Mom, I’m nervous. Breathing is what happens when you’re nervous.”She didn’t answer that. She made two small adjustments near my waist and stepped back and looked at me in the mirror.I looked at myself too.The dress was beautiful. Of course it was. Victoria had spent four months choosing it, three fittings, two designers consulted before she finally settled on this one. Ivory silk, long and clean, with a low open back and small pearl buttons running from the base of my spine all the way up to my shoulders. On Victoria it would have looked like something out of

The drive to Blackwood mansion took forty minutes.I know because I counted. Not intentionally, I just needed something to do with my mind that wasn’t thinking about what I had just done or where I was going or the man sitting beside me who had said exactly four words since we got into the car. He had asked if I was cold. I said no. That was it.Damien spent most of the drive looking at his phone. Not in a rude way exactly, more like a man who had a life that didn’t stop moving just because he had gotten married that afternoon. Emails probably. Maybe calls he had missed during the ceremony. I didn’t ask. I looked out the window instead and watched New York go by and tried to feel something other than tired.I was very tired.The mansion appeared at the end of a long private driveway lined with trees on both sides that were tall enough to make the sky feel smaller. I saw the gates first, black iron, the kind that didn’t need a sign to tell you that whatever was behind them was serious.

I spent the rest of the morning getting familiar with a house that didn’t know me yet.Helen walked me through the basic things. Which number to call if I needed anything. Where the kitchen staff kept things if I wanted something outside of meal times. The gym on the lower ground floor that I probably would never use but noted anyway. The schedule the house ran on, which was precise in the way that everything connected to Damien Blackwood seemed to be precise, meals at consistent times, staff rotations that ran without overlap, There was a calm rhythm beneath everything that you could feel if you paid attentionI paid attention. It was the only thing I knew how to do in a new place.By early afternoon I had found my way back to the library and spent an hour just sitting in the reading chair by the window doing nothing in particular. Not reading. Just sitting. Looking at the shelves and the light and the garden outside and trying to let the house become slightly

I found out by accident.Damien hadn’t invited me. He hadn’t mentioned it. I just happened to be walking past the study at the wrong time, or maybe the right time depending on how you looked at it, and the door was open by about four inches and the voice coming through it was not the voice I had heard at breakfast or during the house rules conversation or at dinner with Eleanor.It was something else entirely.“I don’t care what they agreed to last quarter,” he was saying. “That number is not acceptable and if Morrison thinks I’m going to sit across from him and pretend it is then he doesn’t know me as well as he thinks he does.”I stopped walking.I know I should have kept going. It was a private call and I had no business standing in the corridor listening to it. But something about the tone held me there. Not anger exactly. It was colder than anger. More precise. The kind of voice that didn&r