Chapter 2

IRIS

The language of the marriage contract rises in my mind with merciless clarity, not as ink on paper but as something living, something with teeth. Fidelity – not merely of action, not limited to touch or sex or the crude mechanics of betrayal – but fidelity of response. Of attention. Of want. No entanglement, no flirtation, no acknowledgment (external or internal) of desire for any man other than my husband. Not even in passing, not even in imagination.

Panic tightens my chest, as though something has cinched closed around my ribs. My pulse skitters, uneven and loud in my ears, and I have the disorienting sensation of having stepped onto unstable ground without realizing it. The thought arrives unbidden, cold and precise, and once it does I can't dislodge it:

Is this a test?

Thomas dominated the drafting of the marriage contract. He intimately understands its reach, its appetite, the way it was designed to close around me quietly and completely. He knows how it can be enforced, how failure can be retroactively interpreted, how intent can be inferred from something as small and treacherous as a gaze held too long or a breath drawn too shallowly.

What if this look  – this slow, deliberate possession that I felt settle over me – was intentional? What if he's already watching, already measuring, already waiting to see whether I'll falter?

And what if I already have?

The sheer absurdity of the situation crashes down on me all at once, a sickening convergence of place and circumstance that makes my stomach lurch. I am standing in a church, dressed in expensive white silk, a gold ring on my finger, legally married to a kind, staggeringly wealthy man for all of thirty seconds.

And my body – traitorous, hungry, undisciplined – answered his father. At a look.

Shame and panic burn through me, hot and sharp, eclipsing the sensual ache before it can deepen. I force myself into stillness, into the narrow posture of survival I know so well. I hold my breath, concentrate on the soft brush of the veil against my lashes.

Thank God for the veil. Thank God he can't see my face.

I'm acutely aware of the heat rising under my skin, of the faint tremor in my hands that I fight to still. Please let this have passed unnoticed, I think, the plea rising unbidden and desperate. Please let this moment already be over, sealed away, irretrievable.

Just then, just as I compose myself completely, Edward lifts the veil.

Light floods in, sudden and disorienting, and for a heartbeat I'm nearly blinded by it. Edward's face fills my vision – handsome, relieved, satisfied – his smile uncomplicated and sincere. He looks at me like a man who believes the arrangement has resolved itself perfectly, like a man who's arrived at the correct outcome after having followed all the necessary steps.

I look up into my new husband’s clear blue eyes and let him see only what I'm allowed to show. Devotion, gratitude, loyalty.

He kisses me – briefly, correctly – as applause swells around us, the sound washing over me in a wave that feels both too loud and too far away. I kiss him back because I must, because anything else would be catastrophic, because the cost of deviation has already been made painfully clear.

And all the while, beneath silk and lace and law, my body trembles with the knowledge that something has already gone irrevocably wrong... and that if Thomas Ashcroft saw even the faintest flicker of what passed through me, I may have failed in my marriage before it's even begun.