Lahat ng Kabanata ng Married to My Runaway Groom's Ruthless Brother: Kabanata 1 - Kabanata 10

Chapter 1: The Wrong BrotherThe whispers reached her before she reached the doors.Clarissa heard them bleeding through the wood, low and urgent, the kind of whispers that had weight to them. The kind that meant something had already gone wrong inside that hall before she even walked in.She stopped.Her father stopped beside her.She turned to look at him and that was all it took. One look at his face. The jaw locked too tight. The eyes that found somewhere else to be the moment hers reached them.“Dad.”He said nothing.“Look at me.”He looked at her. And she saw it. All of it. Everything he hadn’t said since he knocked on the bridal suite door forty minutes ago and told her it was time.She pushed the doors open herself.The music died.Three hundred people turned and the silence that replaced it was suffocating. Not the reverent silence of a wedding. Something heavier. Something laced with secondhand shame and the particular discomfort of people watching a woman walk into somethi

He didn’t sleep.He sat in the armchair by the window with a glass of whiskey he hadn’t touched and the city spread out below him like it had no idea what kind of day it had been. Which it didn’t. The city never cared. That was one of the things he had always appreciated about it.He was still hearing her voice.Was any of it real. Any of it.He had kissed her back.One moment. One unguarded moment where three years of ironclad discipline cracked straight down the middle and he had kissed her back and felt the full weight of everything he had been carrying collapse onto him all at once. Then he had pulled away because she was drunk and her heart was broken and he refused, absolutely refused, to be something she woke up regretting.He picked up the whiskey and took one slow sip.A knock at the door.Not Daniel’s knock. Daniel knocked twice, short and professional. This was one knock. Slow. Deliberate.He already knew.“Come in.”Yvonne walked in like she owned the room. She always walk

She had been to the Richard mansion before.Six times in four years. Christmas dinner twice, a birthday celebration for Maria, two family gatherings she couldn’t remember the occasion for, and one Sunday afternoon that Luca had brought her without warning and she had spent three hours pretending she wasn’t completely overwhelmed.She knew this house.Except walking through its doors today felt nothing like any of those six times because this time she wasn’t a guest arriving on Luca’s arm with a return ticket back to her own life waiting at the end of the evening.This time she lived here.The entrance hall felt different with that knowledge sitting in her chest. The ceilings hadn’t changed. The pale stone floors hadn’t changed. The staircase curving upward on the right was exactly as she remembered it. But everything looked different when you understood it was yours now, when the weight of permanence settled over something familiar and made it strange again.Charles carried nothing. H

Clarissa found the garden by accident.She had only meant to walk until the weight in her chest loosened. Instead she followed a side corridor past a set of glass doors and stepped into a courtyard the size of her parents' entire backyard, thick with late roses and the quiet sound of water moving somewhere she couldn't see.It was the first place in the Richard mansion that didn't feel like it was studying her.She sat on a stone bench and let the silence settle. For the first time since the wedding she could hear her own thoughts without interruption. They were not kind.Four years. Four years of believing she knew the shape of her future. And now she was living in a house full of people who looked at her like a problem that had not yet been solved.Raymond's smile. Elena's soft voice. The way Charles had looked at her in the corridor and said not everyone was her enemy, as if that should have been comfort.She pressed her palms against the cool stone and closed her eyes.Footsteps o

The dining room was long and bright with candlelight.Place cards waited at every setting. Clarissa found her name beside Charles’s at the head of the table. Elena sat three seats down on the opposite side. Raymond claimed the place near Gwen. The woman in red, Yvonne, had been seated farther down, close enough to watch, far enough to require effort if she wanted to speak during the meal.Charles pulled out Clarissa’s chair. She sat. His hand brushed the back of her shoulder as he took his own seat. Brief. Deliberate.Conversation rose again once everyone was settled. Servers moved in quiet patterns. Wine was poured.Raymond lifted his glass first. “To family. And to new beginnings, however unexpected they may be.”A few polite chuckles. Glasses touched.Clarissa drank without tasting it.Across from her, Elena smiled at something Nate said and then glanced toward the head of the table. The look lasted only a second. Clarissa caught it anyway.Charles spoke little. When he did, the ta