All Chapters of A Bride for the Wrong Brother : Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

(Alondra's POV)I woke to the sound of metal.A soft slow clink, like a coin being turned over in someone's hand. My eyes opened to a ceiling of dark wood beams. A heavy chandelier hanging from a black iron chain. The bedposts I was tied to were tall and carved at the tops.I was not in the same room anymore.I tried to lift my left hand. It would not lift. The chain at my wrist drew tight against the post above my head and pulled me back down. My other arm lay loose against the silk sheet that had been thrown across my lower half. My right cheek throbbed in a slow heavy pulse where his palm had landed. The taste of dried blood sat at the corner of my mouth.This was his bed.I did not have to be told.The whole room smelled like him. That same dark clean scent from the staircase, pine and smoke and something colder underneath. The pillows. The sheets. The air itself. He had not slept here. I could tell from the coldness of the silk beside me. Yet every part of this room knew his body

(Doña Carmen's POV)I could not stop looking at it.The empty chair. The clean plate in front of it. The folded napkin no hand would ever shake open again.A servant set the first course before me. Caldo gallego, the broth my son had loved since he was small enough to need a cushion to reach the table. The smell of it rose up warm and green and familiar, and something in my chest folded in half.I lifted my spoon.I set it down again.Across the table, Dante ate without lifting his eyes from his plate. There was a long red line down the side of his neck, three thin furrows, the kind a woman's nails leave.I looked at the scratches and felt nothing I could name.The girl had done that. The thought of her was a stone in my throat.Rafael said something low to Dante about the Calderón shipment. Dante answered him in the same low register, clipped, certain, the voice of a man who had been waiting his whole life to be spoken to like this and was careful not to show how much it mattered. T

(Dante's POV)The bar was the way I liked it.Low ceiling. Dark wood. The kind of lighting that did not ask too much of a man's face. Old Emilio ran the place out of the same corner of downtown Madrid he had been running it out of since I was twenty-two years old and discovering for the first time that whiskey did not actually solve anything.The second stool was empty tonight.I took the first.He set the glass down in front of me before I had finished sitting. The good one. The single barrel he kept under the counter for two customers."Don Dante.""Emilio.""Long time.""Not long enough."He smiled at that, and he moved off down the bar to leave me with my drink.I lifted the glass.And sipped it. The fire of it went down slow and clean, the way good whiskey is supposed to, and a small piece of the dull weight that had been sitting on the inside of my ribs all day eased by half a finger.I lifted the glass again.Halfway to my mouth, the door opened behind me.The bell above it gav

(Alondra's POV)They woke me before the sun was properly up.Two maids came in quiet and quick, and one of them unlocked my chained wrist while the other began running a bath, and neither of them would answer a single question I put to them. They washed my shorn hair and dressed me in a small soft gown, pale and plain, the first thing that had touched my skin in days that did not scratch. They sat me down and arranged what little hair I had left until it lay neat against my head.I watched all of it in a strange silence.I did not know what was happening. A person being prepared this carefully is being prepared for something, and in this house the somethings had not yet learned how to be kind. My stomach stayed tight the whole time their hands moved over me. I kept waiting for one of them to slip and tell me. Neither of them slipped.When they were finished, two men came to the door.They walked me through the corridors. They did not grip my arms the way the others had. They simply wa

(Dante's POV) "Fuck." I pushed the paper away from me across the kitchen table. The numbers on it had stopped being numbers an hour ago. They had become marks. Shapes a man stares at long enough that they forget how to mean anything. The shipment my father had handed me was not complicated, not really, it was the kind of work I had done a hundred times in my old life, but my old life had been a life with a quiet head, and the head I had now would not go quiet for anything. I had come down to the kitchen at one in the morning because I could not sleep. The kitchen was the one room in this house with no memory in it for me. Just the long wooden table the staff used for their own meals, and the cold range, and the row of copper pots that the night caught and held in a soft dull shine. I had brought the papers down here and and grabbed a glass of chilled water from the refrigerator. I clicked my phone face up against the wood. Three in the morning. I had been at it two hour