All Chapters of Married to My Enemy : Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

Sienna had buried her father three days ago. She had not cried yet, not once, not in front of anyone, and she was not about to start now, sitting across a mahogany table from the man who’d made her father’s last decade a war.The lawyer’s office smelled like old paper and expensive cologne, the kind of room built to make people feel small. Rain streaked the windows in long, restless lines, blurring the city outside into smears of gray light. Sienna kept her spine straight, her hands folded in her lap, the way her mother had taught her before every meeting that mattered. Never let them see you flinch first.“You’re joking,” she said.Elias Bankole, her father’s lawyer for thirty years, did not look like a man who joked. His face had the careful blankness of someone who’d delivered bad news for a living and had long since stopped letting it show. He slid the folder another inch toward her across the polished table, as if that might make the words on the page less true.“Your father rest

The ceremony was exactly as small and exactly as cold as Nathaniel had promised. Forty guests, a private chapel upstate, white flowers chosen by someone on his staff because Sienna hadn’t had the heart to choose them herself. She wore her mother’s veil and her own grief like a second dress underneath the first, and when she walked down the aisle toward a man who was marrying her the way other men signed leases, she kept her chin up because forty people, investors, board members, a scattering of relatives from both sides who hadn’t spoken to each other in years, were watching to see if she’d break.She didn’t break. She had promised herself she wouldn’t, standing in the small dressing room an hour earlier while her aunt fussed with the veil and pretended not to notice Sienna’s hands shaking. This was a business transaction wearing the shape of a wedding. She could survive a business transaction. She’d survived worse.Nathaniel was waiting for her at the altar in a black suit so perfect

The inconsistencies in her father’s contracts turned out to be the least of what the late nights uncovered.Over the next week, Sienna found herself in that study more nights than not, not because Nathaniel asked her to be there, but because neither of them mentioned that she shouldn’t. They built an unspoken routine: coffee at ten, silence until midnight, the occasional exchange of a page across the desk with nothing but a raised eyebrow for commentary. Some nights they barely spoke at all, just worked in companionable quiet that Sienna found herself, disturbingly, starting to look forward to. It should have felt like work. It didn’t, not entirely.She learned things about him in those quiet hours that no boardroom rumor had ever told her. That he took his coffee black and drank too much of it. That he had a habit of reading the same sentence three times when something troubled him, lips moving faintly around the words. That underneath the ruthless reputation the business press had b

They didn’t speak of Reginald Cole again until they were home, until the driver had gone and the house had settled into its late-night quiet and Sienna, still in her midnight-blue dress, found Nathaniel standing at the window of his study instead of behind his desk, staring out at nothing.“You think it’s connected to your father’s death,” she said. It wasn’t a question.He didn’t turn around right away. “My father had a heart attack. That’s what the doctors said. That’s what I believed, for six months, right up until an hour ago when a seventy-year-old man went pale at the mention of your father asking questions.” His voice was tight in a way she’d never heard from him, not the practiced control of the boardroom, but something rawer underneath it. “I don’t know what to do with the possibility that it wasn’t just his heart.”Sienna crossed the room without deciding to, the way she seemed to keep doing around him lately, and stood close enough that she could see the tension in his shou

It took four days and a private investigator Nathaniel trusted more than the police to find any trace of Marcus Webb, and what they found only deepened the mystery instead of solving it. Webb hadn’t moved abroad. He’d changed his name quietly, eighteen months after disappearing from public record, and had spent the last two decades living less than sixty miles from the city under an identity built to make sure no one from his old life ever found him.They found him in a modest house at the edge of a small coastal town, an older man now, gray and weathered, who went pale at the sight of Nathaniel’s face, the unmistakable resemblance to the business partner he’d vanished from twenty years before.“You look just like him,” Webb said, standing frozen in his own doorway. “I always wondered if you’d come looking eventually.”What he told them, over tea neither of them touched, unraveled two decades of assumed history. He and Nathaniel’s father had discovered, together, that a silent partner