All Chapters of The Wife They Wanted Dead : Chapter 1 - Chapter 5

Chapter 2 They let me back in faster than I expected. Maybe Marlow said something. Maybe it didn't matter anymore, once a name like Ravaryn got involved. My father was already sitting when they brought me in, and something about the way he looked up — hopeful, like maybe I'd come back with good news — made what I had to say so much worse. "Dad." I sat down across from him and put the card on the table between us, face up, like it was evidence of something. "Valen Ravaryn came to see me." His whole body went still. "He wants me to marry his son. In exchange, he says he'll get you real representation. The best in the state, he said. A real chance." I watched it land on him, watched his face do something I hadn't seen it do the whole time I'd been growing up. Not the lying face. Something worse. Fear that wasn't for himself. "No." He said it flat, immediate, like there was no room in it for discussion. "Absolutely not. Seraphine, no." "Dad, they're going to convict you. Every law

Chapter 4 I never told anyone about the figure across the street. Not my father, who wasn't allowed visitors that close to a wedding. Not Sophia, who would've shown up at my door with a baseball bat and a hundred questions I didn't have answers to. I just folded it up small and carried it with me into the one day I didn't have room to carry anything extra, and by the time the stylist was pinning my hair back, I'd half convinced myself I'd imagined the whole thing. Half. --- The wedding wasn't a wedding. It was a production. Three hundred chairs. A string quartet that never seemed to stop playing even during the parts where nobody was supposed to be listening to music. Senators. A woman I recognized from the cover of a business magazine standing near the bar with a smile that didn't move past her mouth. Every guest dressed like they were auditioning for something, and me in the middle of it in white, feeling less like a bride and more like something set out on a table for people