All Chapters of Marry Me To Destroy Them: Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

Lyra POVThere is a particular kind of silence that comes from standing in a room full of people who believe you are dead.I had forgotten what it sounded like the hum of a hundred conversations, glasses clinking, laughter stretched thin over old money and older secrets until I stood at the edge of the Calloway Enterprises gala in a dress the colour of dried blood, and none of it stopped for me. Nobody turned. Nobody gasped. I was a shadow at the mouth of a ballroom I used to own, watching my own funeral happen twice once, two years ago, in a closed casket my father wept over, and again now, in the easy, untroubled way this room breathed without me in it.I found her within thirty seconds. I always find her within thirty seconds. Camille has never known how to stand in a room quietly; she has to be seen, has to be the centre of every axis, and tonight she was glowing under the chandelier light in a way that made my chest go hollow and hot at once. She wore my mother's emerald necklace

Ethan POVI've been called a lot of things in boardrooms across this city ruthless, cold, a shark in a three-thousand-dollar suit. I've never bothered correcting any of it. Reputation is a tool like any other, and mine has been sharpened, deliberately, for years, until men twice my age flinch when my name comes up in a negotiation.Today it took me eleven minutes to finish Halloway Textiles.I watched the CEO's face, a man named Robert Halloway who built his company from nothing forty years ago and lost it to me in less time than it takes to eat a lunch cycle through disbelief, anger, and finally a kind of hollow, resigned grief. I've seen that exact sequence of expressions more times than I can count. It used to bother me. It doesn't anymore. That's the part nobody tells you about becoming what I've become: the guilt doesn't disappear, it just goes quiet. It waits somewhere in the back of your chest, and you learn to work around it the way you learn to work around any old injury."

Lyra, POVThe lawyers arrived on a Thursday.I hadn't expected the process of destroying my family to feel so much like drafting a merger agreement, but there I was, seated at Ethan's absurdly long conference table with two attorneys, a stack of documents thick enough to stop a bullet, and a man across from me who kept watching me with an attentiveness that had nothing to do with the paperwork."Prenuptial terms," his lawyer said, sliding a folder toward me. "Standard dissolution clause after twenty-four months, or upon mutual written agreement that the arrangement has served its purpose. Asset division remains separate throughout. No claim on Vance Global Holdings in the event of divorce.""Fine," I said, scanning the clause without really reading it. I'd read worse. I'd survived worse."There's an addendum," Ethan said.I looked up. He hadn't looked at his own attorney once since the meeting started; he'd been watching me the entire time, and something about the stillness in his fac

Lyra, pov:The jeweller's shop was closed to everyone but us, an arrangement Ethan's assistant had made with the kind of quiet efficiency that told me this wasn't the first time Vance Global Holdings had rented out an entire Fifth Avenue storefront for a private hour.I expected a selection process. A tray of rings, a conversation about cut and carat, the performance of choice that I imagined most brides went through even in marriages built on love instead of leverage. Instead, Ethan walked directly to a locked case near the back of the shop, exchanged a few quiet words with the owner, and returned holding a small black box that he set on the velvet counter between us without ceremony."I already have one," he said.Something about the certainty in his voice made my stomach tighten. "You didn't think I might have opinions about what I wear on my hand for the next two years?""You can have opinions," he said. "I just think you'll like this one."He opened the box.The ring inside was n

Camille pov:I saw her face before anyone told me.I was in my office at Calloway Enterprises my office, the one I'd earned, the one I deserved after years of being the daughter nobody looked at twice while Lyra got everything handed to her on a silver tray simply for having the right mother when my assistant burst in without knocking, her face bloodless, holding her phone out like it was something that might explode.“Calloway Heiress Alive.”I read the headline four times before the words rearranged themselves into something my brain could process. Then I saw the photograph beneath it Lyra, unmistakably Lyra, sitting beside Ethan Vance in a studio I didn't recognise, wearing an expression so composed, so utterly unbothered, that for one disorienting moment I thought it had to be doctored.It wasn't doctored. I would have known. I would have felt it in my chest the way I felt everything about Lyra, the particular ache of comparison that had lived in me since we were children, since o