All Chapters of Marry Me To Destroy Them: Chapter 11 - Chapter 15

POV: Lyra**Neither of us slept in Ethan's building that night.He didn't say why, not directly, but I understood without being told. If someone inside his own headquarters had watched Julian walk in and out of that conference room, had known enough to send me three words the exact moment the conversation ended, then his building was no longer a place either of us could trust. By ten o'clock, a car was waiting in the underground garage, and by eleven, we were driving north out of the city in silence so thick I could feel it pressing against my ribs."Where are we going," I asked, somewhere around the second hour, when the skyline had shrunk to a smear of light behind us and the road had narrowed into something quieter, darker, lined with trees instead of buildings."Home," Ethan said. "The real one. Not the penthouse."I hadn't known there was a difference until the car turned through a set of iron gates and the headlights swept across a house that looked less like the residence of a

Lyra Pov:The formal engagement announcement was held at the Vance Global Holdings headquarters, in a ballroom rented out for exactly the kind of spectacle Ethan's PR team had spent a week engineering enough press to guarantee saturation coverage, enough of the city's old-money elite to guarantee the news would travel through every drawing room and boardroom by morning, and enough security, quiet and unobtrusive, to guarantee that whoever had watched Julian walk in and out of that conference room wouldn't have the chance to do it again undetected.I wore ivory. Ethan's stylist had suggested it, deliberately, a color close enough to bridal to make the announcement feel inevitable rather than performative, and standing in the mirror before we left, watching the fabric catch the light, I thought of the red dress I'd worn to Camille's gala weeks earlier and understood, with a strange, vertiginous clarity, how much distance I'd traveled in that short a time. The woman in red had been a gho

Lyra, povI met Ethan's brother properly for the first time at a small, informal dinner at the estate, a deliberate departure from the carefully staged public performances that had defined every other moment of my new marriage, and one that left me, if I was honest, unexpectedly nervous.Marcus Vance looked like an easier version of his brother the same dark hair, the same height, but where Ethan's face had settled into the guarded stillness of a man who'd learned young to hide what he was feeling, Marcus's expression moved constantly, openly, warmth and mischief flickering across it in a way that made him instantly, disarmingly likeable."So you're the ghost," he said, by way of greeting, grinning as he pulled out a chair across from me at the estate's smaller, more intimate dining room. "I have to say, you're better looking than the tabloids gave you credit for. They usually don't manage to make dead people look this good.""Marcus," Ethan said, in a tone that carried a warning unde