Todos los capítulos de Married to my Fiancé Uncle: Capítulo 11 - Capítulo 20

ELENA POVThe inside of the house didn't match the coldness of its walls. That was the first thing I noticed, stepping through the front doors into a hall with ceilings so high my footsteps seemed to disappear into them before they had the chance to echo. Dark wood, warm lighting, a staircase that curved up out of sight. It looked less like a fortress and more like a museum nobody had invited me to visit.A woman was waiting near the base of the stairs, silver hair pinned back in a style that hadn't changed in decades, her eyes moving over me the way a jeweler examines a stone before deciding whether it's worth the setting. She didn't smile. "So this is her," she said, not to me, but to Damien, who had wheeled himself in behind me with the same unhurried patience he seemed to bring to everything."Grandmother." His voice carried a warning I hadn't heard from him before, low and even but with an edge underneath it. "This is Elena.""I know who she is." The woman finally looked at me

ELENA POVThree weeks into the marriage, I found a rhythm I hadn't expected to find at all. Mornings belonged to my sketchbook, sitting by the tall window in my room while the fog burned off the bay, and afternoons belonged to the online fashion program I'd fought to keep, the one small thread still connecting me to the life I used to imagine for myself. Evenings, more often than not, belonged to the library.It started by accident. I'd gone looking for something to read after a particularly long day of lectures, and found Damien already there, a book open in his lap, no mask, no chair, sitting in an armchair by the fire like a completely different man than the one everyone else in this house believed they knew. I froze in the doorway, and he looked up without any of the alarm I expected."You can come in," he said. "I'm not going to pretend around you when we're alone. It would be exhausting for both of us."That was the first time I understood how much of him was performance. Not ju

ELENA POVI heard about Emily Moretti before I ever met her, which somehow made the introduction worse. Damien's grandmother mentioned her at breakfast the way other people mention the weather, casual and pointed at the same time."The Morettis are joining us for dinner Friday," she said, not looking up from her coffee. "Emily is a lovely girl. Ambitious. Comes from a very respected family.""That's nice," I said, though the way she'd emphasized lovely and ambitious told me this wasn't simply a social visit."She and Damien were close once. Before all of this." She waved a hand vaguely in my direction, as if my entire existence in this house could be summarized in one dismissive gesture. "I thought it would be good for him to reconnect with people who understand our world properly."I understood exactly what she meant, and I understood, too, that arguing with her would only prove whatever point she was trying to make about me not belonging here. So I said nothing, finished my coffee,

ELENA POVMy fashion class met on Tuesdays in a converted warehouse downtown, the one part of my week that still felt entirely mine. Damien's driver dropped me off and waited outside without ever coming in, an arrangement I'd insisted on more firmly than almost anything else since moving into that house. I needed at least one room in my life that didn't smell like old money and quiet danger.I was gathering my sketches after class, half listening to two other students arguing about draping techniques, when a voice I hadn't heard in years stopped me cold in the middle of the hallway."Elena DeLuca. I thought that was you."I turned, and for a moment I couldn't place him: tall, dark-haired, a little heavier through the shoulders than I remembered. Still, the eyes were the same, sharp and a little too observant, the eyes of a boy who used to sit two rows behind me in high school chemistry and somehow always knew when I hadn't finished my homework."Marco?" His name came out somewhere bet

ELENA POVMy instructor announced the showcase three weeks before it happened: a small industry event where a handful of students would present a single finished piece to local buyers and press. I hadn't expected to be chosen. I definitely hadn't expected to spend the next three weeks barely sleeping, hunched over my sewing machine in a corner of the library while Damien read beside me, occasionally handing me pins without being asked."You don't have to stay up with me every night," I told him, somewhere around midnight on the third week, my eyes burning from focusing too long on tiny, uneven stitches."I'm not staying up for you," he said, not looking up from his book. "I like the quiet. You're just in it."I didn't believe that entirely, but I let it go, mostly because the sound of his pages turning had become its own kind of comfort, something steady underneath the anxious hum of everything I still needed to finish before the showcase.The piece I'd chosen was a coat, structured