Chapter 1 #3
“Hey,” I said, lifting my hand in a small, uncertain wave.
He blinked slowly, processing, then stepped aside. “Come in.”
I walked past him, the air inside immediately turning heavy—alcohol, cigarette smoke, something burnt.
The living room looked like the aftermath of a private collapse. Empty bottles of Don Julio and Patrón littered the glass coffee table. An ashtray overflowed, cigarette butts crushed down to filters. Low music pulsed from hidden speakers, bass vibrating faintly through the floor.
He shut the door behind me and followed, dropping onto the couch with a grunt, legs sprawled. I sat at the far end, careful to keep space between us.
“What made you leave work so early?” he asked.
I watched his lips closely, tracking each word. “I w-was fired.”
His brow lifted, not in concern—just mild curiosity.
He reached for the bottle and poured himself another shot. “Why?”
“My... my boss... he asked me out a month ago,” I said, voice tight. “I... I said no. Told him... I have a fiancé. That... that we’re getting married soon. I thought... I thought he... he accepted it.”
Harris knocked back the shot in one swallow, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
“He... he didn’t,” I continued, my voice trembling. “Today... today he... he ridiculed me. Said I was deaf and... and dumb. Told me I should be grateful... grateful that someone like him even... even wanted me. And then... then he fired me.”
Silence stretched between us. He studied me—not with sympathy, but calculation—then shrugged.
“And you didn’t plead?”
The word hit harder than the firing.
“Pl-Plead?” My voice cracked despite my effort to keep it steady. “He... he wouldn’t have... he wouldn’t have taken back the firing... unless I said yes... to his... his ridiculous proposal. Unless... unless I let him have... what he wanted.”
Harris leaned back, eyes drifting to the ceiling. “You realize there’s no love in this, right?”
I stiffened.
“This marriage,” he went on casually. “It’s paperwork. A deal two dead old men made behind our backs. I’m not about to lose sleep—or my freedom—over it.”
I stared at him, the distance between us suddenly vast.
“I didn’t come here for love,” I said quietly. “I c-came because I didn’t want to be alone.”
He laughed softly, humorless. “Then you came to the wrong place.”
The words settled like a weight in my chest.
My chest tightened, a coil of tension squeezing my lungs.
“Are you... saying I don’t... I don’t have to.
.. be faithful to the arrangement?” I forced each word out, slow, deliberate, like stepping across broken glass.
My throat tightened, and my next words barely escaped.
“And... you? Have... have you been... with other women?”
He laughed once—short, harsh, humorless.
It wasn’t amusement. It was the kind of laugh that left no room for argument.
“Women? Please,” he said, leaning forward, elbows on his knees, the half-empty bottle dangling carelessly from his fingers.
“I’ve got women on speed dial. I call when I want.
They come. We have fun. They leave. No strings.
No drama. Nothing to be ashamed of. You understand? ”
I swallowed, dry and bitter. The casual cruelty in his tone made the blood drain from my face.
“You’re doing this for the inheritance,” he continued, gaze locked on me like I was some puzzle he was amused to watch struggle.
“I’m doing it for the same reason. Once the papers are signed, once the accounts transfer, we divorce.
Clean break. You walk away rich. I walk away richer. That’s the deal. That’s the only deal.”
I stared at him. The man I was supposed to marry in less than twenty-four hours.
The man I had tried—foolishly, desperately—to imagine as someone who could change, someone who might one day care, just a fraction.
Someone who might, after the vows, see me as a person instead of a clause in a contract.
“Right,” I said quietly, the word trembling on my lips despite my effort to keep steady.
He didn’t notice. Or maybe he did and simply didn’t care. He poured another drink into the glass, a lazy tilt of the wrist, and offered it toward me.
I shook my head.
He shrugged again, slow, easy, like he had all the time in the world.
“You should’ve gone back to your boss...
said yes. Let him have his fun. One night—for a job you’re desperate for.
It’s just sex. Just... penetration. Doesn’t mean anything.
Does it? Or would you rather starve before finding another job.
.. if you even could, given... your... condition? ”
The words sank into me like shards of ice, each one piercing deeper than the last.
My chest felt hollow, my ribs crushed under the weight of his cruelty.
I stared at him, disbelief twisting into something sharper, something that cut through every layer of trust I had left.
This is my fiancé... the man I was supposed to rely on... saying this to me? My arranged engagement meant nothing now—it was as if my disability had erased my right to dignity, reduced me to a label.
I swayed slightly, legs trembling, knees threatening to buckle.
The exhaustion pressed down on me from every angle: the physical weariness of a body conditioned for survival, layered with the raw ache of betrayal, grief, fear, and a simmering anger that I could neither release nor name.
My hands trembled at my sides, fingers curling into fists that did nothing but shake, useless.
My throat tightened so much that even trying to speak felt like splitting open from the inside.
A sob threatened, clawing up my chest, but I swallowed it down, sharp and bitter, tasting of humiliation and despair.
The silence between us was heavier than any scream. Each beat of my heart screamed a question I didn’t dare voice: Do I not deserve respect? Do I not matter?
“I thought...” I began, voice cracking, then faltered.
What had I thought? That this marriage might somehow be different? That Harris, after all the contracts, all the obligations, might look at me like I was more than a transaction, more than a bargaining chip?
Being here for another second after this level of humiliation felt like an abomination.
I turned, every movement trembling with a mix of shame and fury, my body aching with the weight of it.
Each step toward the door was heavy, deliberate, like I was dragging my dignity behind me.
My fingers trailed along the cool doorframe, seeking something solid in the world as if it could anchor me against the storm raging inside.
“Where are you going?” he asked, voice lazily amused, as though he couldn’t quite believe I was daring to leave.
“Home,” I said, voice tight, clipped. “I need... to be alone.”
He didn’t stop me. He didn’t rise. Didn’t move. Didn’t even look up from the slow swirling of the amber liquid in his glass.
He leaned back against the couch, sprawling with lazy arrogance, arms stretched along the backrest like a man who had never once been denied anything. A king on a throne built from other people’s sacrifices.
“You want to know one truth?” he said, lips curling. He didn’t wait for me to answer. He never did. “You disgust me.”
The words landed cleanly, precisely, like a blade finding a soft gap in armor.
“I don’t know if it’s that ugly scar on your cheek,” he continued, lifting a finger and gesturing vaguely toward my face, “where a normal woman would have a dimple, you’ve got this puckered, stinking mess—or because you’re.
..” He tilted his head, pretending to think.
“You know. Disabled. Deaf. And dumb, for that matter.”
My chest constricted until breathing hurt.
It felt like someone had wrapped wire around my ribs and twisted.
To think I had come here seeking comfort, afraid of being alone after today’s sudden firing—yet here I was, humiliated by my fiancé with brutal indifference, every word crushing me deeper, leaving me exposed and small, as if my very existence were a mistake.
My fists clenched so tightly my nails cut crescents into my palms, skin breaking under the pressure.
Warm blood welled, unnoticed at first.
First Hargrove.
Now him.
Two men in a single day, stripping me down to the same word. Broken.
I forced my shoulders back, refusing to let him see me fold. “Everyone calling me disabled is laughable,” I said. My voice shook, but it didn’t break. “But I wasn’t always like this.”
Harris rose slowly, unbothered, unthreatened.
He stepped closer until I could smell the tequila on his breath, stale and sour. He didn’t touch me. He didn’t need to.
“The wedding is at nine a.m. tomorrow,” he said evenly. “Be early. I hate waiting. Of all the things I despise, waiting comes first.”
Then he turned and walked away, disappearing down the hallway as if the conversation—and I—were already finished.
Tears burned down my cheeks, hot and unstoppable. The truth I had spent years outrunning finally caught me.
No one would ever love me.
Not the way I deserved.
Who would choose a woman who couldn’t hear? Whose voice fractured and failed her the longer she spoke? No sane man.
Not after ten years of dragging the wreckage of my past behind me like a chain.
Not with the ugly, jagged scar carved into my cheek—right where my dimple used to be.
Not with silence filling my ears and a body that betrayed me every time I tried to speak.
Then I finally stepped out of Harris’s building.
The air outside felt colder, heavier, like it carried judgment with it. Tomorrow would come whether I was ready or not—the wedding, the expectations, the silence wrapped in white lace and obligation.
And I would walk into it the same way I had walked into everything else since the disaster: alone, wounded, and pretending I wasn’t already breaking.