Chapter 5 #4
The hatred in her voice was almost a physical pressure in the room.
I snapped my hand to her chin, fingers clamping around the soft hinge of her jaw with bruising precision. Her breath hitched, her pulse fluttered against my palm, but she didn’t look away.
“Who is your son’s father?”
Her nostrils flared. “That’s none of your business.”
I leaned in until my forehead almost touched hers. My voice dropped into a register that had made generals fold and presidents sign treaties they swore they’d never sign.
“Maybe he’s related to me.”
Her eyes widened—just a fraction—and that fraction made something primal rip through me.
“He looks exactly like me,” I hissed. “Same eyes. Same mouth. Same blood. Did you send him to the altar that day? Is that why you came to my wedding? To parade my own bastard in front of me like some twisted joke?”
Her chest rose sharply. Anger, fear, guilt—I couldn’t tell which, and it maddened me.
“You heard him,” she said, voice trembling with fury.
“He came to you himself. I owe you nothing. No explanation. No obedience. And I will never be your wife, your mistress, or your slave.” She leaned forward until our lips were almost touching, as if she wanted me to feel her defiance on my tongue.
“Because I will escape this place. And when I do, you’ll never see us again. ”
For a split second, everything in me went perfectly still.
Her lips—so close they brushed the air I exhaled.
So close they shook every shred of restraint I had left.
So close I wanted to devour them, bruise them, pray to them.
I wanted to kiss her until she forgot her own name.
I wanted to punish her for every breath she took that wasn’t mine.
I wanted to put her on her knees and worship her until she shattered.
I did none of it.
Instead, I released her chin—slowly, reluctantly—and stepped back half an inch. Just enough to let her lungs fill. Just enough to remind her I controlled the space between us.
“Seraphina is awake,” I said flatly, “from what should have been a months-long coma.”
That got her attention.
Her eyes widened.
“The paralytic I administered was meant to keep her sedated for months,” I continued, voice cold. “It barely lasted a week. And now her family is already threatening war if the wedding doesn’t proceed immediately.”
Pen stiffened.
“If I end up marrying her, remember this—it’s because of you,” I said, voice sharp as broken glass. “Seraphina will destroy your peace. She’ll have full legal access to my estate. And when she decides to hurt you or your boy, I may not be there to intervene.”
The words hit her like blows.
I saw it.
All of it.
The flicker of fear she tried to bury.
The way her breath stuttered.
The way her hand trembled before she forced it still.
And then—
A smaller shift.
A softening.
A brief, fragile flicker of something she would die before admitting.
Relief.
Relief that I hated Seraphina.
That I didn’t want the woman waiting at my altar.
That knowledge was a shot of pure electricity straight to my veins.
“Put the hatred aside,” I said softly, too softly. “Marry me. It’s the only way to keep you and your son safe. And the only way to keep me out of her hands.”
She crossed her arms—an attempt at a shield—but her voice was steady.
“I want safety for my son more than anything. And the safest place is far from you—back in Greece. You think I’d marry you? The man who abducted us? The man who’d cage us for life with no way out? I would sooner walk into the sea.”
“Fine,” I said immediately. “Three months.”
She blinked. Once. Twice.
“You wear my ring for three months,” I said. “After that, you can divorce me. Clean. Legal. You walk away with enough money to disappear forever if that’s what you want.”
She studied me—slow, calculating, deeply suspicious.
“I want it in writing,” she said.
“Done.”
“And no sex.”
A dark laugh slid out of me, quiet and molten.
“I can’t promise no sex,” I said truthfully. “But I can promise—on my blood—that there will be no sex without your explicit consent. Every single time. For all three months.”
Her eyes narrowed. Testing me. Weighing me.
“Any other conditions?” I asked. “Name them. They’ll be in the contract.”
She stared at me for such a long time I felt the world tighten around us.
“After three months... you’ll actually let me go?” she whispered, fear and hope warring in her tone.
The softness in her voice—the hope buried beneath the words—stabbed straight through my ribs.
She knew the truth.
She knew contracts meant nothing against a man like me.
She knew I could tear up the paper, burn it, chain her to this place with nothing but my will.
And she knew I wanted to.
I looked her dead in the eyes.
And with the smoothness of a lifetime of sin—
I lied with every shred of sincerity in my body. “Yes,” I said. “Three months. Then you’re free.”
A lie dressed as mercy.
She didn’t believe me—her eyes made that painfully clear. Distrust flickered in them like a warning light. But beneath it was something else, something harsher:
Resignation.
She was running out of exits, and she knew it.
“And after the three months?” she asked, voice low but steady. “They’ll force you to marry her again?”
I smiled.
Not a gentle smile—a slow, cold, surgical one, carved from bone-deep hatred.
“Seraphina will disappear long before the three months are up,” I said.
“Permanently this time. Giovanni botched the last attempt. This time I do it myself. She’ll vanish from the face of the earth.
I will never put that woman in my bed. Never give her my name.
Never let her breathe the same air as your son. ”
The last word—your son—landed between us like a dropped weapon.
I saw the moment her defiance faltered.
Saw the way her shoulders dipped a millimeter, the way her pulse jumped at her throat.
Not because she feared Seraphina’s fate—but because she understood mine.
This was not a man negotiating. This was a man fixated.
“Oh, so she’s unworthy of your bed,” she breathed, anger shaking through her, “but somehow I’m fit for it? Fit to be your wife?”
A knife of guilt slid between my ribs.
“Yes,” I said, and the truth shredded me on the way out. “Because you look like her. You talk like her. You move like her. You are Penelope reborn. And I am a selfish bastard who will take any piece of her I can get... even if it’s a lie.”
Her breath hitched.
Not fear exactly.
More like recognition.
She finally understood the depth of the madness she was bargaining with.
The silence that followed was thick enough to choke on.
I could hear her heartbeat—or maybe it was mine.
Then, so softly it was closer to an exhale than a word:
“...Yes.”
One syllable.
One surrender.
Everything inside me stopped.
Then roared back to life—wild, feral, unstoppable—like something long-buried had just clawed its way out of a coffin.
I didn’t move.
Didn’t trust myself not to drag her into my arms and ruin the fragile thing she had just offered.
She turned without waiting for my reaction, without giving me the chance to say anything else, and walked out.
The door clicked shut behind her with the gentlest sound—but it felt like a gunshot.
I stood alone in the dark room, surrounded by dead monitors, stale air, and the ghost of her perfume—something cheap, something ordinary, something absolutely devastating.
Only then did I let it hit me.
The thing I’d been choking down since the moment she walked into my house wearing my dead wife’s face.
Hope.
Violent, reckless, delusional hope.
Three months.
I had three months to make her stay.
To carve my place into her life.
Into her son’s life.
Into her future.
And if the world burned in the process?
So be it.
Because I didn’t just want her.
I wasn’t capable of wanting.
I hungered.
Starved.
Obsessed.
And I would tear kingdoms down, bury enemies alive, drown oceans, and shatter every promise I’d ever made before I let her walk away from me.
Not after what I’d seen in her eyes.
Not after that whispered “yes.”
Not after hope resurrected the dead thing in my chest and demanded more.
Three months.
Three months to turn a contract into a cage.
Three months to make her mine—permanently.