15. CHAPTER 13 #2
“He was very… firm with your brothers,” she said. “Your father was not pleased, but there was nothing he could do. Orion told them he would not tolerate you being sedated again. He reminded them you are to be protected, not treated like someone who needs to be managed.”
Heat crawled up my neck. Shock. Shame. A feeling I refused to acknowledge at all because it uncomfortably resembled gratitude. I didn’t want that.
“But he doesn’t even know me,” I said. “We’ve never spoken.”
“That isn't relevant,” my mother replied. “He knows what is his responsibility now, and he acts accordingly. If there is anything you’ll benefit from in this marriage, it's his protection.”
I bristled.
“I don’t want his protection,” I muttered mostly to myself. “I don’t want anything from him.”
She looked at me as though I’d just said I no longer believed in gravity. I held her gaze anyway.
Since she was being uncharacteristically soft today, I wondered if this was my final opening to speak the truth. Not that honesty had ever made a difference in this house—words were just noise to people who only understood leverage—but I felt a desperate, foolish need to try one last time.
“I don’t want to marry Orion Kade,” I said, the words barely above a whisper. “I don’t want to be a Kade.”
The confession hung in the air, as out of place as a weed in her perfectly curated garden. I waited for a reaction, a sigh, or even a trace of anger, anything that felt human.
Her face went still. Then she smiled, but the earlier excitement had weaned.
It was the same smile she wore at charity luncheons when someone said something gauche and she decided to forgive them because she was above being offended.
“You know, you remind me so much of my Elodie,” she reminded me, and the pivot was so swift it made me blink.
Elodie Moreaux.
That name always sat between us like a debt collector who refused to leave.
“So sweet,” my mother carried on. “Na?ve, and very stubborn.”
I’d heard it my whole life.
You look like Elodie. You have Elodie’s hair. Elodie’s eyes. Elodie’s mouth, always on the verge of an argument.
Sometimes I wondered if that was why my mother had never quite known what to do with me. I was a walking reminder of the twin she’d lost the year I was born. The loss she'd never forgiven the universe for.
“The only difference between you two,” she went on, “is that at least she ran with a man whose family strength was on par with the Moreaux.”
I tensed.
I knew the story. Everyone did. It was a family cautionary tale and secret boast all at once.
Elodie Moreaux had fallen in love with Malik Okoye-Nassar—one of those names people said like a prayer, a curse or a threat, depending on the room.
Old money on one side, old empire on the other.
Oil, shipping, and a legacy written in the ink of other men's failures.
Two powerhouses stapled together in one dangerous man.
She’d defied her family and ran with him.
My mother said he’d killed her. My Uncle élie said she’d died loving him.
They didn’t speak to the Okoye-Nassars now. Not publicly, or privately. Isolde and I had a cousin we’d never met because our parents had decided grief was easier if you amputated an entire branch of the family tree.
I'd grown up hearing that I was just like Elodie. Stubborn and soft in the wrong places.
Maybe some part of me had believed I could borrow her courage and have it end differently. That I could run for love and survive it.
Except Yves was no Okoye-Nassar. His father did taxes for small businesses. His mother taught English at a lycée. They were good people. Honest. Ordinary.
Ordinary men didn’t stand a chance against empires like the Kades and the Moreaux. It had been foolish to think love would be any kind of currency here.
“But the Moreaux are just as powerful as the Kades,” I said, hearing the thinness in my own voice. “Why do we need them?”
My mother watched me, weariness briefly surfacing in her eyes.
“Because your father has been pulling the weight for both houses,” she said simply. “For years. The Fernández side and mine. He can’t anymore. We need the Kades to maintain the balance and keep both houses afloat.”
That was it. The part no one else in the family would ever admit out loud. My parents were at every society event flaunting their wealth when in truth, it was all a farce.
We weren’t being noble. We were drowning. And I was the sandbag being tossed overboard to keep the ship from sinking.
“I barely know him,” I said, the words escaping before I could swallow them. “I don’t know what kind of man he is. What he wants. What he doesn’t.”
“You have a lifetime to get to know him,” my mother said.
A lifetime. A life sentence.
A shiver crawled down my spine that had nothing to do with temperature of the room.
It hit me then that my mother didn't see a marriage, she saw a long-term lease.
She was giving him decades to break me, mold me, to turn me into whatever version of a wife he required, while I was simply expected to survive the process.
éliane sighed, satisfied that topic was now closed and she could move on to something more pleasant.
“Esmé has already asked about dates,” she said, and the light was back in her eyes now, the excitement had crawled back in.
“We’ll have to move quickly. We’ll need to speak to the planners, of course.
I was thinking something classic for the church.
Ivory and gold. We’ll keep it modern and simple. Just as you like it. Nothing vulgar.”
Just as you like it? When has my mother done anything as I liked it?
I watched her as she spoke. Her hands began to move as she imagined flowers and fabrics and guest lists and photo angles. She was in her element now, assembling a spectacle.
I couldn’t tell if she was happy at the prospect of the wedding itself, or at the prospect of finally seeing me…tamed. Less rebellious, and more pliant.
Orion Kade looked like the type of man who’d build a cage she approved of.
“I was thinking,” she continued, “your hair down for the church. Esmé said Orion has always liked—”
“I don’t care what Orion likes,” I blurted out.
Her words halted mid-sentence.
I could see the anger forming on her face. A mix of fury and excitement, now fragile.
“Then learn to,” she said, her voice gentle in a way that felt more dangerous than shouting. “Because men like him don’t come twice for girls who run, or girls who choose love over obligation.”
She sat back, smoothing an imaginary crease in her skirt.
“You should rest,” she added. “We’ll call the planners tomorrow. You’ll need to look—” her eyes roamed my face and hair. “—composed when you meet them.”
She stood, signaling that our meeting was over. I rose too. Her perfume, usually so elegant, suddenly felt cloyingly intense, coating the back of my throat and stealing the very air I needed to breathe.
Breathe in. Breathe out. You’re fine.
I pulled myself together, but my mind kept circling the fact that somewhere outside this house, there were papers with my future written into clauses and consolidations. Men in boardrooms arguing over governance shares, control and trust structures. None of which concerned me, but was all about me.
Somewhere in a remote town outside Paris, there was a man bloodied, lying to waste, probably dead and rotting away due to my foolishness.
In between was a man who I knew nothing about, but has insisted he would marry me despite my rebellion. I’ve never uttered a word to him, but he knew enough to draw a boundary in a house that had never drawn one on my behalf.
It made me feel strangely uneasy, and I didn’t want to think too hard about the rest.
My phone buzzed in my hand, the notification appearing across my lock screen.
Céleste: Checking up on you. Hope you at least ate something today?
“I’ll go lie down,” I excused myself.
My mother nodded, already reaching for her phone—no doubt to message Lady Kade back, to talk colours and guest lists and timelines for the dismantling of my life.
I left the drawing room with my pulse thudding, the word she’d used ringing in my ears.
A lifetime.
A lifetime of what exactly? I didn't know. All I could see was a long, gold-lined hallway with no doors and no windows, with a man I didn't know waiting at the end of it to claim what was left of me.