Chapter 10
Chapter Ten
Donovan announced our engagement himself, through a single carefully worded statement to the press, and the city did exactly what he'd predicted it would do, which was erupt.
My old friend Marisol, one of the few people from my old life who'd remained genuinely kind through the whole mess rather than faking kindness for an audience, called me the morning the story broke and read me three different headlines in a voice somewhere between disbelief and delight.
Donovan Winthrop Engaged to Hamilton's Former Fiancée, one of them read, like my name had become a footnote to his rather than a person in my own right, which struck me as both insulting and, in its own strange way, useful.
Charles called me four times that first day.
I didn't answer once, partly out of strategy and partly because hearing his voice still did something unpleasant to my pulse that I refused to give him the satisfaction of witnessing.
When I finally read his texts, days later, they read exactly like a man who couldn't decide whether he was furious or panicked, which told me he hadn't yet realized those were the same emotion wearing different clothes.
He believed, I learned later through the particular gossip channel of mutual friends who couldn't resist reporting back, that Donovan had taken me specifically to humiliate him.
That his greatest enemy had reached past every other available woman in the city and claimed the one Charles had so publicly discarded, purely as a calculated insult aimed at his pride.
He wasn't entirely wrong about the satisfaction Donovan took in it.
He was completely wrong about why I'd said yes.
Lucy tried to laugh it off at a brunch she clearly hadn't realized I'd hear about, telling everyone within earshot that I was just doing it for the money, that any woman would marry Donovan Winthrop for a fraction of what he was apparently worth.
The laugh didn't land. Not because the room disbelieved her exactly, but because something in her voice cracked at the edges, the particular brittleness of a woman watching her own victory get smaller every time someone mentioned my name in the same breath as Donovan's.
She sent me a text that evening, the first since the morning she and Charles had destroyed the illusion of my relationship, asking if we could talk privately.
I didn't answer it. There was nothing left between us worth being private about, and some part of me suspected she only wanted to talk so she could measure, up close, exactly how unbothered I actually was.
I was, almost overnight, more powerful than I had ever been as Charles Hamilton's fiancée.
Not because Donovan had given me power directly, but because the entire city had just learned that the man Charles spent a decade hating wanted the woman Charles had thrown away, and that single fact rearranged every assumption anyone had made about my worth in the three weeks since my engagement ended.
I sat with that feeling for a long time, alone in the apartment Donovan's money had already started furnishing before I'd fully agreed to anything. It tasted less like triumph and more like the particular relief of finally being believed about something nobody had asked me to prove.