He Jilted Me at the Altar. I Married His Enemy by Midnight. Chapter 05

He Jilted Me at the Altar. I Married His Enemy by Midnight. Chapter 05

I didn’t ask.

For eleven days, I didn’t ask-because for eleven days, the man I’d married out of vengeance was quietly, methodically ruining me in an entirely different way.

Day two, I woke at 5 a.m. with morning sickness so vicious I couldn’t stand up off the bathroom floor. I’d planned to hide it-one year, on paper, no complications. But the door opened, and Damian Cross, CEO of a two-hundred-billion-dollar empire, sat down on the marble floor of my bathroom in his six-thousand-dollar suit and held my hair back without a single word.

Then he canceled his morning. Tokyo waited.

Day four, I found the kitchen stocked with the only three foods I could keep down-foods I’d never mentioned.

I pay attention,J was all he said.

Day seven, I had a nightmare-the altar, the screens, the laughing-and woke up screaming. He was there

in under a minute. He didn’t touch me. He just sat in the chair by my window until my breathing slowed, and

when I woke at dawn he was still there, asleep sitting up, tie loose, one hand resting near mine on the blanket.

Not on it.

Near it. Like he’d wanted to and hadn’t let himself.

“It’s paper, I whispered to my reflection that morning. It’s a contract. Do not do this to yourself again.J

My reflection didn’t look convinced.

Because here’s what nobody warns you about: cruelty you can survive. You build walls against cruelty. But

gentleness-gentleness from a man who owes you nothing, at five in the morning, on a bathroom floor-

gentleness walks straight through every wall like it holds the deed to the building.

Day nine, at 2 a.m., I found him asleep at his desk, and I did something dangerous.

I put a blanket over Damian Cross.

He caught my wrist before the blanket even settled-reflexes like a man who’d learned young that sleeping deeply gets you hurt. And for one unguarded second, before he was fully awake, he looked at me and said, rough and soft and certain:

“You’re here.J

Not a question. Like a prayer being answered.

Then his eyes cleared, the shutters slammed down, and he released my wrist like it burned him. Go to

sleep, Aria. You need rest.j

I lay awake until sunrise with my heart pounding, hating myself, hearing Julian’s champagne whisper on a

loop.

The east wing. Nine years. A shrine.

Day eleven, Damian flew to Singapore.

And I stood in front of the east wing doors with a passcode I’d watched the housekeeper enter, telling myself I had a right to know what I was living inside of.

The lock clicked green.

The corridor beyond was dark, dust-sheeted, airless-a wing of the house deliberately stopped in time. One door at the end stood half open, moonlight spilling out.

An art studio. Untouched for years. Canvases stacked against every wall, all facing away-except one, on an

easel, in the center of the room.

I turned on the light.

And my heart stopped.

It was a painting of a girl on a rain-soaked street at night. Nineteen, maybe twenty. Dark hair plastered to her cheek, kneeling on wet asphalt, holding a yellow umbrella over something-someone-outside the frame. Her face tilted down with an expression of fierce, stubborn tenderness. Painted with such devastating precision,

such memorized love, that I could see the tiny scar above her left eyebrow.

I knew that scar.

I got it falling off a bike when I was seven.

The girl in the painting was me.

I stumbled back into the stacked canvases and they slid, toppling, faces turning up one after another after

another-

Me. Me. Me. Dozens of them. Years of them.

Painted by a man I’d met eleven days ago.

Behind me, from the doorway, Damian’s voice came out of the dark-low, and wrecked, and nine years tired.

“You weren’t supposed to see these.j

Not yet. J