He Told Me He Slept With Her, on Our Wedding Bed, in My Dress Chapter 04

He Told Me He Slept With Her, on Our Wedding Bed, in My Dress Chapter 04

A moment later, I heard kissing through the wall.

Then Blaire’s breathy laugh drifted into the room.

“You’re awful. This is supposed to be your wedding night with Sienna, and instead you’ve got her as an audience.”

“She deserves it,” Callum said.

I clapped my hands over my ears.

It did not help.

The sounds still slipped through my fingers, impossible to block out, impossible to escape, each one carving into my chest like a blade.

My mind split in two.

One moment I saw the Callum who had stayed up with me through sleepless nights, the one who anchored me when I was drifting toward death.

The next, I could not stop imagining him tangled up with Blaire on the other side of that wall.

The two sets of memories crashed together until my head felt like it might split open.

With shaking hands, I fumbled through my clothes for my antidepressants and dry-swallowed them, praying for the chemicals to numb the world into silence.

Then the door opened.

Callum walked in wearing nothing but a towel around his waist and looked down at me from above.

“That’s all it took?” he asked. “How are you supposed to survive the next year?”

Behind him, Blaire laughed. Her skin was marked with enough evidence to make me sick all over again.

“What, are you starting to feel bad for her?”

Something flickered in his eyes, but it vanished so fast I almost thought I imagined it. He let out a cold laugh.

“Feel bad? Please.”

“I married her so she could feel what I felt. Why would I pity her?”

I looked up at him in disbelief.

The despair spread slowly this time, not like a knife, but like ice filling every empty place inside me.

It had all been fake.

The tenderness, the love, the promises.

I hadn’t been rescued; I’d been recruited for my own execution.

And somehow, when a person reached the very edge of breaking, sometimes that was where strength came from.

I shot to my feet and slapped him.

The crack of it rang through the room. For a second, all three of us froze.

Then Callum roared, “You slapped me? Sienna, have you lost your mind?”

I looked at him, and felt my heart go a little deader inside my chest.

“Wasn’t that the bet?” I said. “You said if I found out you cheated, I’d hit you. I did. So why are you mad?”

Then I smiled.

“But if it had been Gavin, I wouldn’t have slapped him. I wouldn’t have wanted him to get hurt.”

The color drained from his face and came back twice as dark.

He stared at me for several long seconds, then laughed, though there was nothing warm in it. “Trying to provoke me?”

“Fine. Then you can watch.”

He dragged me into the primary bedroom and threw me onto the floor.

I curled into the corner and looked toward the bed, where Callum pulled Blaire into his arms and kissed her hard.

On the floor our wedding finery was trampled underfoot, reduced to rags in the dirt.

In an instant, my mind filled with image after image.

Callum holding me through a whole sleepless night, pointing at the dark sky outside and counting stars with me until morning.

My mother striking me so hard my face swelled, screaming that I had no right to compete with Blaire over a man.

Then the grand finale—Gavin’s betrayal.

Gavin had scrambled to pull up his pants, flustered and pale. Blaire had just smiled at me, smug and lazy and cruel.

“Sorry, Sienna,” she had said. “I was bored and lonely, so I borrowed your husband for a while. Honestly? Not bad.”

Three years ago and now collapsed into the same moment.

A broken sound tore out of me before I even realized it was coming from my own throat.

My hands and legs shook so violently I could barely feel them.

Blaire let out a soft breath and looked at me with the exact same mocking smile she had worn back then.

“I was wrong on the phone,” she said. “Callum’s way better than your ex.”

Hearing that, Callum moved harder and turned to look straight at me, excitement flashing in his eyes like something sick.

“Does it hurt, Sienna?”

“Good. It’s supposed to.”

The two bodies on the bed blurred together until I could barely see them anymore. Somewhere inside myself, in a voice so quiet it hardly felt real, I thought, So no one ever really loved me.

I got to my feet and walked toward the window.

Then I turned back, smiled at him, and said, “Callum, I’m done with you.”

And I jumped.

“Sienna, no!”

Behind me, I heard Callum’s scream rip through the room as he lunged for the window.