CHAPTER 5: The Mark

Lena.

"I'll deal with it myself," I said.

Julian's eyes stayed on me for a long moment, unreadable in that way that had already started to feel familiar, a locked door I hadn't found the key to yet. Then he nodded once and moved toward the elevator like the decision had never been in question.

"You're coming with me?" I asked.

"I'm coming down. What happens in that lobby is your choice." He pressed the button. "But I don't leave a mess in my own building for someone else to clean up."

The elevator dropped thirty floors in silence. I studied our reflection in the polished doors, his crisp black suit and my wrinkled dress from yesterday, the only clothes I owned in this life. I looked like a woman playing a part she hadn't rehearsed for. I supposed, in a way, I was.

I heard Cassie before I saw her.

"I don't care whose wife she is, I want to see her right now."

Her voice carried across the marble lobby, sharp and entitled, the same voice that had introduced me to her friends as a girl who "really commits to the role." Two security guards stood between her and the elevator bank, and she was dressed for war, hair pulled back tight, mascara smudged like she'd been crying and was furious about it.

Julian's hand found the small of my back, not affectionate, just steady, the way you'd brace a door before opening it into wind. "Say the word and she's gone."

"I want to hear what she has to say."

He studied me for a beat, then dropped his hand and stepped back, close enough to watch, far enough to let it be mine.

Cassie's eyes locked onto me and something in her face cracked open. "You," she breathed. "You actually did it. You actually married him."

"Cassie." I kept my voice even, though my pulse hammered. "What are you doing here?"

"What am I doing here?" Her laugh was brittle, dangerous. "I'm here because my life fell apart in one night and somehow you ended up married to a billionaire. Do you have any idea what people are saying about me? Liam left me in front of two hundred people, and now everyone's asking why the family's other daughter is suddenly Mrs. Blackwood."

"That's not something I did to you."

"Everything is something you did to me." She took a step closer, and one of the guards moved with her, a hand hovering near her elbow. "You've been jealous of me your entire life. The maid's daughter, pretending to be one of us. And the second I stumble, you slither into my spot."

"I didn't ask for this," I said quietly. "You know I didn't. I was leaving. I had a bus ticket. I had a job. I wanted nothing to do with any of you, and then Dad and Bridget sold me to save the company neither of us will ever see a cent from."

For a moment, something flickered in her expression, something almost like recognition. Then it hardened again.

"Poor Lena," she said. "Always the victim. Always so quiet and suffering while the rest of us are the monsters." Her hands curled into fists at her sides. "You have no idea what it's like to be me. To have a mother who compares you to her dead best friend's daughter every single day of your life."

"I never asked to be compared to anyone."

"You didn't have to ask." Her voice cracked, and for a second I almost felt sorry for her, almost remembered the girl who used to braid my hair before our mothers taught us both how to hate. "You just existed. And that was enough."

"Cassie." Julian's voice cut through the space between us, low and final. "This conversation is over."

She rounded on him like she'd forgotten he was standing there. "This isn't your business, Mr. Blackwood."

"She is my wife. That makes it exactly my business."

"Your wife." Cassie spat the word like it tasted wrong. "She's a servant playing dress-up in your penthouse. Ask her what she used to do in our house. Ask her what she was actually good for."

"I know what she's good for." His tone didn't rise, didn't change, but something in it turned colder, harder, like ice compacting under pressure. "I know she negotiated a contract that protected her mother's garden before she protected herself. I know she stood in a room with two people who'd spent twelve years telling her she was worthless and still walked out with her spine straight. I don't need you to tell me what she's good for."

I stared at him. It was the most words he had strung together about me since the wedding, and none of them had been meant as a compliment to my face, they had been meant as a wall between me and her, and somehow that felt like more.

Cassie's composure finally shattered. "You don't know her. Nobody knows her. She's spent her whole life making herself small so nobody would look too closely, and now she's playing house with your money like she actually belongs here."

"Cassie, please." My voice wavered despite myself. "Just go home."

"Home." She laughed, high and cracked. "There is no home. Mom's been crying in her room for two days because Liam humiliated her daughter, and you're standing here in a diamond ring like none of it touched you."

"It touched me plenty," I said. "You just never noticed, because you never looked."

That was the moment she moved.

Her hand caught me across the cheek before either guard could close the distance, a hard, open-palmed crack that snapped my head sideways and lit my face with sudden white heat. The sound of it rang off the marble.

For one suspended second, nobody moved. Then everyone moved at once.

The guards seized Cassie's arms, hauling her back as she screamed something I couldn't process through the ringing in my ear. Julian was in front of me before I'd even finished turning my head back, his hand rising toward my face and then stopping just short of touching it, like he'd caught himself.

"Don't touch her again," he said to Cassie, and his voice had gone somewhere I hadn't heard it go before, low and flat and absolutely without mercy. "You have exactly one warning left in this lifetime, and you just used it."

"Let go of me," Cassie snarled at the guards, but her bravado had thinned into something closer to fear. "Let go, this is assault, you can't just manhandle me."

"You struck my wife in my building," Julian said. "Be grateful I'm only having you removed."

The guards walked her toward the doors. She twisted once to look back at me, and for a fraction of a second the fury on her face gave way to something rawer, something almost like grief, before the glass doors swallowed her and she was gone.

The lobby went quiet except for the low murmur of the front desk staff pretending they hadn't watched the entire thing.

"Let me see." Julian's voice was quieter now, rougher at the edges.

"I'm fine."

"Lena." My name, not Mrs. Blackwood, not a title. Just my name, said like he needed me to stop performing for one second. "Let me see."

I lifted my chin. His fingers came to my jaw, careful, clinical, tilting my face toward the light, and I watched something pass behind his grey eyes as he took in the mark blooming red across my cheekbone.

"She's hit you before," he said. It wasn't a question.

"It's not the first time," I admitted, because there didn't seem to be a version of this conversation where I could lie and have it matter.

His thumb brushed, just barely, along the edge of the mark, and then his gaze dropped, unbidden, to my hands, which I'd folded in front of me out of old habit. He reached out and turned one over before I could stop him, his fingers tracing the thin white scars that criss-crossed my knuckles, the burn mark near my wrist from a curling iron Bridget had once used on me instead of her own hair.

"What happened here?" His voice had lost its edge entirely.

I pulled my hand back, tucking it against my side. "Twelve years of being useful," I said, and even I could hear how hollow the joke landed. "It's not important."

His jaw tightened, a muscle working there like he was chewing on something he wasn't ready to say. "Go upstairs," he said finally. "Mrs. Billy will have ice for that."

I turned toward the elevator, my cheek throbbing in time with my pulse, and I didn't look back to see what was written on his face. I already suspected I wouldn't have understood it if I had.