"You can survive this," I tell her, tell myself. "Whatever happens, you can survive it."
But I'm not sure I believe it.
Somewhere in the city, in his hotel room, is Sean. Is he sleeping? Is he dreading tomorrow as much as I am? Or is he simply indifferent, viewing it as just another job to complete?
I'll know soon enough. Tomorrow, I'll stand beside him at the altar. Tomorrow, I'll say vows I don't mean to a man who doesn't want me. Tomorrow, my life will change irrevocably.
And there's nothing I can do to stop it.
I finish my tea and go back upstairs. Fluff is sprawled across my pillow, and I carefully move her aside before crawling back under the covers. The clock ticks on. The house settles around me. And I lie in the dark, watching the shadows, waiting for a dawn I'm dreading.
Waiting for my wedding day.
5
SEAN
The hotel room is too quiet. Too sterile. Too fucking empty.
I stand at the window of the Langham, looking out over Boston's harbor, and try not to think about the fact that in twelve hours I'll be married to a girl I met once. A girl whose terrified eyes have been haunting me since I walked out of her house twenty minutes after meeting her for the first time.
A girl I'm being forced to marry because I couldn't detonate a bomb with a woman and child in the car.
The irony would be funny if it wasn't my life.
My phone buzzes. Flynn, asking how I’m holding up. I ignore it. I've been ignoring most of his calls since I arrived in Boston. I'm not in the mood to discuss… well, anything at all. Not in the mood for his jokes about finally settling down or his curiosity about what the girl looks like.
Beautiful. She's beautiful. That's what she looks like.
And she's terrified of me.
I should feel more than I do about that. Idofeel more, actually, but I keep shoving it down, because if I let myself think about what’s really happening, what I’m being told to do,I’ll either tell Connor McBride to go fuck himself or spend the rest of the day in my hotel room trying to exorcise the dark, hungry desire that I feel every time I think too long about Maeve Connelly.
I’ve been trying not to. Trying to ignore my body’s reaction to her. I’ve never needed to curb that kind of thing before. Jerking off has always been a means to an end, a bodily need like eating or drinking, a release so I can focus on everything else that requires my attention, so that I survive my job. Now, it feels like a desperate, aching need. I couldn’t stop myself when I came back from that fucking godawful counseling session, my entire body throbbing from the moment that damned priest started talking about sex with my future bride right next to me. I had half an erection sitting in a priest’s office, and that’s sure as fuck not something I ever expected.
Compassion, empathy, guilt… those are all emotions I’ve learned to turn off. They're luxuries I can't afford in my line of work—made clear by the fact that the one time I gave in to them, I ended up in this fucking situation. So since then, since I was handed Maeve’s file, I’ve been doing my damnedest to turn them off.
Except they keep surfacing anyway, every time I think about her pale face and trembling hands.
Fuck.
Thinking about that stupid fucking counseling session still pisses me off. As if sitting in a church office and lying to a priest will somehow make this forced marriage more legitimate. I hated that fucking priest for going along with this. For sitting there and listening to the bullshit excuse for answers he got, and not calling this whole thing off.
And then what?He’s a friend of the family, apparently, so he’s probably just trying to see Maeve through this. If he didn’t, they’d find someone else. Somewhere in Boston, there’s a priestcorrupt enough to take this on without question, especially if Connor lined his pockets. I’m sure of that.
I had to force myself not to stare at Maeve the entire time I was sitting there. Not to look at her frail frame and think of things that make me ashamed beyond measure.
She looked like a bird ready to take flight, the entire time we were sitting there in that ridiculous meeting. Too delicate, too young for what's about to happen to her.
Sitting next to her felt like torture. I could smell the soft florals of her perfume. See the way she twisted her fingers together over and over in her lap until I thought for sure she was going to give herself blisters. I listened to the priest ask me questions about marriage and family and faith and sex that surely,surelyhe knew he wasn’t going to like the answers to, and wondered what Maeve was thinking the entire time, as the priest asked me what kind of husband I planned to be to her.
What kind of husband? The kind who was ordered to marry her. The kind who kills people for a living. The kind who's going to share her bed tomorrow night, whether she wants me there or not.
But I couldn’t say that, so I gave him the sanitized version: "The kind who keeps her alive. That's what I was sent here to do."
It wasn’t a lie. That is what the Council sent me to do. Marry her, control her assets, keep her safe so those assets stay in the Council's orbit. Everything else is secondary. Truthfully, plenty of people in the world should fear me, but Maeve isn’t one of them, at least not when it comes to her personal safety.
In terms of what it will mean to be married to me… if I were her, I imagine I’d be terrified too, though it’s nearly impossible to put myself in the shoes of an eighteen-year-old orphaned heiress.
