We married on a Thursday, in a judge's chambers, in eleven minutes.

I wore grey. Roman wore black. There were two witnesses — his lawyer and mine — and a ring that fit like it had been sized off a photograph, which, I would later learn, it had.

“You may kiss,” the judge said, bored.

“That won't be necessary,” I said.

Roman's mouth twitched. “She's shy,” he told the judge, and took my hand instead, and the judge sighed at the modern age.

His hand was warm and dry and steady, and I hated that I noticed. I had married for love once, in a cathedral, in a dress that cost more than my father's first fund raised in its first month. That marriage was a fraud dressed as a fairy tale.

This one was a fairy tale's opposite — honest about being a weapon — and somehow it felt less like a lie than the first.

The public appearance was a different animal.

You do not marry Roman Thorne quietly. You do it on the steps of the opera, on a night the whole financial world is watching, with photographers stacked three deep, because the point is not the marriage.

The point is the message.

And the message reached Rhys Ashford in about ninety seconds.

I know, because I watched it land. We arrived at the gala arm in arm — the same social circuit, the same predators in the same tuxedos — and across the room I saw my husband, my soon-to-be-ex husband, register that the woman he'd branded a cheating nobody had married his oldest enemy before the ink on his own filing had dried.

His face did something I will treasure until I die.

There is a specific expression a controlling man makes when a variable he thought he'd nailed down gets up and walks across the board on its own. A flicker of pure disbelief, chased by fury, chased by frantic recalculation.

I'd seen it on losing traders a hundred times.

I had never seen it on my husband.

It suited him.

Bianca went the color of her dress.

“You're enjoying this,” Roman murmured, his hand warm at the small of my back.

“Is it that obvious.”

“Only to me.” His thumb moved, once, a small circle against the silk. It was for the cameras. It had to be for the cameras. “Keep smiling. Let them wonder how long it's been going on.”

“How long has it been going on?”

“Since a message board, six years ago.” He said it lightly, but he didn't look at me when he said it, and something in my chest turned over in a way I chose not to examine.

Here is the thing about pretending to be adored by a dangerous man.

It is very easy to forget you are pretending.

He handed me champagne I didn't drink. He laughed at things I said as if they were the wittiest things ever said. When a photographer called my new name — Mrs. Thorne, over here — he leaned in and murmured something filthy about the man's tie into my ear just to make me laugh for real, and the picture that ran the next morning made three continents believe in love.

It wasn't real. I knew it wasn't real.

So why did I keep having to remind myself.

“Dance with me,” he said, and it wasn't the cameras, there were no cameras on the terrace, and I said yes anyway.

We didn't talk about the model. We didn't talk about Rhys. He held me at a proper, cold distance that somehow felt like standing too near a fire, and he said, quietly, “You didn't shatter. At the gala. Everyone was waiting for it and you lifted your glass instead.”

“You were watching me at the gala.”

“I've been watching you longer than that.” A pause. “It's the bravest thing I've ever seen a person do in a ballroom.”

And I, who had armor for insults and armor for lies, had no armor at all for being seen, and I felt it go straight through the seam of me.

“Evie.” A different voice. Cold.

Rhys had found the terrace.

“Give us a minute,” he said to Roman — to Roman Thorne, in that lord-of-the-manor tone — and to my surprise Roman studied me, read whatever was in my face, and stepped back.

“One minute,” Roman said. “I'll be watching the clock.” And he was gone into the light, and I was alone with my husband for the last time.

“You've made a mistake,” Rhys said.

“I've made several. I married the first one at twenty-three.”

He smiled, and it was the smile that used to charm boardrooms, and I felt nothing but the cold clean nothing of a market that has finally corrected.

“You think Thorne cares about you?” he said softly. “He cares about the model. Same as I did. The only difference is he found out what I've known for years.”

“And what's that.”

Rhys leaned in. Champagne and something rotten underneath.

“I always knew you were Cassandra,” he said.

The terrace stopped. The music, the city, my own heart — all of it, for one long second, simply stopped.

“Since before I proposed. I read the boards, Evie. I read those seven posts and I knew whoever wrote them would be worth a fortune to the man who owned her. So I found her. I courted her. I married her.” His eyes glittered. “I didn't fall in love with a girl. I acquired an asset. The model, the mind, the maiden name that would never think to protect itself. All of it. For five years I've owned Cassandra and she brought me my coffee and never once knew what she was.”

I could not breathe. Five years. Every anniversary. Every I love you. A transaction I had mistaken for a life.

I thought of our first date, the little Italian place he'd pretended to stumble on by accident. He'd researched it. He'd researched me. He'd read seven posts by an anonymous girl and gone shopping for the woman behind them and I had thought — God, I had thought I was lucky.

Every tender moment of my marriage rearranged itself in real time into a series of business decisions, and I stood on that terrace and watched my own past turn to ash.

“It doesn't matter now,” I managed. “I'm leaving. The model comes with me.”

“Does it?” And there it was — the thing he'd come to the terrace to say, the reason he was smiling. “Read clause twenty-two, sweetheart. The kill-switch. If you file for divorce first — if you're the one who walks — the model's IP defaults to me. Permanently. Vests to Ashford Capital at midnight tomorrow, the moment your petition is docketed.” He straightened his cuffs. “And you already filed this afternoon. Didn't you.”

I had. Roman's lawyers had. Hours ago.

“So run,” Rhys said. “Marry your shark. Play your little revenge. By this time tomorrow the one thing that makes you worth anything to anyone will be legally, permanently mine — and you'll be exactly what everyone always thought you were. The wife I threw away.”

The floor of the world dropped out. Three thoughts fell through the hole at once — the clause, the clock, the five stolen years — and I could not catch a single one.

I opened my mouth to say something, anything, to not let him have the last word —

And a hand closed hard around my arm from behind.