My Arrogant Husband Destroyed My Reputation — And Then I Found Out Why
Part 2
The wedding was a ghost story.
There were no flowers, no string quartets, and no weeping relatives to bid me farewell.
At ten the following morning, I walked down the echoing, empty aisle of the parish church wearing a somber dove-gray traveling gown.
When the vicar instructed us to join hands, Dan’s grip was firm and warm, a stark contrast to the freezing terror settling deep in my bones.
He slid a massive square-cut sapphire ring onto my finger, the stones heavy as a shackle.
“I pronounce you man and wife,” the vicar echoed into the cavernous space.
My new husband did not pull me into a passionate embrace.
Instead, he leaned down and pressed a slow, deliberate kiss to my cheek that burned my skin like dry ice.
Within the hour, I was packed into his black crest-emblazoned carriage, leaving London and my family far behind.
We were bound for his notoriously isolated fortress perched on the jagged, windswept cliffs of the coast.
The journey took four agonizing days.
Inside the carriage, the tension was thick enough to choke on.
Dan was flawlessly polite, yet completely impenetrable.
He read his parliamentary dispatches, ordered the best meals at the coaching inns, and ensured I was draped in furs against the chill.
Yet, the Duke hardly spoke a word to me.
Having gone to terrifying, socially ruinous lengths to trap me into this marriage, he now treated me like a fragile, expensive porcelain vase.
On the fourth evening, the carriage rumbled over a stone drawbridge.
I looked out the window and gasped at the monstrous, salt-stained castle looming over the churning ocean.
For the next three weeks, a bizarre psychological warfare continued.
Dan was a phantom in his own home.
He provided me with a limitless allowance, a massive staff, and complete dominion over the estate, but he never touched me.
The sheer confusion of it began to drive me mad.
Why destroy my life, drag me to the end of the earth, only to ignore me entirely?
One rainy Tuesday, my frustration reached a boiling point.
The Duke had ridden out, and I found myself pacing the echoing corridors until I stopped outside the heavy oak doors of his private library.
Defiance flared in my chest.
I was his Duchess, and this was my house too.
Turning the brass handle, I slipped inside the magnificent room smelling of old paper, leather, and his signature bergamot.
I approached his massive mahogany desk, my eyes catching on a stack of correspondence held down by a brass paperweight.
The top letter was an unsealed report from a private inquiry agent detailing Brian’s plot to abduct my sister Brenda on the night of the masquerade.
My breath hitched.
Dan hadn’t just orchestrated the scandal to trap me, he had intentionally intercepted me to save Brenda from a violent abduction.
Scrambling through the rest of the papers, I found a small, velvet-bound sketchbook hidden at the bottom of the pile.
I opened it, and the breath was knocked entirely out of my lungs.
Every single page was filled with charcoal sketches of me.
Me at the opera three years ago, me walking in the park, me laughing at a ball he hadn’t even been invited to.
The margins were filled with his harsh handwriting, detailing a devastating, obsessive chronicle of a man who had been watching me from the shadows for years.
He hadn’t ruined me out of cruelty, but what was I supposed to do now that I held the terrifying truth of his obsession?
