His Irresistible Obsession

Bella

I've spent my whole life being told which parts of me need fixing. Today it's my waist, cinched so tight into a $12,000 dress that I can't take a full breath, like even on my wedding day my body is a problem someone else gets to solve.

St. Victoria Cathedral is full. Three hundred guests, all watching me walk toward a man I've known for four months and never once wanted to kiss.

"Almost there, sweetheart," my father says, squeezing my arm.

"Dad." I keep my voice low. "Tell me again why this is happening so fast."

"Because Preston's a good match. Because it's time." He doesn't look at me. He hasn't looked at me directly in weeks, not since he sat me down and told me I was marrying a man I'd met twice.

I don't believe him. Three nights ago I found paperwork on his desk, numbers so large I read them twice, and a name signed at the bottom that made my skin go cold before my mind could tell me why. De Luca. I know that name. I just can't remember where… only that thinking about it feels like pressing on a bruise I don't remember getting.

At my throat is a locket that isn't mine. I found it in my mother's things after she died, an initial engraved inside the clasp that isn't my father's, a small rose worked into the metal around it that I've never been able to place. I don't know why I wore it today, under the collar of the dress where no one's supposed to see it. It felt wrong to leave it behind, like it was the one true thing I owned in a day built entirely out of things that weren't.

We reach the altar. Preston takes my hand like he's accepting a delivery.

"You look beautiful," he says, in the voice he uses for cameras.

The priest starts speaking. I stop listening around the second sentence, my whole body gone tight with something between dread and relief, like I'm waiting for someone to stop this before I have to say words I don't mean.

The cathedral doors slam open.

He's tall, dark suit, no tie, three men behind him dressed the same, unbothered that they're interrupting a wedding in front of half of Ravencrest's elite.

"Stop the ceremony."

His voice doesn't rise. It doesn't need to. The whole cathedral goes silent around it.

"Who the hell are you?" Preston's voice cracks.

"Nicolo De Luca." He walks down the aisle like he owns the cathedral, like he owns the city, like he owns everyone frozen in these pews. "And you're marrying a woman who doesn't belong to you."

My father's face drains of color. "Mr. De Luca, we had an agreement…"

"You had a debt." Nicolo stops at the altar, close enough that I can see his eyes are a gray I've never seen on a person, cold and sharp and then they drop, just for a moment, to my throat.

Something shifts in his face. It isn't a calculation this time, it's closer to recognition, sudden and unwelcome, a man seeing something he didn't expect to find in a room he thought he understood completely. It's there and gone so fast that if I weren't already watching him this closely, I'd have missed it.

"Two million dollars, Mr. Harrison," he says, and his voice has recovered its edge, but his eyes haven't fully left me. "Due three days ago and instead of paying it, you tried to marry your daughter off to cover the difference, with money that was never yours to promise."

"That's not…"

"Don't." One word, and my father actually stops, actual fear on his face.

"I don't have two million dollars," Harrison says.

"No." Nicolo's gaze comes back to my throat again, quick, deliberate, like he's confirming something he needs to be certain of before he says his next sentence. 

"But you have something that settles this in an entirely different currency."

"You can't be serious." Preston finds his voice thin and useless. "She's marrying me."

"She was, five minutes ago." Nicolo doesn't even look at him.

He steps closer to the altar, closer to me, and up close he's overwhelming…broad-shouldered, unshaken but the way he's studying me now isn't the way a man studies a woman he's decided to claim as payment. It's the way someone studies a piece of a puzzle they didn't expect to find in a place like this, turning it over, trying to see how many other pieces it connects to.

"Isabella Harrison." He says my full name slowly, like he's testing whether I match something he already knows. 

"Your father owes me two million dollars, and I'm willing to consider it paid, if you come with me right now."

"You're asking me to marry a stranger to cover my father's debt."

"I'm not asking you to marry anyone yet." Something flickers behind his eyes that isn't amusement, not quite…something closer to a decision being made faster than he's used to making them. "I'm telling you you're leaving with me today, what happens after that is up to you."

"Bella, don't." Preston grabs my wrist, the first time all day he's touched me like he cares whether I stay or go. "You don't have to do anything this man says."

Nicolo's gaze drops to Preston's hand on my wrist, and something in his expression goes so cold, so immediate, that Preston lets go before Nicolo says a word.

"Touch her again," Nicolo says quietly, "and it will be the last thing you do with that hand."

Three hundred guests and nobody moves.

I look at my father, who won't meet my eyes. I look at Preston, already stepping back. Then I look at Nicolo De Luca, a stranger offering me his hand in the middle of my own wedding, his eyes not on my face at all now but on the collar of my dress, on the small shape underneath it he clearly already knows is there.

"And if I say no?"

"Then your father's debt stands," he says. "And I'll collect it in a different way. One that won't involve you at all." A pause, and something almost gentler underneath the warning. 

"But I don't think that's the choice you want to make…not once you understand what you're actually wearing around your neck."

I don't know exactly what that means. I only know my hand goes to my collarbone without my permission, fingers brushing the outline of the locket through the fabric, and that his eyes follow the movement like he's been waiting all day for me to do exactly that.

I take his hand before I let myself think too hard about why.