Vows to My Enemy

I didn't choose him. I chose to survive him.

My father sold me to end a war. Three weeks to plan a wedding. Zero say in who I'd marry. The price of peace between two families who've spent twenty years burying each other's men — and I'm the blood that's supposed to seal it shut.

Dante Cesari is everything I was raised to fear. Cold. Controlled. Precise in a way that makes violence look like arithmetic. He didn't want a wife. He wanted access — a way inside the one house he could never touch, chasing a truth about his brother's death that leads straight back to my family's front door.

We made a deal instead of a marriage. No love. No lies we didn't need. Just two people using each other to survive a war neither of us started.

Except he keeps looking at me like I'm not a bargaining chip. Like I'm a person worth protecting instead of a name worth trading. And somewhere between the ledgers, the lies, and the blood neither of us can wash off our hands, I stopped calculating my way out of this marriage — and started fighting to keep it.

But the enemy who wants us both dead isn't finished. And the truth we're both hiding might cost us everything we've built to survive each other.

I said "I do" to my enemy. I never expected to mean it.