"You'll marry him, Anastasia."
That voice.
That tone.
Like an order disguised as opportunity.
I was seventeen when they first said it.
Sitting at the dining room table in a house that had never once felt like mine. My hands were still stained with flour from baking bread with the maid, and my lips were chapped from the cold.
I blinked. "What?"
Viola…the daughter they chose, the one they claimed, the one whose name sat on every document until it was inconvenient…looked up from her tea, smirking.
"Try to look surprised. It makes you prettier."
Across the table, my adoptive father steepled his fingers, as if he were about to broker a deal…not shatter my life.
"He's not a man who needs a wife. He needs an alliance."
"He needs Viola," I whispered.
Viola laughed softly. "I refused."
I stared at her.
"You refused the man everyone in this country would kill to be near?"
"Exactly," she purred. "That's why he wanted me."
Their mother…her mother, never mine…set her teacup down with a loud clink.
"We don't have time for theatrics, Anastasia. He's agreed to the terms. You'll go in her place."
I didn't speak.
I couldn't.
Because all I heard was the subtext.
You are nothing more than her understudy. A shadow. A placeholder in lace.
"It's a temporary contract," her father said, voice calm. "He needs to appear stable. You need to secure our name. After that, you can live wherever you want."
"And if I say no?"
Viola looked up, smiling with her eyes. "Then we send you back to the orphanage we plucked you from. Remember that?"
The blood in my chest ran cold.
"You owe us," their mother added. "For the roof, the food, the education."
They said it like I'd begged to be adopted.
Like I hadn't spent every year trying not to take up too much space in a house that used my silence as currency.
"You won't have to love him," her father said.
"But you'll keep your mouth shut," her mother warned.
"And look beautiful," Viola added. "That's all you're good at anyway."
I sat there.
Still. Pale.
A girl with nothing.
Being offered everything.
And losing even more.
I never forgot what I overheard that night.
Not the forced smile on Viola's lips.
Not the cold way Damiano poured Chiara a drink like they were celebrating the sale of a house, not the destruction of a girl's future.
"She's pretty enough," Chiara had said. "Plain is fashionable these days."
"She'll do," Damiano agreed. "Quiet girls don't ruin contracts."
Viola had laughed.
God, I remember that sound.
Like silk being cut with scissors.
"She'll make a perfect wife," she said. "Because she doesn't know how to be anything else."
I had stood in the hallway, barefoot, frozen, listening to the people who raised me speak about me like I was a pair of shoes being handed down.
And then…
The most painful sentence.
"She'll never survive that house," Chiara said, almost too casually. "But that's fine. We only need her to last the year."
A silence followed.
Then Damiano's voice, low and amused.
"She'll last longer than Viola would've."
Viola had laughed again. "Because she has nothing to lose."
They were right.
I didn't.
No name.
No inheritance.
No family.
Just a paper-thin smile and a heart I was trying to keep from folding in on itself.
So I said yes.
Not because I wanted to.
But because saying no would've meant being thrown out of the only place I'd ever known…even if it had never truly belonged to me.
They handed me a dress. A script. A lie.
They painted me like porcelain, not knowing I was already cracked underneath.
And on the day of the wedding, Chiara had kissed my cheek and whispered:
> "Smile. You don't get many chances to be worth something."
That was the moment I broke.
But no one noticed.
Because I did exactly what they taught me:
Smiled.
And disappeared.
Into the ceremony.
Into the contract.
Into the silence of being someone else's solution.
The wedding was private.
No guests. No music. No photographs.
Just ink, signatures, and a name I was forced to take.
The ceremony took place in a sunless room inside the Moretti estate…a marble corridor dressed in hollow gold and cold roses that refused to bloom.
I stood there in a gown picked by Chiara, hair pulled too tightly, veil over my face like a curtain between the life I lost and the one I was being sold into.
He was late.
Of course.
When Alessandro Moretti finally walked in, the room shifted.
Not with warmth.
Not with awe.
But tension.
Tight. Wire-drawn. Almost hostile.
He didn't look at me.
He didn't greet me.
He only looked to the priest and said, "Let's get this over with."
Those were his first words to me.
I thought maybe he hadn't meant it.
That maybe he was angry at someone else. That maybe he hadn't even seen my face.
But when I turned toward him as the vows began, his eyes flicked to mine.
Hazel. Distant. Cold.
He knew exactly who he was marrying.
And he hated every second of it..
"You may kiss the bride."
He didn't.
He signed the paper. Walked out of the room. And left me standing there alone with a veil that still hadn't been lifted.
No ring.
No touch.
No name spoken.
Just a silence so loud I could feel it echo in my chest for hours.
Viola had sent a message through the staff later that day.
"Congratulations on becoming invisible in a mansion made for queens."
I slept that night in a guest room on the farthest side of the house.
No one told me where he was.
No one came to check if I'd eaten.
No one cared.
And that was when I realized…
This wasn't a marriage.
It was a sentence.
And I had no one to serve it with but myself.
It happened two months before the wedding.
Viola's cousin…Lorenzo…had come to stay for the weekend. He was older. Maybe thirty. Slick smile. Oil-slick hair. He smelled like scotch and sin and looked at me like I was a warm meal laid out just for him.
It was late. Everyone else had gone to bed. I was returning a book to the downstairs library when I felt him behind me.
"You always walk around like you belong here," he murmured. "You don't."
I didn't respond. I just turned to leave.
He stepped in my path.
"Pretty little mouth on you," he said, gaze dropping. "Do you use it for anything besides pretending you're one of us?"
I tried to move past.
He grabbed my wrist.
Tight.
Too tight.
His other hand touched my hip.
I shoved him. "Get off me."
He laughed. "Don't act like you don't want it. You wear Chiara's cast-offs and expect to be invisible? You've been begging for someone to notice."
My stomach turned.
I fought. Harder than I thought I could.
He pinned me against the bookshelf, his body pressing into mine like he had every right to.
I kneed him.
Hard.
He swore and let go.
I ran.
Straight to Chiara.
My voice trembled. My hands shook.
I told her everything.
She didn't even blink.
"Lorenzo's family," she said flatly.
"So am I."
She looked up from her mirror and applied her lipstick. "No. You're the girl we raised out of pity."
"He tried to…"
"You provoked him."
I stood there, stunned.
"You walk around like a shadow and get upset when someone notices?" she asked.
When I told Viola, she didn't even look surprised.
She just scoffed. "Lorenzo touches everything in this house. You're not special."
That night, I locked my door for the first time.
Not because I was afraid.
Because I understood.
They wouldn't protect me.
They never had.
And when they handed me off to Alessandro weeks later, they weren't giving me a future.
They were getting rid of a burden.