Chapter 1 - The Scars Under the Wedding Dress
"What the hell is this?" my husband went completely still on our wedding night, the towel frozen in his hand.
"If you married me because you felt sorry for me, then say it to my face right now. But don't stand there looking at me like I'm something that came back damaged."
Adeline's voice broke on the last word. She had both arms locked around a white hotel towel, pressing it to her chest like a shield, her back against the window of the bridal suite on the top floor of a downtown Boston hotel.
Sebastian Cole didn't move.
A few hours earlier, in front of two hundred guests, he had promised to love this woman for the rest of his life. He was the only heir to one of the most respected jewelry houses in the country. He could sit across a table from men worth nine figures and negotiate a buyout without his pulse changing. But standing in that hotel room, looking at his wife, he had no idea what to say.
He'd met her six months before, at a public hospital during a charity event his family's foundation was funding. Everyone in the room had been angling for a photo with him. His eyes had gone somewhere else entirely — to a young pediatric nurse crouched beside a frightened elderly patient, holding the woman's hand and humming something soft until the fear went out of her face.
That nurse was Adeline Ashford.
The hospital's medical director, Dr. Ronald Ashford, had introduced her with a stiff, uncomfortable smile.
"Our adopted daughter," he'd said, like he was reading it off a form. "Good heart. Always been a little difficult, though."
Standing next to him was Vivienne, Ronald's biological daughter — polished, expensively dressed, the kind of woman who had spent months making sure everyone understood that she and Sebastian were practically engaged.
Sebastian couldn't stop thinking about Adeline.
The more he learned about her, the more it didn't add up. She was smart. She was kind. And she was locked down tighter than anyone he'd ever met. Any time her family came up, her eyes dropped to the floor. Any time Ronald raised his voice, even a little, something in her shoulders went rigid.
One afternoon Sebastian showed up at the Ashford house without calling first, and he heard Ronald shouting at her in the garden.
"You'll do exactly what this family tells you to do. You'd be dead in a ditch back in Bucharest if it weren't for us. You owe us every breath you take."
Adeline said something back, quieter — something about not putting her name on falsified orders, about not wanting to be part of a crime. Ronald shut her down the instant he spotted Sebastian on the path.
After that day, Sebastian knew there was something rotten in that house.
When Vivienne found out he was seeing her sister, she came apart. The Ashfords started telling people, out loud, that Adeline was a gold digger who had thrown herself at a rich man. Sebastian's own family lined up against it too. His stepmother, Nell, made it very clear that an adopted nurse was not an "appropriate match" for a Cole.
Sebastian knew that feeling better than anyone. He'd been born from an affair his father had years before the marriage, and he'd spent his whole childhood trying to earn a warm word from a stepmother who never once looked at him like he belonged to her.
So when Adeline stood outside the hospital one rainy night and whispered, "We can't do this anymore, Sebastian. Vivienne hates me. My parents keep saying I'm going to blow this whole family apart," he took both of her shaking hands in his.
"Then build a real family with me instead."
They were married three months later.
That night, in the suite, she'd asked him to turn the lights down before she took off her dress. He'd thought it was shyness, and he'd found it sweet. He held her. He kissed her slowly. He slid his hands around to the small of her back.
His fingers ran over a thick, raised ridge of scar tissue.
He reached over and switched on the bedside lamp.
Adeline tried to twist away, tried to pull the towel up, but it was already too late. Her lower back. Her side. Her abdomen. All of it crossed with old surgical scars, the deep kind, the kind that come from being opened up more than once.
Something cold moved through him.
"Who did this to you?"
She dropped onto the edge of the bed and put her face in her hands, her shoulders heaving.
"The same people you spent all night calling my mom and dad."
May you like
What she told him next sent Sebastian out of that room with his fists clenched so hard his knuckles turned white.
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