Page 1 of The Vows He Buried
Chapter 1: The Anniversary
The makeup artist’s fingers were like ice against my cheekbones. A clinical, impersonal touch, calculated to carve the perfect contour. Like everything else in my life for the past three years, it was staged for an image, not a person. His name was Antoine, and he smelled faintly of expensive citrus and disdain. He worked with the detached precision of a mortician preparing a body for its final viewing. In a way, that’s what this was.
I sat motionless before the enormous, gilt-framed mirror in the master dressing room of the Vale mansion, a silent statue surrounded by my mother-in-law’s handpicked glam squad. They moved around me in a hushed, reverent orbit, their tools clicking and whirring softly. One woman, Giselle, adjusted a lock of honey-blonde hair, ensuring it fell with “artless” grace over my bare shoulder. Another, a young girl whose name I never bothered to learn, used tweezers to meticulously apply microscopic diamonds to the bodice of the champagne-colored couture gown I was to wear. The dress hadn’t been my choice. Neither were the diamonds. They were simply part of the uniform.
They were preparing me not for a party, but for a performance. Mrs. Maddox Vale, the perfect wife of the Vale Global CEO, on the night of her third wedding anniversary. A porcelain doll being polished for display in a gilded dollhouse. The air was thick with the cloying scent of gardenia perfume—Evelyn’s signature, a scent that had come to represent surveillance and disapproval.
“Perfect,” Giselle murmured, her voice a low hum of satisfaction as she stepped back to admire her work.
Perfect.The word was a razor blade against my eardrums. Perfect was a lie. Perfect was the gilded cage. I remembered Maddox whispering it against my ear on our wedding night, his voice thick with something I’d mistaken for passion. “You are perfect, Savannah,” he’d said, his hands tracing the outline of the obscenely expensive dress Evelyn had chosen. It wasn’t a compliment; it was a statement of acquisition. He had acquired the perfect asset.
Three years. One thousand and ninety-five days of being Mrs. Vale. It felt like a century buried alive under layers of silk and poisonous whispers. They polished the cage, but no one ever asked if the bird inside still knew how to sing. I no longer sang. I no longer even chirped. I was silent.
I stared at my reflection, a stranger in my own skin. My blue eyes, once sparkling with the chaotic energy of a summer lake, were now flat, opaque pools of deep water. They had tried to extinguish every flame within them, and for a long time, I’d let them. The woman staring back was a masterpiece of their creation: elegant, serene, and utterly hollow. Her posture was impeccable, her expression placid. She was beautiful. She was breakable. She was a fraud.
My mind drifted back, a painful, involuntary reflex, to a life that felt like it belonged to someone else. I had loved Maddox once. A wild, desperate, all-consuming kind of love. I loved the rare, unguarded curve of his smile, the way his brow would furrow when he was lost in a contract, the way he’d pull me against him in his sleep, as if I were the only anchor keeping him from drifting away into a sea of corporate warfare and familialexpectations. I had seen a flicker of a man drowning under the weight of his name, and I had foolishly believed my love could be his life raft. I had believed I could thaw his frozen heart, that I could be the one to save him from his mother’s suffocating grip and the ghosts of the Vale dynasty.
For that love, I had surrendered everything. Piece by piece, they had stripped me bare. The dream of a small atelier in Florence, a sun-drenched space with rough-hewn wooden tables and windows thrown open to the Tuscan hills. I could almost feel the phantom weight of a charcoal pencil in my hand, the satisfying scratch of it on thick paper as I brought a design to life. I had packed away the real me, Savannah Blake—the ambitious designer, the woman with ink-stained fingers and a fire in her belly—to become Mrs. Vale, an accessory. A beautiful, silent partner whose only job was to look good on her husband’s arm and never, ever cause a scene.
It was too high a price for a love that was never truly mine to keep.
The swell of orchestral jazz from the grand ballroom below drifted up, a signal that the performance was about to begin. Evelyn’s army quietly retreated, their job done. They left me alone in the suffocating silence, their lingering scents of hairspray and perfume mingling with the ever-present gardenia. I rose, the silk of the gown whispering against the cold marble floor. Every movement was deliberate. Tonight, every action had a purpose.
I walked out of the dressing room, my bare feet silent on the plush runner of the vast hallway. The walls were lined with oil portraits of Vale ancestors, their stern, painted eyes following me, judging me. There was Hezekiah Vale, the 19th-centuryrailroad tycoon with eyes like chips of granite. I saw the same ruthless glint in Evelyn. There was Alistair Vale, who had driven his competitor to suicide during the Great Depression. I saw his cold ambition in Maddox. I used to fear them, used to feel their silent pressure to be worthy of the name. Tonight, I felt nothing but a cold, clear void. They were just dead men on a wall, architects of the prison I inhabited.
From the second-floor balustrade, a sweeping curve of marble that overlooked the cavernous ballroom, I looked down upon the sea of bodies below. The glittering faces of New York’s elite—a kaleidoscope of fake smiles, air kisses, and vapid conversations revolving around power, money, and influence. The noise was a dull roar, the clinking of champagne flutes a constant, brittle chime.
And then I saw him.
Maddox. My husband. He stood there, tall and formidable in a perfectly tailored Tom Ford suit, a king in his kingdom. His dark hair was impeccably styled, his jaw set with the easy confidence of a man who owned every room he entered. But he wasn't alone.
Beside him stood Sienna Ward. My best friend. My maid of honor. The woman who had sworn to always have my back. She was radiant in a crimson dress that clung to her curves, a stark, passionate contrast to my pale champagne. She was everything I wasn’t: vibrant, loud, alive. She had comforted me through every cold shoulder from Maddox, her hand on my arm, her voice a sympathetic murmur. “He’s just under a lot of pressure, Vannah,” she’d say. “He loves you.” All the while, she was living in this very house, a viper I had welcomed into my nest.
She was laughing, a bright, tinkling sound directed entirely at Maddox. And then, when she thought no one was looking, in a small alcove of shadow behind a marble pillar, Maddox’s hand moved. It wasn’t a grab or a touch; it was a slow, possessive slide of his fingers over the back of her hand. A gesture so small, so intimate, yet it screamed a truth louder than any confession. It wasn’t a fleeting touch. It was familiar. It was ownership. His thumb stroked her skin once, a gesture of absolute, unconscious intimacy.
The roar of the party faded to a distant hum. The world narrowed to that single, damning point of contact.
A shard of ice slid down my spine, but it wasn’t the familiar ache of a breaking heart. My heart had been shattered long ago, ground into dust under the heel of this marriage. This was something else. This was the final confirmation. The last shovelful of dirt on the grave of what we once were. This was the cold, hard clarity of truth.
I retreated from the railing, melting back into the shadows of the corridor and returning to the dressing room. The space now felt less like a sanctuary and more like a cell. I faced the mirror again, taking in the woman they had built—the woman with the empty eyes, the perfectly painted red lips, and the soul worn down to a smooth, hard stone. The perfect façade.
But beneath that placid surface, a flicker of heat was finally stirring. The ice in my veins began to crack. It wasn’t the warmth of love, but the white-hot flame of rage. Of resolve. A rage so pure and so potent it felt like coming alive again.
They had buried me. They had taken my name, my dreams, and something far more precious that they never even knew existed. They thought they had won. They thought I was broken.
They were wrong. You can’t break something that has already been turned to dust. You can only watch as the wind picks it up and reshapes it into a storm.
The perfect wife was an illusion. A ghost they had created. And ghosts, I thought with a chilling clarity, had a way of coming back to haunt you.
I looked deep into my own eyes in the mirror, and for the first time in three years, I saw a flicker of the old Savannah Blake. The fighter. A silent vow passed between the woman I was and the woman I was about to become. My spine straightened. My chin lifted. The hollow doll was gone, and in her place stood a queen surveying the ruins of her kingdom, preparing for war.
“Tonight,” I whispered to my reflection, my voice a cold breath in the still, opulent air, no longer a victim’s sigh but a predator’s promise. “I end this.”
Chapter 2: The Dollhouse
The rage that had ignited in the dressing room didn't burn wildly. It settled deep in my bones, a cold, dense star of fury, pulling all the broken pieces of me into a new, terrible gravity. The reflection in the mirror was no longer a stranger; she was an ally. An instrument. We were in this together.
My feet carried me away from the grand balustrade, not back to the party, but deeper into the mansion’s heart of darkness. I moved through the silent, shadowed hallways of the family wing, a ghost in my own home. This house wasn’t a home; it was a museum, and I was its most lifeless exhibit. The Dollhouse. Evelyn had called it that once, in a moment of unguarded pride, gesturing to the sprawling estate. “Every piece perfectly placed.” She had been looking right at me when she said it.
