Page 39 of Corrupted Union

She looked back at the ring, her head shaking in disbelief. “No. You’re lying. I would never have married you. It never happened.” Her words were a blade slicing through all but the very last thread of my control.

“Oh yeah? Then tell me how I got these?” I pulled up the camera roll on my phone and displayed an image of me with Rowan, her grinning ecstatically while holding a small bouquet of fresh flowers and displaying her new tattoo for the camera.

She jumped to her feet and snatched the phone from my hand. One by one, she scrolled through my record of the past twenty-four hours. Our arrival at the small chapel. Our kiss. Her grinning through the pain of her tattoo. Us dancing at a nightclub decked out in celebratory decorations. It had taken me a couple of days to put it all together, but the night had gone off without a hitch. Granted, she’d been high as a kite, and the paperwork was all forged, but none of that mattered. My objective had been to make sure the world knew Rowan and I were married, and now they did.

“How? How could you do this without telling me first?” She looked up, eyes glassy. “How could you?” she screamed, then threw my phone at me.

I ducked on instinct and grimaced when I heard the thing crash against the wall behind me. “I did it for exactly this reason,” I roared back at her. “I knew … you … this wouldn’t … JesusChrist!” I roared, turning around to try to regain my composure.

It pissed me off even more that I was upset because the words seemed to get lost on their way from my head to my mouth. It had always been that way. I’d learned to manage it by keeping calm, but fuck if Rowan didn’t make me feel like a stuttering kid again.

“If you knew I wouldn’t agree, that should have been a sign not to do it.”

I turned back around and forced my words to come slow and steady. “So I’m allowed to fuck you, but I’m not good enough to stand beside you? Is that how this works?”

She flinched. “No, I…I had plans.”

“Yeah, I know your plans. Marry some panty-waste socialite who probably has a secret fetish for little boys and work for Daddy’s campaign while doing charity work on the side. Maybe have two-point-five kids and drink away your misery every night. That’s one hell of a plan.”

“You presumptive, condescendingasshole. You don’t know anything.”

“Well, I know that your father agreed with me that a marriage was the best way to protect you.” That’s right, princess. Your daddy knew.

Her face went so white, I was surprised she didn’t pass out. “He knows?”

All the oxygen seemed to leak from the room.

“I told him that day I took you home when he and I talked privately. I didn’t exactly spell out how it would all go down, but he knew the goal.”

Her eyes cut to the side a split second before she bolted for the bathroom, slamming the door behind her and locking it. Had it been anyone else, I would have written off the outburst as normal. People got upset and lashed out. I would have given her some time to cool off and hoped we could discuss things rationally later.

But this was Rowan.

She didn’t do emotions like other people. My instincts were screaming at me that something was horribly wrong, but I had no idea what.

I lifted my gaze to the vaulted ceiling, breathing deeply before sitting down on the edge of the bed. I didn’t feel right leaving her, so I resigned myself to wait. I didn’t have to wait long. Minutes later, her scream and the crash of shattering glass had me shooting to my feet.

I leanedmy back against the bathroom door, my breaths coming in such rapid bursts I was growing lightheaded. But the universe had no plans to let me escape from reality. Escape from myself.

Directly across from me was a large circular mirror in a gold frame, and within it was a set of eyes staring back at me with such innocence and heartbreak, I felt my own heart incinerate into a pile of ash at my feet. Tears ran like rivers down my cheeks.

“I didn’t mean for it to happen,” I whispered to the girl in the mirror, inching closer. “I’m so …” A sob hitched in my throat. “I’m so sorry.”

Her arms reached out for me, and for the cruelest second, I almost believed she was with me. That I could reach through the glass and finally hold the other half of my heart.

She wept for me just as helplessly as I cried for her.

Same heartbreak, different reasons. She hated to see me in pain, and my heart shattered to know I’d never get her back.

The desire was so intense that I kept moving forward, desperate to reach her. Except, when my fingertips finally made contact, I was met with cold, hard reality. She was gone, and the only person left was a sad, pathetic replica who couldn’t do anything right.

“No,” I cried. “Please, come back.Please.” I pressed my palm flat against the mirror as wave after wave of crushing sorrow battered me from the inside. “I don’t want to be here without you. Please.”

The unfairness was so cruel. So pointless and arbitrary. I couldn’t take it any longer. I didn’t want to.

My face crumpled with the weight of the crushing expectations and my monumental failures. My chest heaved with a quaking breath as I pulled back my fist and let it slam into the sadistic mirage of a life I’d never get back, letting loose a scream filled with every suffocating, heart-wrenching emotion festering deep inside me.

I barreledinto the door with enough force to take it clean off the hinges. I wasn’t wasting time convincing Rowan to let me in. Not after hearing such soul-crushing agony in her cry.

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