The suit clung to me like a second skin, the white shirt buttoned up to my throat, strangling me as I stood in my step brother’s place.

My father sat at the head of the room, fury simmering beneath his expression.

I knew what they were thinking.

I was nothing to these people. An act in my father’s past that he had long since forgotten. He had his real family, his real son. He had my step-brother.

Born from an act of violence, I had spent my life being a walking reminder of his sins. A bastard raised in a house filled with resentment and disgust, a boy whose mother saw him as everything that had been stolen from her. I had left the past behind, built a life that had nothing to do with him.

My brother and I had never lived the same life. We had never been brothers.

But when I heard what he was about to do—when I found out that he was set to marry a woman who had no idea what kind of man he was, a woman he spoke about like she was nothing more than something to be owned—I got on the first flight out.

Because I had seen this before.

In my mother’s empty eyes. In the bruises she tried to hide. In the way she had looked at me every day of my life, blaming me for a past I had never asked to be a part of.

Not again.

I wasn’t a good man. I didn’t pretend to be. But I would not stand by and watch him repeat the sins of our father.

So I took his place.

My stepmother had screamed at me. My father had threatened me. He had sworn vengeance, but none of it mattered. He was gone. Forced out of the home, out of the city, out of her life.

And now, as she walked down the aisle, eyes full of hesitation and confusion, I clenched my fists at my sides.

She didn’t know. Didn’t know the monster she had nearly been given to. Didn’t know the monster standing before her now.

But ignorance was a mercy.

And I had never been given mercy.

So I stood there, silent, as she came closer. The woman who should have been his.

The woman who was now mine.