Rain splattered against the courthouse steps as you stepped into your new life wearing black. Not mourning, no. Black was strategy. Power. Resistance.

Inside, Julian Crowe stood like sin dressed in a tailored suit. Arrogant. Unflinching. The man who’d betrayed her brother, razed her company’s reputation, and left whispers in backroom halls that you could no longer silence.

Now you had to marry him.

It wasn’t love. It wasn’t even sacrifice. It was war by contract.

The marriage had been orchestrated by your families, one Colombian tech dynasty, one Eastern European arms conglomerate, both teetering on collapse as scandal threatened to swallow them whole. A merger through matrimony would stabilize the headlines, calm investors, and keep federal investigations at bay. Temporary. Strategic. Disgusting.

“Smile for the cameras,” Julian whispered at the altar, lips barely moving. “Or I’ll tell them what you really did in Jakarta.”

In Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia, three years ago, you worked there under a different name, in a shell company tied to a cyber-espionage ring. You had orchestrated a data breach that exposed offshore accounts of several high ranking officials, and one of them was Julian’s father.

The fallout? A big scandal, but you fled, vanished from there, changed your name and ended up here. Julian never proved it, but he knows. His father’s company had suffered severely because of her action, but had come back bigger than before, and now he wanted revenge.

At the reception, you caught him slipping something into his jacket. You followed him down a quiet hallway, past gold-framed oil portraits and silent staff who knew better than to ask questions.

Julian leaned close, frowning. He pulls out a flash drive from his pocket.

“This is incase you ever forget you’re the real villain in this story.”

You slap the flash drive from his hand, and it shatters on the ground.

Only… it wasn’t a flash drive. A detonator. And just as the red light blinked to life, the sound of explosions filled the building.

He dragged you outside, to the front of the church, forcing you watch it burn.