Lucian and I had been married for three years, bound not by the sweet strings of romance, like in the romance novels I had often read as a young girl, but by the heavy chains of our families’ expectations. My parents argued he was the quintessential catch—young, breathtakingly handsome, a billionaire with connections that reached far beyond the city's glittering skyline. On paper, he was the dream every woman was supposed to wish for, but my heart was a silent rebel. I never liked him. I agreed to this union out of duty, believing that the mutual indifference between us would grant me the freedom to exist quietly in the corners of his vast empire. But recently, a shift had crept into the air between us, and it felt like he was seeing me for the first time. I was concerned. “Tell me, where exactly is my wife heading off to in that dress?” Lucian's voice cut through the silence like a knife. His gaze swept over me, slow and searing, his posture tense with a new, unsettling intensity. There was a strange heat in his eyes, as though he’d just realized he had a claim to something he had long taken for granted. He wasn’t just looking at me anymore—he was seeing me, and the weight of that was heavy, a pressure that caused my breath to catch. Lucian—the man's words were velvet-soft, yet they carried an edge sharp enough to draw blood.