Chapter 3 - The Ring on Her Finger
He didn't care about the dust. He didn't care about the spilled champagne or the crushed flower petals on the runner.
Alexander reached out his hand. His fingers were long, warm, and scarred slightly across the knuckles. He gently cupped my chin, his thumb brushing against the corner of my split lip with an agonizing tenderness that made my chest ache.
"Who did this?" he asked softly.
The question wasn't loud. It didn't need to be. It possessed the deadly calm of an executioner verifying a name on a parchment.
I let out a ragged breath. "My father."
Alexander’s thumb caught a drop of my blood. He looked at it for one heartbeat, his face completely devoid of human warmth. Then, he stood up, offering me his arm.
I placed my hand in his. As he lifted me effortlessly to my feet, I turned my left hand over.
Until this moment, I had kept my wedding band turned inward toward my palm, hiding the stone under my fingers so Nathan and Vanessa wouldn't mock me for wearing cheap jewelry.
Now, under the blazing illumination of five crystal chandeliers, the stone caught the light.
It was not white diamond. It was a flawless, five-carat black diamond, cut in an emerald shape, flanked by two trilliant-cut blue diamonds, set in deep, antique platinum.
The Thorne crest was engraved into the visible platinum bezel: an eagle clutching a broken sword.
Vanessa’s knees gave out. She had to grab the wooden altar rail to keep from collapsing onto her white train. "That's... that's the Thorne family ring. The Imperial Black. It was lost at auction in Geneva three years ago..."
"It wasn't lost," Marcus Hill croaked from the pews, his voice shaking uncontrollably. "Thorne bought it for his wife. The private marriage... the one the papers couldn't crack..."
Arthur took a step forward, his chest puffed out in desperate, delusional bravado. He pointed a trembling finger at Alexander.
"Mr. Thorne! I don't know what kind of game you think you're playing, or how my good-for-nothing daughter managed to trick you into coming here today, but this is a private family event! You have no right to barge into my son's wedding, bringing armed thugs into a holy place!"
Alexander slowly turned his head.
He looked at Arthur the way a man looks at an insect buzzing near a windowpane.
"A private event?" Alexander murmured, taking a slow step toward my father. "You sent an invitation to my wife. You humiliated her on an open stage. And then you raised your hand against the Duchess of the Thorne estate."
"W-Wife?" Arthur’s voice cracked. The color drained from his nose, his cheeks, his forehead, leaving him the shade of curdled milk. "She’s... she’s nobody! She works as an assistant at an architectural firm! She lives in a two-bedroom walk-up in Queens!"
"She lived where she chose to live because she wanted to build something without my shadow," Alexander answered, his voice dropping into a register of icy venom. "Because she believed, naively, that if she succeeded with her own hands, you might finally look at her with pride."
Alexander stopped six inches from Arthur's face.
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"You called her a mistake, Arthur. But in five minutes, you will realize that breathing the same air as her was the only privilege keeping your family alive."
***
