Chapter 8 - The Weight of Steel
The click of the handcuffs was remarkably soft compared to the shouting around us.
*Clack. Clack.*
High-grade carbon steel snapped around Adrian’s wrists, pinning his arms behind his back. The sound had a finality to it—a mechanical period at the end of a long, bloody sentence.
They hauled him to his feet.
His tuxedo jacket was soaked in holy water and gray with altar dust. A thin line of blood ran from his left nostril where his face had struck the brass font. The manicured, effortless prince of high society looked like an animal caught in a storm drain.
As the agents turned him toward the center aisle, his eyes found mine one last time.
The rage was still there, but beneath it, like oil floating on water, was something new: pure, unadulterated terror. He was looking at me, but he wasn't seeing the quiet, obedient orphan he had terrorized behind closed doors. He was seeing the woman who had dismantled his entire existence in thirty minutes flat.
“Why?” he choked out, his voice hoarse and broken. “You could have had everything. The money, the houses, the name... you were going to be a Blackwell.”
I walked down the altar steps, my bare feet cool against the marble, until I stood directly in front of him.
I was wearing a torn slip. My skin was covered in the bruises he had given me. My hair was disheveled, and my feet were dirty.
Yet standing next to him, I looked like a queen, and he looked like garbage waiting for collection.
“I was already a Vance, Adrian,” I said, my voice barely above a whisper, though I knew the whole cathedral could hear the ice behind it. “And a Vance never sells her soul to the man who killed her father.”
I reached out and reached into his torn lapel pocket.
With two fingers, I pulled out the platinum-and-diamond wedding band he had bought for me—the three-carat ring he had bragged would keep me on a short leash for the rest of my life.
I held it up before his eyes.
Then, without looking away from his face, I dropped it.
The heavy platinum ring bounced twice on the marble floor before rolling into the drain beneath the baptismal font, disappearing into the dark plumbing of the cathedral with a tiny, hollow splash.
“Get him out of my sight,” I told the agents.
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They didn't wait for a second invitation. They shoved Adrian forward, his leather shoes dragging along the red carpet as they marched him down the center aisle, past the rows of horrified guests who drew their coats back as he passed, terrified that his disgrace might brush against their sleeves.
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