We’d been fighting since the day we married. Eight years. Eight long, stupid years.
Damon and I were what everyone in our circle called a disaster wearing a wedding ring.
But now? Everything was about to end.
I stared at the medical report in my hand. The words blurred, then settled: Late stage of Pancreatic cancer.
I smiled bitterly. Then my phone buzzed until the sound almost hurt. Messages flooded the screen.
[Rhea! Check the group now!]
[Is Damon insane?]
[He put up an auction... he is selling your right to spend one night with another man!]
My hands went cold.
Damon Whitlocke, mafia boss of the Eastern Quarter, you heartless bastard!
I drove like a woman set on collision. By the time I arrived, the auction hall felt like a cathedral to money and power. Men with lapel pins and tattoos, women with dangerous smiles. Henchmen like sentries along the walls. Cameras. Laughter. Cigarette smoke. And there he sat in the front row, my husband, his shoulders broader than in photos, his presence like an edict. A woman in a red dress sat beside him.
When I saw her face, something inside turned sideways.
Harper.
The woman he’d chosen because she looked like my sister. Close enough to steal the shape of me.
My photos were on the big screen, one after another. The crowd grew hungry.
“Twenty million.”
“Three.”
“One hundred million.”
A bald man rose, his voice a cannon. “One hundred and fifty. I’ll pay a hundred and fifty million for one night with Miss Rhea.”
Phones lifted. Cameras flashed. The room smelled of perfume and calculating hunger.
I stood frozen. My legs failed.
Damon did not look at me. He leaned back, expression like stone, eyes half-closed, as if watching me was an indulgence. He said lazily, “Deal.”
The bald man grinned and came for me. “So, Boss Whitlocke, I can take her tonight?”
“Sure,” Damon said, smirking. “Once the money clears, she is yours.”
That was the sound of something breaking clean and final.
The man reached for my arm. I grabbed a wine bottle from the nearest table and smashed it across his skull.
Glass exploded. Blood painted the marble like a grotesque blossom.
The room went silent. For a second the world was only the ringing in my ears.
“TOUCH ME AGAIN,” I said, voice shaking, “AND I WILL MAKE SURE YOU REGRET BEING BORN.”
No one moved.
Damon laughed. A slow, soft clapping. He rose and walked toward me through a path of men whose faces did not flinch. Up close I could smell the whiskey and the expensive cologne. He leaned in until his breath ghosted my ear.
“If I can auction you once,” he whispered, “I can do it again. And again. Until there is nothing left of you to sell.”
I turned to him, words splitting in my throat, “W-why? Do you really hate me that much?”
“Hate?” He chuckled like a man who had spent too long listening to caskets close. “You killed the two people I loved most. What do you think I feel?”
My heart clenched so hard I thought it would stop.
He said it like a verdict. Like a blessing.
I could feel the room tilt, the faces like windows into a city that had always been his and never mine. Men I had smiled at at parties, boys who had learned to call him Boss, women who owed everything to his patronage. No one reached for me. No one helped.
They watched their Boss humiliate his wife. They watched to see how low a woman could fall before she became nothing but currency.
Then my mind drifted back to the past…
Nikolai Whitlocke.
Damon’s fraternal twin brother.
The one who never raised his voice. The one whose smile could quiet a storm.
When we were kids, he used to buy me chocolates even when Damon told him not to. He’d laugh and hand it to me anyway, saying, “Don’t tell my brother.” When I grew up, he was still the same—gentle, patient, steady in a world that was anything but. Falling for him just… happened.
Damon, on the other hand, was chaos made flesh. Cold eyes, sharp words, the kind of man who could command a room with silence. He was already running his father’s mafia operations before he turned twenty. People feared him. Even family obeyed him.
He liked my sister, Sylvia. She was soft-spoken, graceful, the kind of woman who made dangerous men forget they were dangerous.
The four of us used to spend time together. Me and Damon fought like fire and gasoline, while Nikolai and Sylvia would just stand by smiling faintly, like they knew how this all would end.
Then one day, everything changed.
Nikolai held Sylvia’s hand and said, in front of everyone, that they were getting married.
The world fell apart quietly.
That night, I locked myself in my room and cried until my ribs ached. The next morning, I ran away from home like a fool, thinking distance could numb heartbreak.
Nikolai and Sylvia went out to look for me.
They never came back.
The police said it was a car accident.
But in the Whitlocke family, “accidents” were never accidents.
For days, I knelt in front of their coffins, unable to breathe from the grief. I thought I’d die too.
And that was when Damon came.
He picked me up when I collapsed, wiped my face, and said nothing while I shattered. When nightmares dragged me under, he turned the lights on before I could scream. When I couldn’t eat, he forced me to take a spoonful, threatening to call his men if I didn’t.
He was cruel, but he stayed.
Little by little, I started depending on him. His voice. His hands. His presence. He became the only thing left that tethered me to the living.
One night, he looked at me and said quietly, “Rhea, marry me.”
I froze.
He smiled but it didn’t reach his eyes. “You’ve started loving me too, haven’t you? You don’t need anyone else. I’ll take care of you… for the rest of your life.”
He wasn’t wrong. Somewhere between grief and madness, I did start to love him. He had saved me when I was drowning, and I mistook control for care. I thought maybe this was love... real love.
So I said yes.
On our wedding day, I stood in front of him, holding my bouquet so tightly my hands trembled. I told myself this was a new beginning. That Nikolai would have wanted me to be happy.
But the moment the lights dimmed, and the big screen lit up behind us...
My private photos appeared.
The room went silent for a second, then laughter broke out.
“Everyone,” Damon said from the stage, smiling like it was a joke, “hope you enjoy the wedding gift. These are Mrs. Whitlocke’s private treasures.”
