Sienna
The wedding wasn't a wedding.
It was a transaction—cold, calculated, signed in ink that felt more like blood. There were no guests. No vows whispered with trembling hearts. No slow, sacred walk down a flower-lined aisle. Just the faint rustle of legal documents on a marble table and the suffocating silence between two people who didn't believe in fairy tales.
No white dress, either. I wore a navy silk gown I picked the night before, staring at it like I was choosing the color of my own funeral. It wasn't soft or romantic. It was structured. Sharp. A dress for someone stepping into a war she didn't start.
The judge didn't even pretend to care. He looked like he wanted to be anywhere else—perhaps officiating a real wedding with laughter and champagne, not this stiff, soulless thing.
And Dominic… Dominic Russo looked like the devil at a funeral.
My own.
He stood tall in a perfectly tailored obsidian suit, silver tie knotted with surgical precision. Every line of his body was power made flesh, control in human form. He didn't smile. He didn't soften. He didn't offer a hand, a word, or even a nod of acknowledgement when I stepped into the atrium.
He just watched me with those eyes—icy, unreadable—as if he could see straight through every thread of my resistance.
I tried not to falter under his gaze, but I felt like glass beneath a microscope. Transparent. Breakable.
The marble atrium inside the Russo estate was vast and cold, polished to a blinding sheen. Every footstep echoed too loudly, like even the walls were listening. There were no flowers. No music. Just the sound of a pen scratching across legal parchment.
Mrs. Sienna Hart-Russo.
That name looked foreign beneath my hand.
I kept my signature sharp. Controlled. It was the only part of this day I had any say over, so I let every stroke of my pen carry weight—like I was carving out a last piece of myself before surrendering the rest.
Dominic leaned over slightly, inspecting the signature like he was reading a fine piece of art.
"Pretty," he murmured.
The word curled between us like smoke.
"You always write with such precision."
I glanced up, unwilling to give him anything more than necessary. "I was taught that handwriting reveals character," I said, my tone as dry as the pen in my hand.
His eyes didn't waver. "Then yours says you're stubborn, elegant, and impossible to intimidate."
He tilted his head slightly, lowering his voice so only I could hear. "That's why I chose you."
My stomach turned, but I forced myself to hold still. I wouldn't give him the satisfaction of seeing how that sentence struck me like a match to dry wood. Every instinct screamed to run. But I just stood there—silent, composed, burning behind my eyes.
He reached for my hand to slide the ring on.
I didn't flinch.
Not when the cold metal touched my skin.
Not when the judge declared us legally bound.
But when Dominic pressed a kiss to my cheek—soft, lingering, almost too gentle for the man he was—I froze.
Because for a second, it didn't feel calculated.
It felt… real.
And nothing about this was supposed to be real.
Dominic
She didn't smile once.
Good.
He didn't want her smile.
He wanted her steel.
The Sienna Hart who stood beside him wasn't the panicked girl he expected to drag through this process. No. She was poised. Quiet, but not submissive. Her silence spoke louder than words—sharp silence, the kind that cut.
A lesser man would've underestimated her.
But Dominic didn't make that mistake.
He'd seen boardroom titans shrink under pressure. Seen senators lie through their teeth to save their legacies. But Sienna? She signed her soul away with a steady hand and refused to blink.
Even as she stood in her navy gown, chin raised, her spine holding tension like a drawn bow—she didn't fumble.
She was regal. Untouchable.
And beautiful, in a way that had nothing to do with her looks.
She was becoming something dangerous. Something powerful.
His equal.
She didn't know it yet.
But she would.
He looked at the signature one more time, then at the woman who had just become his wife by law.
There were no witnesses, but he didn't need them.
This wasn't a performance.
It was a reckoning.
Sienna — The Next Morning
Marriage to Dominic Russo came with contracts.
Literal ones.
An NDA that could silence a presidential scandal. A public behavior clause that read like a leash made of gold. And a shared residence agreement that placed me squarely in enemy territory—his penthouse.
"I don't sleep in the same bed," I told him when I stepped into the foyer, suitcase in hand.
He looked up from his phone with that maddening calm. "Then I'll have a separate one prepared."
Like it didn't bother him.
Like I wasn't rejecting him.
But I saw it.
A flicker in his eyes. Barely there, but present. A crack in the mask.
I didn't understand it then.
Later, I would.
The penthouse was all glass and steel. Floor-to-ceiling windows that framed the Manhattan skyline like a painting. Every detail screamed quiet power—brushed gold fixtures, midnight marble countertops, curated art that looked expensive enough to fund a small country.
I hated how much I loved it.
And I hated that he knew I would.
There were already press leaks. Photos of us leaving the courthouse, my face half-hidden by sunglasses, his jaw set like stone. A headline in The Tribune splashed across the front page:
"Heiress Sienna Hart Marries Billionaire Financier Dominic Russo – A Quiet Empire Is Born."
Quiet empire, my ass.
This was a battlefield.
And I was living inside enemy lines.
Flashback – Six Years Ago
My father was a god back then. Richard Hart, the man who built Hart Global from the ground up. A tycoon who made billionaires sweat with a single raised brow. To the world, he was impenetrable.
To me, he was just Dad.
He never raised his voice to me. Never called me anything but "his girl." He taught me how to read balance sheets before I learned to drive. Told me that power was just intelligence in a suit.
But one night changed everything.
He came home late. Smelling like whiskey and something else—something sour. Fear.
I was sixteen, peeking from the hallway in my pajamas. He didn't see me.
I watched as he entered his study, locked the door behind him, and opened the safe with trembling hands. I'd never seen his hands shake before.
He pulled out a file. Thick. Bound in red tape.
His lips moved, low and bitter. I only caught one line.
"If Russo ever comes for me… this is what I use to bury him."
The next morning, the file was gone.
And he never spoke of it again.
Sienna — Present Day
That memory clung to me like smoke.
So after Dominic left for a dinner meeting that night, I crept into my father's old office at the company. I opened every drawer, ran my fingers behind the rows of dusty books, checked beneath desk panels and behind picture frames.
Nothing.
If that file still existed, he had hidden it somewhere only he knew.
But I would find it.
Because if Dominic Russo framed my father, I needed proof.
Not for the board. Not for headlines. Not even for revenge.
For me.
For the girl who used to trust men in suits.
Dominic
"She's adapting fast," Luca said, his voice low as he leaned against the bar of the private club.
Dominic swirled the amber scotch in his glass, jaw tense. "She's watching everything. Reading people like ledgers."
Luca smirked. "She's dangerous."
"She's necessary."
Luca raised an eyebrow. "And if she finds out the truth?"
Dominic didn't answer right away.
He took a sip, eyes distant, then set the glass down with slow precision.
When he finally spoke, his voice was colder than the drink.
"She won't."
Sienna
That night, I dreamed of fire again.
Only this time, it wasn't the company in flames.
It was the man I'd just married.
And I was the one holding the match.