THE MAN WHO MARRIED MY WORST ENEMY

Kelly Romance

THE MAN WHO MARRIED MY WORST ENEMY
I buried my father three years ago. Today I'm marrying the man I believe put him in the ground.
That's what I told myself walking down the aisle in a dress I didn't pick, toward a man I spent three years learning to hate properly. Adrian Cross runs a business empire that looks clean on paper and isn't clean underneath. People talk about him in low voices in the rooms that matter. I believed my father's death was one of the things nobody talks about out loud.
So I did what made sense to me at the time. I spent two years working my way into his life. I let him think we met by chance. I let him fall for a version of me I built for one reason only, to get close enough to take everything from him the way I felt he took everything from me.
Then he asked me to marry him. Not out of love, I told myself. Just his way of keeping me where he could watch me.
I said yes anyway. Marriage would get me through doors two years of lying never could.
Halfway down the aisle, my phone buzzed. A number I didn't know.
*Your father is watching you get married.*
My father is dead. I identified his body myself. I held his hand in that morgue and I have never let myself doubt what I saw that night.
Then a man appeared at the back of the church. Standing the exact way my father used to stand, weight on one leg, hand in his pocket, checking the room before he checked anything else. By the time I looked twice, he was gone. Like he was never there.
I married Adrian an hour later with that message still sitting in my hand. That night, instead of an explanation, he gave me one line that split three years of certainty right down the middle.
"Your father didn't die because of me. He died because of what he stole from me."
Now I'm living in the house of the man I came to destroy, and some days I can't tell which one of us is really running the con. Every room I get into leads to another piece of a story that started twenty years before either of us was born. Everyone I trust turns out to have known more than they ever told me. And every time I remind myself I still hate him, he says or does something that makes the hate feel like the last lie I have left.
I came into this marriage to burn his life down.
I didn't plan on staying long enough to fall for him too.
And I never thought the man I buried might be the one behind all of it, watching from a church doorway on my own wedding day, waiting to see how far his daughter would go before she found out none of this was ever really about revenge.
It was about a debt owed long before either of our families knew they owed anything at all.
How far would you go for someone you loved, if the person who taught you to love them never actually died?

Unfold