Chapter 3: The Ring Everyone Noticed but No One Understood
The ring was never meant to be loud, but it screamed everywhere I went.
It caught the light in classrooms, in hallways, in places where seventeen-year-old girls were supposed to worry about grades and crushes, not marriage contracts and shared last names. I tried turning it around on my finger, hiding the stone against my palm, but it always found its way back, unapologetic.
Lucien noticed before I did.
"You keep touching it," he said one morning as I rushed around the kitchen, late again.
"I do not."
"You've touched it six times in the last minute."
I froze. "You're counting?"
"I notice things."
That shouldn't have made my heart skip. It did anyway.
School had become a performance. Teachers asked gentle questions that weren't really about homework. Friends asked sharp ones that were. Strangers stared like I was a headline they couldn't stop reading.
"So… married life?" my friend Nina asked during lunch, poking at her food.
I shrugged. "It's… normal."
That was a lie. Nothing about my life was normal anymore.
After school, Lucien picked me up like always, leaning against his car, scrolling through his phone. He looked bored, detached, like the world didn't expect anything from him and he expected nothing back.
"Do you ever get tired of this?" I asked as we drove.
"Of what?"
"Pretending."
He glanced at me. "Do you want to stop?"
The question startled me. I stared out the window, watching buildings blur past. "I don't know."
He didn't push. Lucien never pushed. That was the problem. It made it too easy to step closer on my own.
That evening, his aunt came over.
She was elegant, sharp-eyed, and terrifying in the way women who know exactly who they are tend to be. She looked at me once and smiled politely, like she was evaluating a purchase she hadn't approved.
"So this is her," she said.
Lucien stiffened. "This is Arielle."
I offered my hand. She ignored it, pulling me into a hug instead. "You're younger than I imagined."
"I get that a lot," I said.
Dinner was a battlefield disguised as manners. Questions flew, each one sharper than the last. Where did I come from? What were my plans? Did I understand the responsibility of being a Blackwood?
Lucien answered most of them for me.
"I didn't marry her for her résumé," he said calmly. "I married her because I wanted to."
I almost choked.
After his aunt left, the house felt quieter than usual.
"You didn't have to do that," I said.
"Yes, I did."
"You lied."
He looked at me, something unreadable in his eyes. "It wasn't a lie."
That night, I cried for reasons I couldn't explain.
Days later, I failed a math test I'd studied all week for. I sat on the school steps afterward, staring at the paper like it had personally betrayed me. Lucien found me there.
"Bad day?" he asked.
"I'm stupid," I muttered.
He sat beside me without hesitation. "You're overwhelmed."
"It's the same thing."
"No," he said firmly. "It's not."
I looked at him, really looked at him, and wondered when his opinions had started to matter so much.
At home, we studied together. He didn't understand half the material, but he stayed anyway, reading quietly while I worked, occasionally handing me tea without a word.
"You don't have to stay," I said.
"I want to."
Those words were dangerous.
The first almost-kiss happened by accident.
I reached for a book at the same time he did. Our fingers brushed. We froze. The air shifted, heavy and electric. I could feel his breath, steady and warm.
"Sorry," I whispered.
"So am I," he replied, though neither of us moved.
Then I stepped back, heart racing, and the moment shattered.
We didn't talk about it. We didn't have to. It followed us anyway.
One evening, I overheard him on the phone.
"She's not a weakness," Lucien said quietly. "She's… important."
I stood there, unseen, heart pounding, realizing for the first time that this wasn't just confusing for me.
Later that night, I lay awake, staring at the ceiling, the ring glinting faintly in the dark. I thought about the contract. About the end date printed so clearly, so cruelly.
One year.
I wondered who I would be when it was over. I wondered who he would be. I wondered if love could grow in borrowed time or if it only bloomed where there were promises.
In the quiet of the house, I made a silent vow to myself.
I would not fall in love.
Even if my heart was already arguing back.