Faking My Death With His Baby: The Billionaire Burned My Wedding

Sienna's POV

The black van idled in the driveway for forty minutes while I watched from the bedroom window. Men in dark jackets carried sealed boxes from the house—my boxes. My studio inventory. The leather satchel I'd carried to design school a decade ago, now reduced to contraband.

My wedding ring caught the afternoon light. Three carats. Flawless clarity. A prison in rose gold.

One of the guards—ex-military, I'd learned, like all of Declan's men—hefted my sketchbook between two fingers as though it were evidence from a crime scene. He dropped it into a black crate. The lid sealed with a hydraulic hiss.

Something small and bright flashed in another guard's grip. My burnisher. Five years of my palm worn into that handle. I'd bought it second-hand in Antwerp, survived on ramen for a month to afford it.

"Wait." The word left me before thought. My bare feet carried me across the marble floor. "That one—please, just that one."

The guard didn't blink. "Mr. Hayes's orders, ma'am. Nothing stays."

His colleague stepped forward, blocking my path with a cardboard box. Inside, shrink-wrapped in plastic, lay a new phone. Rose gold. Matching the ring. Matching the cage.

"Two contacts pre-programmed," he recited. "Mr. Hayes's private line, and the estate manager."

I stared at the device. "What if there's an emergency?"

"Then you call Mr. Hayes."

The hydraulic lift on the van engaged. My tools disappeared behind tinted glass. The engine turned over, and the vehicle rolled down the long, manicured drive toward the gates. Toward the incinerator, probably. Declan didn't do things by halves.

My thumb found the call button before I'd decided to press it.

He answered on the fourth ring. Paper rustled in the background. His office. His kingdom. "Yes."

"Declan, leave the burnisher set. I won't take outside work. I'll only sketch in the bedroom. I promise—"

"Mrs. Hayes doesn't need skills beyond serving her husband." His voice could have been discussing stock portfolios. "Dispose of the scrap metal."

"Please—"

The line died.

I held the phone to my ear until the silence burned, then lowered it. The marble floor stretched vast and empty around me. Somewhere in the house, a clock ticked. Somewhere in my chest, something smaller than a heart, something harder, calcified another layer.

---

Four hours. I spent four hours in that kitchen.

The estate manager had delivered Declan's preferences in a typed memo that morning: medium-rare filet, truffle mashed potatoes, asparagus with hollandaise, a Bordeaux reduction he favored from that vineyard in

Saint-Émilion whose name I'd practiced pronouncing three times before I got it right. Seven-thirty sharp, the memo said. He'd be home at seven-thirty.

I timed the steak to rest at seven-twenty. The potatoes stayed warm under a copper lid. The asparagus I blanched at seven-fifteen, quick shock in ice water, ready for the pan at seven-twenty-five. I'd burned a stripe across my knuckle on the broiler and didn't notice until the skin blistered white.

Seven-thirty came. Then seven-forty-five. Then eight.

I called his cell. Straight to voicemail. I called the office line. Vanessa answered.

"Mrs. Hayes." The name dripped like honey laced with something bitter. "The president is in a meeting. Shall

I take a message?"

"I just need to know when he's leaving."

"I'm afraid that information isn't available to me." A pause. "Or to you, apparently. Have a lovely evening."

The line clicked.

At eight-twenty, I reheated the steak. The medium-rare bled toward medium. The potatoes developed a skin.

At eight-thirty, the front door finally opened.

Declan's footsteps crossed the foyer with deliberate weight. When he appeared in the dining room doorway, he'd loosened his tie but not removed it. His jacket hung from one finger, which meant he'd been home long enough to pour himself a drink in the study first. He'd let me wait.

"Smells adequate," he said, sitting.

I set the plate before him. The china was wedding-gift porcelain, hand-painted with gold leaf that probably cost more than my first studio lease. My burned knuckle throbbed when I withdrew my hand.

He cut into the filet. Chewed once. Twice.

The fork and knife hit the plate with a clang that sent a jolt through my spine.

"This," he said, and the calm was worse than shouting, "is what you spent your day preparing? The meat is stringy. The sauce has split. Sienna." He folded his napkin, laying it beside the plate with precision, and his grey eyes lifted to mine. "I manage thousands of employees. I keep an empire running. And my wife cannot deliver a hot meal."

"It was ready at seven-thirty." My voice came out steadier than I felt. "I called you. I called the office. You didn't—"

His chair scraped back. The sound raked through the quiet dining room, and then his hand closed around my jaw, thumb pressing into the joint beneath my ear, forcing my chin up.

"You're blaming me." Not a question. "You live in this house. You wear the clothes I buy. You sleep in the bed

I provide. You contribute nothing." His thumb traced the edge of my jaw, almost gentle, a mockery of a caress. "Cooking is your single function. And you can't even manage that."

I didn't answer. Couldn't. His grip held my mouth clamped.

Then his phone rang.

Vanessa's name glowed on the screen. Declan released my jaw, and his eyes never left mine as he thumbed the speaker button and set the device on the table between us.

"Sir? The merger documents are in your inbox." Vanessa's voice filled the room, amplified and intimate. "Oh

—and I drove past Caleb's law office today. His name's on the letterhead now. Partner." A pause, perfectly timed. "It made me remember. Mrs. Hayes used to spend so much time at that coffee shop downstairs. The way she smiled at him—" A little exhale, a practiced note of sadness. "I've never seen her smile like that. Not once, since she moved into the estate. All she gives you is that pinched, miserable face. It seems so ungrateful, considering everything you've given her."

The words settled into the silence like stones dropped into still water.

Declan's expression didn't change. That was the terrifying part. The rage was there, I could feel it radiating off him like heat from a furnace, but his face remained carved from stone. He reached down and ended the call without a goodbye.

"You smiled for him." His voice had dropped to something subterranean. "Lit up like a goddamn sunrise, according to my secretary. And for me?" He stepped closer. "That face. Every day. That hollow, haunted face."

"Declan—"

The plate smashed. He swept it off the table in one motion, porcelain shattering against the wall, meat and sauce splattering across cream-colored carpet that cost more per square foot than most people's monthly rent. I flinched. Couldn't help it. My shoulders hit the wall behind me, and he was there, caging me with both arms.

"You can't produce a decent meal. You can't produce an heir." His gaze dropped to my stomach, lingered there with deliberate, surgical cruelty. "Your body's already been hollowed out for another man. What's left for me, Sienna? Tell me." His palm flattened against my abdomen, pressing just below my navel. "What's left in here besides scar tissue and someone else's ghost?"

The breath left me in a single, soundless rush. That wound—the one I'd packed in silence and sealed behind my ribs three years ago—split open. Fresh as the day I'd woken alone in a hospital bed, a nurse's pitying hand on my shoulder, no baby, no voice to explain what had really happened.

My jaw tightened. My eyes burned. But I lifted my chin and met his gaze, and I did not cry.

Something flickered behind the grey. A crack in the ice. For one heartbeat, I thought he saw it—the truth I couldn't speak, the secret that would burn more than my studio, more than this marriage, more than me.

Then it was gone.

"Smile for me," he whispered, and his thumb traced my lower lip. "Give me a sunrise, Sienna."