My Groom Locked Me Away After Impregnating His Secretary

Forrest noticed before I told him anything.

That was the thing about him. He didn't ask. He just paid attention, which is rarer than it sounds.

It started small. He'd fall into step beside me when I left the building after late client calls, hands in his coat pockets, not making a thing of it. Just there. One evening I caught myself checking the parking garage entrance before I pushed through the door, and he caught me doing it.

"You want me to walk you down?" he said. Casual. Like it was nothing.

"I'm fine."

"I know you are." He held the door. "I'm going to the garage anyway."

He wasn't. His car was street parking, two blocks north. I found that out later.

We talked about work mostly. A campaign rollout that was running behind. A client who kept changing the brief. Safe things. But sometimes he'd ask something that had more room in it — *how are you sleeping* or *when did you last take a real lunch* — and he'd wait for an actual answer instead of the polished one. I wasn't used to that.

I didn't tell him about Demetrius. But I think he understood there was a shape to what I wasn't saying, and he didn't push at it. He just kept showing up, steady and unhurried, like a person who had nowhere more important to be.

I trusted that before I meant to.

---

The invitation from Mrs. Cox came on a Thursday. Handwritten, on heavy cream stock. *A quiet dinner. Just family. I think it's time we talked properly, Alaiya. I've always been fond of you.*

I read it three times.

I knew what it was. I knew exactly what it was. But I also knew that refusing would cost me information I needed — about the timeline, about what Demetrius had told her, about how far along this had gotten without my knowing. So I went. I wore gray. I brought nothing I wasn't willing to lose.

The Cox estate sat an hour outside the city, up a private road lined with old oaks that had probably been there longer than the family's money. The house was the kind of beautiful that was also a warning — all symmetry and restraint, every surface saying *we have nothing to prove.*

Dinner was exactly as gracious as I expected. Mrs. Cox at the head of the table, Demetrius to her right, me across from him. Candles. Good wine I didn't drink. She asked about my work with the warm, slightly impersonal interest she had always performed for me. She complimented my earrings. She said, at one point, *you've always been so composed, Alaiya. I've always admired that about you.*

Demetrius watched me the whole meal. He didn't say much. He touched his watch twice.

After dessert, Mrs. Cox excused herself with the kind of timing that told me it had been planned. I pushed back my chair.

"I should get going," I said. "Thank you for dinner."

"I'll have someone bring the car around," Demetrius said.

I walked to the front entrance. The foyer was dim, lit by a single lamp on the console table. I waited. Five minutes. Then ten.

I pulled out my phone. No signal. Not one bar.

I walked to the window. The circular drive was empty. My car was not where the driver had left it.

Demetrius appeared in the foyer doorway. He hadn't hurried. He stood with one hand in his pocket, his jacket still on, his face perfectly still — all the warmth from dinner gone, like a light switched off.

"Where is my car," I said.

"Sit down, Alaiya."

"Where is my car."

He crossed the foyer slowly. "I booked the venue six days ago. The Whitmore. Two hundred guests. Both families." He said it the way you'd read items off a list. "Invitations went out Monday. The ceremony is in three weeks."

The room was very quiet.

"You need to cancel it," I said.

"I'm not going to do that."

"Demetrius."

"You walked out of that gala and you think that's the end of it." His voice didn't rise. That was the worst part — it never rose. "It's not the end of it. You don't get to make that decision alone. Not after everything."

*Not after everything.* As if everything was something we had built together, equally, instead of something I had bled for while he was in a hotel room in Paris.

I looked at him for a long moment. Then I walked past him to the window and looked out at the dark lawn, the long driveway, the iron gates at the end of it.

Closed.

"Okay," I said quietly.

He exhaled. Like he'd won something.

He hadn't. He had just given me three weeks and a venue and two hundred witnesses.

I turned away from the window and looked at my own reflection in the glass instead — gray dress, steady hands, a face that gave nothing away.

I started counting backward from three weeks.

I had work to do.