SINS OF THE FATHERS

: “I Object.”

Aurora’s POV

The world is watching.

I know this because I can hear the soft, incessant clicks of camera shutters, a modern-day chorus to this grotesque pantomime. My Instagram feed is probably exploding right now: #WallStreetFairytale, #SongShenUnion, #WheelchairRomance. The algorithm loves a good tragedy dressed in silk and calla lilies.

I stand beside Dominic Shen in the solarium of the Hamptons estate his family "generously" provided for our wedding. Glass ceiling, floor-to-ceiling views of the Atlantic, three hundred of New York’s finest pretending they don’t see the elephant in the room—or rather, the wheelchair.

Dominic’s hand is cool and dry in mine. His eyes, a placid, unfocused blue, are trained somewhere over the pastor’s shoulder. The perfect picture of dignified tragedy. The heir to Shen Holdings, blinded and deafened in a tragic accident, finding love with the orphaned daughter of his father’s former rivals. The press ate it up.

*My parents would be vomiting,* I think, not for the first time. The thought is a shard of ice in my chest, a familiar, comforting pain.

"Do you, Aurora Song, take Dominic Shen to be your lawfully wedded husband?" The pastor’s voice is butter-soft.

My mouth is Sahara-dry. *This is for them. This is the only way in.* I’ve repeated the mantra for three years, since the day I knelt in the rain beside two mangled cars, my mother’s favorite pearl earring glinting in the flashing police lights. Since the day Song Capital was carved up like a holiday turkey, and I learned the word "vulture" wasn’t just for birds.

"I do," I say. The words taste like ash.

The pastor turns to Dominic, placing a Braille card in his palm. "Do you, Dominic Shen, take Aurora Song…"

He never finishes.

The massive oak doors at the back of the solarium crash open.

Not a gentle push. A violent, splintering *bang* that echoes through the stunned silence. Every head whips around. The camera clicks become a frenzied staccato.

A figure stands silhouetted against the harsh midday light. Tall, lean, moving with a predatory grace that sucks the air from the room. He steps into the light, and my heart simply stops.

*Elias.*

Four years haven’t softened him; they’ve whittled him down to something harder, sharper. His once-sun-kissed skin carries the pallor of fluorescent lights and no windows. His bespoke black suit hangs on a frame that’s all wiry muscle and tense angles, the kind of body forged in survival, not gyms. His hair is shorter, darker. But his eyes… God, his eyes. They sweep the room, a storm-gray reckoning, and land on me with the force of a physical blow.

The whispers start like a brushfire. "Isn’t that…?" "I thought he was in…" "My God, he got out?"

He walks down the aisle, not like a guest, but like a conqueror. People shrink back. He doesn’t look at them. He only looks at me.

He stops a foot away from the pastor. His voice, when it comes, is low, raspier than I remember, and it carves through the silence like a blade.

"I have an objection."

The pastor blinks. "I’m sorry, sir, you can’t just—"

"Four years ago," Elias cuts him off, his gaze pinning me to the spot, "you sent me to a federal prison, Aurora. You stood in a courtroom and swore I was a monster." He takes a step closer. The scent of him—cold air, faint ozone, and something uniquely, dangerously Elias—washes over me. "You didn’t say ‘I do’ then. Why now?"

A flashback hits me, violent and unbidden: *Elias in a cheap suit, his hands cuffed, being led out of a precinct. His eyes, shattered and pleading, finding mine across the room. My own voice, cold as the marble floor: "He raped me."* The lie that became my truth, my armor, my prison.

Then another: *Dominic finding me sobbing in the ruins of my life, his voice a gentle balm. "Let me help you, Aurora. Let me take care of you."* The beginning of the trap.

My bouquet, a cascade of white orchids, slips from my numb fingers and hits the marble floor with a soft, final thud.

Elias doesn’t look at it. He looks at my trembling hands, my surely bloodless face. A ghost of a smile, cruel and beautiful, touches his lips. He bends, picks up the flowers, and holds them out to me.

"Miss me, sweetheart?" he murmurs, the endearment a poison-tipped dart.

I can’t speak. My carefully constructed world is cracking at the seams.

He leans in, his lips brushing my ear. The cameras go wild. "You took three years of my life," he whispers, the heat of his breath a brand. "I think it’s only fair I take the rest of it."

Before I can react, before Dominic can even pretend to sense the disturbance, Elias’s hand cups my jaw. His thumb strokes my cheekbone, a mockery of tenderness. Then his mouth crashes down on mine.

It’s not a kiss. It’s a takeover. A reclamation. It’s hard, possessive, and blazing with four years of pent-up fury and something else I refuse to name. My body betrays me, a spark of familiar heat flaring to life before my mind douses it with horror. The solarium erupts in gasps and shouts.

He pulls back, leaving me breathless and publicly ruined. His stormy eyes hold mine, promising a world of pain.

As the chaos swells around us, as security finally starts to move, I find my voice. It’s a thin, venomous thread, meant for his ears only.

"I’ll destroy you," I hiss, the tremor in it belying the threat. "A second time."

He just smiles, wiping a trace of my lipstick from his mouth with his thumb. A slow, deliberate gesture for the cameras.

"Looking forward to it, Aurora."

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