Chapter 155 CHAPTER 155
Acting in rage
Word moved faster now: the street was blocked briefly for the event; a cluster of chairs were arranged, candles placed in glass cylinders, strings of soft bulbs hanging between artful posts like constellations. A small stage was set with minimalist flowers. The photographers were positioned at precise angles. The crowd that gathered was a curated mix of influencers, bankers, real estate players, and curious locals who were always eager to peer into someone else’s life. The air smelled of street food, chai spices, and diesel; the city felt raw and honest beneath the contrivance.
Ares wore black tailored to look severe and effortless at once; Lila wore a gown that shimmered with the same danger she carried. They moved into the street, hand in hand. A hush fell among the crowd when the officiant began to speak. There was something performative to it, and they both performed with a disciplined intensity—eyes meeting sometimes in rehearsed warmth, smiles lifted at the right moments.
Tessa watched from an upstairs window two blocks away.
She had not planned to come. She had planned other things that night, quiet phone calls, the presence of her children tucked into bed, the small rituals that kept their apartment ordinary. But the city is a small, glinting thing when you live in the same neighborhoods.
Tessa had stepped out for groceries earlier, had ended up lingering on the street where the ceremony would take place, then been pulled back by the rhythm of her thoughts. It was curiosity at first, then a magnet of something else—an arrow of old, raw pain. She found an upstairs window that overlooked the narrow street and stayed.
Now, with the evening lights haloing the two figures below, Tessa felt a pressure behind her sternum that was both grief and a curious, cold clarity. She watched Ares say words in a voice that sounded like his, about a future he promised but did not mean. She watched Lila lean in for the symbolic, staged kiss. The two of them were a picture of an arranged reality made to look spontaneous.
Tessa took the sight in with a steady breath. She wrapped her hands around a mug on the sill and tried not to imagine the scene in a thousand different versions—worse ones, better ones, versions where she had not left, versions where Ares had risen after the arrest and ripped everything down.
A single tear slid down her cheek, hot and shameful. She wiped it away with the flat of her hand, an almost automatic motion, and tried to breathe. That small gesture, sniffing back the rest of the tears was the crux of the moment. There was tenderness in the solitude of it: she let herself feel the hurt, then refused to let the trembling of it be her undoing. She would not let her sadness become a spectacle.
Below, Ares and Lila finished the vows that had been drafted as much for optics as for legal purposes, and the officiant pronounced them husband and wife. Applause rippled through the curated crowd, some polite, some champagne charged, some genuine and the flash of cameras punctuated the hush with bright, momentary blows. Lila glanced up for a beat, scanning the balcony side facades as if checking for signs of counterattack. Ares’ face, for the cameras, was a picture of a man who had regained footing after an earthquake.
From her window, Tessa watched the staged triumph of two people who had bartered for power, and her chest tightened with an ache that felt more like waking than mourning. She had known this day might come, not as a specific event but as an inevitability: people rearrange themselves into alliances when pressure comes. What she had not expected, though, was the feeling that rose through her like a second pulse: something colder than the grief she felt, a strange liberation at seeing the game laid bare.
The ceremony wrapped. Ares and Lila walked down the middle of the street arm in arm, smiling at the cameras and the well-dressed group that walked beside them, the glow of the city wrapping around them like a soft, dangerous cloak. They had made their move, public, legal, unambiguous.
Tessa stayed at the window, lifting the mug for warmth, and let the city sound fill the gap where words could not lie. For the first time in the long months of bruises and betrayals, a possibility bloomed in her chest: she might not be the only one who would have to choose where to stand when the war came.
She had been pushed and pulled by other people’s games for too long. Watching Ares speak vows for the headline was a small, clear lesson: some marriages are weapons. Some are alliances. Some end when they are no longer useful.
She sniffed again, quietly, and drew in a breath that tasted of cold air and resolve. The city kept moving, the streetlights stared down like indifferent judges, and the two figures below carried on their chosen script.
Tessa lowered her mug and pressed her forehead to the cool glass, whispering something not for the world but for herself, an admission, a promise, maybe a threat, then turned away to step back into the life she’d rebuilt brick by brick.
Outside, the crowd thinned as people melted back into the night. The wedding had been a signal shot across a field. Ares had given Lila his name for six months; Marcus and the world had been forced to re-evaluate him. The scaffolding of influence shifted, and somewhere in the steam of the city’s breath, the first moves of a longer game were already being plotted.
The night settled, and the city exhaled. The war had begun to take form, and everyone in its orbit would have
to decide which side they were on.