Chapter 25 JUST AN ACT
Eli's POV
I barely slept.
I don’t even know if I slept at all. My body lay in the bed, but my head stayed wide awake, replaying his words in the darkness like they were stitched into the ceiling.
Your father isn’t dead.
I married you to get to him.
He wouldn’t even come out of hiding even if I killed you.
I kept turning those sentences over and over until they scraped me raw. Eventually the night thinned into morning, the room lightened, and the world went on even though everything inside me felt ripped open.
When I dragged myself out of bed, the house felt strange. Wrong. Like a home rearranged by ghosts. But thankfully the perfectionist mother in law is gone.
I followed the faint clinking noise to the dining area.
Julian was already there. Neatly dressed, and already eating; eggs and coffee like it was any other morning, like he hadn’t thrown my entire life off a cliff just hours ago.
He didn’t even look at me when I hovered by the doorway, still wearing one of the oversized sleep shirts he'd filled my wardrobe with.
My heart hammered stupidly, and painfully.
He looked… normal. Very unbothered.
I approached slowly, like getting too close might set off some silent alarm.
“Morning,” I said.
My voice sounded small. Pathetic.
He didn’t respond. Not even a grunt. Just cut another piece of his eggs.
I swallowed hard. My palms were sweating. My throat felt too tight.
“Julian… we need to talk.”
That only got me a slow, bored blink. He didn’t lift his head. Just looked up with his eyes.
“What,” he said flatly.
Not what’s wrong, not what do you want, not anything remotely human.
Just what.
I forced in a deep breath.
“I want to understand last night,” I said. “All of it.”
He kept eating.
I continued anyway, because if I stopped now I’d never say this again.
“You told me my father isn’t dead,” I said, my voice trembling slightly. “You said you married me to bait him. You said he… didn’t even care if I died and it's like you were planning to kill me.” The words tasted sour. “So I want to know—”
“No,” Julian cut in. “You want answers that don’t exist. Your father is trash. That’s the only explanation I have to offer.”
My stomach twisted. But that wasn’t the point. Not the point I was here to make.
“That’s not what I’m asking,” I whispered.
His jaw twitched very faintly, annoyance slipping into his facial expression.
I took a step closer.
“I’m asking about you,” I said. “Why you—” my face burned, “—kissed me. Why you held me. Why you… punished me. I'm asking if spanking and kissing needed to be part of the play of baiting my supposed living father.”
He paused chewing.
And then, very quietly:
“Don’t.”
“What do you mean don’t?” I pressed. “You kissed me. You grabbed me. You comforted me when I cried. That wasn’t just business—”
“Eli.”
“No,” I snapped, surprising even myself. “No. I’m not going to shut up about this. You can’t kiss me and then tell me it meant nothing or you did it to bait my father, is my father watching you kiss me? You just can’t—”
His chair scraped across the floor as he stood abruptly.
“Shut. Up,” he said.
I froze for a moment, but the fear didn’t stop my mouth.
“You kissed me,” I insisted, my words trembling with something between humiliation and fury. “You freaking kissed me!”
“That’s enough.”
“It’s not enough for me,” I shot back. “You don’t get to kiss someone you claim to own like a—like a pet—and then pretend it didn’t—”
“Eli,” he snapped so loudly the sound cracked through my chest. “It was an act.”
I went still as quick as the air went cold.
His eyes were glacial as he stepped closer, each footstep slow, controlled, deadly deliberate.
“It was an act,” he repeated. “I don’t feel. I don’t do emotions. Love is stupid shit I can’t imitate for long.”
I felt something in me twist painfully.
“So what?” I choked. “Kissing me was just—what—business strategy?”
“It was to shut you up,” he said, voice dry. “You were spiraling. Whining. And it was exhausting to watch.”
I swallowed hard, the sting sharp behind my eyes.
“Then let me go,” I whispered. “If your plan didn’t work. If using me didn’t get him to come out of hiding. Let. Me. Go.”
Silence.
He stared at me like he was calculating a number.
Then he moved.
In two slow steps he was right in front of me, close enough that I felt his breath skim my cheek. My back hit the edge of the table.
He leaned in, his voice dropping into something dark and scorching:
“No.”
My pulse thrashed.
“I own you,” he said softly, almost gently, which somehow made it far worse. “And if your father won’t come for you, I’ll find another way to put you to use.”
A shiver ran through me.
“I’m not an object,” I whispered.
His lashes lowered, and his next breath was slow, bored, dismissive…
“I don’t care what you are,” he said. “You belong to me.”
The phrase hit me like a slap.
He pulled back slightly, his eyes raking over me without warmth.
“And it will be in your best interest,” he added, “to talk a lot less.”
Something broke inside me. Something I didn’t even know was fragile until it broke.
Somehow this — this — hurts.
Because for one stupid second, one tiny moment, I actually thought the kiss meant something. That maybe Julian was capable of something a hair more human than monstrous. I mean, he was gentle and… and he asked permission and he made me all shy and giggly…
But he wasn’t.
He never was… I must have imagined it all.
And he never pretended otherwise.
He stepped away from me without another word, grabbing his suit jacket off the back of the chair.
“Eat,” he said. “You’ll need your strength.”
“For what?” I asked hoarsely.
He didn’t look at me as he walked toward the door.
“For whatever comes next.”
And then he was gone.
The house swallowed the slam of the door like it had been expecting it.
And I stood there, staring at the untouched breakfast he’d told me to eat, feeling something inside myself bleed quietly from the sudden realization that yesterday was the closest Julian Thorne would ever get to softness.
He will actually get worse.. And I had no idea what that meant for me.