Chapter 80
Sienna's pov
“Don’t touch me!”
Shock snapped through me, followed by instinctive fear, and I recoiled from his hand as if my skin had learned to flinch.
The slap rang out in the hospital ward, too loud for a place that was supposed to be quiet. It startled both of us—him, because he hadn’t expected it, and me, because I hadn’t realized I could still move that fast when I felt cornered.
Harrison’s eyes flashed with something sharp before his expression sealed back into that brooding calm, controlled enough to make me doubt what I’d seen.
“Are you really that scared of me?” His voice was hoarse, threaded with disbelief.
Scared?
I lifted my hand and felt the sting spread across my palm. I hadn’t held back.
“Is that strange?” I curled my fingers into a fist and forced myself to look up. “Shouldn’t I be afraid of you?”
The bruise along his jaw looked darker up close, yet he stood there as if pain were beneath his notice.
“Don’t you know what you’ve done to me?” I rubbed my wrist, heat and soreness rising under my skin. “You’re worse than an animal. I should’ve hit the other side of your face, too.”
He didn’t blink. “You can do it now.”
“You—”
His calmness felt like provocation. I swung again before I could stop myself. “Do you think I won’t?”
A faint, cold smile surfaced in his eyes. Harrison caught my wrist and yanked me toward him, stealing my balance.
“Let go of me!” I twisted and lashed out with my other arm, but that wrist was trapped too, both held in his hands like restraints.
“Who gave you the audacity?” he asked, low and even.
Our faces were closer than they’d been in the hallway. The difference was that he was in control, and he knew it.
I glared at him, teeth clenched. “You provoked me first.”
“So what?” He leaned in until his breath warmed my cheek, his mouth hovering where it didn’t belong. “Even if I wanted to sleep with you right here, what could you do about it?”
“What do you want?” I forced the words out. “Speak properly, and don’t get so close.”
How had it turned into this again, my pulse loud and my pride useless? And Harrison—something was wrong with him today. I’d said enough to start a war, yet he hadn’t truly erupted, leaving me looking like the only one losing control.
“You’re my wife,” he said, and it sounded less like intimacy than a claim. He released me abruptly and added, “Sleeping with you is natural. You don’t have the right to refuse.”
I didn’t bother arguing about morality. “I’m not going home with you. If you need my cooperation for the divorce, bring everything here.”
What unsettled me was the math that wouldn’t add up. When I filed, Vanya and I had already sorted out property and debts under the law, and Harrison had agreed. Even the part about him helping with what I owed—I’d told him I’d repay him someday.
So what was left?
I steadied my breathing. “Do I owe you anything in terms of property?”
His mouth tilted as if I’d amused him. “Do you think I’m settling accounts with you over money?” He let out a short, humorless laugh. “Money is the last thing I care about, especially what I’ve spent on you. I never planned to get it back.”
“Then what do you want?”
“Come home,” he said. “Stay with me for another month.”
He must have anticipated my refusal, because he added smoothly, “For five years, everything you had was because of me. Now you repay me with one month. I’m still the one losing out.”
“Why are you insisting I go back with you?” Somewhere beneath my anger was a truth I hated: my survival over the past five years was tangled up with him. Without that one night five years ago, I would’ve been dead.
“Don’t you hate me?” I asked. “Wouldn’t it disgust you to be with me?”
He smirked, playful and cruel at once. “Yeah. I hate you. I’m disgusted by you. For five whole years.” His eyes sharpened. “So for this last month, Mrs. Blackwood, you’d better serve me well. Or I have plenty of ways to make your life miserable. And Sienna—stop comparing yourself to Elena. You’re different. Some things can only be done by you, as Mrs. Blackwood.”
The words landed like an insult, yet something about the way he said it snagged at me, as if there were another meaning he refused to name. Then his face returned to that familiar coldness.
As his wife, I didn’t have a background that matched the Blackwood name. When I married him, I was drowning in debt, and Nora was lying in a coma that demanded money like air.
If Harrison truly hated me, he could have divorced me cleanly and made sure I got nothing. If he only needed a wife as a shield, he could’ve chosen someone easier, someone whose presence didn’t complicate his world.
So why wouldn’t he let me go?
And yet, as he humiliated me, something in me went still. For the first time, his cruelty didn’t pierce where it usually did. I met his gaze head-on.
His eyes were clear, jewel-bright, and always shadowed by something that felt permanent.
“Harrison,” I said quietly, “is that how you really feel?” My throat tightened, but I kept going. “Can you be honest with me for once? Let’s stop tearing at each other and actually talk.”
His pupils tightened for a beat—then he shut his eyes, like he could lock me out.
I caught that crack and pressed on. “If you really hate me, there are a dozen ways you could divorce me. I can’t stop you.”
I thought of his contradictions, of Alexander Jakes’s careful hints, of nights when Harrison’s control had slipped and his desire had seemed too real to fake. Which version of him was the lie?
I forced a smile that tasted like salt. “Just like now—you didn’t have to come to the hospital to see me—”
Harrison moved so suddenly I barely registered it. He stood, tugged at his collar, and before I could scramble away he seized my wrists and pinned them above my head, his grip iron, his other hand already working at the buttons of my hospital gown.
There was no tenderness—only urgency, roughness, and a brutal need to erase whatever hope I’d let myself feel.
“Why do you think I came to the hospital?” he murmured, a smile like ice. “You know better than anyone.”
My gown fell open under his hand, exposing me to his gaze, and humiliation flared hot enough to make me dizzy.
“Sienna,” he said, almost gentle—almost. “You don’t still think I like you, do you?”