My fiancé paid a man to attack me before our wedding, then said, “If she’s scarred, even better.”

Chapter 3
His perfect public grief hid an even darker conspiracy inside

Sabrina’s name on the records hurt differently. She had not been some woman Christian had protected from the truth. She knew my treatment had been manipulated. She knew someone had been hired to leave me unable to appear at my own wedding, and she had agreed because Christian promised that afterward she would finally become his wife. Yet the recordings showed he was deceiving her too. He offered each of us a different future while arranging both lives for his convenience.

Gabriel wanted me transferred immediately, but the investigators warned that sudden movement might tell Christian I knew too much. So I stayed where I was, surrounded by machines and flowers from a man who had helped put me there. Every afternoon, Christian sat beside me and rehearsed tenderness. Sometimes he brushed his thumb over my knuckles. Sometimes he told my motionless body about the messages pouring in from fans. “Everyone is praying for us,” he whispered once. The word us nearly made me open my eyes.

Outside my room, his performance grew larger. Reporters described him as exhausted and devoted. His team released carefully worded statements about privacy, healing, and postponed celebrations. He never publicly canceled the wedding. That detail mattered. Christian still needed the country to see him as the man who had been robbed of his happiest day, not the man who had arranged the robbery himself.

Meanwhile, the case tightened around him. Investigators matched payments, communications, and travel records. Gabriel preserved the recording in multiple secure copies. Dr. Lawson’s confession gave the financial trail a human voice, and hospital records supported the pattern he described. I listened as attorneys explained what might happen next, but none of it felt real. The most real thing was still Christian’s hand closing around mine each afternoon as though he owned the right to comfort me.

The night before the wedding, I barely slept. I kept thinking about the gown hanging unused, the guest list, the flowers, and the thousands of people who believed a love story had been interrupted by tragedy. Christian believed that story too, just in a different way. He believed he had written every ending available to me.

The next afternoon, he walked into my room smiling with practiced sadness and sat beside the bed. “Tomorrow was supposed to be the happiest day of our lives,” he murmured. I let the silence stretch until his fingers tightened around mine.

Then I opened my eyes.

Christian froze. The color drained from his face as he stared at me, waiting to discover how much I knew. I looked directly at the man I had planned to marry and said quietly, “It still will be.”

For one second, hope flickered across his face.

I finished, “But not for you.”