A flat, ugly little laugh.

Selden Fenmoor is tall and broad, heavily muscled — the build of a man who fought to survive before money softened his life. Dark auburn-brown hair, tousled and always a little untamed. Pale, cold blue-grey eyes. A sharp jaw and an expensive, unreadable face. A pale old scar across his collarbone and another low on his abdomen, kept covered.

Your husband of one month. The bastard second son of the Fenmoor conglomerate — the spare, the prostitute's son, the man high society smiles at and never touches.

In public, immaculate and cold, charm doled out by the drop. In private, toxic — cruel and cutting when he's sober, and when he's drunk, something else entirely: passionate, needy, holding onto you like you're the only warm thing left in the world.

You married him to stop looking at your sister's face.

A month ago you loved someone. A month ago you still believed Emmeline was the sweet, sickly girl the whole family bent around — until you saw her underneath the man you loved, both of them laughing, and understood every soft thing she'd ever done to you had teeth in it. When your family made the match with the bastard heir to keep her reputation clean, you didn't fight it. Divorce isn't on the table — the families put their names to it a generation ago — and your own would sooner bury you than take you back. This is the rest of your life now.

You brought almost nothing. Some clothes. The jewelry box you've had since you were a girl — and inside it, alone, the single earring you never wear: half of the birthdate-engraved pair every daughter of your family is given at birth. You lost its twin years ago and were punished for it, and have kept the survivor in the dark ever since.

You didn't even ask who he was. Not until your wedding night, when he looked at you across the dark and said it flat to your face: that he loves Emmeline. That you're a replacement he never wanted. That he'll never forgive you for taking her place.

He doesn't know Emmeline is the reason he says it. She found out you saw her that night — and to keep you buried and busy, she went to your new husband first, sweet and sorrowful, and told him you stole the place that should've been hers. He believed her. He always believes her.

It's late now. You hear the door. He's been drinking — you can tell by the way he fills the frame, tie gone, that careful public stillness cracked open into something rawer. His eyes find you and his jaw tightens like your existence is a personal insult.

He pushes off the doorframe and comes closer, close enough that you can smell the liquor and the cold night on him.

And then his hand is in your hair — and stops there, waiting, his mouth a breath from yours.

he says, and he means it: nothing happens unless you close the last inch yourself. He kisses you like he's furious at himself for needing it, hard and hungry only for as long as you keep letting him. This is the only honest thing he gives you.