Faking My Death With His Baby: The Billionaire Burned My Wedding

Sienna's POV

The gravel bit into the soles of my feet before the iron gate had finished its slow, grinding retreat. Two guards blocked the drive, their jackets slick with the first mist of rain, arms crossed. I threw myself at the nearest one, palms flat against his chest, shoving with everything I had left.

He didn't move. Might as well have shoved a concrete pillar.

"Let me through." My voice splintered. The slap-mark on my cheek throbbed in the cold air, a hot brand against the October chill. "Move—please, just move—"

The second guard lifted his wrist to his mouth. His lips formed words I couldn't hear over the roaring in my ears. Static crackled from the gate's speaker box. Then Declan's voice poured into the night, amplified and metallic, filling the driveway like a god pronouncing judgment from on high.

"Let her go. Open the gate."

I froze mid-strike, my fists still raised against the guard's immovable chest. Slowly, I turned. The balcony off the master suite jutted into darkness two stories up. A tiny orange ember glowed there—the lit tip of his cigarette, flaring bright as he inhaled.

His silhouette leaned against the railing. Casual. Bored.

"She has no money," Declan said, and the speaker carried every syllable to me with crystalline cruelty. "The phone is mine. A plucked bird doesn't survive long in the cold. Don't follow her." The ember arced through the air as he flicked the cigarette over the railing. "By dawn, she'll scratch at the door begging to be let back in."

The gates groaned. Began to part.

I didn't wait for them to finish. I squeezed through the gap sideways, silk catching on iron scrollwork, tearing a long rip up the side of my blouse. Didn't care. The road beyond the estate stretched dark and empty, lined with ancient oaks that swallowed the streetlights.

My slippers were already soaked. Thin-soled things, meant for marble floors and heated dressing rooms, not asphalt. I walked anyway. Ran, at first—a staggering, bare-limbed sprint that carried me half a mile before the stitch in my side forced me to slow. Then walked. Then walked some more.

---

The rain started in earnest around midnight.

Not a dramatic storm. No thunder. Just a steady, patient drizzle that seeped into every seam and plastered my hair to my scalp in dripping ropes. My blouse clung transparent to my shoulders. The silk slip underneath

—cream-colored, lace-trimmed, chosen by Declan's personal shopper—offered nothing against the cold.

My left slipper gave out near a gas station. The sole peeled away from the upper like a mocking tongue, flopping with each step until I kicked it into a gutter. The right followed two blocks later. I walked barefoot after that, the pavement rough and gritty, tiny stones embedding themselves in the tender arch of each foot. I stopped noticing the pain somewhere around hour three.

The city didn't recognize me. Why would it? I'd only ever seen it through tinted car windows, chauffeured from estate to boutique to charity gala. Now it sprawled around me—neon signs buzzing, homeless men huddled in ATM vestibules, a dog barking from a fire escape. A woman in a fur coat crossed the street to avoid me.

I caught my reflection in a bank window and stopped breathing for three full seconds.

The woman staring back wasn't Sienna Hayes. She was a ghost. A ruin. Wet hair flattened like a drowned animal's pelt. Left cheek swollen mauve and purple, the imprint of Declan's knuckles still visible in the bruise's topography. Silk slip stained grey with street filth, ripped at the hip. Lips cracked. Eyes hollow.

Behind the glass, a wedding dress stood posed on a faceless mannequin. Strapless. Cascading tiers of tulle.

Tiny seed pearls sewn in constellations across the bodice that I knew, from my jeweler's eye, were hand- knotted and probably cost a thousand dollars a strand.

My palm pressed flat against the window.

The dress was beautiful. Someone had spent hundreds of hours on those pearls. Someone with a burnisher and a steady hand—the kind of hand I used to have, before my tools were loaded into a black van and driven to an incinerator. The kind of hand that had traced initials into rose gold and believed, stupidly, desperately, that love could be hidden in a helix of filigree.

My other hand drifted to my stomach. Flattened there.

What's left but scar tissue and someone else's ghost?

The rain blurred the mannequin's face. Or maybe that was tears. I didn't wipe them. My stomach cramped, a fist of hunger clenching beneath my ribs. Twenty-four hours since I'd eaten. The steak I'd made for Declan was probably still smeared across the dining room carpet. Let the maids clean it. Let them scrub until the fibers frayed.

I pushed off the glass and kept walking.

---

Dawn came grey and indifferent.

I found a park bench near a dried-up fountain and sat with my knees pulled to my chest, the silk slip riding up my thighs, goosebumps pebbling every inch of exposed skin. A jogger passed at six-fifteen and didn't look at me. A mother pushing a stroller at seven-thirty steered a wide arc around my bench. By nine, the sun had burned off the drizzle, but the cold settled deeper, burrowing into the marrow of my bones.

The phone buzzed at four in the afternoon.

I'd almost forgotten it was there. The weight of it in my pocket—rose gold, matching the ring, matching the cage—had become part of my body's new geography of misery. It vibrated against my hip bone, insistent.

I pulled it out. The screen glowed.

Declan.

Not a text. A call. He was calling me. He'd waited eighteen hours—just long enough to make sure the cold and the hunger and the fear had done their work. Just long enough to imagine me broken, weeping, ready to grovel. The phone buzzed again. The vibration traveled up my arm into the sore place where his fingers had clamped my wrist.

My thumb hovered over the green button.

I could hear his voice before I'd even answered. The cool, measured tone. The smirk buried beneath the words. Had enough, Sienna? Ready to come home and behave? He'd be sitting in his leather chair, bourbon in hand, Vanessa probably draped over the armrest pretending to take dictation. The image was so sharp it made my teeth ache.

The phone buzzed a third time.

I pressed the red button. Held it.

The screen went dark. I pressed the power button next, long and deliberate, until the rose-gold logo flickered and died. The silence that followed was terrifying and enormous and beautiful—the silence of a chain snapping.

I shoved the dead phone back into my pocket and sat on the bench until the sky purpled toward evening, and the cold grew teeth, and the hunger became a living thing gnawing at the lining of my stomach. My feet had stopped bleeding. The cuts had sealed with dried blood and street grit, a mosaic of grey and rust.

I was going to die out here. The thought arrived without drama. A simple fact, like rain or gravity. I had no money. No friends. No studio. No phone. The city was a machine designed to chew up people like me, and I'd been fed into it wearing silk and bruises.

My fingers crawled into my slip pocket. Searching for nothing. Finding something.

A bill. Folded small, forgotten. I pulled it out and stared. Thirty-seven dollars. Change from a coffee run weeks ago, back when I'd had a studio to go to and an assistant who fetched lattes. I'd stuffed it in the pocket and never thought about it again.

Thirty-seven dollars wouldn't buy a room. Wouldn't buy a coat. Wouldn't buy a phone charger. But it would buy a drink. Several drinks.

The bass hit me before I saw the sign. A low, thudding pulse that vibrated up through the pavement into the bruised soles of my feet. Neon flickered ahead—blue and pink, a cursive scrawl that spelled out The Dive in letters that buzzed and crackled. Below the sign, a doorway led down. Concrete steps. A heavy steel door. The sound leaking through it was feral and loud and mindless.

I pushed the door open.

The music swallowed me whole. Bass rattled my ribs. Stale beer and sweat and something sharper—tequila, maybe, or desperation—coated the back of my throat. Bodies packed the dance floor, a single writhing mass under strobe lights that fractured the room into stop-motion fragments. A woman laughed, high and sharp. A man shouted something unintelligible. No one looked at me.

I wove through the crowd toward the bar, keeping my head down, my hair curtaining the bruise on my cheek.

The bartender was a thick-set man with sleeve tattoos and the weary eyes of someone who'd seen every variety of human wreckage this city could produce. He did look at me. His gaze snagged on the rip in my blouse, the bare feet, the mottled swelling beneath my left eye.

I slapped the thirty-seven dollars on the bar.

His eyebrows drew together. "Lady. You okay? You need me to call someone? Police, maybe?"

My voice came out scraped raw, a rasp barely audible over the bass. "No police. No calling." I pushed the crumpled bills toward him. "Whiskey. The strongest you've got. No ice. Just—" My throat closed. A tremor ran through my jaw. "Just enough to make me forget."

He didn't move for a long moment. Then he scooped the money, counted it, and set a glass on the bar. The bottle he reached for wasn't top-shelf—no estate whiskey here, none of Declan's Saint-Émilion vintages—but the pour was generous. Three fingers. Four. He slid it across the wood.

I wrapped both hands around the glass. The warmth of the alcohol hadn't yet hit; it was just cold glass and the faint sting of fumes in my nostrils. I lifted it to my lips and drank deep, and the burn was a baptism.

Liquid fire scoured my throat, hit my empty stomach, spread outward through my chest until my fingers tingled.

Another sip. Another. The edges of the room began to soften.

I folded my arms on the bar and dropped my head into them. The music thudded on, somewhere far away.

The bruise on my cheek pressed against the inside of my forearm, a dull reminder that I still had a body, that it still hurt, that I was still alive even though every other fact of my existence had been erased.

The glass was empty. I'd finished it without noticing.

In the darkness of my own arms, I closed my eyes and let the world dissolve into bass and noise and nothing.