The Substitute Wife Escapes Her Gilded Cage

Liv POV

I never made it to the airport.

My body, a traitor of bone and blood, had given out before the taxi even hit the main highway. The darkness took me there, and I woke up back in the white room, the sterile hum of machinery replacing the relentless sound of rain.

My father, David Hayes, sat in the corner. He looked like a man shrinking inside his own cheap suit, folding in on himself like wet cardboard. He had brought a bag of toiletries and a stack of magazines, placing them on the bedside table with trembling hands.

"You need to eat more, Liv," he said, his gaze fixed on the floor tiles. "Marcus... he worries."

He didn't worry. He worried about optics. And my father, a low-level soldier in the D'Angelo empire, worried about his pension—and his neck.

"I'm fine, Dad," I lied. My voice was a scrape of sandpaper against stone.

Marcus came every day. He played the part of the devoted husband for the nurses, adjusting my pillows, pouring my water with practiced precision. But his eyes were always elsewhere.

They drifted to the window, to the door, checking his watch, checking his phone. He was a body occupying a chair, his soul already halfway down the hall.

I stopped letting him feed me. I stopped letting him touch me. When he reached for my hand, I pulled it under the sheet. It was a small rebellion, a silent war waged in the cold inches between us.

One afternoon, the pain meds made the world fuzzy, but my hearing was razor sharp. I heard footsteps outside my door, then a pause.

I slid out of bed, dragging my IV pole. The burns on my legs screamed, a hot, tearing sensation with every shuffling step, but I needed to see.

Marcus was standing in the alcove at the end of the corridor. He was hunched over, his broad back blocking the harsh hospital light.

He pulled something from his breast pocket. A silver pocket watch. Old, tarnished, completely out of place against his Italian silk suit.

It was hers. I had seen it in the photos I burned. Izzy holding it up to the camera, laughing.

He ran his thumb over the engraved lid. The gesture was so tender, so intimate, it felt like I was watching him stroke a lover's skin. His knuckles turned white as he gripped it, his jaw tight, fighting a war inside his own head.

"Give it back."

Izzy stormed into the frame. She looked frantic, her hair disheveled.

"Why did you take it, Marcus?" she hissed, grabbing his arm. "It's all I have left of that summer."

Marcus didn't let go. He looked down at her, and the raw, bleeding agony in his eyes made my stomach turn.

"Because if I don't hold onto something of yours," he whispered, his voice cracking, "I'm going to burn this whole city down just to feel warm."

"You have a wife," Izzy said, but she didn't pull away. Instead, she leaned into him, drawn like a moth to the flame.

"I have a distraction," he corrected, his voice low and lethal. "I have a duty. You know who holds my soul, Isabella. You know."

I backed away from the door, my breath hitching in my throat.

I managed to get back to bed before my legs gave out. I lay there, staring at the ceiling tiles, counting the cracks in the plaster.

Later, two nurses came in to change the IV bag. They thought I was asleep.

"He's intense, isn't he? The husband," one whispered.

"Intense? He's obsessed," the other replied, checking my chart. "But not with her. You know the stories. Ten years ago, he nearly abdicated his position for the cousin. He was ready to walk away from the Family, the money, the legacy—all of it."

"What happened?"

"She left. Ran off to Europe because she didn't want him to lose his crown. He went mad. They say he only married this one because she has the cousin's nose. Poor girl. She's just a ghost he's trying to touch."

A ghost.

I closed my eyes, letting the darkness take me. They were right. I wasn't fighting for my marriage. I was fighting a memory. And you can't kill a memory. It's already dead.