Chapter 324 You would not marry Damian Blackwood

Chapter 324: Chapter 324 You would not marry Damian Blackwood

Aria’s POV

I woke to sunlight pouring across white sheets and the low hum of Damian’s heartbeat under my ear.

It had to be past noon. My whole body ached in the sweetest, most inconvenient way, and when I tried to shift, an arm the size of a tree branch tightened around my waist and pulled me back against a wall of warm muscle.

"Where do you think you’re going," he murmured, voice rough with sleep.

"Damian, it’s the middle of the day."

"Then we’ve made excellent use of the morning." His lips grazed the mark on my shoulder, and I felt that ridiculous shiver run all the way down to my toes. The scent of him wrapped around me, cedar and lavender, that dark quiet smell I’d stopped fighting weeks ago.

I twisted in his arms until I could see his face. Sharp jaw, heavy brow, those charcoal-grey eyes that terrified everyone else in the Blackwood Kingdom and somehow only ever softened for me. It still didn’t feel real. The Alpha King, feared across every pack on the continent, tangled up in bedsheets and looking at me like I was the only thing in the world worth looking at.

"You’re staring," I said.

"I’m allowed." His thumb traced my cheekbone. "You’re going to be my wife."

My heart tripped. "I already am, technically."

"Mating isn’t enough." He said it with that absolute, immovable certainty he used for everything. "I want the whole thing. A wedding. In front of the entire Kingdom. I want every Alpha in North America watching me put a ring on you and knowing exactly who you belong to."

"That’s not romantic, that’s a hostile takeover."

He grinned, and it did unfair things to my pulse. "Marry me anyway."

We flew back to the capital that afternoon.

The next few days were the happiest I could remember.

Damian, who I’d been told never appeared in public, who nobody had ever seen crack so much as a smile, spent an entire morning in a bridal atelier watching me try on gowns.

He sat in a velvet chair with his ankle crossed over his knee, dismissing dress after dress with a single lifted eyebrow, until I stepped out in one that made him go very, very still.

"That one," he said quietly.

"You’ve said that four times."

"I mean it this time." He rose, crossed the room, and stood behind me at the mirror, his hands settling on my waist. In the glass, his eyes met mine. "You look like the Luna Queen."

"I look like a very expensive meringue."

"Aria." He turned me around. "I have wanted this my whole life. Do you understand? Thirty-one years. Every pack I inspected, every face I looked at, waiting for the Moon Goddess to hand me the one person made for me. And then there was you." His voice dropped. "I’m not letting a single detail be less than perfect."

I had to blink hard against the sting behind my eyes. After everything with Ethan, after two years of being a stand-in, a shield, a Luna in name only, I’d stopped believing anyone would ever choose me. Damian chose me every single day, loudly, without shame.

We took the bridal photographs the following afternoon.

Somewhere between the fifteenth pose and the photographer begging Damian to stop growling at the male stylist, I laughed so hard I cried, and he pulled me into his lap in front of everyone and kissed me until the whole crew pretended to check their equipment.

"Happy?" he asked against my hair.

"Terrifyingly," I admitted.

For the first time in my life, I let myself believe it would last.

Then my phone rang.

The name on the screen turned my blood cold. Grandfather. My father’s father. Kiel, the old man who’d summoned me across an ocean once before and never wasted a single word.

"You need to come to me," he said. No greeting. "Now. France. Today, Aria."

I looked up at Damian, and I watched his whole face change.

"I don’t want you going alone," he said flatly, already reaching for his own phone.

"He asked for me. Only me." I pressed my palm to his chest. "It’s my family, Damian. I have to."

His jaw worked. Every instinct in him was screaming to lock me in this suite and never let me out of his sight, I could feel it radiating off him. But he’d learned, painfully, that I didn’t respond well to cages.

"Forty-eight hours," he said finally. "Then I come after you. And God help whoever’s in my way."

I kissed him goodbye at the private terminal, and I told myself it was nothing. A cranky old man, a family obligation. I told myself I’d be back before the flowers for the wedding were even chosen.

I was wrong about all of it.

The estate outside Paris was cold in a way that had nothing to do with the weather. My grandfather was waiting in his study, and standing at his right hand, poised and elegant and radiating quiet triumph, was Sylvia Smith.

I didn’t even get to sit down.

"I’m ending this," Kiel said. "Whatever arrangement exists between you and the Alpha King, it stops now. You will not marry Damian Blackwood."

The floor seemed to tilt. "What? Why? You’ve never even met him—"

"Because I know what his family is." His voice was iron. "And I will not watch my granddaughter walk into their bed."

"That’s not a reason." My voice cracked. "Grandfather, I love him. He’s my second chance. After everything I’ve been through, he is the one good thing—"

"Sylvia."

At his nod, my stepmother stepped forward, and with a small, poisonous smile, she laid a thick folder on the desk between us.

"You should see this before you throw your life away, sweetheart," she said gently. "The Blackwoods aren’t the fairy tale you think they are." Her manicured finger tapped the top page. "There are questions. About your uncle Vincent’s business partner. About a death that was never fully explained. About the pack that stood to gain from it."

She let the pause stretch. "The Blackwoods had motive, Aria. And your grandfather has spent a very long time believing they had opportunity."

I stared at the folder as if it might catch fire.

"You’re lying," I whispered.

But my hands, when I reached for it, would not stop shaking.