The steam from the bathroom billowed out into the master suite like a silver ghost, carrying with it the scent of expensive sandalwood and the sharp, clinical freshness of Dermin's world. When he stepped through the door, he was already partially dressed in charcoal-grey trousers that fit him with surgical precision. A white silk shirt hung open over his chest, damp droplets of water still clinging to the tanned skin of his collarbone.
He looked devastatingly handsome—not just because of his features, but because of the absolute, unshakable power radiating from him. He didn't look like a man who had slept with a pair of scissors at his throat. He looked like a man who had already conquered the day.
Hannah, still huddled on the floor where she had fallen, looked up at him with eyes that burned with a decade's worth of feverish resentment. The sight of his perfection was a physical insult to her.
"What kind of a man are you?" her voice cracked, a jagged sound in the quiet room.
Dermin paused, reaching for a gold watch on the dresser. He didn't look at her, his fingers steady as he adjusted the strap. "I'm the kind of man who ensures his interests are protected, Hannah."
"Interests?" She scrambled to her feet, her legs shaking so violently she had to lean against the bedpost. "I am a human being! I am the girl you left in the dirt ten years ago! You betrayed me, Dermin. You ran while the sirens were still screaming, and the first thing you do—the very first thing you do when I breathe fresh air—is bind me to you with this crappy, fraudulent marriage?"
She took a step toward him, her hands balled into fists. "You haven't even asked. Not once. You haven't asked how I survived the first year when I thought I was going to die of terror. You haven't asked about the winters without heat, or the women who tried to sharpen toothbrushes to use on my neck because I didn't know how to keep my mouth shut. You never visited. Not a single time in three thousand days. Why?"
Her voice rose to a scream. "Why did you never come? I spent years staring at the visitor's gate until my eyes bled! And then I realized... I wished you never did. Because if you had walked through that glass, I would have found a way to kill you then. I still want to kill you now!"
Dermin finally looked at her. His expression was a wall of ice—smooth, impenetrable, and chillingly detached. He didn't flinch at her rage. He didn't even blink.
"What is there to ask, Hannah?" he said, his voice dropping into a cold, flat register. "Prison life is never 'great.' I don't need a play-by-play of the squalor you endured to know it was unpleasant. The details of those ten years are irrelevant now. They are a sunk cost."
"Irrelevant?" Hannah gasped, her face turning a ghostly white. "My youth is a 'sunk cost'?"
"The past is a graveyard," Dermin said, stepping toward her until he was towering over her, his shadow swallowing her whole. "The rest of it—how I escaped, why you were the one in the back of the cruiser—it isn't important. What matters is that you are safe now. You are in this house. You are under my name. That is the only reality you need to focus on. Our marriage is the only thing that exists for you now."
"There is no marriage!" Hannah spat, her eyes wild. "I will burn this house down before I let this be my reality! I will find a way to make sure this union is no more, Dermin. I don't care if I have to crawl back to the parole board and beg for a life sentence. I will get away from you. You are a ruthless, hollow monster."
She moved closer, her face inches from his, her voice dropping to a low, trembling hiss that carried the weight of a thousand heartbreaks.
"You didn't even show up to her funeral, Dermin. Six years ago. My mother. She died thinking her daughter was a cold-blooded criminal. She died alone because the only person she trusted was behind bars. You knew her. She used to feed you when you were hungry! And you didn't even show up to throw a handful of dirt on her casket."
The silence that followed was suffocating. The air in the room felt thick, as if the walls were closing in to hear his response. Hannah watched his face, searching for a crack, a flicker of guilt, a single tear of regret for the woman who had treated him like a son.
Dermin's eyes didn't soften. He didn't look away. He reached out, his hand grasping the back of her neck with a firm, possessive grip that forced her to maintain eye contact. His touch was warm, but his words were like lead.
"My condolences," he said.
Two words. No emotion. No explanation. Just a flat, clinical acknowledgement of a death he hadn't bothered to witness.
"Condolences?" Hannah whispered, a single tear finally breaking free and trailing down her cheek. "That's all? After everything she did for you? After everything you cost her?"
"It's all that is required," Dermin said, his thumb brushing the skin behind her ear in a gesture that was terrifyingly intimate. "Death is the only thing we can't negotiate, Hannah. But life? Life is something I control. Your mother is gone, but you are here. And as long as you are here, you will behave as my wife. Now, go to the dressing room. Your stylist will be here in twenty minutes. We are going out."
He let go of her, turning back to the mirror as if the conversation were finished, as if he hadn't just stepped over the corpse of her past.
Hannah stood there, her heart feeling like a shattered vessel. She looked at his broad back, at the effortless way he commanded the space around him, and she felt a cold, sharp clarity wash over her. He wasn't just a man who had betrayed her. He was a man who had erased her.
"I'm going to destroy you, Dermin," she whispered to the air. "I'm going to make you feel every second of those ten years."
Dermin didn't turn around. He just straightened his collar and smiled at her reflection in the glass. "I look forward to seeing you try, my love."