Sweet Romance15 min read
Married for a Week, Stuck for a Fortune
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I signed a marriage certificate like signing away a key I never owned.
"Can we divorce quickly after the registry?" I asked, voice small and sticky with cheap confessions.
Elijah Barron stopped walking. He was taller than the doorway, an even taller shadow on the pavement, suit sharp, shoulders like maps anyone could get lost under.
"You think that's easy?" he said, voice low and smooth. "You think I let go that fast?"
I held the little red booklet up like proof and pretended I hadn't heard him. "We just—if you don't care about me, won't you give me fast terms? A clean break?"
He watched my fingers fumble over the page. "You wish," he said.
I pinched my lip. I was twenty. I had been shoved from one cold room into another.
"What's your name?" he asked finally.
"Sophie Scholz," I said, like I was giving him a rumor.
He didn't smile. He flicked his eyes over the booklet, at me, with something that looked like interest and then like a cold blade. "You cry too much," he said.
"I am not crying," I snapped, wiping my cheek with the back of my hand so fast it smelled like salt. "I'm glad, actually. This is better than the lab."
He only looked at me as if I were a cracked vase someone pretended to care about.
A quiet black Bentley slid to a stop. "Nine's car," someone said. Camilo Howard opened the door with the quiet of people who move mountains for him and he spoke to Elijah with the kind of shortness I later learned meant obedience.
"Mr. Barron," Camilo said.
I looked at the window. Elijah slid inside like he was swallowing a storm whole. The car closed and hissed. I ran and clutched the door.
"You won't leave me, will you?" I said. "You can't just dump me."
He looked over, and his face was the cut of a man used to having people agree with him, used to being answered only with the word yes. "Go home," he said. "Take a taxi. I have business."
I tried to bribe him for a taxi fare with the kind of smile that used to be a currency in the lab. "A hundred? I'll let go of your tie."
Camilo passed a crisp note forward with hands that never trembled. "Take it," Elijah said.
I took it. I let my mouth curve when he turned his head away.
At the villa my new life began under red banners and an old man's grin.
"Come sit," Dario Eriksson said, taking my hand like a marionette's. "This is your home now."
I looked down at the "double happiness" decorations and almost laughed. It felt like a thrift store set for a movie I hadn't auditioned for.
"Where are my things?" I asked.
"You don't have any," the housekeeper said. "You were brought; the master had things prepared."
Gloria Marchetti — my new husband's mother — inspected me and sneered like I was a messy line in her favorite painting. "This is the family brought in for the show," she said. "You? You?" Her voice threaded into every corner, like a sharp wire.
I swallowed.
"Don't cry," Dario said, and his tenderness surprised me into warmth. "Eat."
So I did. I hadn't eaten proper food in months.
"I don't like this," Gloria muttered. She muttered and I felt it like gray weather.
"I will leave if you want," I told her. I practiced being small because it had always kept me alive. "I will go. I have no money but—"
"Stay," Dario said. "You are family now."
I believed him like I believed a half-mended bandage.
That night, wrapped in the red room that smelled of dates and lipstick, Elijah left through the glass like someone who never expected the house to keep the heat. He did not offer to stay. I fell asleep feeling hollow and oddly safe, like a seed in bad soil.
I have a secret.
When water touches me, something happens. My legs betray me. The pain is an ocean of needles. My skin peels into scales and for a terrible moment I become something other people read in old tales and put on museum pedestals.
I was a lab subject as a teenager. My family kept a door to the past where they put me like an unpaid debt. The "family" who raised me, Kendrick Pfeiffer and his woman, used me and pretended not to know the cost.
"Don't go near water," Kendrick told me once, his voice soft and empty like someone selling a lie he needed to sell himself.
At the Barron mansion I kept the secret like a coin in my mouth.
Later that night a shower trickled in the room and I did what I had to do. I closed the bathroom door and opened the hot: some part of me needed to see if the pain would find me again and if it could be beaten by my own courage.
A knock at the door froze the water's voice.
"Is it done?" Elijah's voice came through the glass.
I pressed water into my palms to keep them steady. "Yes," I said, because I could not let him see me falter.
He called the car: "Drive," he said to Camilo.
He walked to the door and I could barely keep my breath in my chest. He didn't enter. He called, irritated. "Open the door."
I did, wrapped in towel and trembling. He looked at my wet hair and the bandage on my arm. The bandage hid a secret: the lab's final joke had been a bone break staged as the cost of a life experiment.
"You don't need help," I lied.
"Sign this," he said, dropping a thick pile of paper on the bed. "A year. Sign. No feelings. Five million. A house."
It read like bait and became my lifeboat.
"One million now," I asked, like a beggar who'd found a palace.
"One million," he said without shaking, and the number popped up in my old phone. He gave me a new phone, and then a rule.
"No contact with the Pfeiffers," he said.
I called Kendrick anyway. He offered me a pill and then a task: "Steal the investment plan from the Barron file and I will give you the medicine you need."
He was cruel enough to sell the idea like a favor.
I did what I had to. I learned to keep eyes like coins. I learned to lie like I had trained for it my whole life.
Mabel Chapman was a friend who had left the lab. "Come to me if you can," she had said. "I won't let them take you again."
She helped me with a private doctor, Leo Cooper. He was a soft gravity with a kind of careful, intelligent smile. He told me the truth: the gene therapy they used on me was sophisticated. I was not supposed to become what I was. But I was useful. "They wanted a marketable miracle," he said. "They wanted mermaid stories to become products."
"Does it hurt every time?" I asked him.
"Yes," he said. "But it is your choice now."
"Then I choose to get better."
"Money first," Mabel said. "We need proof. We need a journalist. We need witnesses."
We planned small things. I sold a box of goods at a bar that night with Mabel; an arrogant social boy named Xander Bass — who'd shown a sudden interest because the bar's manager thought the Barron wedding was good gossip — brought me to the party three floors up.
"Nine's friend," Xander said, meaning a man I later saw as a kind of rough jewel, a cousin of the Barrons.
Elijah Barron was already there, in a corner like a sculpture, when I walked in, carrying the little pink bottle.
"You here?" he said without surprise.
"Just sales," I said, and the bar's lights made the drink look like a carnival of swallowed stars.
Xander smiled and promised to buy everything if I could make the one man — the man everyone said was old and cruel — take a sip.
"Do it," he said. "If he drinks, he pays. You get all the bottles."
So I walked to Elijah's table and offered him a cup. He did not want it.
"Try," Xander chuckled.
"Not interested," Elijah said, and I felt the chill again.
"Please," I said. "Just one sip for this poor peddler."
He shoved it away. I opened the cup myself and tasted it. It was sweet. It was stupidly like candy. It made a laugh bubble out of me that wasn't mine.
"She likes it," Xander said, beaming. "Buy it all if she convinces you."
Elijah watched me like a man watching a sleeping animal, and then — against all rumor and spite — he lifted the cup and sipped.
He did not sip politely. He drank as if he had suddenly remembered some forgotten taste. He finished it in one swallow.
"Bring her back," he said quietly to Xander, "and buy it. All of it."
Xander's face split into a grin and we walked to the private room where bad jokes and rich boys made decisions.
"She? Your assistant?" Xander asked, because the rumor mills all needed a paintable angle.
"Yes," Elijah said. "Buy it. And bring her back."
I walked back like a puppet who had just discovered a string could change everything.
"How do you know it's safe?" Elijah asked, when we were alone.
"It's not," I said. "Xander spiked it. He did not mean harm, but he added something. He wanted a show."
"You drank it," Elijah said.
"Yes," I said. "I'm fine."
He seemed less sure. Later, he ordered his driver. "Take her home."
He said it like a man delivering an order. But I didn't feel like a victim. I felt like someone with a plan.
The first time I almost told him the truth was at the fancy dinner for Xander's cousin's birthday. I sat in a borrowed suit and it stuck to me like a foreign skin.
"You're booked for the dancing," someone laughed.
"I don't dance," I blurted.
"Then you'll drink," Xander said. "He insisted."
I saw Elijah's jaw move slowly. "No."
"Yes," someone else pressed. "Two options: dance or drink."
"I'll drink," I said quickly and snatched the cup from the table. I downed it. I meant to do it to escape the dance-floor demand. I didn't expect the heat to climb under my skin and the world to spin like coin. I watched my fingers go limp and then someone lifted me into his arms.
"Get her home," he said to Camilo.
The car ride is fuzzy.
"Are you all right?" he asked, once our feet were on the Barron lawn and the moon hung like a coin in the sky.
"I am very hot," I said, voice soft as cotton.
"We're going home," he said.
At the Barron estate, the warm air turned cold, and Elijah carried me like a small thief carrying their last found thing. I felt weightless and then I felt heavy and then a hand dumped me into the mansion's small, secret pool — a long black mirror kept for his nights — and cold buried me.
I screamed.
"Don't panic," Elijah said quickly, stepping back. "Stay still."
Something in me tore. Pain like someone stitching glass into my legs. I clenched my teeth and tried to keep my sound small. That had always been my survival method: small, quiet, useful.
When I surfaced the pool was empty and my legs were a scandal in my head. I wrapped a towel, and my tail went back to normal like a private trick.
Elijah's eyes were hard and for the first time I felt seen, not like a curiosity, but like a person who had aching truth. He called someone and said, without softness, "Call Dr. Cooper."
The doctor came. He checked me quickly, like a detective with a stethoscope.
"It's a severe reaction," he said. "We need to monitor. No more strange drinks."
"Sure," Elijah said. He stood too close to me and said, "You are my responsibility now. That is the law until the papers are signed off."
I wanted to run but the villa felt like a net. I wanted to tell him everything, but lying was how I'd been taught to be safe.
Weeks moved like a slow machine. I stayed at the Barron private house — at Elijah's private home more often than at the public house where Dario lived. He was present in small and odd ways: he didn't smile much, but he took the belt out of my jeans when I couldn't do the clasp, and he rolled down a bandage when no one asked him to.
"Eat," he said, pushing a spoon to my mouth like a patient uncle.
"You don't have to—" I started.
"Do it," he said, voice low. "If you don't eat you'll be weak."
I tasted the kindness and it felt like a coin with one side scraped off. I also took notes. He was not what my family had told me he was. The man had a softness inside a winter jacket.
But Kendrick Pfeiffer — the man who had traded my body for his ledger — had not yet been punished. He was still the same man who smiled like a shark to strangers and treated me like paper.
Mabel and Dr. Leo had found something: documents showing Kendrick's company ordered my gene "modification" as research for a pharmaceutical product. I had proof now. We had a journalist ready; a night at a society gala where Kendrick planned to sign an investor pact would be the stage.
We did it like thieves planning the right theft.
The night of the gala, all the wealthy islands had come to the banquet. Chatter like glass clinked and two thousand lights made binary constellations. Kendrick sat at a table with his polished wife, his friends, and a man who'd been ready to sign away a conscience for a better position.
"Mr. Pfeiffer?" I whispered into the microphone when the moderator introduced a segment on philanthropy. "Good evening."
He looked up and was about to dismiss me when the projector flared with slides.
"Is this show?" he said, and the room quieted.
Mabel, Dr. Leo, and Elijah stood with me. On the screen were lab photos, invoices, private emails, shipments. The bank transfers that showed a pattern of experimentation with no ethics. Pictures of me — young, sleepy, held with cold hands in the lab — and the very documents Kendrick had boasted were legal outside of the city. They were not legal.
"These people tried to sell a product created by altering a child," Mabel said, voice beautiful and full of proof. "They trafficked in altered DNA for profit."
"That's slander," Kendrick barked. "You can't—"
"I can," Mabel said. "And I can show you the report. Here."
She clicked to another set of slides. Plain invoices led to the investor. The crowd, at first murmur, leaned forward like a wave reaching for shore.
"I want you to explain," Dr. Leo said. "How was the product tested? Who signed off on human trials? Mr. Pfeiffer, did your company approve experimentations on unpaid or uninformed subjects?"
His hands shook.
Kendrick stood, face white with a color like old paper. "You have no right—"
"Everyone will see that you bought off regulators," Elijah said, calm now like a blade. "You will cancel the investment. You will return the money and you will resign from the board. Otherwise the press gets everything. All the names. Every cost. Every corrupted signature."
"No," Kendrick said. His voice jumped from confident to small. "This is absurd!"
Gloria, at his side, tried to smile and failed. "This is slander," she said. "These are lies."
"Let the police speak," a woman in the crowd snapped as she filmed the screen. "Let the public see."
Phones rose like a sky of little suns. People once polite now made a net. Investors who had laughed with Kendrick last week murmured like men who suddenly guessed their houses were built on sand.
"Listen," I said, more real than I had been earlier. "My life was sold. I am not a lab number. I am not a product. I am a person."
"You're lying," Kendrick said, but his words were thin. The room's temperature shifted.
"Has anyone told your donors?" Dr. Leo asked. "Would you sign your name knowing what it meant?"
"I will sue," Kendrick cried.
"Not if your partners pull out," Elijah said.
Phones recorded everything. A reporter rose. "Are you planning to donate the money they stole from human lives?" she asked. "Will you return the profits?"
A few investors put their hands over their mouths. The Gala's host went pale as his board texted.
Kendrick's grin snapped into a different thing — a man whose world had lost its map.
"Our contracts are solid," Gloria said, and her voice had the smallness of someone trapped in a shrinking room.
"Bring them the contracts," Elijah said, "in court."
The chaos was a storm. People gathered. The valet had a longer face than earlier. A socialite posted a live stream: "Bombshell at the gala. Pfeiffer possible crimes. Link in bio."
Around Kendrick men and women who had pretended to be friends shifted. The investor who had been ready to cut a check now asked quietly, "What of my name?"
"Protect your families," another whispered. The safety they had traded for friendship flickered like a bad bulb.
Kendrick's face went through stages.
First: disbelief. He blinked hard like the world was wrong.
Then: anger. "You have ruined my life!" he shouted. He ranted about reputation like a man beating at the bars of a cage he had paid for.
He pointed at Mabel. "You will pay!"
She smiled in a way that was not triumph, but right. "I already did. I gave the truth."
The crowd's reaction was a chorus: "Shut up," "Tell us everything," "Call the police."
One investor got up, took his coat, and walked out. Another whispered into a phone and then hung up slowly. The host's assistant hustled to block the live stream, but it was already everywhere.
Kendrick staggered like a man who had been hit by the truth. He tried to call a lawyer. He tried to flail. He grabbed Gloria's arm, pleading.
"Don't," she said, and her voice cracked. "Don't do that now."
Mabel spoke softly into the mic, "These are human beings. We want restitution, transparency, and the end of inhumane testing."
The live comments crawled. "This is criminal," said one. "Prime for prosecution," said another.
Kendrick's face hardened and then collapsed. People he thought were allies turned away. Friends took their glasses and left. A waiter who had served him clean water all evening said nothing. A young reporter asked him one final question he could not answer: "Did you ever ask the people you experimented on for consent?"
His eyes had nowhere to look.
He dropped his face into his hands. He began to plead. "Please, I—this is a misunderstanding!"
"No," said Elijah, steady. "You and your company will answer. Tonight is only the start."
They had wanted to be mostly anonymous; the crowd made them public. The message was clear: the world would watch.
I watched Kendrick falter, listen to the presenter read lines that would be valuable evidence. I felt something strange inside me — not triumph so much as relief. Public ruin is not joy; it is the door opening after a long night of being locked out. The room watched as a man begged, as his supporters left, as the police officer in the corner took notes.
Mabel's voice did not shake as she said, "We want change. We want real medicine. We want safety."
The crowd applauded, half in anger and half in relief. Cameras swarmed. The man who had sold my life was reduced to mouthing words for the news with his name no longer honored but shouted.
When his plea turned into nothing, when investors packed their coats and left, Kendrick looking small like a man whose kingdom had been a paper palace, a new thing started: calls, demands, a cascade of "where were you?" from people who wanted distance.
"Stop," he cried at one point. "Please stop."
"Why?" someone called out. "So you can return to what you were doing?"
The crowd laughed like a river.
Kendrick called for help. No help came. He tried to propose a press conference to "explain." The TV crews were already there. The world had been given access to the ledger. A man who had been above the law had been made below it.
He crumpled. He cried. He threatened to sue. He pleaded. He begged. He offered to hand over documents. He offered apologies like change dropped on a table. None of it mattered. The courthouse of public eye is long and sharp.
Gloria left without him, shoulders small. She had been the kind of woman who wore theater like armor; when the theater fell she had nothing.
In the end it wasn't violence that broke Kendrick. It was exposure. It was people naming the harm. It was investors who would not be seen as partners in a horror, and the press who would follow through.
Elijah stayed through it as if he was waiting for the silence afterward. He did not smile. He only put his hand on my shoulder, a small steady pressure.
"You're safe," he said, the words like an anchor.
"I will fix it," Mabel said, and there was a steel behind her softness that I had not known she had.
"Yes," I said. "You will."
After the gala, the fall was not instant, but the consequences multiplied. The board resigned. Reporters made phone calls. The people Kendrick thought he had paid now kept their distance. For once, the power of the room had been used to take something back.
Elijah walked me home that night. He did not let go of my hand.
"Why did you do that?" he asked.
"Because I had to," I said. "Because I could."
"Good," he murmured.
Weeks later, after lawyers and press releases and a long, hard public unspooling, Kendrick's name was on paper in a way it had never been before — as a man whose companies faced inquiries. It was not a neat justice, but it was real, and for the first time someone asked me what I wanted.
"Do you want to leave?" Elijah asked.
"Yes," I said immediately. "Yes. But I want something else too."
He didn't argue. He helped me, quietly, like a doctor measuring a patient's fever.
I learned there are many tiny moments that make you know someone cares:
"Stop crying," he had said and then smoothed the tears away.
"Eat," he insisted, scooping food into my mouth when my hands failed.
"Stay," he said, and meant it in a way that was not possessive but protective.
I stayed. We found a way to be something between strangers and something like friends.
In the months after the gala, Kendrick tried to scramble his reputation back; he lost boards and partners. He called me a liar to the press. He held a shabby press conference that smelled of daisies and excuses.
"You're a failure," he spat at our gate one morning when he saw how people walked past him. "You ruined me."
"You ruined yourself," I said, because the hurt had made me sharp and I could speak without fear.
He went to lawyers. He got furious. He cussed my name in the air like a curse he tried to throw at me and missed. People took photos. People remembered his smile from the old days and began to forget it.
Kendrick's last phone call to me was a plea: "Please — come talk to me. We can settle."
"Settle what?" I asked.
He begged. He grovelled. He tried to buy back the silence he had sold. I sent his calls to voicemail. The city softened on him like a tide retreating from a cliff.
The scandal didn't cure all the damage. I still went to doctors and did the hard work of believing a life could be mine beyond the lab. But the world had changed: my name was now in newsfeeds alongside images of a man who had been in charge of his own cruelty.
Elijah and I settled into a strange rhythm that was both mundane and stitched with flashes of feeling: him softening at odd times, me being less scared to ask for help; us both learning the edges of an agreement nobody had expected us to cross.
"Don't get used to me being soft," he would say with a clipped laugh when he found himself making coffee for me.
"Too late," I'd answer, and he'd pretend to be annoyed.
The stuffed squirrel bag I carried — Stinky, my small ragged companion made in a lab light — became the last secret I kept. When the night was very quiet, I would put Stinky on Elijah's jacket and watch him notice with a little crease in his brow that meant I found him watching. He would complain, and then tuck the squirrel into his coat pocket.
"Don't lose her," I'd say.
"I won't," he said.
We had no fairy tale, only a messy, true day-to-day: a cold man who learned, slowly, to be warm; a girl who learned that being bought did not make her cheaper; a public fall that taught a city to look differently at its heroes.
The first time I called Elijah by a smaller name — "Eli" — he didn't react. He only let his fingers squeeze mine and told me to eat.
In the end the world changed a little. Kendrick's companies folded into bad headlines. The lab that had kept me became known. Mabel and Dr. Leo opened a clinic instead of a research wing. I got more than money: a chance to heal and a stake in my own life.
And sometimes in the middle of the night, if the house is quiet, I hear the soft tick of Elijah's watch. "Stop sleeping with it wound around your wrist," he teased once, and I laughed.
"Maybe it's our witness," I said.
"Keep Stinky safe," he answered.
And I do.
The End
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