Sweet Romance13 min read
My Wild Marriage: The Little Princess Who Wouldn't Back Down
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I woke to moonlight and the messy, dizzy ache of too much and too little sleep. The apartment smelled faintly of sandalwood and something metallic. My silk nightdress stuck to me like a second skin. Under the thin curtain of white fabric, shadows moved like vines. I blinked. A man rolled off the bed and laughed low.
"Little princess, you can't burn bridges like that," he said, breathing in satisfaction.
I turned my back on him and spat, "A toy. Just a toy. Keep it as trash if you like."
He came forward like a tide. "I haven't had enough, princess."
I slapped his cheek hard. "Get out! I don't want you. I'm sleepy. I'm going to sleep."
He laughed. "I like it when you resist. It makes me cruel."
There was a blur of hands and a dragging, and I woke to pain and a pounding that wasn't just in my head. When I could finally move, my body hummed with that wrong mixture of shame and rage. I pushed myself up and fled the room.
Downstairs sunlight stabbed my eyes. I yawned and shuffled toward the kitchen for something to eat, but the stairs felt like a cliff. Each step a battle.
He waited at the bottom, leaning on the banister with that smug smile I had known since childhood. He never hugged me on the stairs. He never helped. He waited and watched like a man watching a performance.
"Want me to carry you, princess?" he asked, lip tilting.
"Get out of my sight!" I snapped, then lifted my chest and forced my shoulders back. I would not show him I was weak.
I am Jolie Flynn. People call me the little princess because my father built a life loud enough for everyone to know I should be pampered. But the man watching me—Holden Silva—had been my shadow since before I can remember. We grew up across the cul-de-sac, one pair of opposing houses, one pair of opposing personalities. He mocked my taste, my habits, my laugh. But behind that, he watched me the way a hawk watches prey.
"Stop staring," I hissed, but by the time I reached the living room I had a smile polished into place. The world expected the bright, unbothered Jolie. I could be bright when necessary.
He had been away for a while—school in another country—and he had come back with a different edge. He kissed me in ways that left me dizzy and furious and a little breathless.
"You threw away the morning pill," I said when I found the empty bottle. I thought my voice sounded steady. "Why would you throw out my pills? What is wrong with you?"
He answered calm as glass, "I threw it out. I don't like you making messy choices."
"Messy choices? You're the one who doesn't use protection," I hissed, fury hot and real at the back of my throat. "I won't have your child. I won't keep anything that ties me to you."
Holden's face changed. The laugh drained. He turned, and the house dimmed. "You would not have my child?"
"I wouldn't have your child even if your name was a golden crown," I said. "I'd rather be free."
A crash outside pulled our eyes to the door. His parents had come with baskets and fruit—pears clattering on the floor. They stood there like an old accusation.
"Mom, Dad," I said forcibly polite. They were formal, smiling the practiced smile of people who live in other people's business.
"Good afternoon," I told them. Their eyes slipped to Holden like the world turned to him first. He stepped in front of me without a word. "They're here," he announced simply. "My parents."
His mother, Laura Gonzales, narrowed her eyes at me like she could smell my defiance. "You got home late, didn't you, Jolie?"
My cheeks rosed red. "I did. I need rest."
His father's mouth tightened. "You two need to be sensible. This household has rules."
He tried to smooth things—Holden always tried to smooth things with a neat voice and cold hands. He wrapped an arm around me and said, "She's my wife. Rest is all she needs after last night."
I wanted to crawl into a hole. I wanted to scream that last night was the worst. The house knew us as a power couple and nothing more. But in private, we were an unsteady battlefield.
"Where are my pills?" I demanded again. He answered the same way and this time I lost it.
"You threw out my pills?"
"I did," he said. "I don't like the way you depend on them."
"Don't you dare play saint!" I threw the pillow at him. "You think you can lecture me? You—"
He watched me with a look that made my bones cold. "I can't allow you to be careless with our lives."
"Don't speak for me," I snapped. "I didn't ask to be your property."
A silence fell thick enough to taste. Then I said something I had planned for weeks in a small voice. The words felt like knives.
"I want a divorce," I said.
He didn't flinch. He simply said, "What?"
"I said," I went on, because once I started I could not stop. "I would marry my father's enemies, the neighbors, anyone but you. I will not bear your child. If you want me, you'll have to bet everything."
He took me in his arms before I could regret it, the same way he had held me when I was a child and scraped my knees. "Princess," he murmured in a voice that softened a fraction. "We will not divorce."
He had the advantage of patience; he also had calendars and a stubborn ownership that made me both furious and miserable.
Days blurred. He was busy, always in meetings, always smelling faintly of a woman's perfume that was not mine. He came home sometimes with the scent of orange blossom and rose along with the mint and cedar that was his signature. That scent told me something he didn't tell.
"Who wears this perfume?" I asked one night, reckless with suspicion.
"Nobody important," he said.
"Holden, don't lie."
He didn't look guilty. He looked annoyed. "You were jealous."
"Maybe I am," I admitted. Pride tore at me. "I don't like the idea of you in someone else's arms."
He studied me, and his voice turned soft like velvet. "Jealous? So cute."
A small war between us started. I would flirt with danger; he would correct it with a look. He would be both tender and untamed. He would plant quick morning kisses, and then in the dark press me between his arms like a conquering general.
"Call me brother for a favor," he once teased when I wanted a snack and he refused to move. He said it with that sardonic grin. "Call me 'big brother' and you'll get what you want."
"Stop it," I said, but my voice trembled with laughter, and I called him "big brother" just to see him melt. He laughed, and that laugh made a shallow place in my heart sink.
We went out. People whispered about our marriage like it was a piece of theater. I was the bright new thing on everyone’s social feed. He was the dark prince who kissed me in private.
There were flashes of something strange and sweet among the bruises. Once, in the park with candles and taro cake, he held out a fork and fed me even after we had argued. Once, exhausted and sore, he walked me into the bedroom and took my coat to warm his hands with on a cold night.
"Why do you do these things?" I asked once.
"I love annoying you," he said with such affection that I actually laughed. "And sometimes I like being nice."
Those were the moments that confused me the most. He was not just a monster. He was a man who could be ridiculous, tender, and cruel in the same breath.
Then the worst sort of deceit arrived: Emily Morel walked into our lives like an idea made of perfume.
I saw her first at a hotel lounge—tall, composed, with a smile that suggested someone used to getting what she wanted. She was Holden's high-school flame, or so she claimed. Her perfume matched the scent on his jacket.
"Holden didn't tell you?" she asked me within minutes, polite and sharp. "I thought he would."
"Tell me what?" I demand. I didn't want to know. I didn't want any more reasons to feel small.
"That I'm... old news," she said lightly. "But you may know I've always liked him."
She looked at me with an almost tender smile. "Some things are worth fighting for."
I hated her already. I told her nothing. Instead I asked, flat and cold, "You here to take him back?"
"Perhaps," she said with a slight tilt of the head. "If you are leaving, I can help make it easier."
I nearly laughed at her audacity. "I am not leaving," I said. "And leave him? He chose me."
She bit back a smile. "We shall see."
When she left, Holden's expression did not change. But later that night, in the quiet of our bedroom, he stood a little closer and said, "She came to see me."
"Really?" I felt icy with jealousy. "And you didn't tell me."
"I didn't think it mattered," he shrugged.
It mattered very much. I began to watch him like a hawk, and where I had been determined to be cold, my anger melted into a peculiar, sinking fear.
At a company retreat, things exploded. I had stumbled into a club mostly for appearances—rooms of flashing lights, loud music, liquor that smelled of sugar—because Kaylin Franke, my friend, dragged me there for a birthday. People gathered and played tricks. In the crowd, I was shoved; someone tried to drag me into a room. I shouted. The man who grabbed my hair had been a pest before—one of Miguel Figueroa's cronies, likely—someone who didn't know I married into such a house.
"Let go!" I cried.
"Be quiet," he hissed.
I fought. He raised a shard of broken mirror close to my throat. Everyone shouted. The man laughed like an animal. I could see my life sliding—an ugly scrape that might never fade.
Then the door slammed. The club stopped like a movie frozen. Holden had arrived and torn through the crowd. He looked like a god with an edge.
"You touch my wife again," he said and his foot smashed into the man's face.
The world turned to chaos. Holden's men—Brent Morozov and some others—came in with a handful of goons. They dragged the attacker into view. I had my phone out, blood on my hands, an echo in my ears.
"What did you do?" I asked weakly.
"What you couldn't," he said flatly.
That man—call him "the rat"—was broken fast. But what followed was worse and more deliberate. Holden had a method I had seen before: exposure and ruin. He pulled out a USB and a remote.
"Holden, don't—" I began.
He lit a cigarette and, with a calm I had never given him credit for, played a video on the club's projector. The screen showed Emily Morel—a woman I had greeted hours before—in a compromising loop with another man. The footage came from some hidden camera in a private lounge. The room went silent, then furious. Ladies gasped and men cursed. Emily, in the corner, froze as her past was thrust into blinding light.
"This is sick," I whispered, but Holden's voice cut like ice. "You thought you could play with us."
Emily's face drained of color. "Holden! You can't—"
"I can," he said. "You brought men to tempt my wife? You thought you could engineer a fall for Jolie to ruin our lives?" He slammed the remote down. "You're fired. You'll leave my life."
He turned to the whole room. "Show her the door," he ordered. "Make sure she never finds work in this city again."
They did. The women who once liked Emily hissed and turned away. Men who courted her gave her cold, calculating looks. The humiliation was sharp and public. Emily's fingers trembled. She begged and shrieked; she pleaded that we had misread, that the tape was old, that she had been forced.
"Stop!" she cried. "Please! Please—"
"No," Holden said. He placed the USB in his pocket and walked away, leaving her kneeling beneath the projector like a saint burned for blasphemy. People recorded, whispered, and filmed. Cameras flashed. Men who were once her suitors put distance between themselves and her like she carried a disease.
I watched her collapse under the weight of everyone’s gaze. Her proud face crumbled. She crawled to the door and fled, but the footage stayed on the club’s system; that night, videos went viral. She became a thing of public mockery.
The punishment scene was a slow, terrible thing. I watched Emily go through every phase: the smirk when she thought herself untouchable, the defiant denial that became small, the attempts to explain that only confirmed suspicion, the begging, the final collapse into desperation. Voices in the crowd shifted from gossip to contempt, and people who had once admired her publicly renounced her. Someone handed her a tissue, another filmed her husband covering his face. A few clapped—hushed, vicious applause. Her anger broke into pleads and her peacocking became a pitiful, private grief.
She walked away a shadow. The whole place watched her go. Men who had been her allies turned their backs right there in the hallway. Phones recorded her tears and spread them like fire. The world took its pleasure in watching her fall.
That public scene lasted for minutes, and for me, it was both justice and nightmare. I hated Holden for turning off his humanity entirely, and I could not help but feel the rush of victory. Emily had conspired, but had she deserved such ruin? The crowd whispered yes like a verdict.
But Holden's punishment wasn't all spectacle. Later, in the quiet of his office, he sent a different kind of justice to the men who had tried to hurt me. He invited a pair of them—one of whom had tormented me in the club—and had them broken systematically. I watched as a man who had claimed to be untouchable groaned and begged in a way that echoed Emily's wails but was cruder, harsher. Holden used the law with the same ferocity as his personal vengeance; he ensured the men would be publicly categorized and stripped of status; they were unable to return to the circles they had used for cover. People who had cultivated power suddenly had it slip like sand through their fingers.
The public beaten one—Miguel Figueroa’s shadow man—had his arm ruined in a fight that ended in a hospital bed. That punishment scene was brutal and clinical: the crowd watched Holden cleanly break a man’s control and strip away his arrogance. The way the man went from swagger to pleading was cinematic. The witnesses took videos; people who had once laughed at women now winced. The man’s face collapsed in shock, his empire small and hollow underneath the weight of his own humiliation. The whispers in the club amplified into rumors and then into legal inquiries. The man’s father, Gustavo Figueroa, called the next day and begged. In public, the attacker tried to cover his shame with boasts; in private he was a quivering mess. The reaction of onlookers was mixed: some repulsed, some delighted. I couldn't stop the shiver that slid down my spine.
After the public spectacle and the retribution, I felt hollow. "Why do you do this?" I asked Holden in a low curt voice as we left the club.
"Because you are mine to protect," he said.
"You're not my protector," I spat. "You're my jailer."
He didn't answer. He pulled me close, fingers pressing my wrist, but the heat in that touch didn't belong to comfort. It belonged to someone who decided what I would be allowed to feel.
Days passed. Kaylin sat with me, and we whispered plans. "You can't keep letting him drag you around," she said. "He's got his ways, but you're not powerless."
"Tell that to my head," I said.
She laughed and then grew serious. "He keeps Emily quiet now. But he's got secrets. Everyone has secrets."
One secret arrived in the bleakest form: a worker in a hotel had been paid to plant a camera in a private room. Holden had the footage. Holden could make the world bend. He made the wrongs into a demonstration. Public punishment is a sharp knife. It promises revenge, and revenge is addicting.
The day after the club, we had a small, dangerous peace. Holden's protective armor became a confusing mixture of softness and dominance. He brought home taro cake and fed me the fork with kids' patience. He hummed old songs. He kissed me slow in the kitchen and pressed his forehead to mine.
Then Kaylin found out Miguel Figueroa's son had taken advantage of their friend. Tears followed. I knew we had to act. He would be punished; Holden promised that. But this time I insisted on being the one to do the speaking to our friends, to show Kaylin they could not get away with such crimes. Holden nodded and—for once—claimed he trusted my voice.
At the town hall, in front of a crowd of neighbors and friends, I told the truth about what had happened at the club. My voice shook at first. "He tried to take me to the back room," I said. "He had a blade. He wanted to hurt me." My confession was simple and direct.
The crowd's faces shifted. People murmured. Miguel Figueroa's names circulated in low curses. Miguel, the son, attempted a smile that failed at first.
Holden stood behind me. When I finished, he stepped forward and spoke: "We will not let criminals hide in my city." His words were declarative, immune to doubt. "He will be arrested."
The punishment scene that followed was ugly, precise, and public. The attacker was taken to the policehouse by uniformed men in front of everyone, handcuffed, protests dissolving into silence. People watched him go, like a bad drawing erased. Mothers crossed themselves, men lowered their eyes, and fireworks of gossip sputtered and died.
I felt sick and alive at once. Justice had happened. The crowd clapped and I realized they were clapping for me, for our victory, for the sight of insolence being extinguished. I didn't laugh. I did not cry. I thought of the first night and the taste of shame and how it had become armor.
At home, Holden wrapped me in his arms and said, "You are my princess."
I responded, "I don't need a prince to keep me. I need to keep myself."
He blinked, just slightly, like a man surprised a coin might shine when turned another way.
We had a fight that blew out the lanterns. We argued over whether to punish Emily and whether to let Miguel go through law. The city loved scandal and gossip, and Holden used that hunger like a weapon.
Sometimes, in private, he would stand outside my door and listen for my breath. Once he admitted, in a whisper, "I was never off the leash for anyone else."
"Then why punish them the way you do?" I said. "Why let them hurt you and me?"
He kissed my forehead as if to say it didn't matter. "Because the world is messy," he said. "And sometimes mess needs a tempered hand."
The story is not neatly packaged. I am a woman who married a man who both broke and saved me in ways I cannot always explain. He is cruel and kind, lethal and sweet. I do not pretend to be a saint. I do not pretend to have forgiven everything. But beneath the bruises and the chaos, fragments of something warm and dangerous festered into a strange, complicated care.
These events led to more secrets unraveling. I found out Holden had other past flames—none mattered except Emily and the quiet girl who had once been his steady shadow. The world continued to pivot on scandal.
One morning, I found our front door open and my locks changed. "You changed the locks," I said, incredulous.
"I did," Holden said across the hallway. "You locked me out."
"Yes," I said. "I wanted to see what you'd do."
"You could have just asked me not to call," he muttered.
And we keep going. We kept fighting. We kept making each other bleed a little. We kept finding small thrills—his hand brushing my neck, his temper snapping at the right moment, his ridiculous stubbornness.
And when the world turned ugly and when villains thought they could get away, Holden had a way of making sure they felt the weight of their own choices in front of everyone. He would make examples out of liars and predators, in public, with witnesses, and with a coldness that scared me and made me safe at once. I hate that my relief comes from his rage, but sometimes safety tastes like that.
Tonight, I write and feel the moonlight on my face. I remember the feel of being cornered and the feel of being held. I remember being called "princess" and wanting to throw that word in his face. I remember the sting of victory and public shame. I remember how, when Holden turned his rage outward, entire worlds shifted. I remember Emily's face in the projector light and the way people watched. I remember the men who thought themselves untouchable, and the way the city cheered when they fell.
I am not a perfect woman. I am not a perfect wife. I am Jolie Flynn, and Holden Silva is Holden Silva—terrible, brilliant, unbearable, and sometimes everything I can't say out loud. We are tangled like vines. We strangle one another and still bloom.
The last scene of this chapter is not a promise, not a beginning. It is an everyday memory: Holden wrapped a blanket around me one night after a storm, my hair damp, my hands bloodied and shaking from a fight I chose. He brushed my hair back and said, "You aren't mine to own, but God help anyone who hurts you."
"Then be careful," I said.
"I will," he said, kissing my temple.
We both lied a little then and told truths with our mouths pressed against skin. That is the best we have so far.
The End
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