Julian’s POV
"I am asking you to choose, as I said before, you can fuck whoever you want to fuck, Hell, you can fuck my guards I wouldn’t care but if you get pregnant, you will terminate the pregnancy." I corrected her. "Status or sentiment. Access or affection. Security or illusion."
She stared down at the paper again, and for the first time the weight of the Windsor name seemed to press down on her rather than lift her.
"You will relocate after the wedding," I continued, because clarity prevents future rebellion. "You will attend family functions as my wife. You will represent the Windsor foundation when necessary. You will not interfere with business decisions. You will not question my whereabouts. You will not attempt to leverage my grandmother emotionally. You will not involve your parents in internal matters. And you will not under any circumstances speak of this arrangement to anyone."
"And if I do?" she asked, her voice smaller now.
"If you do," I said calmly, "you will find that being a Windsor can be significantly more difficult than marrying one."
I did not threaten loudly. I did not need to.
Silence filled the space between us, thick and suffocating.
She read the final page slowly, her eyes lingering on the signature line longer than necessary.
"You don’t even plan to divorce your wife," she said quietly, almost to herself.
"No."
"And I’m supposed to accept that."
"Yes."
Her jaw tightened, and for a brief second she looked like she might tear the contract in half out of pride alone, but she did not, because pride does not compete well against power.
"You’re humiliating me," she said finally.
"No," I corrected her. "I am being honest with you."
She exhaled sharply, closing the folder halfway before reopening it again as though she needed to confirm the clauses had not rearranged themselves into something kinder.
"This is not what I imagined," she admitted.
"That is not my responsibility."
The room felt smaller now, and I could see the moment she understood that this was not a negotiation but an offer with defined edges.
"You will have until tomorrow at noon to sign," I said, standing slowly. "If you decline, the engagement ends quietly and permanently."
"And my family?" she asked.
"Will be informed that we were incompatible."
She searched my face one last time for warmth, for hesitation, for a crack in the armor she might exploit.
She found none.
As I reached the door, I paused and turned back just slightly.
"You wanted to be Mrs. Windsor," I said evenly. "Now you understand what that costs."
Then I left her alone with the contract, the silence, and the realization that she had mistaken proximity to power for partnership.
The dawn over the Windsor Estate didn’t break; it bled. A pale, sickly grey light filtered through the heavy condensation on my bedroom windows, illuminating the sprawling gardens that had been manicured into submission for today’s spectacle. I had been awake since three in the morning, staring at the ceiling, tracing the intricate plaster moldings as if they held some secret escape hatch. There were none. In the quiet hours of the night, the weight of the Windsor name felt less like a crown and more like a shroud.
I stood in the center of my dressing room, a space larger than most people’s apartments, and felt the walls closing in. Every object in this room was a testament to a legacy I hadn’t asked for but was sworn to protect. The floor-to-ceiling mirrors reflected a man I struggled to recognize. Sunlight finally fought its way through the heavy velvet curtains, illuminating the dust motes dancing in the air, but the warmth remained outside the glass.
I was being dressed by a valet who moved with the invisible, haunting efficiency of a ghost. Every touch was painfully annoying, a ritual of preparation for a man being sent to his own fucking execution. The crisp, white cotton of the shirt felt like a second skin—starch-stiff, cold, and utterly unforgiving against my ribs. As he fastened the gold studs down my chest, each click felt like a nail being driven into a coffin. I wasn’t being dressed for a wedding; I was being armored for a battle I had already lost before the first shot was fired.
"The tie, sir? The silver silk or the traditional Windsor black?" the valet asked, his voice barely a ripple in the suffocating silence.
"I’ll do it," I muttered. My voice sounded like gravel, raspy and hollow.
I stepped toward the mirror, leaning my palms against the cold marble of the vanity. I looked at the man in the glass. The jawline was sharp enough to cut, the brow furrowed in a permanent shadow of the eyes—the eyes were the problem. Usually, they were flinty, the eyes of a man who saw the world in spreadsheets and power plays. Today, they looked like stagnant water. I began the familiar motions of tying a Windsor knot. My fingers, which could strip a high-performance engine in a dark garage or sign away a billion-dollar merger without a single tremor, were ice-cold.
Today was the day I would legally bind myself to Delia Kensington. Maybe illegally, not so legal.
The thought should have brought some sense of completion, a finality to the restless, feral searching that had plagued me for six years. I was fulfilling the debt. I was marrying the daughter of the family that—according to my grandmother—deserved the Windsor blessing. But standing here, in the stillness of my ancestral home, it felt like a grotesque parody of duty.