The sound of the glass shattering against the wall was louder than my mother's voice, and that was saying something.
"You will do as you're told, Janine." Her rings caught the light as she pointed at the shards on the marble floor. "Or is sweeping the only thing you're good for?"
I didn't answer. I never did.
Answering only ever added minutes to it. So I knelt instead, picking up the pieces, careful not to let my fingers shake, careful not to let her see the sting building behind my eyes.
I'd learned long ago that tears only ever bought me more of whatever had caused them.
Across the room, my sister Adaeze curled deeper into the armchair, scrolling her phone like none of this concerned her. It never did. It never would.
"Leave it," my father said, walking in with that flat, unreadable voice he used only when something had already been decided without me. "Get her cleaned up. The Vance family is arriving in an hour."
My hands stopped moving.
"The Vance family?" I looked up, glass cutting cool lines into my palm. "Why would they be coming here? I thought the merger was with—"
"Because you're getting married," my mother said. "In two months."
The glass in my hand bit down harder. I didn't feel the sting of it until later, lying awake, staring at a ceiling that had never once felt like it belonged to me.
"Married," I repeated, the word foreign in my mouth. "To whom?"
"To Ronan Vance." My father said the name like a debt finally being paid off. "First son. Heir to Vance Holdings."
I almost laughed. Almost. Because I knew, everyone in this city knew what came bundled with that name. "Isn't he"
"Crippled. Yes." My mother's smile was thin enough to cut skin. "Perfect, isn't it? A broken girl for a broken man. No one will ask questions"
A broken girl.
That was the moment I understood exactly what I had always been to this family. A liability they'd finally found a use for, something to be traded rather than someone to be kept.
"You can't just—" I started, my voice cracking despite every effort to keep it steady.
"I can," my father cut in, already turning toward the door, "And we have. The contracts are signed. You leave in two months."
I stood there holding a fistful of broken glass while my future was rearranged in under a minute.
Imelda found me later, sitting on the floor of my room, staring at nothing, the blood on my palm long since dried into something rust-colored and forgotten. She didn't ask what happened. She never had to. She lowered herself down beside me, joints protesting the way they always did, and took my hand, turning it over to press a damp cloth against the cut.
"They're sending me away," I said, my voice smaller than I wanted it to be. "To marry a man I've never met."
"Then you go," she said finally, "and you survive it. The way you've survived everything else in this house."
"What if he's worse than them?"
Her hand stilled on mine, just for a second — a flicker of hesitation I might have missed
"Then you'll still have yourself," she said carefully. "Something none of them ever gave you room to have."
I wanted badly to believe her — that whatever waited at the Vance estate couldn't possibly be crueler than the twenty-three years I'd already survived under this roof. But something in her eyes, gone as fast as it came, made me pause.
"Imelda." I searched her face, suddenly certain I was standing at the edge of something I didn't yet have the shape of. "Is there something you're not telling me?"
Her hand went still entirely.
"There are things," she said, "that are not mine to tell you. Not yet. Maybe not ever." She squeezed my fingers once, hard, like she meant to press the words into my skin instead of saying them aloud. "But whatever you hear about yourself in that house, whatever you're told about who you are, don't accept it as the whole truth.
"What questions? Imelda, what are you talking about?"
She stood, brushing off her skirt, her face closing the way it always did whenever she'd said more than she'd meant to.
"Get some rest," she said instead. "You have a long two months ahead of you."
She left before I could ask again, and I sat there long after the door clicked shut, turning her words over, feeling the shape of a secret I couldn't yet see.
Two months passed the way a held breath passes. My mother's parting words followed me to the front steps of a house that looked more like a fortress than a home: Try not to embarrass us.
I stood there with a single suitcase in hand, when the door opened before I could even knock.
A woman in a staff uniform gave me a slow once-over that made me feel smaller than I already did. "You must be the bride," she said, not unkindly, but not warmly either. "Mr. Vance won't be joining you for dinner. He doesn't join anyone for dinner."
"Where is he?"
She hesitated — just long enough for me to notice it, the same flicker I'd seen cross Imelda's face two months earlier.
"You'll hear him before you see him," she said. "If you see him at all."
Behind her, somewhere deep inside the house, a door slammed shut hard enough that I felt it move through the floor and into my chest, and for one unsteady second, standing on the threshold of a life I hadn't chosen, I understood that whatever waited inside was nothing like what I'd been told to expect.