Married To My Haphephobia Husband

The address was written on a crumpled piece of napkin that was currently dissolving in the sweat of Keira's palm.

She looked at the paper. Then she looked at the steel door in front of her.

It was covered in layers of peeling black paint and a fresh tag of graffiti that looked like a skull.

The hallway smelled of urine and bleach, a chemical cocktail that burned the inside of her nose.

Somewhere two floors down, a siren wailed, the sound vibrating through the thin soles of her white satin heels.

Keira looked down at herself.

The Vera Wang wedding dress, with its hand-stitched lace bodice and cascading tulle skirt, took up half the width of the narrow, filthy corridor.

It was a joke. A cruel, expensive joke.

Her mother was hooked up to a ventilator in a sterile room in Manhattan, her life measuring out in beeps and hisses.

And Keira was here. In the Bronx. About to knock on the door of a man she had never met. A man her father had bailed out of prison specifically to marry her.

Her stomach twisted violently. Acid climbed up her throat.

Do it, Keira. Do it for her.

She raised her hand. Her knuckles were white, the skin stretched tight over the bone.

She knocked.

The sound was pathetic. A soft tap that was instantly swallowed by the heavy bass of rap music thumping from the apartment next door.

She waited.

Nothing.

Panic began to crawl up her spine. What if he wasn't here? What if he had taken the money her father paid him and vanished?

If this marriage didn't happen tonight, she knew the wire transfer to the hospital wouldn't go through tomorrow morning.

She sucked in a breath of the stale air and hammered her fist against the metal.

Bang. Bang. Bang.

"Open the door!" Her voice cracked.

Silence.

Then, the sound of a heavy deadbolt sliding back. The metal screech was like a gunshot in the quiet hallway.

The door was ripped open.

Keira didn't step back. She couldn't. Her heels were rooted to the cracked linoleum.

The man standing in the doorway blocked out the flickering overhead light.

He was huge.

That was her first thought. Not that he was handsome, or scary, or a stranger. Just that he took up all the available space in the world.

He wasn't wearing a shirt.

His skin was tanned, slick with a sheen of sweat, and mapped with scars.

There was a jagged, raised line running from his left shoulder down across his pectoral muscle. It looked angry. Violent.

Like something that should have killed him.

He wasn't wearing shoes, either. Just low-slung gray sweatpants that hung dangerously loose on his hips.

He looked down at her.

His eyes were dark. Not brown, but a black so deep they seemed to absorb the light around them.

There was no welcome in them. No curiosity. Just a cold, flat assessment. Like a wolf deciding if the rabbit in front of him was worth the energy to kill.

"Who are you?"

His voice was a low rumble that Keira felt in her chest more than she heard with her ears. It sounded like gravel grinding together.

Her throat went dry. Her tongue felt like sandpaper.

"I'm... I'm Keira."

She held out the envelope with the marriage license inside. Her hand was shaking so badly the paper rattled.

"Keira Jacobson."

He didn't take the envelope immediately. He just stared at her hand, then let his gaze travel up the length of her arm, over the lace bodice of the dress, to her face.

A corner of his mouth ticked up. It wasn't a smile. It was a sneer.

"Jacobson," he repeated. The name was flat, devoid of emotion, but Keira felt a flicker of something cold in his eyes. He made her family name sound like something he'd stepped in.

He snatched the envelope from her hand. His fingers brushed hers.

His skin was rough. Calloused. And burning hot.

Keira flinched.

He saw it. His eyes narrowed, sharpening into something dangerous.

He stepped back and swung the door open wider.

"Well?" he said, his voice dripping with mock politeness. "Are you coming in, Princess? Or do you prefer the hallway?"

Keira gathered the heavy tulle of her skirt in both hands, lifting it away from the grime of the threshold, and stepped into the beast's lair.

The door slammed shut behind her. The sound vibrated through the floorboards and straight up her legs.

She was trapped.

She forced herself to look around.

The apartment was small. Claustrophobic.

But it wasn't the pigsty she had expected.