They dressed me in white as though the color could protect me. As though purity could shield me from a man whose name the world spoke in fear.

When I walked down the aisle, my groom stood waiting—tall, unmoving, a figure carved from shadow. A silver mask concealed his face, hiding whatever lay beneath. He never spoke, not when our hands touched, not when the priest asked for vows. The silence between us was not emptiness—it was power.

They called him the Silent Groom.

To the outside world, he was a figure of dread. Men stepped aside when he entered a room, and women crossed themselves when they heard his name. But behind that mask was something more dangerous than cruelty.

He had orchestrated everything. The swift, strange courtship. The wedding no one dared to question. Even the veil I wore was his command—so that in his presence, my face would belong to him alone.

The carriage carried me from the cold chapel to his sprawling estate—a gothic manor of towering stone, where shadows clung to the walls like secrets. The rules were simple that his assistant told me: Not to enter his wing. Not to speak to him. Not to appear in front of him or even cross his path.

I thought he wanted distance. But I felt his presence everywhere. In the gifts left on my bed—he knew my size, my favorite colors, the things that I had never told a soul.

In the way the halls seemed to watch me. In the portraits I found hidden in his forbidden wing… all of me, painted long before we met. I often took his silence for absence.

But in this manor, silence was the echo of him, wrapping itself around me.

And though he would not touch me, I could feel his claim in every breath. He was the darkness at my back. The vow unspoken but binding.

I was his from the moment I stepped into the church. I just didn’t know about it.