She was never supposed to want him.

When her father seals her fate with a handshake and a signature, she becomes the price of peace in a war she never chose-delivered to a man whose hands are stained with the blood of her own blood. He takes her like he takes everything else: without asking, without apology, without a glance back at the life she is leaving behind.

Their wedding night is not gentle. His mouth bruises. His fingers leave marks she will find in the morning, pale and claiming against her hips. He does not ask permission because he already owns the answer. What undoes her is not the roughness she expects-it is the way he watches her afterward, like she is something he did not know he was starving for. The way his thumb traces her swollen lips when he thinks she is sleeping. The way he brings her coffee the way she likes it, bitter and black, without her ever telling him.

She learns the rhythm of his violence, the cadence of his cruelty. She learns too the moments he softens-the way his voice drops when he says her name, the way he buries his face in her neck and breathes her in like air after drowning. Each time she tells herself this is strategy, survival, the performance a captive bride owes her captor. Each time she lies.

In the end the question is not whether she can escape him.

It is whether she still wants to.