Chapter 3 Married a Murderer
Alisha stood with her hands clenched rigidly at her sides as she stared at Sebastian with deep hatred burning in her eyes.
But before she could make a move, she caught sight of a nurse walking over to pull the white sheet over the old man’s head. The moment the girl saw it, she ran to her father and yanked the sheet off his face.
She touched his shoulder. Shook it gently.
“Dad. Dad.”
No answer.
She pressed her ear to his chest. Nothing. She grabbed his hand. But it was cold. Already cooling.
“No. No, no, no, no—” Her voice climbed and then shattered. “You promised. You said you’d be fine. You promised you would never leave me—”
She sat down hard beside the bed, clutching his hand to her chest, refusing, the way she refused everything, to accept what was directly in front of her.
Sebastian stood back and watched, and found, for the first time in longer than he could remember, that he genuinely did not know what to do. This wasn’t grief the way he understood it, measured, private, and allowed to be shown only behind closed doors. This was unfiltered and raw.
A woman grieving in front of a stranger without a single thought for how it looked.
She collapsed against the bed. Sobbing. Ugly-crying, gasping sobs. No composure of any sort. Just a girl breaking apart in a hospital room.
Sebastian watched.
Every instinct screamed at him to leave. The sight was too sad for him to keep watching.
This wasn’t his world. This wasn’t supposed to be his grief. He didn’t even know this girl. But now he was indebted to her forever. He was the cause of this girl’s grief. He had been the one who couldn’t control his pain and caused another person an even bigger pain.
The thought that he had done something of this magnitude because of whatever happened earlier, just wouldn’t leave him.
Then he remembered the promise he had made to the girl’s father.
He stayed.
Minutes passed. Maybe ten. Maybe twenty. Alisha cried until she couldn’t breathe, then cried some more. The nurses gave her space. Sebastian gave her space.
It took her several minutes before her eyes started towards him again, the man standing near the wall in a ruined shirt, watching her with an expression she couldn’t read. She didn’t say a word to him, which was strange.
Instead she turned to the nurse and said in a firm voice.
“He can’t stay here,” she said, her voice scraped raw. “He needs to go home.”
A nurse, gently, started to explain the process, paperwork, arrangements, a funeral home that could be reached in the morning.
“No.” Alisha stood, swaying slightly, mud and dried blood still on her hands. “He told me. He always told me that whenever he died, he wasn’t going to lie somewhere and rot in a box while people argued about timing. He wanted to go back into the ground where he came from. The very same day. He already showed me where he wanted to be buried at our backyard. He has no relative but me.”
No one in that hospital had the heart, or the authority, to argue with her.
Sebastian said nothing. He simply watched her, dirt streaked, hollow eyed.
By the time the sun dropped low over the hills, they were already carrying her father home.
The cottage sat at the end of a dirt track so narrow Sebastian’s driver had to stop half a mile out and let them walk the rest. He said nothing about it. Instead he just quietly took in everything as they got closer.
The roof sagged badly in the middle, the wood dark with rot and ready to give way. The walls leaned to one side, boards split and hanging loose. It was a single room, barely standing, with no real foundation left. Nearby, a well with a frayed rope and rusty bucket was the only sign of water.
Sebastian stood there and felt something strange settle in his chest.
A man had raised a daughter alone in this place, a house that looked one strong wind away from collapsing. No electricity, no proper path, nothing that suggested safety or comfort. Just this broken little structure under a darkening sky.
He had built companies and stood in boardrooms deciding the fate of industries. He had never, in twenty six years, stood in front of a home this bare and this pathetic.
Everything unfolding before Sebastian just didn't feel real. Yet here he was, watching two of the old man’s neighbors dig a grave beneath a lone tree at the edge of the property, because that was where the old man had always said he wanted to lie, at the backyard of the cottage, perhaps so that Alisha would never have to travel far before she could sit with him.
There was no priest. No formal service. Just a handful of neighbors in worn clothes, murmured words, and a wooden box lowered by rope into freshly turned earth.
Alisha didn’t cry out. She had no voice left for that. She simply stood at the edge of the grave and wept, continuously.
She kept crying until the last shovelful of earth was packed down and there was nothing left to watch.
Then her legs simply gave out from under her.
She sat down right there in the dirt, heedless of the mud soaking through her dress, her feet bare. She’d lost her shoes somewhere between the hospital and here and hadn’t noticed, or hadn’t cared. She stared at the fresh mound of earth like she expected it to change its mind.
Sebastian stood a respectful distance back for a long time. Long enough that the neighbors quietly drifted away, murmuring condolences she didn’t hear, leaving the two of them alone in the fading light.
Eventually, he walked over to her in slow steps. Then carefully crouched down beside her.
“My deep condolences. But I think you should leave this place already,” he said in a careful voice. “It’s getting cold.”
She didn’t look at him. “You have no business being around me. So get away from me, you murderer.”
That last word hits him like a punch in the throat that he had to stand upright, blinking that realization away.
The hatred in her voice was very sharp. Sebastian couldn't have missed that, but he sniffed and swallowed all that guilt. It was getting late. The clouds were changing. It was about to rain. The damage had already been done. What was left was the next phase.
“I’m sorry about your father. But right now, I have become your next only standing family,” he said, his teeth grinding as he swallowed that reality inside of him like a bitter pill.
Alisha frowned and then turned toward him properly.
“Family? What are you even saying?” she asked.
"Yes, family." He said simply.
"I don't understand. Family? How come?" She asked.
“Your husband,” Sebastian said.
She stared at him as if he was comical. Then her expression shifted into shock. Sebastian could tell from the way she blinked repeatedly and how her face went very still.
“That’s not, that’s not possible. I am only eighteen, and I have never been married,” she stammered.
He reached into his coat and produced the document, creased now from being carried through a hospital corridor and a funeral both. He held it out to her.
Her eyes moved over the document. Her own signature. The name beside it. And her father’s face surfaced in her mind.
She knew how that stubborn old man of hers thought. But the irony of it all was totally too much for her to take in.
Did her father just marry her off to the man who killed him?
Then she suddenly reached out, not to take it but to tear it.
Sebastian was faster. He pulled it back out of her reach before her fingers closed on the paper, folding it once and returning it to his coat before she could try again.
“I’m sorry, but I already gave your father my word,” he said, low and even. “There’s nothing left to do about that now.”
“I don’t care what you promised him.” Her voice cracked upward, grief and fury finally finding a target. “I didn’t agree to this. I didn’t consent to any of this. I signed a paper because he was dying in front of me and I would have signed anything, and you know that, and you’re standing here telling me I am now married to a murderer like you? Over my dead body!”
She spat the words with every standing vein in her body, and Sebastian felt this strange weakness he had never felt in his entire life as he stared at this stranger staring daggers at him.
He shut his eyes and opened them because, well, he deserved every hurtful words being thrown at him.
“I understand your pain. But I’m afraid it doesn’t change what’s owed.”
“I’m not owed, I’m a person—” She was on her feet now, unsteady, swaying with an exhaustion that had nothing left to run on.
“You don’t get to just decide my life because of some promise you made to a dying man who didn’t even ask me first—”
“You’re coming with me, Alisha.”
“Never!” she screamed.
“As your husband, I say you are coming with me,” he said.
“This is my house, and there’s no you!”
“I cannot leave you here,” he said softly this time, as he looked around the whole place that looked like a haunted environment. He could literally feel the chill.
“I am not—”
Her voice broke off mid word.
Sebastian saw it happen, the color draining from her face a half second before her knees buckled, the fight going out of her all at once, hours of blood loss and grief and an empty stomach finally collecting their debt.
He caught her before she hit the ground.
She was lighter than he expected, and absolutely still in his arms, her muddy skirt hanging limp, her bare feet dangling, her face, finally, quiet.
Sebastian stood there a moment, in the dark, in front of a cottage he would probably never see again, with a woman he barely knew and had somehow already promised the rest of his life to.
He looked back once at the small, broken house at the edge of the woods, the only home she’d ever known, memorizing it the way a man memorizes something he’s about to take someone away from forever.
Then he turned, and carried her into the dark, toward the car waiting half a mile down the track, and toward a life she hadn’t chosen and didn’t yet understand she was already living.
