The Sound of His Silence

PROLOGUE

11:30 AM. The wedding was supposed to start thirty minutes ago. 

Inside her hotel room, Seraphina Altieri stared at her reflection. 

She wasn't looking at the bride. She was looking at a ghost.

SLAM.

The giant double doors of the church fractured the silence. 

The crowd gasped.

Seraphina walked slowly. Step by step, wearing a fitted black dress with her face veiled in midnight lace. Holding a bouquet of white lilies, funeral flowers. 

Don Silvio furiously glared at Seraphina, who is supposed to wear her late mother’s wedding dress.

As she passed the pews, the crowd started to whisper. 

When she reached her father, the scandal was finally revealed. 

The back of her dress was entirely absent, exposing the black ink of a snake slithering down her porcelain spine.

“I intended to humiliate you,” she whispered as Don Silvio handed her to the groom. “And this is just the start.”

At the altar, Caspian Argento was a statue in a white suit. He didn't blink. He didn't react. Even as Seraphina took his hand with cold resentment, his expression remained a void.

“You may kiss the bride.”

Caspian leaned in. Seraphina didn't close her eyes; she turned her face, offering only the corner of her lips in a silent act of war. Caspian didn't flinch. He pressed his lips to her skin with his eyes wide open—staring straight through her.

The pastor’s voice was a ghost of a sound. ”I-I pronounce you… husband and wife.”

They turned to the audience, standing side-by-side but worlds apart.

The groom thought of the silencer hidden in his coat. 

The bride thought of Julian, her commoner lover, and whispered an apology into the void. 

The father thought of his winning move.

The echoes of the ceremony died at the doorstep of their new home. 

Replaced by silence…

—