Gabriel’s POV
Standing at the altar, I kept my gaze fixed ahead, refusing to look at her. Aria. The woman who, in a matter of hours, would legally become my wife.
How did I get here? A marriage to a stranger, orchestrated by my grandmother, Helen. The same woman who’d built this empire with her bare hands and who, now in her twilight years, thought she had the right to rearrange my life like one of her elaborate dinner table settings.
This wasn’t a marriage. It was a transaction, plain and simple—a desperate bid to protect the family’s estate, legacy, and God knows what else. And Aria? She was just as much a pawn in this as I was. A woman drowning in debt, dragged into this mess because she was the "solution" to Grandma’s prophecy that only I, married to her, could secure the future.
I
