Entertainment Circle18 min read
“You’re Not Just My Husband — You’re My Reckoning”
ButterPicks30 views
“Get out of my sight.”
I swatted the hand away and stepped back, letting the wedding dress trail over the dusty floor. My cousin Bridget Owens only laughed, a thin, cruel sound.
“Corinna, everyone knows the Castillo family fell. And there are rumors—terrible ones. Who would want to marry a man who prefers men? You don’t have to go through with this.”
“I never said I don’t want to marry,” I said, fastening a simple earring in front of the cracked vanity mirror.
“You’re not listening. My father took you and your brother in when your parents died. He expects loyalty. You bring shame if you stay. If you don’t leave quietly, we’ll make sure everyone knows the truth about your family.”
“You don’t have to nag me.” I smiled at my reflection and felt nothing but an odd calm. “I won’t be a burden. I won’t make trouble. I’ll do what I must and then I’ll leave when I can.”
Bridget’s face twisted with satisfaction as I walked out. I stepped down from the lobby into the sun and the shabby car waiting for me. The driver looked at me like I was carrying a secret. Maybe I was. Maybe everyone thought I was throwing my life away.
The apartment Atticus Castillo — or rather, the man who introduced himself as Dante Marchetti — had prepared looked cheaper than the cheap brochure suggested. The roof had holes patched with foam. The bed was small. The whole place smelled faintly of old smoke and something like rosemary.
“Mrs. Marchetti?” I heard someone call from the hallway.
I turned and met a pair of eyes that burned like coals. He was very, very handsome in a way that made the air go thin. Dark hair, a jaw that could cut things, a body that looked like it was carved slowly and precisely. He had an odd shyness in his gaze, as if he wasn’t sure what it meant to be this close to me.
“Dante—” I started.
He closed that distance in an instant and held me tight, the breath in his chest hot and full of something like pleading. “Corinna.”
His voice cracked. I pushed him away, startled.
“Sir—Mr. Marchetti, please look properly. We just met today.” I made the words precise and careful.
He blinked, red-rimmed. “You really don’t remember me?”
“You’re joking.” I stepped back and looked him over like I’d been given a strange puzzle. “We just married today. We met this morning.”
He laughed that laugh that isn’t a laugh. “You look more beautiful than I remembered.”
“You remembered me?” My voice was flat. I did not. I had no memory of him at all.
He folded his hands into his coat pockets, small, painful smiles crossing his face. “I promised I would only marry once.”
The way he said it left heat in my chest that I could not place.
“You can call me Dante if it helps,” he said, trying to be casual. “I work as a bartender here in town. I won’t get in your way.”
“Bartender?” I tried to picture him among bottles and neon. He looked nothing like the rumors—no scarred heart, no slyness. He looked clean and solid. “You really are a bartender?” I asked.
He swallowed. “Yes.”
“For what it’s worth… I don’t care about the rumors. If you prefer men, that’s fine. We can be a marriage of convenience. If one day you want a divorce, say the word.”
“That means you married me with plans to leave,” he said, voice small.
“I said it.” I smiled. “I’ll never ask for your money. I won’t interfere. We share a roof. That’s it.”
He looked at me, and something inside him shifted. “I won’t take you for granted,” he said. “I searched for you for six years. I will not lose you again.”
I blinked. The words didn’t align with the man in the civic gossip. He sounded like someone who’d waited.
That night he tucked me into the bed and left me on the couch. I woke to the note on the bedside table — a phone number and two sentences: “I work early. Call me anytime.”
I twirled the ring on my finger and thought of my brother, Owen Burns, and the letter in his hand about unpaid hospital bills. I swallowed the worry down like bitter tea. I was trying to be strong. I had to be.
Two days later, a frantic knocking sounded at the door.
“Sis! It’s me!”
Owen came in red-faced and sweating. “You really married that—” He stopped, jaw tight. “Why?”
“Because I wanted out,” I said simply.
“You should come with me. We can run. Start over in the capital. I can take care of you.” His voice was thin with fear and stubborn hope.
“You can’t spend your life doing other people’s dreaming,” I told him. “Please stop getting into fights, stop riding that edge.”
He sank down on the step and curled his hands into his hair. “I messed up, Jin. I was in a fight and I beat some men bad. They’re in ICU. They want three hundred thousand in compensation. If I can’t pay—I might go to jail.”
I felt the room tilt.
“Three hundred thousand?” I said. “Where will I even—
“Stop. We’re not ruining other people’s lives to pay off bullies. We’ll figure out a way.”
When Dante came home that night, the place looked cleaner. He had hired men to patch the holes, hung a second curtain, replaced the broken lamp. He wore an expression I’d never seen before when he set a reservation at the most expensive hotel in the city.
“You didn’t have to—” I said in the car, staring at the bill after dinner. “Two million for dinner?”
He looked at me oddly. “I wanted your first night to feel like something special.”
“It’s too much money.”
He watched me carefully. “Do you want me to stop?”
I was about to say yes when a waiter placed a piece of paper on the table. I tried not to read the total.
“You work how much a month?” I asked.
“About ten thousand,” he said.
“You spent two million.”
He looked small and ridiculous. “I wasn’t thinking.”
I hated feeling this way—like a moth to flame. My brother’s debts churned in my mind, a cruel, insistent reminder that the world doesn't always reward good choices.
Back at the apartment, Owen burst in with tears and a triumph I couldn’t quite trust.
“Sis! They dropped the charge.” He laughed, then cried. “The bullies were wanted for other crimes. The hospital told me I don’t need to pay. I’m free.”
Relief was a warm, trembly thing. I hugged him until we both laughed.
“Find better work,” I told him.
The next afternoon, I needed money. I had already used every contact and borrowed everything I could. I called an old friend, Kailani Russell.
“Kai, can you get me a job? Fast pay?”
“What kind of job?”
“Anything.”
There’s a certain tone in people’s voices when they know more than they let on. Kailani hesitated. “I can get you a gig at a high-end private club. Day pay. But—” Her voice softened. “They’ll ask you to keep people company.” She didn’t finish the sentence.
I signed on, because when the choice is between pride and rent, rent wins.
The first night at the club the manager nodded at three men who smelled of whiskey and oil, older and coarse. They were important, he said. “They’re from the Liri group.”
I sat across them in a modest dress. They joked. They pushed their hands. One called me pretty in a way that made my skin crawl.
“You could be mine,” said the worst-smelling one.
“Keep your hands off me,” I said, standing.
They laughed. That laugh turned ugly and then hands went to my wrist.
I grabbed a glass and threw wine in the biggest of them.
The men erupted, drunk and rat-mean. I saw the opening to the fire alarm and smashed it, letting a shrill alarm ruin the whole place. They couldn’t touch me in a public panic.
Then someone else walked in.
A man in a black suit, trench of attitude, and a mask that covered his face. He moved like a threat contained.
“Who let this—” the biggest man sneered.
The man in the mask, one I later learned people called “Seven,” moved like a tide. He grabbed and slammed and knocked the leader flat across the table with a single, precise move. Other men scrambled, then fled when men his size — and his own men — filled the room.
He looked at me as if I were a broken bird. The mask came off. He had the same air as Dante: too precise, too controlled, and far too dangerous.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
I wanted to say: Who are you? I wanted to say a hundred things, but a wet rush in my ribcage and anger at the men lowered all common speech to a single warm note.
“Thank you,” I said.
“You shouldn’t be where you are,” he said. “Come with me.”
He held me like he might take me away. I sputtered a refusal, then he turned and called someone, and men in black moved the troublemakers out.
Later I learned his name was Atticus Castillo. Later I learned he ran half the city by breathing. He was impossibly powerful, and I was not meant to cross him.
I went home bruised and raw. Denting glass in my hand had cut my finger. I saw Dante come back after midnight with oil on his cuffs, a bruise at his jaw from a woman he’d tried to calm.
“You were right,” he said later when I told him the alarm story. “I was wrong to frighten you.”
“Dante—” I reached but he looked away. “You beat someone?”
“I was hit,” he said simply.
“You don’t deserve it.” I put medicine on his mouth. There, a small tenderness between us we both ignored like a hot coal.
Then the worst thing: Bridget and those same men started whispering. Someone had spread that I had been at a private club. A rumor bloomed like rot. My cousin called me a disgrace. The school had heard. The acting academy I’d just enrolled me in might revoke me.
The next morning I got the call that changed everything. The class monitor, a nice girl with a bright face, offered me her makeup kit and a nervous apology. I suspected collusion. I suspected Bridget.
A week later, during a class, the monitor — Meng Xiaomei — smeared the product onto her skin. Her face went white with burns, then swollen, then red sores. She had used the product I touched.
“Poison,” my friend Kailani whispered at my side.
I had accused the monitor publicly. They demanded a public apology that would be mine alone between them and me. The academy said I’d written an assault report. The director, a woman with eyes like chips of ice, said the class must be calm. The owner of the academy, Bryce Gordon, called me into his office.
“You caused a scene,” he said. “You will write a public apology and a ten-thousand-word reflection. The student who used the product is gravely injured.”
I wanted to argue, to say the evidence was planted. I wanted to tell them about Bridget whispering to Meng while she gave me that kit. But I had no proof. Instead, I thought of Atticus — of the man in the mask who had broken men in a club to save me. I thought of Dante, who made dinner so expensive it made me want to cry.
That afternoon, a hand reached for me in the hallway. Bryce’s youngest son sat across from me like an impossible, drunk saint. His eyes were amused, not cruel. He lifted his chin at me like a prince.
“You were right to be careful,” he said.
“Who are you?” I asked.
“Bryce’s heir?” he said. “Call me Bryce Junior.”
He waved me out of the office. “Don’t accept public apologies under pressure.”
He also, later, called the correct people in the administration and told them to check the product. Someone from the academy took the kit to the lab. The lab found the product had been tampered with.
I had accused the monitor wrongly. She was punished by association and risked becoming a scarred name in the school records. The director wanted scapegoats. But Bryce Junior — Bryce Gordon — found a way: he announced investigations. He put out a statement that the culprit would be punished.
At the same time, a quiet man who worked for Atticus — Driscoll Bradshaw — walked up to me outside.
“You’re Corinna.” He said it like an observation. His voice was steady. “Mr. Castillo wanted to make sure you’re protected.”
“Protected?” I asked.
He nodded. “We traced a link to Bridget. She has bettors who use influence to get small results. That kit was meant to prove you unfit.”
Bridget’s face fell when the academy announced a thorough probe.
“You should be ashamed!” she spat when I walked by the corridor.
“You should be fired,” I said.
“Do it,” she hissed. “I’ll tell the papers you slept around.”
She was good at saying ugly things.
Atticus — or rather, the man behind Dante and the masked Atticus identity — moved. Men in tailored suits went to Bridget’s sponsor and found contracts she’d signed in exchange for favors. The sponsor withdrew. Bridget’s classes were suspended. The academy published a cautionary note: any person trading favors for admission would be expelled.
At dinner that night, Dante looked tired and yet oddly fierce. “I don’t like liars.”
“I don’t either,” I said.
He touched my cheek, gentle and careful. “Do you want me to tell you something?”
“Yes.”
“I am not entirely Dante Marchetti.” His voice was softer than the moon. “I used a different name for a time. I used the name Atticus Castillo for... other reasons. I want you to know—my life is complicated. But I married you because I wanted you. Not to own you, never to own you.”
I blinked. “You have another name?”
“Yes. There are things I won’t tell yet. But I promise I’m here.”
Weeks turned. Owen was trained under a tough supervisor and grew steadier. Meng Xiaomei recovered in hospital, and the lab’s results led to an arrest of the product supplier — a small-time distributor who had been bribed by Bridget’s sponsor. Bridget ran out of breath defending herself.
My days in acting school were harder. I practiced emotion until my chest felt raw. I read scripts about women who lost everything. I watched reels of Eliza Belov — the star they called “White Clear” — an actress who had been ruined by a scandal years ago and vanished. We joked about the tales. I worried about whether this business would chew me up.
Atticus and I argued as domestic partners. He wanted me to stay away from the industry. He said it was a “stain of greed and hunger” that would swallow me.
“You mean you don’t trust me?” I asked.
“I don’t trust what will come for you.” He grabbed my shoulders. “Let me keep you away.”
“You mean control me.”
“No.” He released me. “I mean keep you whole.”
I would not be kept in a cage. I’d held my breath for a life where trains hissed at night. I had survived hunger, quiet — and the cowardly smiles of people around big tables. Acting mattered to me.
“You won’t decide for me,” I said.
He looked at me for a long time. “Then promise me you’ll be careful.”
I promised, and we both felt like liars.
One weekend, Kailani begged me to attend a glittering selection event for Atticus’s family. It was a public gala: “The Seven’s Charity.” Atticus had a vanishingly old father who wanted an heir to continue the family line. They held high-profile selections where the elite looked at possible matches like chess pieces.
I refused. I said I would not go. I married into a quiet life. I did not want to be paraded.
Kailani dragged me anyway. I told myself I would be an observer.
The night was glitter and cold. I wore an inexpensive dress that hid well. We slipped into the lobby and found a place on the sidelines.
There he was in the crowd — Atticus, unmasked and starless — but with the same heavy gravity that had gripped me in the club. He was talking to men who moved like granite. I watched him and wondered how all his danger sat in his skin.
The gala turned to show. They announced an upcoming beauty ride: a showcase, invitations to the city’s bright lights. Then Atticus’s old man — a toothless, hungry old man — demanded he participate as a show of normalcy. Atticus refused publically.
“Don’t do it,” I whispered to Kailani. “This is a trap.”
Atticus looked at me. For a second his eyes said something I could not name.
After the gala, he walked over to me. “Come with me,” he said.
He led me to the rooftop. Wind shredded our skirts.
“What do you want?” I asked.
He looked at me with that property I could not claim and said, simply, “I want to show you who I am.”
He told me that he was both names: Atticus Castillo, the family head’s son who should be impeccable, and Dante Marchetti, the man the world saw less often. He had played both roles for reasons he kept hidden. “I created Dante to disappear,” he said. “I built Dante to walk without the weight of family.”
“You lied to me.”
“To keep you safe.” He moved closer. “I love you.”
Suppose someone had given me a map leading to a treasure trunk filled with knives. I would have said yes. Atticus took my hand and pressed his forehead to mine. It felt strangely like home.
Then the phone in his jacket buzzed. He glared and stalked away. After that, news leaked: Bridget had been seen trying to bribe a casting director. The smaller scandal — the makeup plot — had a designer behind it. People started whispering about funding, and a small firm pressed charges.
The same evening, a man from the construction crew who had beaten people for my brother was found dead. It was clean. The city’s rumor mill said Atticus had moved his men.
I did not know if I wanted him to. I did not know if I wanted the man who kept me safe to be the cause of fear.
One night, a cluster of men from the old gang walked into a run-down barbecue joint where we ate late and started taunting Atticus. The leader called him every old name, flung insults at me.
“You married a freak,” he slurred. “A gay freak.”
I stood up, furious. The leader reached a hand toward me the way a coward reaches for the last straw.
Atticus moved in a heartbeat. The fight was a storm of hooks and broken glass. I grabbed a bottle to defend myself. When the leader pulled a knife and lunged, Atticus hit him hard, a clean, terrifying movement. The rest of the men fled when black-suited men appeared and hauled them off, bloody and whimpering. The restaurant’s windows shattered like eyes.
Later, Atticus sat with my finger in his mouth, cleaning the cut I had taken to defend him. “Why did you fight for me?” I asked.
He smiled like someone who had been given something rare. “Because you’re mine.”
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“It means I’ll bear whatever storm comes. But”—his voice changed—“I won’t lie to you anymore. I want to be honest.”
After that night, things started changing fast. The school and the city began to reveal networks. The man who organized those dirty deals was a mid-level fixer who paid bribes to people who thought a girl's enrollment or her fall might be entertainment gossip. The academy expelled Bridget. The actress Eliza Belov returned — in the quiet way of a slow sunrise — returning from seclusion to give evidence that her own scandal years ago had been a setup by a rival who wanted her out. She cleared her name in court.
“You were right to be stubborn,” Eliza told me, late over coffee. “This business chews people alive if they aren’t wise. But it also rewards those who stay true. You will find your place.”
The press called me “The Girl Who Fired a Riot.” They loved controversy. I hated their appetite. I loved the part where Atticus stood in front of cameras and said, “This is Corinna Okada. Anyone who harms her will be dealt with.”
It was the first time I heard the name Atticus tied to real power.
At my graduation from the academy, when I stood under the bright stage lights trembling, the director announced my first small part. I took a breath and remembered every cheap evening where I had learned to be brave. Later that night, Atticus took me to the same rooftop where he had told me his truth and kissed me with a ferocity that pulled a different core into being.
“The world will try to swallow you,” he said around the soft of the kiss. “But I like you. I will not be gentle with anything that tries to hurt you.”
“You sound like a promise,” I said.
He smiled. “I am.”
A few months passed. I worked on set with Eliza, who treated me like a sister. I trained my voice, my face, my small dying crimes into honest gestures. The more I learned, the more I loved the craft.
Bridget disappeared from our town. She moved away to rumors and a name tagged with scandal. Owen became a stable young man, trained by men who seemed terrifying at first but who modeled rigor and respect.
As for Atticus, his life spun faster than mine. He managed companies and men and the heavy law of the city. He still visited the bar where he worked sometimes, a ghost of Dante among the drinks, but he preferred our little apartment. He bought rice from the street vendor at midnight and heated it like someone who had never eaten a meal he didn’t earn.
Once, in a moment of honesty, I asked him, “Do you ever want to stop being both people?”
He looked at me and for the first time in many nights, he looked tired.
“I used to think I needed to be both to survive,” he said. “Now, I only want to be the man you see.”
We grew in small ways. He stopped spending two million on dinners that made me anxious. He learned how to cook reasonable food that tasted like the city and not like someone else’s wallet. He learned some gentle anonymity. He also used his power in quiet and careful ways—helping a director see a young actor, calling a producer on my behalf. He never forced anything. He protected, but he never demanded.
When a scandal resurfaced about Eliza — an old rival tried to drag her name back through new fake evidence — Atticus called in favors. He sat through depositions with a cold smile that made people shiver.
“You’re ruthless,” I told him.
“To hurt those who hurt you,” he answered. “Only for you.”
His hands were steady in mine. His shadow went before him. The city felt different when he walked the streets. People moved aside less out of fear and more out of respect. I began to believe that the man who would wreck the world for someone he loved could also be the man who would one day ask to be loved back honestly.
It happened one night after a messy premier when the rain came down like it wanted to scrub everything clean. He had been quiet all evening, the way someone retreats into problem-solving.
“You have to be certain,” he said suddenly.
“Certain about what?”
He inhaled and swallowed. Then he stepped closer and took my hand. “Do you want to be truly married? Not the legal paper, not the names, but in the middle of whatever we have — do you want me? As myself. As Atticus. No masks. No Dante.”
My answer came from somewhere lower than my throat. “Yes.”
He closed the distance, took my face, kissed me like he would not be denied. I had never been sure I was someone anyone would wait for, but the way he held me that night made me feel like a light with a call on it.
The rest of the world fell away. The act of telling the press that we were engaged — not as a play for power, but as a real thing — caused a small earthquake. People talked. The tabloids tried to pick apart our lives. Bridget wrote an op-ed that tried to vilify me one last time; she was laughed off platforms because the academy released documents showing she’d accepted money for favors.
I suppose some part of me expected him to change when he finally shed Dante fully. He didn’t. He became softer, not weaker. He kept the parts that were fierce and gave them towards good things. He used his business acumen to fund a small studio where new actors could work without being preyed upon. He created a foundation to protect girls who worked in dangerous clubs.
“You’ve done a lot,” I said once, as we sat at a tiny table eating grilled fish at a cheap stand, hands sticky and happy.
“I did it for you,” he said.
“You did it for us,” I corrected him.
The biggest moment came like a clap in the sky. A producer who had tried to ruin Eliza returned to the public and tried to smear my name to ruin the debut of a film I loved. He had a history with powerful people. Bryce Gordon started a quiet coalition of the studio heads. Atticus made sure evidence that had been faked came to light. The man was arrested on camera the same night. I was onstage when the producer fell, and I felt like my chest was a drum.
After the cameras were off and the crowd had thinned, Atticus took my hand with the same fierceness he used before the bar fight.
“You saved me all this time,” I said.
“No,” he said. “You saved yourself. I only made sure the fire stayed out.”
We walked to the rooftop. The wind blew the city into a quiet hush. He held me close.
“I will not let them take you,” he said.
“I know,” I said. “But you can’t keep me as a secret I tidy up.”
He laughed. “I would rip apart the world for you.”
“And I would not ask you to.”
We stayed like that for a long while, two people who had been battered and had put themselves back together more beautiful for it.
When the studio that I worked with offered me a role in a small film that would require leaving the city for months, he didn’t hide the worry in his eyes.
“You can go,” he said. “I’ll be here.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yes.”
So I left. The film was small and patient. I learned to cry for reasons that grew out of practice, to smile for moments like moments in a language I had only begun to learn. When I returned, a premiere greeted me, and among the crowd, Atticus stood, taller than before, but the same hand that had bandaged my finger.
He came up to the front after the credits and slipped an envelope into my pocket.
“Open it at home,” he whispered.
At home, under the yellow light, I opened the envelope. Inside was a tiny, battered ring and a single note: “Marry me properly. Real names only.”
I laughed and then cried, because nothing had ever made more sense.
He came back to the apartment and found me smiling with the ring in my hand.
“You answered me already,” he said.
“I did,” I said. “And I will.”
That night he asked in a small way, not a grand gesture but with all of himself laid bare. I said yes.
There were complications. His family complained. The old patriarch tried to wring bargains out of us like deals. I refused. We married again, this time with our names. Atticus Castillo and Corinna Okada stood in a simple room with a man who had always known and loved me.
We did not make a show of power. We did not care for it. We existed like two people who had finally exhausted the need to prove themselves to the world.
Months later, on the rooftop where we had first held truth, Atticus tucked the ribbon of my hair behind my ear.
“You ever think about what would have happened if you said no that day?” I asked.
“I’d have found you,” he said simply. “I would have looked until you were mine.”
“You took me in a thousand ways,” I said.
He kissed me then, and the kiss was not the urgent thing of the beginning, nor the desperate claim of a protector. It tasted like the city after rain and like small grilled fish and like tiny things that last.
“This is ours,” he whispered. “All of it.”
We built something that could survive the press, the industry, and the old cruelties of people who liked to take and keep. Owen settled into a quiet life, safe now. My name, Corinna Okada, belonged to me. I kept my craft and grew better. Atticus kept his power and bent it toward the people he loved. We walked down streets that still smelled like smoke from stalls and the sweet fat of late-night food, and in this city of razor lights and gossip, we made our home.
Once, years later, when someone asked me how I came to be married to the most powerful man in the city, I simply said, “I married him because he closed his fist on my life and refused to let go.”
He laughed and kissed my forehead.
“That’s how I fell for you,” he said.
“Then why did you search?” I asked him once.
“I was trying to find the girl who could laugh when the whole world burned,” he said.
“And did you find her?”
“I found you,” he said. “And that was enough.”
Outside our window, the city buzzed on. A new girl walked into an acting class, frightened and hopeful. Someone else opened a small bar and learned the comfort of hands. Men who once felt powerful because they hurt others now kept their distance because the world no longer let them move freely.
We made no speeches. We did small things, quiet and steady. We were both broken and mended in places we didn’t tell anyone. In the end, I learned the best promise is not the public one but the one made over midnight noodles and quiet, honest kisses.
I will tell my grandchildren someday, if I have them, that love is not all fireworks. It is a steady thing. It is the way a man washes your laundry when you are ashamed. It is the way he stands on the rooftop and says, “I will keep you.”
The last line is simple: he did, and I did too.
The End
— Thank you for reading —