MARRIED TO THE ENEMY

CHAPTER TWO - THE BRIDE

JULIA'S POV

For Julia to become Lucinda, Julia first had to disappear.

That part was easier than I expected. After ten years of being invisible inside this pack, becoming no one at all required very little effort. What took longer—what took every droplet of patience that I had spent a decade cultivating was waiting for the right moment to become someone else.

The moment came last week, when Jamie and Lucinda’s wedding date was finally set.

I watched her receive the news from across the courtyard. She pressed both hands to her cheeks as she spun around excitedly, looking exactly like a girl who had always gotten what she wanted from life.

I gave her two days to enjoy it.

Then I told her I knew a fortune-teller in the woods who could read her future with her mate. I made sure to mention that the woman had correctly predicted three marriages in the pack. Lucinda agreed before I finished speaking.

There was no fortune-teller.

There was only the sorceress I had spent three years finding, and the enchanted sleep she placed Lucinda into the moment we arrived, and the potion she pressed into my hands afterward — bitter-cold against my tongue, burning all the way down — that rearranged my face into Lucinda's for every set of eyes that would look at me from that point forward.

Lucinda is not dead. I want to be clear about that. She is simply... resting.

The sorceress assured me she would not age, would not suffer, would not feel a single second pass. She will wake when the spell is broken.

I have no intention of breaking it anytime soon.

* * *

The aisle is long and the morning is bright and my ‘father’—Beta Michael, a man who made my life hell as a servant of this house weeping softly as he tells me how proud he is of me just as we reach the altar.

My eyes are locked on my target. The reason I am going this far.

Reginald is seated in front in his ceremonial Alpha coat, silver-threaded and immaculate. There is grey in his hair that was not there in my memory. He looks like power itself, aloof and untouchable.

His eyes lock on mine and an image of him kicking my father flashes through my head. I feel my smile faltering and my knees growing weak.

“There he is,” Beta Michael’s voice knocks me out of my little trance. “Your husband.”

Steadying my breath, I force back my excited smile as I reach Jamie.

But my breath is knocked out again. Because Jamie’s electric blue eyes are biting into my skin without the warmth of a man seeing his bride for the first time and I am almost irrationally certain that he can see the knife against my thigh.

Impossible. No one can see through the spell. The sorceress was very clear.

I hold his gaze and do not look away.

“Do you, Lucinda, take Jameson to be your lawfully wedded mate?”

The priest’s voice cuts through the silence. Around us, the whole pack seems to hold its breath.

“I do,” I say.

Jamie's jaw shifts almost imperceptibly, his eyes still assessing me.

“I do.” He finally mutters and the pack erupts in celebration.

Someone throws rose petals and Beta Michael begins to sob again.

I wave to the crowd with the brightest smile I have, and if any part of me feels the weight of what I have just done—the lie I have just spoken in front of every living witness—I bury it underneath ten years of practice.

* * *

Reginald finds me before the reception dinner.

“Lucinda dearest.” He opens his arms and I walk into them, because Lucinda would, and because sometimes the only way to kill something is to get very close to it first. His embrace is cold and suffocating, almost like a warning. “Welcome to the family.”

“Thank you, Alpha.” I keep my eyes warm and my voice light. “I look forward to everything we will build together.”

He steps back and looks at me for a moment, just a moment and something passes across his face that I do not like. Then it is gone, replaced by the easy smile of a man who never shows what he is actually thinking.

“You will make a fine Luna,” he says, and turns away.

I watch him go and breathe out slowly through my nose.

He suspects something. I am not sure yet what he suspects, or how much, but the seed of it is there. I can feel it the way I used to feel storms coming over the New Moon pack — a pressure change, a held quality in the air.

I need to move faster.

* * *

I find a glass of wine after dinner and use the excuse of admiring the estate to walk its corridors with deliberate slowness, mapping exits, noting the rhythm of the guard rotations, cataloging windows by floor.

The hand that closes around my wrist and yanks me sideways into a dark room is faster than I am.

I have my free hand lowered to my knife before the figure steps back into a bar of light and I see who it is.

Jona.

He was Lucinda’s childhood friend. He attended the wedding this morning with his jaw set and his eyes on me the entire way through the ceremony.

“You have been avoiding me,” he says.

I frown, removing my hand from my knife before I fully turn to him. “And you grabbed me off a public corridor.”

“You hate him.” Jona’s voice drops, his expression unreadable. “You have always hated him, so what changed?”

I study his face in the dark, my heart racing.

How does he know who I hate?

Has the spell worn off? Does he know my real identity?

“How can you marry him after all that we planned?” Jona raises his voice slightly.

Is he talking about Jamie?

“What did you expect?” I keep my voice carefully flat. “He is my mate. What was I going to do?”

“I expected you to remember what we decided.”

The silence stretches.

I look at Jona for a long moment, my face showing him nothing while my head is racing.

Jona and Lucinda had not simply been friends.

And whatever they had decided—whatever plan the two of them had been quietly building in the space between stolen glances and whispered meeting. It is now mine to inherit and mine to use.

“I haven’t forgotten,” I say at last, my voice soft as a promise. “How can I?"

Jona seems to sigh in relief.

His arms wrap around my waist pulling me closer and it takes everything in me not to squirm.

“Good, now that you’ve married him our plan is only going to get more complicated.” His hand brushes a stray hair from my face as he leans closer.

“Jona wait!” I stop him before he goes any further. “I have to go; people are going to get suspicious if I’m gone for too long.”

Without waiting for his response, I walk out of the dark room and into the lit corridor, and I do not look back, and I let the shape of what I have just learned settle quietly into the architecture of my plan.

Jamie Montgomery is not my only problem.

He may not even be my biggest one.