Healed by My Second Chance

Chapter 19 — Kane

On the morning of my wedding, I spent twenty minutes staring at my reflection before I put on the jacket.

It was a good jacket. Roman had chosen it himself, custom-made by a tailor in the capital who had dressed three generations of Eclipse men to look precisely as expected: powerful, composed, worth marrying into.

I'd spent my entire life looking the part. My father had never shown much interest in what lay beneath it.

The building was already caught up in the usual wedding-day chaos. Two floors down, florists were arguing with caterers. My mother's old wedding ring had been resized and delivered in a velvet box I still hadn't opened. Every detail belonged to me on paper. None of it felt personal.

"You look like you're about to walk into a business meeting," Roman said from the doorway. He hadn't knocked. He rarely bothered anymore when it was just the two of us. His suit was already on, and his best man's boutonniere sat crooked on his lapel, probably on purpose. "Not your own wedding."

"Feels about the same, honestly."

"That's not something you're supposed to say out loud. Even to me."

"You asked."

He crossed the room and straightened my tie without permission. He'd been doing things like that since we were sixteen, before either of us understood how much distance came with power.

"Last chance," he said, avoiding my eyes in the mirror. "I mean it. If you want to walk, I've got a car running. Nobody but me would ever know it was my idea."

"You'd take the fall for me."

"I'd take the fall for a lot of things where you're concerned. Doesn't mean I think you should do this one."

I studied the man in the mirror: the jacket, the tie Roman had just straightened, the face everyone in the ballroom expected to see in exactly forty minutes.

I thought of a dish sink and of Melody Moon, whose name I had failed to forget despite months of practice.

"I'm not walking," I said. "I made a choice. I'm going to live in it."

Roman watched me for a long moment. He'd already said his piece and knew better than to repeat himself.

"All right," he said. "Then let's go get you married."

Since the storage room, detachment had become familiar. The ceremony was no exception. I stood where I was told, said the words, and meant approximately none of them. Judging by Lilith's flat, polished delivery, she wasn't putting much more of herself into her vows than I was.

Three hundred and forty guests watched us promise each other forever with the emotional investment of two executives approving a merger. That was exactly what they had come to witness.

My father's absence affected me more than I'd expected. I kept glancing toward the seats reserved for family, half-expecting to find him there with the expression he wore whenever an outcome pleased him. He had always disguised pride as scrutiny. It was the closest he came to approval.

The seat was empty.

He'd been dead for nearly two years, yet some part of me was still performing for him. It took seeing that empty chair to make it obvious.

I wondered what he would have said if he'd lived to see the wedding. Would he have been satisfied that I'd secured the alliance he'd spent his life building toward? Or would one look at my face have told him how little of me had shown up?

I would never know, and the loss of that answer hurt more than I expected.

Lilith found me during the reception, drink in hand and her public smile still firmly in place. We'd reached a brief lull between obligatory conversations with people neither of us particularly liked.

"We did it," she said, lifting her glass a fraction. It wasn't quite a toast.

"We did."

"You know, for what it's worth..." She studied me over the rim of her glass. There was an unexpected gentleness in her expression. "I hope you eventually find whatever it is you're actually looking for. I don't think it's me, and I don't think it's this."

She gestured at the ballroom, the flowers, and the three hundred and forty guests offering congratulations from every direction.

"I just hope you find it before it's too late to matter."

"That's an unusual thing to say to your husband on your wedding day."

"We're not exactly an ordinary marriage." She spoke without malice. "I married you for the alliance and the name. You married me for the same reasons, plus whatever guilt you're currently refusing to examine. We may as well be honest with each other about that much. It could be the only honest thing either of us gets out of this arrangement."

I had no answer. Lilith didn't appear to expect one.

She returned to the crowd, and her reception smile was back before she reached the next group of guests.

I found Roman an hour later on the terrace, away from the noise. He stood at the railing, looking over the same city I'd been watching from my office window for months. Music drifted through the doors behind us, muffled by the glass—a band working through songs nobody in the ballroom had chosen for themselves.

"Well," he said without turning. "You did it."

"I did."

"There's something you should know before the night is over." He kept his back to me, which was enough to tell me I wouldn't like whatever came next. "Legal flagged something in the Kastellan filings this afternoon. It was buried in the shipping manifests. They've been routing product through Dakelund territory for the better part of a year, and nobody on our side caught it."

"Through Dakelund." The name reached a part of my mind I'd kept closed for months. "That's nowhere near their usual routes."

"No, it isn't." Roman turned to face me. "I don't know what it means yet. It could be nothing—a supply-chain shortcut, cheaper tariffs, something boring. It could also mean they've been scouting territory nobody else is watching. I wanted you to hear it from me before the report officially lands on your desk Monday."

I thought of the small house I'd priced but never bought and the life I'd allowed myself to imagine before deciding I didn't want it badly enough. Both belonged to Dakelund, where Kastellan's people had apparently been moving unnoticed for months.

I couldn't explain why that bothered me. It did.

"Keep me posted," I said. "Quietly, for now."

"Always am." Roman studied me, then left whatever else he'd been thinking unsaid. "How do you feel? About tonight, I mean. Not the filings."

I took longer than I meant to answer.

"Like a man who just watched himself do something he can't take back," I said. "And like I already know whose face I'm going to see every time I close my eyes tonight, and it isn't the woman I just married."

Roman said nothing. He handed me his untouched drink and stayed beside me at the railing.