Claimed as the Wrong Bride

Chapter 7: Running in Heels

The window let out onto a narrow service lane along the east side of the building, barely wide enough for a delivery vehicle. The kind of passage that existed in the gap between what a building presented to the street and what it needed to function. She had noted it during her first circuit of the gallery when she clocked the unlatched window. The lane ran north toward Vane Street and south toward the loading area behind the adjacent building. South meant open lot, too much visibility. She went north.

She heard him come through the window behind her before she had made it ten feet.

Not the man himself. Someone he had sent, or someone who had decided on their own. The specific sound of a person dropping from a window ledge onto cobblestone with the grunt of someone who had not expected the drop to be quite that far. She glanced back without breaking stride. One of his people. Already moving.

She assessed her options in approximately one second.

North end of the lane opened onto Vane Street. Busy, lit, full of people. Good for disappearing, bad because anyone watching the building's front would be positioned there. The buildings on either side were old, the kind of old that had fire escapes. The one to her left had one with a bottom rung about eight feet off the ground. Higher than ideal. Not higher than workable. First landing maybe twelve feet up.

She had been climbing things for four years professionally.

The champagne made the decision feel easier than it probably was.

She grabbed the bottom rung, cold and slightly wet from the earlier rain, and pulled herself up with the same grip she used on the pole. Clean and efficient. The muscle memory activated before her conscious mind had fully committed to the plan. Her heels were a problem immediately. The gaps in the metal grating were exactly the wrong width for four-inch heels and she nearly lost the left one on the second step, caught it, kept going.

Behind her she heard the man reach the base of the fire escape.

"Don't," he said, which was a strange thing to say to someone already four rungs up. She almost laughed. That was either the champagne or the absurdity of the evening or both.

She kept climbing.

The first landing gave her a moment to assess. Below her the man was on the ladder, moving fast. She registered him properly for the first time from this angle. Lean and quick, the one who had been quiet all evening, watching her with that specific precision. Rook, she thought, though she didn't have a name for him yet. Just the categorization of him as the one who found things funny rather than threatening, which was currently being tested by a woman in a gallery dress on a fire escape.

She went up.

The second landing had a window onto the building's interior, closed, and a further ladder to the third level. She was breathing harder now, the heels making every step a small negotiation between her foot and the grating. Below her Rook was gaining. He had sensible shoes and was not negotiating with heels, which was a structural advantage she had failed to account for in the original decision-making process.

She looked up. The third landing had a crossover walkway connecting to the building on the opposite side of the lane, the kind of arrangement that existed in older city blocks where fire egress required access between structures. She had not known this when she started climbing.

She knew it now.

She went for it.

The walkway was narrow, maybe three feet wide, railing on one side and open air on the other. Crossing it in heels over a service lane two stories up while champagne-warm was objectively a poor decision. She committed to it fully and without hesitation because the alternative was being caught and she was not being caught.

Behind her she heard Rook reach the second landing.

"You are not going to make it across that," he called up, and there was something in his voice that was not threatening but was deeply, specifically entertained.

She made it across that.

The far landing connected to a stairwell winding down the inside of the adjacent building to a ground floor exit. She took the stairs two at a time, one hand on the railing, the heels clicking on each step in a way that was not quiet but was faster than the alternative. The ground floor exit opened onto a side street connecting to Crane Street. She came out at a fast walk and merged into the foot traffic without looking back.

She walked three blocks before she allowed herself to breathe properly.

She did not think about how she had just navigated a fire escape in a gallery dress with a blood alcohol level she was choosing not to examine too closely. She did not think about whether Rook was somewhere behind her or had gone back to report. She did not think about the expression on his face when she made it across the walkway, which she had not seen but could construct fairly accurately from the sound of the silence that followed.

She thought about it a little.

Then she stopped.

The cold hit her properly now that the adrenaline was thinning. The gallery had been warm, the specific warmth of a room full of people and good lighting. The Tripicity night was doing what Tripicity nights did in this season, which was be approximately fifteen degrees colder than the inside of anywhere and make no apologies about it. The dress was not a winter dress. It was a gallery dress. She was wearing it in a service lane at ten-thirty at night, her breath making small visible clouds in the cold air, the documents still very present in her memory in a way that was cutting through the champagne faster than she would have liked.

She reached Vane Street and turned left, joining the foot traffic without slowing, fitting herself into the flow of people the way she always fit herself into things. Adjusting her pace. Making herself unremarkable. A woman in a black dress and heels on Vane Street on a Friday night was not unusual. A woman running was a story. She was not a story. She was just someone going somewhere.

She went somewhere.

The champagne was wearing off.

She could feel it happening, the pleasant warmth receding and leaving behind something considerably more precise. The specific sharp clarity of a mind that had been doing her job efficiently for years and was now applying itself with full force to the problem at hand.

The problem at hand.

She turned it over as she walked, the way she turned over everything, with the systematic attention of someone who needed to understand the dimensions of a thing before deciding what to do about it.

She had signed six documents.

She had read them all. Carefully, or carefully enough, or carefully enough for what the situation had appeared to be. An art sale with supporting paperwork. A number that meant the warehouse. A warm room. Four glasses of champagne over two hours.

She had not read carefully enough.

The marriage certificate was real. She had held it next to her own copy. Both said the same thing. Both had her name, Octavia Maddox, and both had his name too, which she had not thought to look for when she was signing because she had been looking for what she expected and not what she hadn't thought to look for.

Bastien Leclair.

The name meant something in Tripicity. She had filed it when Priya said it in the dressing room and she was pulling it back now with the specific attention of someone who had just discovered it was considerably more relevant than the section she had filed it under.

She turned right onto Crane Street, wider and better lit, the night market in the last stages of packing down, vendors loading remaining stock into vans. The particular comfortable industry of people finishing a working day at an hour when most working days had already finished.

She slowed slightly and let herself think properly.

The marriage was legally binding. Twelve months. She had read that clause. It had been in the third document on the second page in language about duration and binding periods and she had registered it as standard contractual language because every other contract she had ever signed had a standard contractual period. She had not thought to interrogate what this one's period was protecting.

Twelve months.

A year of being legally married to a man she had met at a gallery opening, spoken to for approximately two hours, had s*x with in a courtyard, and had now climbed out of a window to avoid.

She was not going to think about the courtyard right now.

The commission payment. The first installment. It would have hit her account already, or would soon. If she contested the marriage, went to a lawyer and said this is wrong, the dissolution conditions voided everything. The commission. The acquisition contract. The warehouse number.

All of it.

She stopped walking.

The night market finished its business around her. A van pulled out to her left. Two vendors talked over the last of a display of printed textiles. Someone laughed somewhere behind her. The easy laughter of people who had not accidentally married a billionaire this evening.

She stood on Crane Street and did the math.

The math was not good.

She could contest and lose the money and stay free and figure something else out. That was what she had always done. That was what she was built for. She had figured things out from a garbage bag at eighteen and she could figure things out from this.

Or she could not contest immediately. Let the situation exist while she understood it better. Twelve months was a long time but it was also a defined time, a clock with an end on it. She had lived on defined terms before. The gym membership. The storage unit. The month-to-month understanding with a city that could stop tolerating her at any point. She understood defined terms.

She started walking again.

She was not deciding anything tonight. Tonight she was moving, which was what she did when she needed to think. She would decide in the morning when the champagne was fully gone and the documents were in front of her in daylight and she had slept.

The dress was cold.

She walked faster.

She found a twenty-four hour laundromat on the south end of Merchant, one she had used before, and went in. The warmth hit her immediately, that specific damp heat of industrial machines. She stood near the nearest dryer for a moment just breathing and letting the cold leave her skin.

The attendant at the back barely looked up.

She found a seat on the bench against the wall and sat down and took the documents out of the clutch and spread them on her knees and read them again.

All six of them.

This time she read every word of every page. This time she was not in a warm gallery with champagne and a number in her head and a pleasant man with a practiced manner and all the patient architecture of a setup she had not recognized as a setup because it had been built to look like something she was already expecting.

This time she was cold and sober and angry and completely present.

She found the clause on the second page of the third document where she had missed it. Buried in the language about party identification and authorization, in a paragraph that began the way six other paragraphs began, with the words all parties acknowledge, and continued for four sentences that had nothing to do with party identification and everything to do with the legal establishment of a binding union between the named parties for a period of no less than twelve calendar months from the date of registration.

She read it twice.

She read the dissolution clause below it that detailed exactly what would be voided if the agreement was contested before the binding period elapsed.

She folded the documents and put them back in the clutch.

She reached in and found the small flat box he had produced from his jacket with the same unhurried efficiency he produced everything. The morning after pill in its clean white packaging. She had taken it with her because she was practical and it was the sensible thing to do and she was not going to let the cold feeling it produced affect a decision that was actually about her own body.

She took it now. No water. She let it sit on her tongue for a moment, the specific chalky bitterness of it, then swallowed and felt it go down dry and sat with the sensation of it all the way to her stomach.

A man who came to a gallery with a pill in his pocket for a woman he hadn't met yet.

She had known what that meant when he handed it to her. She knew it more clearly now, sitting cold and sober in a laundromat with his marriage certificate in her clutch and his pill going down without water and the city running its usual indifferent business outside the window.

She had been convenient. Appealing and present and the timing had aligned and somewhere between the canvas and the courtyard she had filed him under interesting and thought that was just for her. It wasn't just for her. It was never just for her. She was one of a sequence of evenings he came prepared for.

Which made the paperwork, in a specific and infuriating way, almost funny.

Almost.

She sat with the machines running their cycles around her, the specific white noise of a place that never stopped. She thought about the warehouse. The number. A courtyard and gold leaf and a man who had said in a way, yes when she asked if he was taking her home and had meant something else entirely and had known it and had let the moment sit there anyway.

She thought about him standing at the north wall with the documents in his hand and the window open behind her and whatever that expression on his face had been.

She thought about that for longer than she intended.

Then she stopped. Filed it in the section of her mind reserved for things she would deal with when she had the space. Got up from the bench.

She needed to sleep.

Tomorrow she would decide.

Tonight she was just a woman in a stolen dress in a laundromat on Merchant Street at eleven-fifteen, which was a sentence she had not expected her evening to produce and which the city, for its part, found completely unremarkable.

She needed to return the dress before morning. She needed her clothes. Both of those things were at the gym, which was twenty minutes on foot and open all night, and she was going there regardless because she was not sleeping in a parking structure in four inch heels and a gallery dress no matter what else had gone wrong this evening.

She picked up the clutch and went.

The gym at this hour was quiet in the way gyms were quiet after midnight, the day crowd gone and the night crowd thinned to a few serious people who kept hours the world did not cater to. Nobody looked at her when she came through the door. Nobody looked at anyone at this hour. That was one of the things she valued about it.

She went to her locker. Changed quickly, the gallery dress folded with the same care she had given it all evening, back into its plastic wrap, back into the bag she would return to the dry cleaning rack on her way to wherever she ended up tonight. Her jeans. Her worn black shirt. The jacket with the hidden pocket. Sneakers. She felt herself become Occy again as each piece went on, the gallery version of herself packed away along with the borrowed dress.

She went to the showers.

The water ran hot and she stayed under it longer than she needed to, longer than she usually allowed herself, because tonight had been a specific kind of evening and she was going to stand under hot water for as long as it took to feel like herself again and not a woman who had signed a marriage certificate by accident in a gallery in a borrowed dress.

It took a while.

When she came out she stood in front of the mirror and looked at herself. Jeans and a worn shirt and wet hair. No eyeshadow now, the gold and plum washed away, just her face, the one that didn't belong to any stage name or art name or gallery persona. Just Occy.

Occy who was apparently married.

She held that for a moment and then she picked up her bag and went to find her spot.

Rook came back through the gallery's front door eleven minutes later.

He was breathing slightly harder than usual. His jacket was dusty in a way that had not been true when he left. He stopped beside Bastien and said nothing for a moment.

Bastien looked at him.

"Fire escape," Rook said.

"I'm sorry."

"She went up a fire escape." A pause. "In heels."

Bastien looked at him steadily. "And."

"And she made it across the third level crossover walkway to the adjacent building." Rook paused again. "In heels. While." He appeared to be choosing his words. "While not entirely sober."

The gallery continued its business around them. Someone nearby laughed at something.

"You lost her," Bastien said.

"She went through a stairwell into a side street and into foot traffic." Rook's expression was doing something entirely unprecedented in Bastien's experience of it. Something that suggested Rook was going to be thinking about this evening for quite some time. "She's gone."

Bastien looked at the window. He looked at the roofline piece on the north wall with its strip of gold leaf catching the ventilation. He looked at nothing in particular for a moment.

"Find her tomorrow," he said.

He straightened his jacket and went to find Adler.