TE BILLIONAIRE'S SECOND BRIDE

CHAPTER ONE

Avery's POV

The zipper would not close.

I stood in my sister's old bedroom in Tarrytown, sucking in my stomach until my ribs ached. The pink bridesmaid dress gaped open down my spine. Somebody at the shop had ordered the wrong size. Somebody always did, when it came to me.

"Breathe out," my mother said from the doorway.

"I am, Mama."

"Then breathe out harder."

She crossed the room and yanked. The metal teeth bit my skin, slid up an inch, and split apart again. She let go and sighed, the long, tired sigh she saved for me.

"Celeste wore this size in high school."

In the corner, the old radiator knocked three times, hard, like someone rapping to be let in. It had done that every winter of my life. I stared at the stain on the carpet under it, where I had spilled cider one Christmas.

Celeste had spilled red wine on the same spot a week later, and my mother had laughed and called it charming.

"I'll wear my black dress," I said.

"Black? At a wedding?" She shook her head.

"No. Stand at the back. Nobody will look at you anyway."

She left. I stayed in front of the mirror with the dress hanging off my shoulders like a door torn off its hinges.

I am thirty-four years old. I run audits at Halden & Cole, and I have never turned in a report late. But in my mother's house, I was still the girl who ate seconds and stood at the back.

Downstairs, someone laughed. It was a bright, warm laugh, and every head in the house would be turning toward it. Celeste was home.

I pulled on my grey cardigan and went down.

White roses filled the living room, hundreds of them, in tall glass vases. My sister stood in the middle of them with a phone in one hand and a glass of juice in the other. Celeste was twenty-nine, small and golden, with the kind of face that made strangers hold doors open for her. When she saw me, she crossed the room in four quick steps and hugged me.

"Mara! Did the dress fit?"

"It's fine," I lied.

"You're the best." She kissed my cheek.

Her hand, resting on my arm, was ice-cold. Celeste's hands were never cold. She was the warm one. She ran hot like a stove. I glanced at her fingers, then at her eyes. They slid away from mine and dropped to her phone.

"Are you okay?" I asked quietly.

"Wedding nerves." She smiled too fast. "That's all."

Then the front door opened, and the whole room went silent as if someone had cut a wire.

Damian Blackwood ducked under our low doorframe.

I had seen him a dozen times, and my body never learned. My palms went damp. My tongue turned to paper.

He stood six-foot-three, with black hair, a jaw that looked chiseled from slate and eyes the grey of a sky before hail.

His dark coat still carried the snow of the driveway. Newspapers called him The Wall, because in eleven years no one had seen him lose his temper.

But when he looked at Celeste, the wall cracked.

"There she is," he said, and his whole face opened. "My angel."

My sister went into his arms. He held her like she was made of glass. Over her shoulder, his gaze landed on me for exactly one second, swept across my cardigan and my hair and moved on, the way you glance at a coat rack.

I told myself I didn't mind. I had been telling myself that for two years.

Dinner was at seven. The Blackwoods crowded into our small dining room, and their perfume and their good manners squeezed the air out of it.

At the head of the table sat Damian's grandmother, Vivienne. She was eighty and thin as a dry leaf, and she carried a black cane with a silver handle. Her eyes missed nothing. On her right sat Damian's uncle, Reginald, silver-haired and easy, with a smile like a warm blanket. He was the only Blackwood who had ever asked me a real question.

"Miss Avery," he said, pulling out my chair. "I hear you caught an error in a supplier report last month."

My cheeks burned. "It was small."

"There are no small errors in numbers." He winked. "Remember that."

I did not know yet that he was the most dangerous person in the room.

My father, Thomas, laughed too loudly at everything. He always did around Blackwoods. His hand shook so much that wine splashed unto the tablecloth, and my mother pressed a napkin over it without a word.

Then Vivienne rapped her cane on the floor.

"Before this wedding," she said, "the family owes Celeste a story."

The back of my neck prickled.

"Seventeen years ago, in November, the first cold snap of the year froze the shoreline at Ashfall Lake. My grandson took a sailboat out anyway. He was seventeen and stubborn." She glanced at Damian. "The boat flipped. A girl dragged him out of the black water and kept him breathing until the rescue team came. Then she vanished. Damian searched for her for years."

She turned to my sister and smiled.

"And he found her."

My mother wept openly. My father raised his glass. Celeste lowered her lashes and held up her wrist, and the silver bracelet flashed in the candlelight, a thin chain with one small moon.

"I only did what anyone would do," she whispered.

Damian lifted her hand and kissed the bracelet. "You gave me my life. I will spend the rest of it thanking you."

I looked at my plate. Under the tablecloth, I closed my right hand around my bare left wrist.

Our grandmother had given us two matching bracelets, one for each granddaughter. Mine had slipped off in the lake that night, when I waded into water so cold it felt like knives. I remember the boy's blue lips. I remember a navy cap with CAPTAIN stitched across the front, floating away from him faster than he could swim. I remember shouting into his face:

Stay with me, Captain. Captains don't sink.

I never told anyone. When I got home, soaked and shaking, my mother screamed about the ruined coat. When the local paper printed the story a week later, Unknown Girl with Silver Bracelet Saves Boy, Celeste stared at the clipping for a long time. Then she looked at her own wrist.

"That's funny," she said. "I have one too."

I could have spoken. I was seventeen. I could have said, It was me.

But I saw my little sister's face, so hungry and so hopeful, and I swallowed the words. She had never had to earn anything. I told myself she needed the story more than I did.

Years later, when Damian came looking for a girl with a silver bracelet, Celeste was already the answer.

I kept quiet. And in some foolish corner of me, I believed the truth would climb out on its own one day. That someone would look at me and simply know.

No one ever did.

After dinner, I washed the dishes alone. I liked the kitchen. It was the only room where no one watched me.

"You're very good with your hands."

Damian stood in the doorway with his jacket off and his sleeves pushed to his elbows. I had never seen him alone in our house.

"Mr. Blackwood."

"Damian. You are about to be my sister-in-law." He said it politely and without warmth. He filled a glass at the tap.

"How do you take your coffee?" The words fell out before I could catch them.

He frowned. "Why?"

"For breakfast. Tomorrow." I gripped a wet plate. The truth was, I knew. Black, one sugar, a pinch of cinnamon. I knew because on the shore that day, a nurse had handed him hot coffee, and he had grimaced and croaked, cinnamon, and I had stood three steps away in my dripping coat, shivering, listening.

"Black. One sugar."

"No cinnamon?"

His head turned slowly. "Why would you say cinnamon?"

The plate slid an inch in my hands. "Celeste told me. I think."

He studied me. His eyes were flat and gray and patient, like a man reading a contract for the trap in clause nine. Then the look shut, and he set down the glass.

"Celeste notices people," he said. "Unlike most."

He left. I stood at the sink until the water went cold around my wrists.

At two in the morning, a suitcase wheel squeaked in the hallway.

I sat up in the dark. A thin strip of light showed under Celeste's door. I crossed the freezing floorboards in bare feet and pushed the door open.

The room was empty.

The wedding dress hung on the closet door, glowing white like a ghost. The bed was made. On the pillow lay a folded note and, beside it, the silver bracelet with its little moon.

The paper rattled in my fingers. Her handwriting slanted and sprawled, as if she had written it while running.

Mara. Forgive me. I can't marry him. They are going to say terrible things about me tomorrow. Please don't let them find me. You were always the strong one.

I read it three times. Then my phone lit up on the nightstand.

BREAKING: Investors File Fraud Complaint Against Celeste Vale, Fiancée of Billionaire Damian Blackwood.

Feet pounded up the stairs. My mother stormed in, in her robe with her hair loose, and my father stumbled behind her, staring at his phone.

"Where is she?" Mama screamed. "Where is your sister?"

"Gone." I held out the note.

She ripped it out of my hand. She read it and made a sound I had never heard from her, a raw, animal sound. Then she spun on me.

"You knew."

"Mama, no..."

"You've always envied her!" Her palm cracked across my cheek. The sound rang in the bare room. My face burned. "You told her to run!"

"I didn't!"

"Mama." My father caught her arm, but he wasn't looking at her. He was looking at his phone, and his face had gone the color of old dishwater.

"Damian is downstairs."

Three slow knocks landed on our front door, evenly spaced, like a judge's gavel.

My mother wiped her face with both hands and smoothed her robe. Then she looked at me. I waited for anger, or sorrow.

I saw neither. I saw a woman adding up numbers.

"Avery," she said softly. "Put on a dress."

It took me a full minute to understand. She was not sending me downstairs to be blamed.

She was sending me down to be sold.