Pretending to Be the Bride He Lost

CHAPTER FIVE

The ceremony happens the way most disasters do, too fast to stop and too slow to survive without feeling every second of it.

I remember pieces. The aisle stretching longer than any hallway has a right to be, white petals scattered across pale stone, a hundred faces turned toward me wearing the specific, expectant warmth reserved for people who have no idea they're watching a lie. I remember Damian's hand closing around mine at the altar, steady in a way mine wasn't, his thumb pressing once against my knuckles, a small, private pressure that felt less like affection and more like an instruction. Hold still. Don't break.

I remember saying words I don't fully recall choosing to say. I remember a ring, cold and unfamiliar, sliding onto a finger that had never worn anything more expensive than a secondhand watch I sold eight months ago to make rent. I remember the officiant's voice announcing us as husband and wife, and the sound of applause rising around us like weather, and Damian's mouth finding mine for the briefest, most clinical kiss I have ever experienced in my life, over before I can even register the warmth of it.

By the time the car pulls through the gates of the Cross estate, the reception a blur of congratulations and champagne and my own face aching from the effort of smiling at strangers who all seem to genuinely love the woman they believe I am, the adrenaline that's been carrying me since the fire escape has finally, completely burned out.

The house swallows sound the way expensive things do. Marble floors, high ceilings, a silence so complete I can hear my own heels against the stone long after the front doors close behind us and the last of the staff disperses to wherever staff disappear to at midnight. My reflection catches in a dark window as we pass, a stranger in white, and I look away before I have to spend any longer looking at her. Damian doesn't say anything as he leads me up a wide staircase, down a hallway lined with art I don't have the emotional capacity to appreciate right now, and stops in front of a door at the very end.

"This is yours," he says, opening it onto a bedroom larger than my entire apartment, all soft cream and gold light, a bed made up in linens that probably cost more than everything I own combined. "I won't be staying in here with you. I assume that's obvious, but I wanted to say it plainly rather than let you spend the night wondering."

Something in my chest loosens, just slightly, gratitude I don't want to examine too closely. "Thank you."

"Don't thank me." His voice is flat, controlled, the same clinical certainty he wore in the library hours ago. "This isn't kindness. It's practicality. I don't know you well enough yet to trust you, and you clearly don't trust me, so there's no version of tonight that benefits either of us."

I studied him in the low light of the hallway, the exhaustion finally catching up enough that I let myself really look at him for the first time since the ceremony. There's a tightness around his eyes that wasn't there earlier, a weariness underneath the composure that makes him look, for just a moment, almost human.

"Why did you go through with it?" I ask. "The ceremony. You could have stopped it the second we walked out of that library. You could have called this whole thing off in front of everyone and let me disappear the way I was always going to disappear anyway."

He's quite long enough that I think he isn't going to answer at all, his jaw working slightly like he's deciding how much of the truth I've earned tonight.

"Come in," he says finally, nodding past me into the room. "Sit down. You look like you're about to collapse, and I'd rather explain this once than watch you fall over halfway through."

I sit on the edge of the enormous bed because my legs genuinely don't seem capable of holding me upright much longer. He remains standing near the door, arms crossed, putting a careful, deliberate distance between us that somehow makes the room feel smaller instead of larger.

"My father died eight months ago," he says. "Officially, a heart attack. I have reasons to doubt that, reasons I'm not ready to discuss it with a woman I met four hours ago, but that's beside the point tonight. What matters is the will he left behind, and the very specific condition buried inside it."

"What condition?"

"Control of Cross Industries doesn't pass to me automatically. It's contingent on completing the merger with what remains of the Vance family holdings, and that merger was structured, deliberately, around a marriage. Not a business agreement. A marriage, to Aria Vance specifically, finalized by the end of this year, or controlling interest reverts to my cousin Julian instead."

The name lands with a weight I don't fully understand yet, but the coldness in Damian's voice when he says it tells me everything I need to know about how he feels regarding that possibility.

"So if I hadn't shown up tonight," I say slowly, working through it, "if Aria really had just vanished and left you standing at that altar alone..."

"Then everything my father spent forty years building goes to a man who's spent the last five actively trying to dismantle parts of it from the inside, quietly, for reasons I'm still working out." He finally looks at me directly, something sharp and searching in his expression. "I don't know why your sister left this morning. I don't know if she ran, or if something happened to her, or if this was planned. But I know that whatever happens next, I need a Vance woman standing beside me publicly, legally, until I understand exactly what I'm dealing with. That's not affection, Selene. That's survival. I imagine you understand the concept better than most people I know."

I do. God help me, I do.

"And if I say no?" I ask quietly. "If I walk out of this house tomorrow and disappear the way I've disappeared before?"

"Then you walk straight back into whatever the Draycott were doing at your apartment tonight, without the protection this house currently offers you, and I lose everything my father built to a man I don't trust with any of it." His voice doesn't rise, doesn't plead, simply states the calculation like it's the only reasonable conclusion available to either of us.

"I'm not asking you to love this marriage. I'm asking you to survive it alongside me until we both understand what we're actually caught inside."

Silence stretches between us, heavy and strange, and for the first time since the fire escape, I let myself feel the full, dizzying weight of exactly how far my life has spun sideways in a single night. Somewhere in this house, my sister's toothbrush is probably still sitting in a bathroom I haven't seen yet. Somewhere out there, a man in a gray coat is probably reporting back to Marcus Draycott about an empty apartment and a woman who vanished out a bathroom window. And somewhere between those two facts, I am sitting on a stranger's bed wearing a wedding dress that isn't mine, married to a man who needs me for reasons that have nothing to do with wanting me at all.

"Okay," I say finally, and the word tastes strange in my mouth, half surrender and half something that feels dangerously close to relief. "Okay. I'll stay. For now."

Something shifts behind his eyes, not quite a smile, but close to acknowledgment. He turns to leave, hand already on the door, and then pauses, looking back at me over his shoulder with an expression I can't quite read.

"One more thing," he says. "Tomorrow morning, my mother is hosting breakfast for the family. She wasn't at the ceremony, she was traveling, but she'd be there by nine, and she had known Aria since before Aria and I were ever engaged. She's spent years watching that girl grow into a woman she considers a daughter." His eyes hold mine, steady, deliberate.

"Rosalind Cross does not miss details, Selene. And unlike everyone downstairs tonight, she is not going to be fooled by a wedding dress and good lighting."