Pretending to Be the Bride He Lost

CHAPTER THREE

The lobby doors open onto a wall of sound I wasn't prepared for.

Cameras flash somewhere near the entrance, a small cluster of them, and I flinch hard enough that the stylist's hand tightens on my elbow, steering me past a velvet rope and a man in a suit murmuring into his sleeve like this is a state event instead of a wedding. My whole body wants to bolt. Every instinct that has kept me alive for two years is screaming that a room full of cameras and guards and watching eyes is the single worst place a woman running from Marcus Draycott could possibly stand.

But there's a black car idling at the curb, glossy enough to throw back a warped reflection of the building behind it, and the door is already open, and I understand, with a clarity that turns my stomach cold, that the only way out of this lobby that doesn't involve explaining myself to a dozen strangers is straight through that open door.

"In you go," the stylist says, already glancing at her watch. "We'll fix your hair in the car, there's a kit in the back seat."

I duck inside before I can talk myself out of it, and the door shuts behind me with a soft, expensive click that sounds nothing like the flimsy lock on my apartment door, the one that gave way tonight without so much as a fight.

The car is empty except for me. Cream leather, cold air conditioning, the faint smell of cedar and something clean underneath it. I press my raw palms flat against my knees and try to breathe, try to think, try to find the version of this moment where I open my mouth the second the car starts moving and tell whoever's driving that they have the wrong woman.

Except the car hasn't moved yet, anyway.

Through the tinted window, I watch a small crowd gather near the entrance, and I caught, for the first time, the phrase printed across a banner strung above the doors. CROSS INDUSTRIES. The letters are gold, understated, the kind of logo that doesn't need to announce itself loudly because everyone in this city already knows what it means.

Cross.

The name lodges somewhere behind my ribs like a splinter. I read an article about my sister's engagement almost a year ago, forced myself to stop after the first paragraph because it hurt too much to see her photographed and smiling in a life I would never be allowed to have, but I remember the name now, the way you remember the exact moment a warning finally makes sense. Damian Cross. Heir to an empire I couldn't begin to guess the size of. The man my sister is marrying today.

The man I am apparently about to marry today, unless I find a way out of this car in the next several minutes.

The door on the other side opens, and a woman slides in beside me, phone pressed to her ear, speaking in the clipped, efficient tone of someone paid to manage other people's emergencies. She doesn't even look at me directly, just pats my knee once like we've done this a hundred times before.

"Aria, breathe. You look pale. It's just nerves, everyone gets them." She finally glances over, does a small double take at whatever she sees on my face, then softens. "You really are shaking. Do you want water?"

"I need to tell you something," I say, and my voice comes out smaller than I meant it to.

"Save it for the vows," she says, already turning back to her phone, laughing at something someone says on the other end. "Trust me, everyone forgets whatever they meant to say the second they see him anyway."

The car finally pulls away from the curb, and every block that passes feels like a door quietly closing somewhere behind me. I watch the city blur past the tinted glass, streetlights sliding over the woman's face beside me in slow, rhythmic waves, and I think about how easy it would be to reach for the door handle right now, to throw myself out at the next red light and disappear back into the version of my life where at least the danger is familiar. I don't do it. Some small, traitorous part of me is still thinking about the man's voice on Aria's phone, about a private conversation involving my father's debt, about the fact that whatever is happening to my sister might be far bigger than anything I can outrun on foot. I try again twice more, small attempts, half sentences that die in my throat the moment I open my mouth, because every single person in this car is moving too fast, talking too fast, assuming too completely that I am exactly who they think I am for me to find a crack wide enough to slip the truth through.

By the time we pulled up outside a private estate, black iron gates swinging open onto a driveway lined with more cars than I've ever seen in one place, I'd stopped trying to explain and started simply trying to survive the next five minutes without falling apart completely.

Inside, it's worse. Chandeliers, white flowers everywhere, the low hum of a string quartet warming up somewhere out of sight. The air smells like lilies and warm candle wax and something sharper underneath it, expensive perfume layered a dozen times over by a hundred different guests. Someone takes my coat before I can protest. Someone else presses a glass of champagne into my hand that I don't remember agreeing to hold, the cold glass sweating faintly against my raw palm, and the sting of it is the only thing keeping me tethered to my own body right now. I am swept from room to room like a piece of furniture being arranged for a photograph, and every time I open my mouth to say the sentence that's been building in my chest since the moment the security guard called me Miss Vance, someone else's voice arrives first, louder, more certain, more absolutely convinced of who I am than I currently feel about anything in my own life.

"Five minutes," someone calls from a doorway, and the words land in my stomach like a stone dropped in a well.

I catch my own reflection in a gilded mirror at the end of the hall, and for one long, disorienting second I don't recognize the woman looking back. Pale, hollow-eyed, hair pinned into something elegant by hands that weren't mine, wearing the ghost of my sister's life stitched onto my body like it was always meant to fit.

That's when I feel it. The specific, prickling awareness of being watched by someone who isn't simply looking at me the way everyone else in this house has been looking at me tonight, distracted, hurried, seeing exactly what they expect to see.

I turn, and across the crowded room, through a gap between two women in pale blue dresses, I see him for the first time.

He's not looking at the room the way everyone else is. He's not smiling for the small cluster of guests angling for his attention, not accepting the congratulations being offered to him from every direction. He's standing very still near the far wall, dark suit, dark eyes, a stillness to him that reminds me uncomfortably of the man in the gray coat who came knocking on my door tonight, except where that stillness meant danger. This stillness means something closer to attention. Focus. The specific, unsettling quality of a man who notices things other people miss.

And he's looking directly at me.

Not the polite, distracted glance of a groom scanning a room for his bride. Something sharper than that. Something that makes the champagne glass tremble slightly in my hand, because the expression on his face isn't relief, and it isn't love, and it certainly isn't the look of a man seeing the woman he proposed to walk into the room.

It's the look of a man who is already, quietly, methodically, working out exactly what's wrong with the picture in front of him.

And before I can look away, before I can duck back into the crowd and buy myself even a few more seconds of borrowed time, he starts walking toward me, unhurried, certain, the way a man moves when he already knows he isn't going to be stopped.