Pretending to Be the Bride He Lost

CHAPTER TWO

The line goes dead before I can say a single word back to him.

I stare at the phone in my hand, screen cracked in the corner from a fall months ago, battery bar now a thin sliver of red, and I feel something in my chest cave in on itself. Not fear this time. Something worse. A slow, sinking understanding that I have just called the one number I trusted and gotten a stranger who already knows my sister's fiancé has men out collecting debts.

Which means Aria knows. Which means Aria has known for a while, and never once picked up a phone to warn me.

I don't have the luxury of sitting with that right now. My hands are still shaking, my palms still stinging where the fire escape tore two thin lines into them, and somewhere behind me, blocks away, a man in a gray coat is probably standing in my empty apartment deciding what to do next. I can't go back there. I can't go anywhere I've ever been seen.

There's only one address in this city I know by heart that isn't mine. Aria's building, the glass and steel tower downtown where she's lived since she got engaged to a man whose name I only half remember from the one article I let myself read a year ago before I made myself stop. I don't have a plan beyond getting there. I don't have a plan beyond needing to look my sister in the eye and ask her why a stranger answered her phone talking about my father's debt like it was dinner conversation.

The walk takes forty minutes I don't have the luxury of resting through. By the time the building comes into view, glass catching the streetlights like something built to be looked at rather than lived in, my feet are blistered and my breath comes in short, ragged pulls I can't quite smooth out.

The doorman doesn't even blink at me.

"Miss Vance," he says, already reaching to hold the door, "the car's running a little behind, they said fifteen minutes, but the girls are ready for you upstairs whenever you are."

I open my mouth to correct him and nothing comes out. Because for one disorienting second I understand exactly what's happening, and it makes my stomach drop straight through the marble floor beneath my feet.

He thinks I'm Aria.

Of course he does. We are identical down to the mole under our left collarbone, a fact that used to be a party trick when we were nineteen and now feels like the setup to a nightmare I haven't finished dreaming yet. I've been so focused on finding my sister that I forgot, for one crucial moment, that finding her means walking into a place built entirely around the assumption that I already am her.

"I just need a minute," I manage, voice thinner than I want it to be. "Is Aria... is she upstairs?"

The doorman's smile falters, just slightly, confusion flickering behind his eyes. "You're joking, right, Miss Vance? You've got maybe two hours before the ceremony and the stylist's about ready to lose her mind up there."

Ceremony.

The word lands like a physical blow. Not an engagement party. Not a fitting. A ceremony, today, in two hours, and the sister I haven't spoken to in months is nowhere to be found while I stand in her lobby wearing her face and someone else's assumptions.

I should turn around right now. I should walk straight back out that revolving door and disappear into the city the way I've disappeared a dozen times before. Every instinct that's kept me alive for two years is screaming at me to run.

But if Aria is missing, if something has actually happened to her, then this building, this elevator, this apartment upstairs is the last place she was supposed to be. And I am standing in the one spot in the entire city where someone might actually be able to tell me what happened to my sister.

"Right," I say, forcing my voice steady. "Sorry. Long day."

The elevator ride up is a blur of gold trim and my own reflection multiplied in mirrored walls, a version of myself I barely recognize anymore, hollow-eyed and pale under fluorescent light, hair a mess from running, and yet apparently still passable enough to be mistaken for a bride on her wedding day. I press my raw palms flat against the cool brass railing just to feel something real, something that isn't spiraling, and count the floors ticking upward on the little lit numbers above the door, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, each one putting more distance between me and the last version of my life where I still had a plan.

The doors open onto chaos.

A woman with a pincushion strapped to her wrist descends on me the second I step out, already talking, already reaching for my shoulders to steer me toward a room at the end of the hall where I can see, through the open door, a wedding dress the color of bone hanging from a garment rack like something suspended mid-breath. The whole floor smells like white peonies and steamed silk and, underneath it, the faint chemical bite of hairspray, a combination so far removed from the smell of my own apartment, mildew and fabric softener and fear, that for a moment I feel like I've stepped through some invisible seam into a life running parallel to mine, close enough to touch and utterly foreign all at once.

"There you are, thank God, we thought we'd have to send someone out looking," the stylist says, spinning me by the shoulders with a strength that surprises me. "Your mother-in-law's been calling every ten minutes asking if you've had cold feet, I told her absolutely not, I said Aria Vance does not run from anything."

I want to laugh at the irony of that sentence so badly it physically hurts.

"I need to talk to someone," I try again, digging my heels in slightly. "Is there anyone here who knows where Aria actually is? Like, right now, this morning?"

The stylist blinks at me like I've spoken in a language she doesn't understand. "Sweetheart, you're standing right here. Now come on, we don't have time for nerves, your dress needs steaming and your hair appointment was twenty minutes ago."

Before I can find the words to explain that I am not, in fact, standing right here, not the version of me she thinks she's talking to, my phone buzzes once in my pocket and dies completely, the screen going black and taking with it my only remaining connection to anyone who might believe me.

And that's when I hear it, a second voice from down the hall, low and clipped, speaking to someone I can't see.

"Tell the car to come around front. We're not waiting any longer."

The stylist's whole face lights up. "That's Mr. Cross," she says, already pulling me toward the door, toward the dress, toward a version of today I never agreed to be part of. "He's downstairs waiting for you right now, and honestly, between us, I would not keep that man waiting one more minute."

I open my mouth to protest, to explain, to do anything except let myself be pulled forward, and the words simply will not come. Not because I don't have them. Because somewhere underneath the panic, a small, treacherous part of me has already noticed something I don't want to admit out loud.

This building has guards at every entrance. This building has cameras I haven't been able to avoid since the moment I walked in. And nobody, not the Draycotts, not the man in the gray coat, not anyone hunting a woman named Selene Vance, would ever think to look for her here, dressed as someone else entirely, stepping into a car that belongs to a man I have never met.

The stylist doesn't wait for my answer. She simply steers me forward, out of the room, down the hall, toward an elevator already holding its doors open, and by the time I understand what's actually happening, I'm inside it, descending, the numbers ticking down toward a lobby where a car, and a stranger, and a life that isn't mine are already waiting.

I catch one last glimpse of myself in the elevator's mirrored wall as the doors slide shut, a woman in stolen clothes wearing a stolen name, and I don't recognize the look on her face at all.