Dead by Request

"You're humming again," Celeste said, pinning a curl behind my ear that had never once moved out of place. "I'm not humming." "You are, and it's the same four notes you've been repeating for the last ten minutes. It's driving me a little crazy, and it's also the only thing about you today that sounds nervous." I stopped, and in the mirror the woman in the white dress looked exactly the way I had planned for her to look, with soft eyes and an easy mouth, like a bride who had cried the right amount at the right moments. Celeste stood behind me with her hands hovering near my shoulders, and I noticed they were trembling a little more than mine. "You're more nervous than I am," I said. "Somebody has to be." She laughed, but it came out thin. "You look like you're about to sign a lease on an apartment, Sera. Brides shake, and they throw up, and they lock themselves in the bathroom and make me swear not to tell anyone. You're just sitting there like you're waiting for a train that's already late." "That's a very romantic thing to say to me an hour before my wedding." "I'm serious." She came around and crouched in front of my chair so that I had to look at her. "Are you happy? Tell me the truth, because if you're not, I will walk you out of the back door in this dress and nobody will ever mention it again." I took her hand and squeezed it, and her skin felt warm against mine, which only reminded me that I hadn't felt warm in days. "I'm happy," I told her. "This is just what happy looks like on me." "Then I'm scared to find out what sad looks like." I smiled at that, because it was the kind of answer a happy woman would give, and Celeste smiled back because she wanted to believe me. Out in the hallway someone called that the guests were seated, someone else was asking whether anyone had seen the ribbon for the bouquet, and the room filled with the noise of other people's nerves while I sat in the middle of it like the one calm place in a storm. I had practiced this day for a full year, and I knew exactly how to laugh at Dante Rossi's jokes and exactly how long to let a silence sit before I filled it. I knew how to look at him so that he saw a woman who had finally stopped grieving and was ready to be loved again, and none of the people in that building could see what I was really carrying underneath the lace. My father had been dead for two years. The police found him in his study and wrote it up as a suicide, and they said it so gently and so quickly that I knew they had already stopped looking. Elias Vale never left a note, but he left a daughter who refused to believe a single word of their report. "Twelve minutes," the coordinator called through the door. "Twelve minutes," Celeste repeated, standing up and pressing her palms flat against her dress as if she were the one about to walk out there. "Do you need anything before I go find my seat? Food, or a tissue, or a stiff drink I can smuggle in?" "Just water, please." "Water. Okay. Water I can do." She hurried out, and the door clicked shut behind her, and for the first time that day the room was truly quiet. That was when my phone lit up on the vanity. The screen showed an unknown number with no name and no photo, only a video file and one line of text beneath it that said *Watch before you walk*. I told myself it was a prank or a scam or some cruel joke sent by a stranger who had read about the wedding in the society pages, and I told myself I should delete it and go on with my day. Instead I pressed play. The video was dark and grainy and filmed from a corner, showing a man behind a desk in a dim office with his back turned halfway to the camera. I recognized the line of his shoulders before I recognized anything else, because I had spent a year studying them from across crowded rooms until I could have drawn them from memory. It was Dante. He held a phone to his ear, and his voice came through the small speaker low and perfectly level, without any hesitation at all. "Tonight, and make it quiet, and make sure he doesn't suffer." He ended the call and sat very still for several seconds before he lowered his face into his hand, and then the video cut to black. I watched it a second time, and then a third, and in the corner of the frame I found a date stamp that made my chest go hollow. It was the night my father died. I had always imagined that this moment would tear me open, that when the proof finally came I would scream or collapse or smash the mirror in front of me. What actually happened was that everything inside me went calm and cold, like a lake freezing over from the edges toward the middle, until I could feel nothing at all except the weight of those last four words. *Make sure he doesn't suffer.* He had said it as if it were a courtesy, as if my father's final night on earth were an errand that needed to be handled politely. Someone knocked on the door. "Sera?" It was Celeste. "I've got your water, and the coordinator is saying we really have to go." I looked at the bouquet lying on the table, white roses bound tight with ivory ribbon, and I picked it up and slid the phone down between the stems where the petals would hide it. Then I pulled the ribbon snug, smoothed my dress, and opened the door with the same smile I had been wearing all morning. Celeste handed me the glass, and I drank half of it and gave it back to her. "Your face looks different," she said slowly, searching it. "What happened in there?" "Nothing happened." "Sera." "I promise you nothing happened." The smile came so easily that it frightened me, and I thought that this was the part I would have to forgive myself for later. "I'm ready to go." She studied me for a long moment, and then she let it go, because she loved me and because she believed me, and I hated myself a little for both of those things. The aisle was much longer than it had felt in rehearsal. Nobody walked me down it, because I had told everyone I wanted to go alone and that my father would have understood, and the guests turned in their seats as I passed with soft faces and bright hats and hundreds of small, hopeful smiles. I returned every one of them, and the whole time I could feel the phone pressing against my palm through the flowers. Near the front, on the groom's side, Luca Bellandi stood with his arms folded across his chest. He was Dante's right hand and oldest friend, thirty-five years old and built like a locked door, and his eyes followed me the entire way without warming even once. I gave him a small nod as I reached the steps, and he did not return it. Then I was at the altar, and there was nothing left between me and Dante Rossi except a few feet of polished marble and the biggest lie I had ever told. He wore black, cut so precisely that it looked as if it had grown onto him, and at thirty-four he carried himself like a man who had never lost an argument in his life. His eyes were dark and steady, and he was looking at me as though the cathedral behind me had emptied out and left only the two of us. Father Anselm began to speak, his voice kind and a little worn, and I did not hear a single word he said. I was thinking about the phone in my hands, and about the sound of that flat, patient voice giving an order. Dante stepped closer and reached for the edge of my veil, and he lifted it so slowly that it felt like he was afraid I might break. His fingertips brushed my cheek, and I did not flinch, because I had trained myself for a year not to. His hand paused there against my skin. "Your hands are ice," he said, so quietly that only I could hear it. "I'm happy," I said. "No." His eyes moved across my face, taking their time. "You're not." I should have looked away, because any ordinary bride would have, but instead I held his gaze and looked straight into the eyes of the man who had said *make sure he doesn't suffer*, and I waited for the guilt to show up there. It never did. What I found instead was something much harder to bear, a kind of weary recognition, as if he had been waiting a very long time for me to look at him exactly like this. Neither of us moved, and I'm not sure either of us was breathing. "Dante Rossi," Father Anselm said, "do you take this woman to be your wife?" "I do." He did not look away from me. "And Seraphina Vale, do you take this man to be your husband?" My fingers tightened around the bouquet until the stems bit into my palm. Underneath the roses the phone sat against my skin like a second heartbeat, and for just a moment I thought of something I had done three weeks before my father died, something I had been so proud of at the time. I pushed the thought away as I always did, because I had no room for it today. "I do," I said. The church erupted into applause, and somewhere a woman laughed through tears, and a camera flash burned white behind my eyes. Dante's hand found mine and closed around it, and I let him hold it, and his thumb pressed once against the pulse in my wrist as though he were checking whether it was still there. The limousine door shut behind us, and the sound of the church dropped away as if someone had turned a dial. I sat very straight with the bouquet in my lap and watched the city slide past the tinted glass, while Dante sat across from me and did not say a word. He had not spoken since we left the steps, and the silence between us felt less like peace than like two people circling the same dark room. My phone buzzed against the stems. I looked down and saw the same unknown number and a new message, and I read it once, slowly. *You hid it well. Hide it better.* The air inside the car shifted, and I felt it settle against my skin like a change in weather. I raised my eyes, and Dante was already watching me. His jacket hung open and his hands rested on his knees with the palms turned up, empty and relaxed, where I could see every inch of them. His own phone lay face down on the seat beside him, dark and silent. "Is something wrong, wife?" he asked softly.