Until Death Betrayed Us

A WOLF AMONG THE ROSES

For one heartbeat, Damien Blackwood's carefully constructed composure cracked.

Diana saw it happen — saw the flicker of something raw and unguarded pass behind his dark eyes before the mask slid back into place, smooth as poured glass. It was there and gone so fast that anyone else might have missed it. But Diana had spent six years learning to read the smallest tells on a man's face, because in prison, in courtrooms, in the cold arithmetic of survival, a flicker like that could mean the difference between hope and nothing at all.

"What did you say?" His voice had dropped, quiet enough that it barely carried past the two of them, though every soul in that cathedral was straining to hear.

"You heard me. You told me I would die alone."

"Diana." Adrian's voice cracked across the nave like a whip, closing the distance now at a near-run, his golden composure finally, thoroughly shattered. "Diana, what in God's name are you doing?"

She turned. She made herself turn, made herself look at the man she had once loved with the whole unguarded trust of a girl who had never been lied to, and found that six years of memory had changed the way she saw his face. The same jaw. The same eyes, blue and wounded now, wounded and furious, in a way that in another life she would have read as heartbreak and only heartbreak.

Now she wondered what else lived behind it.

"I'm not marrying you, Adrian," she said, and the words came out steadier than she felt, steadier than she had any right to feel with her heart slamming against her ribs like something trying to escape.

"You're—" He stopped two feet from her, chest heaving, and around them the cathedral had dissolved into a hive of whispers, gasps, the rustle of silk as three hundred guests half-rose from their pews to see better, to hear more, to feed on the carcass of the greatest society scandal in a generation. "Diana, you're in shock. You fainted at the door, that's all, you—"

"I didn't faint."

"You are not yourself." His hand shot out and closed around her wrist — not violent, not yet, but firm, proprietary, the grip of a man reclaiming what he considered already his. "We are going to step into the vestry, and you are going to breathe, and in ten minutes we are going to walk back down this aisle and none of this—"

"Let go of her." Damien's voice was low. Almost bored. And utterly, absolutely immovable.

Adrian's head snapped toward him as if noticing him for the first time, and something ugly moved across his handsome face. "This is not your concern, Blackwood. You weren't even invited to this wedding."

"And yet here I am," Damien said, "watching you put your hand on a woman who just told the entire congregation she doesn't want to marry you. I'd think very carefully about your next move, Cross. There are three hundred witnesses, and at least a dozen of them work for newspapers."

Adrian's grip on her wrist tightened, and Diana felt six years of memory rise up in her like a wave — his hand on her arm the night before the trial, steering her toward the lawyers, toward the plea, toward the version of events that would protect the Cross family name at the cost of her own — and something in her that had once been soft and trusting simply, quietly, hardened.

"Let go of me, Adrian," she said, very clearly, very calmly, in a voice that made her own father go still six feet away. "I am not fainting. I am not confused. I have never in my life been more certain of anything."

"You don't mean this." His voice cracked, and for just a moment — the way it always did, the way it always had — something in his eyes looked genuinely wounded, genuinely lost, a boy watching the ground open beneath him. "Diana, I love you" Whatever this is, whatever's happening right now, we can fix it, we can—"

"Did you love me three weeks before I died?"

The words fell into the cathedral like a stone into still water, and Adrian went white.

"What?"

"Nothing." Diana pulled her wrist free of his grip — he let her go, too stunned to hold on — and stepped back, closer to Damien, close enough that she could feel the warmth radiating off him even through layers of French lace. "I'm sorry, Adrian. I'm sorry for the humiliation, I'm sorry for the scandal, I'm sorry for every single thing this is about to cost both our families. But I am not walking back down that aisle."

Her mother's weeping had turned into something closer to a wail. Somewhere in the pews, a Cross family aunt had gone pale enough to require smelling salts. Marcus Vale stood frozen at the mouth of the aisle, his composed public face utterly at war with something desperate and confused in his eyes, and Diana understood, distantly, that she had just detonated a bomb inside the two most powerful families in the country, in front of every witness who mattered.

She found that she did not care.

"You will regret this," Adrian said, low, and there was something underneath the wounded-boy voice now, something colder, that made the hair rise on the back of Diana's neck. "You have no idea what you are throwing away."

"You are mistaken," Diana said. "I know exactly what I'm walking away from."

Adrian's jaw worked. For one long, terrible moment, Diana thought he might do something reckless — grab her again, shout, collapse the last of his composure in front of the very people whose respect the Cross family lived and died by. Instead, something shuttered behind his eyes, fast, practiced, the look of a man recalculating in real time.

"Fine," he said quietly. Too quietly. "Fine, Diana. Have your — episode. But this conversation is not over."

He turned, and Diana watched him walk back up the aisle, spine rigid, chin high, already reassembling the golden, untouchable Adrian Cross for the cameras that would be outside those doors within the hour. It was, she thought distantly, an extraordinary performance. She wondered, watching it, how much of the last six years of her first life had been performance too.

Beside her, Damien exhaled, low, and when she looked up at him, his dark eyes were fixed on her with an intensity that made her pulse stumble.

"You," he said quietly, "are either the most reckless woman I have ever met, or the bravest. I genuinely cannot decide which."

"Does it matter?"

"It might, depending on what you do next." He glanced past her, at the cathedral full of the city's most powerful families, all of them now staring at the two of them with the ravenous attention of an audience that had just watched their entertainment take an unexpected turn. "Because in about ninety seconds, Diana Vale, your father is going to reach us, and I suspect he will have several things to say. And somewhere outside those doors, there are already photographers who will have this story by evening."

"I know."

"Do you?" His voice dropped lower, urgent now, and beneath the composed billionaire mask she caught something else — genuine concern, sharp-edged and real. "Because what you said to me a moment ago — that I told you, you would die alone — that is not the kind of thing a woman invents on her wedding day. Either I said something to you once that I don't remember saying, or something has happened to you that the rest of us cannot see."

Diana looked up into his dark, searching eyes, and felt the whole impossible weight of six years — a marriage, a betrayal, a prison cell, a death — pressing against the back of her throat.

"Something did happen to me," she said. "Something I don't think you're going to believe."

"Try me."

Behind them, her father's footsteps were closing fast, and somewhere beyond the cathedral doors, she could already hear the low, hungry murmur of a scandal being born.

"Not here," Diana said. "Not like this."

Damien studied her for one more long, unreadable moment — and then, to her utter astonishment, he held out his hand.

"Then come with me," he said. "Before your father decides to have me removed by force."

Diana looked at his open palm — the same hand that had reached for hers once before, in a side chapel six years ago, offering her a door out of a life she had not yet learned to fear — and this time, she did not hesitate.

She took it.