The Marriage I Don’t Remember

Chapter 8

Midnight.

We leave the penthouse on foot—no car, no driver, no record. Dimitri’s security team doesn’t know we’re gone. The doorman doesn’t see us slip through the service entrance. For the first time since I walked into his office, we’re invisible.

I’ve changed into dark jeans, a black jacket, my hair pulled back. He’s changed too—dark sweater, no suit, no armor. He looks wrong in street clothes. Too broad, too commanding to disappear into shadows. But he tries.

I almost smile at that.

Almost.

We don’t speak in the elevator. Don’t speak on the street. I lead because I found the address and I know these neighborhoods—I spent six years moving through the city’s forgotten corners chasing evidence. Backstreets where security cameras don’t reach. Buildings where no one asks your name.

He follows without question.

That means something. I don’t examine what.

The cold air bites my cheeks. Our breath clouds in front of us. His shoulder brushes mine when the sidewalk narrows, and neither of us moves away. The city at midnight is emptied out, stripped of performance. Just concrete and light and two people walking toward something that could end everything.

I stop at a corner. Check my phone. Look up.

“Forty meters. Brown door. Third floor.”

He looks at the building. An old walk-up, paint peeling, mailboxes dented. A building where people go when they don’t want to be found.

He looks back at me.

“After this,” he says quietly. “Whatever he tells us. We use it tonight.”

“I know.”

We move.

The building smells like boiled cabbage and old cigarettes. The stairs groan under our feet. Third floor. Apartment 3C.

I knock.

Nothing. I knock again.

Then footsteps. Slow, shuffling. A chain sliding. The door opens a crack.

A man’s face appears. Late sixties. Gray hair, glasses, the kind of face that belongs in a library or a church. He looks at me, then at Dimitri, and goes white.

He knows exactly who is standing in his hallway.

He starts to close the door. My hand shoots out, palm flat against the wood.

“We’re not here to hurt you.” My voice is low, steady. “We’re here because you’re the only person who can tell us who arranged that ceremony.”

He stares at me. His hand shakes on the chain.

“Three months of not knowing,” I say. “We just need the truth.”

A long pause. Then he unlocks the door.

His apartment is small. Books everywhere—stacked on tables, piled in corners, filling shelves that bow under the weight. A single lamp burns on the kitchen table. He sits across from us, his hands folded in front of him, his fingers working against each other.

“He told me it was a surprise wedding,” he says. His voice is thin, frayed. “Two people who wanted something spontaneous and private. He said you’d both consented—that you were just—” He stops. Swallows. “That the champagne had made things blurry.”

I don’t speak. Neither does Dimitri.

“I should have known,” the reverend says. “A man of my years, a man of God—I should have known something was wrong. But he was so convincing. He said he was your family’s legal counsel.” His eyes flick to Dimitri. “He said he’d arranged it as a gift. That your father had always wanted to see you married.”

Dimitri’s voice is very controlled. “Say his name.”

The reverend says it.

Walter Chen.

I watch Dimitri’s face. Watch the last sliver of doubt leave his eyes. What replaces it is not anger. It’s clarity. The terrible, clean clarity of a man who now knows everything and can never unknow it.

“I have the documentation.” The reverend stands, goes to a drawer in the corner, pulls out an envelope with shaking hands. “I kept it because something felt wrong. I thought about burning it a hundred times. But if I burned it, I was just as guilty as him.” He sets it on the table. “I couldn’t live with that.”

I open the envelope.

Inside: the original ceremony record. Signed. Witnessed. And at the bottom—the name of the man who commissioned it. Who paid for it. Who stood in that hotel room and pressed a pen into our hands while we were barely conscious.

Legal. Documented. Witnessed.

I look at Dimitri. “Your investigators—they never found him because they were looking for an officiant. Not a chaplain on a guest list. And Chen must have paid to make sure the guest list didn’t raise questions.”

Dimitri’s jaw tightens. “He buried him in plain sight.”

“It worked for three months.”

He looks at the document. Then at me.

“Until you,” he says.

I look back at the document so he doesn’t see my face.

“We need to take this,” I say to the reverend. “And you need to be willing to testify.”

He nods. His hands are still shaking, but his eyes are clearer than when we walked in.

“One more thing.” I stop. The question I didn’t know I was going to ask. “The night of the ceremony. Did we—” I start again. “Were we aware of each other? At the end?”

The reverend is quiet for a moment. His eyes move between us.

“At the very end,” he says carefully, “when I asked if you consented—you were barely conscious. Both of you.” He pauses. “But he looked at her first. Before he answered. Like he was checking on her.”

I don’t look at Dimitri.

I can feel him looking at me.

Outside. Cold air. The envelope in my hand.

We walk half a block before either speaks.

Then I stop.

He stops beside me.

“He looked at me,” I say. “Even then.”

“Yes.”

I stare at the street ahead. My heart is doing the thing again—the thing without a name, the thing that’s been building since an elevator and a glass of whiskey and a hand held steady in a living room.

I look at him. He’s looking straight ahead. His jaw is tight. His hands are at his sides, and they are not entirely steady.

He’s feeling it too.

I reach for his hand. Just my fingers touching his.

He turns his palm up. Catches my hand. His fingers close around mine.

Warm. Steady.

Neither of us speaks. Neither of us needs to.

Then his phone buzzes in his pocket. He ignores it.

It buzzes again.

He pulls it out. Reads the screen. His expression changes.

“It’s my security team. They found something on the service corridor footage.” He looks at me. “Whoever disabled the camera used a code that hasn’t been active in six years. A code that belonged to my father’s head of security.”

“Who was that?”

“A man who died six months after my father. Car accident.” His jaw tightens. “Chen covered his tracks years ago.”

The moment breaks. We start walking again, faster now.

His hand stays in mine.

We’re three blocks from the penthouse when my phone rings.

The hospital.

My blood turns to ice before I answer.

“Ms. Lancia.” The nurse’s voice is careful, measured—the voice they use when they need you to stay calm. “Your father has had a reaction to the treatment. He’s stable now, but we need you to come in and authorize a medication change. The doctor is waiting.”

“I’m on my way.”

I hang up. Look at Dimitri.

He reads my face. “Your father.”

“It’s him.” My voice is steady even though nothing inside me is. “This is his countermove.”

“We don’t know that.” His hand tightens on mine. “The treatment was experimental. Reactions happen.”

“Now? Tonight? Hours after we found the reverend?”

He doesn’t answer. Because he knows I’m right.

“Chen has people inside that hospital,” I say. “He proved it when he called me the first time. He knows my father’s room number. He knows the treatment protocol. He knows how to make something happen that looks natural.”

“And if it is natural?”

“Then we go to the hospital and handle it. But if it’s him—” I stop. “I can’t take that chance. I can’t assume it’s coincidence. Not tonight.”

He looks at me for one long moment. Then he pulls out his phone. Dials.

“I need you at St. Catherine’s in ten minutes. Full sweep of the medication administration records for room 412. I want to know who accessed that patient’s file in the last twelve hours. And I want a security detail on that floor before I get there.”

He hangs up. Looks at me.

“Run,” he says.

Not a command. Permission.

I run.

He runs beside me.

The envelope is pressed between our hands, still together in the dark.

At some point, the original forty-eight hours ran out. I don’t know when. I stopped counting. The treatment worked—or it didn’t. My father is alive but unstable, and the clock I built my whole plan around has dissolved into something messier.

The texter’s voice echoes in my head. I lost everything. I’m sorry.

She’s out there somewhere, alone, no evidence, no protection. If Chen found her once, he can find her again. I should be thinking about her. I should be planning how to help her.

But right now, all I can think about is the man beside me, running through the empty streets with his hand in mine, and the document in my pocket that’s going to destroy the man who killed his father.

Twelve hours until morning.

We run.