Rival Hearts

Chapter Ten: I Do, Reluctantly

That morning felt like preparing for a stranger's wedding rather than my own. My mother buzzed around the house barking instructions at florists over the phone while three separate hairstylists debated the shape of a bun I hadn't asked anyone's opinion on. Odette sat in the corner of my room, already dressed hours before anyone needed her to be, watching the chaos with the quiet amusement of a woman who had survived a dozen family events exactly like this one.

"You know," she said, apropos of nothing, while I was mid-argument with a seamstress about the length of my veil, "I keep thinking about that dinner. The one with the Voss family."

"What about it?" I asked, only half listening.

"That young man. Kael." She said his name carefully, testing it against a memory. "There was something familiar about him that night, and I couldn't place it until just now. I think he might be the same boy who helped me with my groceries a few weeks back. The one I told you about."

I barely registered the question, my mind three steps ahead already, tangled up in veils and seating charts and the ten thousand other details competing for space in my head that morning. "Maybe," I said, distracted, already turning back to the seamstress.

"You're a lucky girl, if it's him," Odette said, mostly to herself, and the comment slid past me without really landing.

She tried to find him later, once we had arrived at the venue, weaving through the crowd of caterers and coordinators with the particular determination of a woman who wanted her theory confirmed. But Kael was somewhere in the chaos too, pulled in a dozen directions by his own set of last-minute preparations, and by the time Odette gave up searching, the ceremony was less than an hour away, and neither of us had time left to think about anything except getting me down that aisle.

The chapel smelled like white lilies and candle wax, a scent so thick it caught in the back of my throat the moment I stepped through the doors. Late afternoon light fell through the high windows in long amber columns, catching dust in the air, catching the edges of a hundred unfamiliar faces turned toward me in rows of polished pews. Somewhere near the front, a string quartet worked through something slow and formal, the notes swelling under the vaulted ceiling like they belonged to someone else's wedding, someone who had actually chosen this.

My dress weighed more than I expected. Layers of pale silk, my grandmother's veil pinned carefully into my hair by hands that weren't my own, every stitch of it chosen to photograph well rather than to feel like mine. I stood at the back of the aisle with my father's arm looped through mine, and for one strange, suspended moment, I thought about running. Not far. Just far enough to feel like the choice had been mine to make.

I didn't run. The doors opened instead, and three hundred faces turned, and there was nowhere left to go but forward.

Kael stood at the altar in a dark suit that fit him too well, jaw set, hands clasped in front of him in a posture I recognized now as the one he wore whenever he was holding something together by force of will alone. He watched me walk toward him with an expression carefully arranged into something the cameras would read as tenderness, and only when I got close enough did I catch what was underneath it — the same exhaustion I felt, the same resignation, dressed up in a tailored jacket for an audience that needed to believe otherwise.

"You look beautiful," he said quietly, for the benefit of the front row.

"You look terrified," I said back, just as quiet.

Something almost like a real smile crossed his mouth, gone as fast as it came. "Fair."

The ceremony passed in a blur I couldn't fully account for afterward — the officiant's voice rising and falling through words I had heard at a dozen other weddings and never once imagined saying myself, my father's face unreadable in the front row, Odette dabbing at her eyes like this was the happiest day of her life instead of the most engineered one. I said the words when it was my turn to say them. I meant almost none of them, and I suspected, watching Kael's jaw tighten as he said his own, that he meant just as little.

The ring felt strange going onto my finger. Cold, then warm, then simply present, a fact of my life now the same way the Ashcombe name had always been a fact of my life — inherited, not chosen.

"You may kiss the bride."

I felt Kael go still beside me, the same hesitation I felt myself, both of us caught in the particular horror of performing intimacy for an audience that had no idea how little of it was real. He leaned in slowly, and for one unguarded second before his mouth found mine, his expression softened into what looked almost like an apology.

The kiss was brief. Careful. The kind two strangers give each other when three hundred people are watching and neither one knows what else to do. It ended, and the room erupted into applause, and somewhere in the noise of it I felt the full, strange weight of what had just happened settle over me like something I would never be able to take back off.

---

The reception blurred into a series of performances I barely remembered afterward. Toasts from people who barely knew either of us, a first dance I got through by staring at a fixed point over Kael's shoulder and counting the seconds, my mother's careful, practiced smile never once slipping in front of the cameras stationed near the entrance. Kael and I exchanged maybe a dozen real words the entire evening, mostly logistics, mostly delivered through smiles neither of us meant.

By the time it ended, I was exhausted in a way that had nothing to do with the hours on my feet.

The car ride back should have taken us toward the Voss estate. Instead, I had my driver take me home, to my parents' house, to my own room, still in half the wedding dress because I couldn't bear asking anyone to help me out of the rest of it just yet.

My father found me in the hallway outside my room, still in his own formalwear, tie loosened, the particular stillness of a man who had been waiting for this exact conversation.

"You're not going to the Voss estate," he said. It wasn't a question.

"No."

"Wren."

"I just got married to a stranger in front of three hundred people, Dad." My voice came out steadier than I felt, the exhaustion of the day flattening everything into something almost calm. "I'm allowed one night in my own bed before I have to move into someone else's house."

"This isn't about comfort." Something in his tone shifted, harder now, more urgent than I expected from a man who usually kept his emotions locked several rooms away from his voice. "The arrangement requires both of you living under one roof. Immediately. There's no grace period built into the clause."

"Then the clause can wait one night."

"It cannot." He stepped closer, and for the first time all day, his composure cracked enough to show what looked genuinely like fear underneath it. "Wren, I need you to understand something, and I need you to actually hear it, not just push back the way you push back on everything I say. This marriage isn't only about the estate. It isn't only about the contracts. There is more riding on this than either you or Kael realizes, and if it falls apart before it's even had a chance to hold, the consequences reach further than a lost hotel license."

"What consequences?" I stared at him, a cold weight settling low in my stomach despite the heat still clinging to me from the reception. "What are you not telling me?"

He hesitated, and in that hesitation I saw an expression I had never once caught on my father's face in twenty-seven years — real, unguarded uncertainty, like a man standing at the edge of a decision he wasn't ready to make yet.

"Please," he said instead of answering, his voice dropping low. "Just go to the estate tonight. Trust me on this one thing. This marriage matters more than you know, Wren. Far more than you know."

He turned and walked back toward his study before I could ask anything else, leaving me standing alone in the hallway in a wedding dress I hadn't chosen, married to a man I barely knew, staring after a father who had just told me, in the clearest terms he had ever used, that he was keeping something from me far larger than an arranged marriage.

I didn't go to the estate that night. But I lay awake in my old bed until well past midnight, turning his words over and over, and for the first time since this whole nightmare began, my anger at him had a new, colder edge underneath it.

Fear.