I Married My Father's Worst Enemy

Chapter 6: I Do

I don't see Damon again until I'm standing at the top of the aisle with my father's arm rigid under my hand, and six hundred white roses staring back at me like witnesses. Every pew is full. Every face I don't recognize belongs to someone with money riding on this marriage lasting exactly as long as it needs to. Near the back, close to the doors, four men in plain dark suits stand instead of sit, and I clock them for exactly one second as ushers before the music starts and I stop thinking about anything except my own feet.

I almost didn't come.

An hour ago, in the bridal suite, my hand rests on the doorknob, my mother's pearl earrings already in, and I tell myself I can still walk out the back, still call the caterers, still let it all collapse without my name on it.

Then I think about Marisol in accounting, six months from retirement. About the guy in the mailroom who has a kid starting college in the fall. Three hundred people who have no idea their whole future is being decided in a bridal suite by a woman in white.

So I don't walk out. I walk here instead.

My father hasn't said a word to me all morning. His hand is shaking under mine, and I don't know if it's guilt or fear or both, and for once I don't have the energy to ask.

Damon is waiting at the altar in a black suit that fits him like an apology he'll never actually make, and when our eyes meet down the length of the aisle, something passes between us that isn't hate and isn't quite love either. Something unnamed. Something that scares me more than either one would.

I haven't spoken to him since the terrace. Two days of silence, of avoided calls, of him showing up at the house and me telling the housekeeper to say I wasn't home. He let me have the silence. I don't know if that was kindness or strategy.

He catches my hand at the base of the altar steps before the officiant can start, pulls me half a step aside, his voice pitched low enough that only I can hear it under the swell of the string quartet.

"I need you to hear one thing before you say anything up there."

"There's nothing you can say."

"The company, the board vote, your father losing everything — all of that's true, and I won't apologize for it, because he took something from me I can never get back and I spent twenty years earning the right to take it back." His hand tightens on mine. "But the part about you not speaking to him again — that was never a threat, Elena. That was me warning you that there's more he hasn't told you. Worse than the fraud. I found out three days ago. That's what the phone call was."

My stomach drops all over again. "What worse?"

"Not here." His eyes flick to my father, to the officiant waiting with his little book, to the three hundred guests who paid for their seats with silence and gossip. "Marry me today, and I promise you'll have the truth by tonight. All of it. I've been many things to you this month, but I have never once lied to your face."

"You let me believe things."

"There's a difference between a lie and a mercy." His thumb brushes my knuckles, and despite everything, despite the terrace, despite the fist closing around my heart, I don't pull away. "I never planned on wanting you, for what it's worth. That wasn't part of the plan at all."

I don't get to answer, because the officiant clears his throat, and the moment swallows us both.

We take our places. My hands are so cold the ring feels like it belongs to someone else's future. I keep waiting to feel like a bride and instead I feel like a woman standing at the edge of something with no bottom.

The vows blur. I hear myself repeat words I don't fully feel, watch Damon's mouth shape promises I don't know if I believe, and the whole time his eyes never leave mine, steady, dark, unreadable in a way that makes my pulse climb instead of settle. Somewhere in the middle of it, I understand that I am agreeing to something I can't take back, and my own voice keeps going anyway, like it belongs to a braver version of me who already made peace with that.

"If anyone present has any reason these two should not be joined," the officiant says, the old words, the ones nobody ever expects to matter, "speak now."

The room goes silent.

For one heartbeat, two, I think about raising my own hand. I think about all the reasons sitting in my own chest — a phone call on a terrace, a dead man in a black-and-white photo, a father who let him take the fall.

I don't raise it. I will spend a long time after today wondering what that says about me.

Then the doors at the back of the church slam open.

Four men in windbreakers move down the aisle fast, badges out — the same four men I clocked as ushers an hour ago and thought nothing of — and the word FBI is the only thing I fully register before the screaming starts. A woman near the front, my father's assistant maybe, and then my father himself, going white, going still, the way you go still right before you run and realize there's nowhere left to run to.

"Richard Hartley," one of the agents says, and the rest of it — securities fraud, conspiracy, a filing twenty years old and finally, finally surfacing — washes over me in pieces I can't fully catch, because I'm watching my father's face crumple in front of three hundred guests and a wedding cake and a bride still holding another man's hand.

I turn to Damon.

I need him to be as shocked as I am. I need this to be the one thing in the last two weeks that wasn't his doing.

He isn't shocked.

He watches my father get handcuffed with the same calm, contained expression he wore the very first night, standing at the window of my father's study like he already owned the room.

"Damon." My voice comes out cracked, small. "Did you do this?"

He doesn't answer right away, and in the space where the answer should be, the officiant is still holding his little book, and my father is being led past us in handcuffs close enough that I could reach out and touch him, and somewhere behind us a photographer is still taking pictures because nobody told him to stop.

Damon finally looks at me. His hand finds mine again, the new ring cold between our palms, and for one second — just one — something in his face looks less like victory than like grief wearing a very good suit.

"We're married now," he says quietly. "That's the only thing that was ever really mine to control."

I said "I do" nine minutes ago.

I still don't know what I agreed to.