TOMORROW’S WIDOW

Chapter 2: The Groom Who Knew

LENA

I was still holding another man’s wedding ring when Julian opened the door.

He entered with a key card in one hand and his phone in the other, immaculate in his black tuxedo. Not a single strand of his blond hair was out of place. He looked exactly as a groom should look an hour before his wedding—nervous, handsome, and entirely incapable of murder.

Then his gaze fell on the open balcony door.

“Where is he?”

I closed my fingers around the black band.

“Who?”

“Aras.”

He crossed the room and checked the balcony. His movements were too calm, too practiced. Julian wasn’t looking for evidence that a stranger had entered.

He already knew.

“You told me never to let him touch me,” I said. “How did you know he would come?”

Julian turned.

“Did he?”

The question was quiet, but something fierce moved beneath it.

I remembered Aras’s fingertips against my wrist. The window at my back. His mouth beneath my ear in a memory that had never happened.

“At first,” I said, “you told me he may have entered. Now you’re asking where he went.”

“Lena—”

“You knew about the letters.”

“I knew what he would use to frighten you.”

“How?”

Julian looked at the obituary lying on the floor.

His face lost its color.

He picked it up slowly and read it. When he reached the name Aras Vale, his jaw tightened.

“You weren’t supposed to receive this until after the ceremony.”

The answer hit harder than a confession.

“Until after?”

He realized his mistake.

For six years, Julian had been the person I trusted most. He had held me through the anniversaries of my parents’ deaths. He knew I couldn’t sleep during storms and that I hated lilies because they smelled like funerals.

But the man standing before me suddenly looked like an actor wearing Julian’s face.

“How many times have we had this conversation?” I asked.

He stared at me.

“Answer me.”

“Not here.”

A broken laugh escaped me. “That’s what Aras said.”

At the sound of his name, Julian’s composure cracked.

“He is not here to save you.”

“And you are?”

“Yes.”

He answered without hesitation.

“Then tell me what Halcyon House is.”

Julian went still.

I had known him long enough to recognize every version of his silence. This was not confusion. It was fear.

“Where did you hear that name?”

“It’s where I die.”

His eyes closed.

Only for a second.

But it was long enough.

“You believe the obituary?”

“It knew about my parents.”

“So does Aras.”

“It says I’ll be his widow.”

Julian’s gaze dropped to my closed fist.

Before I could move, he caught my wrist.

“Open your hand.”

His grip wasn’t painful, but it was nothing like the Julian I knew. The familiar warmth had vanished. In its place was naked authority.

“Let go.”

“Did he give you something?”

“Julian.”

His fingers tightened.

My body reacted with a sudden flash of panic—and then a fragment of memory.

Julian stood in a room of black glass. Blood covered the front of his shirt. He was gripping both my shoulders.

You have to choose me this time, he said. If you choose him, we begin again.

The vision disappeared.

I jerked my arm free.

Julian stepped back as though I had struck him.

“You remembered something.”

It wasn’t a question.

“What have you done to me?”

“Nothing.”

“You said that too quickly.”

A knock sounded at the door.

“Ten minutes, Lena!” my sister called. “The guests are seated.”

Julian didn’t look away from me.

“We can still fix this.”

“What is ‘this’?”

“Today.”

He lifted his hand toward my face, but I recoiled before he could touch me.

Pain entered his expression.

That frightened me more than anger would have.

“Six years,” he said quietly. “I have spent six years building a life with you.”

“Was any of it real?”

“All of it.”

“Then tell me the truth.”

“I can’t.”

“Can’t or won’t?”

“If I tell you too much before the breach stabilizes, your memories will return in the wrong order. You won’t know which life belongs to you.”

I stared at him.

He sounded insane.

So had Aras.

Yet both men spoke of impossible things with the exhaustion of people who had survived them.

Julian picked up my phone and placed it in my hand.

“Go downstairs. Marry me. Once we leave the hotel, I’ll take you somewhere safe and explain everything.”

“Why should marrying you make me safer?”

“Because the first decision creates the path.”

“What decision?”

His eyes moved to my mouth.

“Which one of us you choose.”

A chill passed through me.

The dressing-room door opened. My sister and two attendants rushed in with my gown. Julian immediately stepped away, restoring the gentle smile everyone knew.

“Sorry,” he said. “I couldn’t wait to see her.”

My sister laughed and pushed him toward the corridor.

“Bad luck, remember?”

Julian paused at the door.

His expression remained affectionate, but his final words were only for me.

“Whatever he showed you, remember that Aras has lied to you in every life.”

Then he left.

Twenty minutes later, I stood at the entrance to the glass garden.

The string quartet began to play.

Two hundred guests rose.

Julian waited beneath an arch of white roses, smiling like the man I had loved for six years. But when I took my first step toward him, the black ring hidden inside my bouquet grew warm.

Not warm from my skin.

Hot.

The glass walls around me trembled.

A sharp c***k ran across the ceiling.

No one else reacted.

At the far end of the aisle, behind Julian, Aras appeared.

He was dressed in black, rain still darkening his shoulders. No one turned toward him. No one screamed for security.

It was as if I were the only person who could see him.

Blood spread across his white shirt.

He pressed one hand against his chest and looked directly at me.

“Don’t say the vows,” he said.

The musicians continued playing.

My sister touched my back.

“Nup—Lena? Are you all right?”

I looked at Julian.

The smile had vanished from his eyes.

He could see Aras too.

I took another step.

The ceiling cracked again.

This time a shard of glass fell and shattered beside the aisle. Guests gasped. The music stopped.

Julian reached for me.

“Keep walking.”

Aras’s blood-covered hand dropped from his chest.

In his palm was the silver locket my mother had been wearing the night she died.

I stopped.

Julian’s fingers closed around mine.

“Lena,” he warned.

“Where did he get my mother’s necklace?”

Julian looked toward the place where Aras stood.

“He took it from her body.”

The garden disappeared.

For one violent second, I smelled smoke. I heard my mother screaming my name. A man carried me through flames while another stood beside a machine made of black glass.

One of them was Aras.

The other was Julian.

Neither had aged a day.

I pulled my hand away.

“I can’t marry you.”

Every clock in the garden stopped.

The lights went out.

When the emergency lamps came on, Aras had vanished.

Julian stood before me, his face stripped of every tender expression he had ever shown me.

Around us, the guests began shouting.

He leaned close enough that no one else could hear.

“You’ve just opened the breach,” he said. “And now he knows you chose him again.”