The Merger Clause

Chapter Nine: The Wedding

The ceremony took place in the Vane estate's garden, under an arch of white roses that Wren suspected cost more than her first car, in front of two hundred guests who had no idea the bride and groom had spent the morning arguing about whether this was still a business arrangement or something neither of them had a name for yet.

Marcus Vane sat in a wheelchair in the front row, thinner than she remembered, watching the proceedings with an expression she couldn't fully read. Triumph, maybe. Or something closer to relief.

Rhys stood beside his brother as best man, and when Wren walked down the aisle on her father's arm, she made the mistake of finding his face in the crowd before she found Sebastian's. Something passed between them, brief, complicated, and then she made herself look forward, toward the man she was actually marrying, and didn't look back again.

Sebastian's expression, when she reached him, wasn't the ice she'd grown used to. It was something rawer, something that looked almost like disbelief that this was actually happening, that she was actually here, in white, choosing to stand across from him in front of everyone.

"You look terrified," she murmured, as the officiant began.

"I am," he murmured back. "Terrified I'm going to wake up and this will have been a very elaborate business negotiation after all."

"It's not."

"I'm starting to believe that."

The vows passed in a blur of practiced words and unpracticed feeling, and when Sebastian slid the ring onto her finger his hands weren't as steady as she'd expected from a man who prided himself on precision. When the officiant told him he could kiss his bride, he did, soft and brief and public, nothing like the kiss in her kitchen, but his eyes found hers after and held something that promised the rest of it later.

They didn't make it far from the door right away. It had barely closed behind them, the sound of the reception still faintly audible through the walls, when Sebastian's mouth found hers again, less careful than the ceremony had allowed, his hands sliding into her hair as he pulled her close.

"I've been thinking about doing this since the kitchen," he said against her mouth, low, rough with a want he'd apparently stopped trying to hide.

"You had eleven days to say something."

"I was giving you time to change your mind."

"I didn't want time." Her hands found the front of his shirt, impatient, and he let out a low sound against her hair that undid something in her composure entirely. "I wanted this."

He drew back just enough to look at her, searching her face for something, and whatever he found there made the last of his restraint give way. He kissed her again, deeper, unhurried now, like a man who'd finally stopped pretending he didn't want to be exactly here.

The rest of the night unfolded slowly, in the quiet of a room lit only by the city outside the windows, in a way that had nothing left of the ice she'd once thought defined him. He was patient with her in the dark, attentive in a way that felt like an apology for every guarded week that had come before it, and when she finally fell asleep against his chest, it was with the strange, unfamiliar sense of being entirely safe.

Afterward, tangled together in the dark, her head on his chest, his fingers moving idly through her hair, he said, quiet, like a confession he hadn't planned on making, "I don't want this to have been only business. Not anymore. I don't know when that stopped being true, but it isn't true tonight."

"It isn't true for me either," Wren admitted, and meant it, even as some quieter, more complicated part of her chest thought of a coffee shop on Ninth and a man who'd told her he never stopped.

She didn't say that part out loud. Not tonight. Tonight she let herself have this, the warmth of him, the unfamiliar steadiness of feeling wanted by someone who'd spent ten years convincing the world he wanted nothing at all.