Shot at the Altar, Claimed by His Brother

I'm three words away from becoming Nico Moretti's wife when the world explodes. "I do—" The gunshot swallows the rest of it. For one full second, nobody moves. Two hundred people in silk and tailored black, frozen mid-breath, like the sound hasn't reached them yet. Then Nico's hand slips out of mine, and he goes down so slowly it doesn't look real, like the string holding him up just got cut. My own heartbeat is the loudest thing in the room — one hard, ringing beat, and then a scream splits the silence open, and I don't understand yet that it's mine. I'm still holding my bouquet. That's the detail I'll remember for the rest of my life — that I stood there holding white peonies while the man I was about to marry bled out on the altar in front of everyone we've ever known. "Nico." My voice doesn't sound like mine. "Nico, look at me." He doesn't. Someone screams. Then everyone is screaming — a wall of sound and silk and running heels, chairs going over, my aunt's voice somewhere behind me shouting my name like I'm the one in danger. I'm on my knees in a wedding dress that's turning red from the hem up, pressing both hands against a wound I don't understand, because nothing about tonight was supposed to include blood. There was a seating chart. There was a four-tier cake. There was not supposed to be this. Six weeks ago I said yes to Nico Moretti in a rooftop restaurant that cost more for one dinner than my mother made in a month at the end of her life. I didn't ask enough questions. I know that now, kneeling in his blood. I didn't ask why a real estate developer needed four bodyguards at his own engagement party, or why his father's name made waiters go quiet, or why the ring alone was worth more than the house I grew up in. Nico laughed it off every single time I brought it up. Old money families are just private, Marlowe. You'll get used to it. I never got used to it. I just stopped asking. "Move." The word cuts through the chaos like it has its own gravity. I look up and there's a man crouching across from me, on the other side of Nico's body, and I have never seen him before in my life. He's not screaming. He's not even standing up like the rest of the venue — waiters, guests, my own maid of honor, all of them backing away like the violence might be contagious. He's perfectly still, two fingers pressed to Nico's throat, and his face is doing something I can't read at all. Not grief. Not shock. Calculation. "Who are you?" I ask. He doesn't answer me. He looks past me instead, at two men in dark suits who materialize out of the crowd like they were always standing there, waiting for a reason to move. "Clear the room," he says. "Now. Nobody leaves through the front." They obey him instantly. Not Nico's father's usual security. Not hotel staff. Him. "I asked who you are." My hands are still on Nico's chest. I can feel his heartbeat stuttering under my palms, slower every second, and some part of me that's still capable of thought understands that I am watching him die and I cannot do a single thing to stop it. The stranger finally looks at me. Really looks — the way you look at something you already know the shape of, like he's checking a memory against the version standing in front of him. "Damian," he says. "Damian Moretti." Moretti. "Nico doesn't have a brother." I've said this sentence to myself so many times over the last six weeks, usually when something about his family didn't add up. He's an only child. His father raised him alone. There's no one else. He told me that on our third date, so certain of it that I never once questioned it again. "Yes, he does." Damian's voice doesn't change at all when he says it, flat and even, like grief is a language he stopped speaking a long time ago. "He just never wanted you to meet me." Nico's heartbeat stops under my hands. I feel it happen. I feel the exact second there's nothing left to feel, and the sound that comes out of me isn't a word, isn't anything human, and Damian is suddenly the one pulling me back, off my knees, away from the body, his grip iron-tight around my arms like he's the only solid thing left in a room that's stopped making sense. "Marlowe." My name in his mouth is unfamiliar and completely certain at the same time, like he's said it before, privately, long before tonight. "Look at me. Not him. Me." I don't know how he knows my name. I don't remember Nico ever saying he'd told his family about me at all. That's when the second wave of guests parts, and I see the man everyone in this room has been quietly afraid of since the moment he walked in three hours ago, wearing a black suit and a wedding smile that never once reached his eyes. Vittorio Moretti crosses the ballroom floor toward his son's body like a man inspecting damage to a building he owns. He crouches beside Nico for exactly four seconds. He doesn't touch him. Then he stands, straightens his jacket, and looks directly at me. "Get her out of that dress," he says to no one in particular, like I'm a stain that needs handling. "And make sure she doesn't leave this property tonight." "Vittorio—" someone starts, one of the other men, older, gray at the temples. "Tonight," he repeats, and walks away from his son's body without looking back once. I understand, in that moment, kneeling in blood that isn't mine but is now soaked into every inch of white silk I'm wearing, that I have just watched a man lose his son and become more concerned with containing me than burying him. Paramedics finally push through, too late to matter, and I watch them lift Nico onto a stretcher with a white sheet already half over his face before they've even left the ballroom. Red and blue light starts sweeping across the windows from outside — police, an ambulance that arrived for nothing. Someone is asking me questions. Someone is trying to get me to stand up. I can't make my legs cooperate. Damian crouches down again, level with me, and for a second the noise around us — the sirens outside, the low murmur of two hundred people trying to figure out what they just witnessed — goes quiet enough that it's just his voice. "You're safer with me than with any of them," he says, low enough that it's only for me. "Starting tonight." "You don't know that." "I do." His eyes flick, just once, toward his father's retreating back. "Because I already knew this was coming, Marlowe. I was too late to stop it." I stare at him. At the blood on his cuffs that isn't his. At the calm that never once cracked, not when Nico died, not when his father walked away from the body like it was inventory. "What does that mean?" I whisper. "What do you mean you knew?" He doesn't answer. He just stands, pulls me up with him like I weigh nothing at all, and keeps one hand locked around my wrist as the first police officer finally reaches us — and I realize I have no idea, not even a little, whether the man holding onto me right now is the reason I'm still breathing, or the reason Nico isn't.