I Married My Sister's Killer

Chapter 3 — First Night

The penthouse is on the fifty-eighth floor.

I know because I counted the elevator numbers on the way up, standing next to my new husband in a silence so complete I could hear the fabric of my dress shift when I breathed. The reception ended at ten. By ten-fifteen, Damian had shaken the last hand, signed the last cheek, and said something quiet to the head of his security detail — a man built like a refrigerator named Colt — that made the room empty faster than a fire alarm.

Now it's eleven, and I'm standing in the middle of a living room the size of my entire apartment building back home, and I don't know which direction to look first.

Floor-to-ceiling glass on three sides. The city below us a spill of light and dark, the Thames a black ribbon cutting through it. The furniture is expensive the way silence is expensive — you don't notice it until it presses on you. Everything dark wood and steel and a grey that isn't cold so much as precise. There are no personal photographs. No books left open. No coffee rings on the table.

This is not a home. It's a controlled environment.

"Your room is the third door on the left," Damian says behind me.

I turn. He's taken off his jacket. Rolled his sleeves to the elbow in a way that should look casual but doesn't, because nothing about this man looks casual. He's looking at his phone, which means he's choosing not to look at me, which I'm starting to understand is its own kind of message.

"My room," I repeat.

"The suite was prepared for Iris." A pause. "I imagine it will suit you as well."

There it is again — that careful double meaning, the way he wraps a knife in silk and hands it over so gently you don't feel the edge until later. Not: I know you're not her. Not: we should talk. Just this. The gift of a lie he's choosing not to unwrap.

"Thank you," I say, because there is nothing else to say.

He nods, already walking toward the other end of the apartment. He stops once, at the edge of the hallway, without turning around.

"There are cameras in the lobby and the elevator. Not in the private floors." Another pause. "I mention it only so you don't waste energy looking for them."

And then he's gone, and I stand in the middle of fifty-eight floors of glass and steel and city light, and I wonder if that was a gift or a warning.

***

The room prepared for Iris is the most beautiful room I've ever slept in and the most unbearable.

White roses on the dresser — fresh, not from the wedding, which means someone put them here today, which means someone was told to, which means Damian ordered white roses for a woman he already knew wasn't Iris. I stand in front of them for a long time trying to decide what that means.

I don't decide. I move on.

The closet is full of clothes I didn't pack. My size — Iris's size, same thing — but the style is wrong. Too polished, too composed, the wardrobe of a CEO's wife rather than a woman who lives in jeans and secondhand leather jackets. I run my fingers along the sleeves and think about the person I'm supposed to be in this apartment, in this city, in this marriage.

I think about Iris, who would have known how to wear all of it.

I pull out my phone and open Elena's contact.

I type: I'm in.

She types back in eleven seconds: Are you okay.

Not a question. She knows me well enough to know the question mark would just be cruelty.

I don't know yet, I type. He's strange.

Strange how.

I look at the white roses. I think about the camera comment. I think about his hand on mine at the altar — light, deliberate, the grip of someone who knows exactly how much pressure they're applying.

Like he already knows the ending, I type. And he's waiting to see if I'll figure it out too.

Elena sends back a single word: Wren.

I know what she means. I close the app.

***

I find it at 2 a.m.

I'm not snooping — or rather, I am, but I'm being careful about it, the way you're careful when you know the house is watching even if the cameras aren't. I've been through the room. Nothing under the mattress, nothing in the false bottom of the nightstand I checked three times to make sure wasn't false. The closet, the bathroom, the small desk by the window with its perfect view of the city going dark.

The desk drawer opens easily. Too easily. The kind of easy that means it's meant to be opened, which means whatever's inside is either harmless or a test.

Inside: a hotel key card.

No branding. No room number. Just a small white card with a magnetic strip, and on the back, in handwriting I don't recognize, two words:

She knew.

I sit down on the edge of the bed and I hold the card and I breathe.

Iris was here. Or someone who knew Iris was here. Someone left this — in this drawer, in this room, in this desk that Damian told his staff to prepare for a woman he knew wasn't coming. Which means either this card was already here before he knew, or he put it here himself.

Either the card is evidence.

Or it's a message.

I tuck it into the inside seam of my cosmetics bag, the place I hid things as a teenager when I didn't want Iris to find them. Same hands, she used to say. Different hearts.

I lie down on the white linen of my dead sister's bed and I stare at the ceiling and I think: she knew. She found something. And then she died.

And I'm the only person inside these walls who is actually looking.

Outside, the city hums fifty-eight floors below. Somewhere in this apartment, my husband is still awake — I can hear the faint, precise sound of typing from somewhere down the hall, consistent and unhurried, the sound of a man with no reason to sleep.

I close my eyes.

I don't sleep either.