I Married My Sister's Killer

Chapter 2 — I Do

The ceremony is at noon.

I know this because I have memorized every detail of a wedding I never agreed to attend, let alone star in. I know the florist's name is Céline and she uses only white roses — Iris's favorite, not mine. I know the officiant is a man named Reverend Hoyt who has performed three Voss family weddings and whose hands shake slightly when he reads from his notes. I know there are one hundred and twelve guests seated in the main hall of the Voss estate, and that forty-seven of them are business contacts who don't know Iris from a stock portfolio.

I know all of this because Elena told me. My best friend, the only person alive who knows what I'm doing and hates me a little for it.

She texted me at six this morning: *Please come home. This is the kind of thing you don't walk back from.*

I didn't answer. There was nothing to say that wouldn't sound like a lie or a goodbye.

Now I'm standing at the top of a staircase in a house that costs more than my father will earn in three lifetimes, and somewhere below me, through two sets of carved mahogany doors, Damian Voss is waiting.

I tell myself it doesn't matter that he's waiting. I tell myself he's a name on a suspect list, a means to an end, a man I'm going to dismantle from the inside.

I tell myself a lot of things on the way down the stairs.

***

The first person who looks at me wrong is Nikolai Voss.

He's standing near the entrance to the hall, a glass of something amber in his hand even though it isn't yet noon, and when I come through the doors he goes very still in a way that has nothing to do with awe. He's older than Damian by four years — I memorized that too — with the same dark coloring but sharper edges, like someone took the same blueprint and cut too deep. There's a hunger in his face that isn't attraction. It's something more like calculation.

"Iris." He says my sister's name the way you'd test a lock. Pressing. Listening for the click.

"Nikolai." I say his name back the same way Iris would have — warm, careful, the smile that means nothing. I saw her use it on men like him our whole lives. Men who wanted something from our father and settled for charm from his daughters.

His eyes move over me slowly. Not the way Damian's did — Damian looked at me like I was interesting. Nikolai looks at me like I'm a problem he hasn't solved yet.

"You seem different," he says.

"Everyone keeps saying that." I let the smile hold. "Weddings do something to a person."

He doesn't smile back. "They do."

Someone calls his name from across the room and he moves away, but not before one last look — and this time I recognize what's in it. It isn't suspicion about who I am.

It's fear about what I might know.

I file that away. I file everything away.

***

The ceremony itself is the strangest forty minutes of my life, and I once spent a night hiding in a car outside a police precinct waiting for my father to post bail for a debt I didn't know he had.

I walk down the aisle to music Iris chose. I hold flowers Iris ordered. I stand at an altar in a dress that still, faintly, smells like her.

Damian is already there when I reach him.

He's in a dark suit, no tie, which somehow makes him look more dangerous than a full tuxedo would. He watches me walk toward him with that same contained stillness from the night before — that held-breath quality, like a man who has already made his decision and is simply waiting for the rest of the world to catch up.

When I reach him, he takes my hand.

His grip is light. Deliberate. The grip of someone who knows exactly how much pressure they're applying.

"You look beautiful," he says, low enough that only I can hear it. Then, quieter still, the words just for me, the words that turn the floor to glass beneath my feet: "She would have, too."

My breath catches.

He doesn't look at me when he says it. He's already turning toward the officiant, already composing his face into the expression of a man about to be married, already performing the same lie I am but with so much more practice.

Reverend Hoyt begins. I hear the words from somewhere slightly outside myself — the promises, the witnesses, the sacred and binding. I say what I'm supposed to say. I sign what I'm supposed to sign. At some point Damian slides a ring onto my finger, a cold band of platinum that fits perfectly because it was sized for my sister, and somehow, horrifyingly, it fits me too.

Same hands, Iris used to say. Different hearts.

I do.

The words come out steady. I don't know how.

***

The reception is where the cracks start to show.

Not in me. I've been cracking since the moment I borrowed her name. The cracks I'm watching are in the people around me — the way certain guests look too long at my chin-length hair and then look away too quickly. The way Marcus Calloway, my own father, watches me from across the room with an expression I've never seen on him before.

It looks almost like guilt.

Almost.

I'm standing near the bar, holding a glass of water and pretending it's champagne, when Damian appears at my side. Not from in front, where I could see him coming. From behind, so close that when he speaks his voice arrives at my ear before his presence does.

"My brother spoke to you."

It isn't a question.

"Briefly," I say. I don't turn around. I've found that with Damian it's better not to give him my face when I don't know what's on it. "He welcomed me to the family."

"Nikolai doesn't welcome people." A pause. "He auditions them."

Now I do turn, because that sentence deserves a face. He's closer than I expected — close enough that I have to tilt my chin up slightly to hold his gaze, close enough that I'm aware of exactly how large he is in a way that isn't entirely unpleasant, which is a problem I don't have time for.

"Should I be worried?" I ask.

His eyes move across my face in that cataloging way, slow and thorough. "That depends," he says, "on what you're hiding."

The room is full of people. Music is playing. Someone laughs too loudly near the windows. And in the middle of all of it, my husband looks at me like we are the only two people who know the punchline to a joke no one else has heard yet.

"Everyone's hiding something," I say carefully. "Isn't that what families are for?"

Something shifts in his expression. Not softening — Damian Voss doesn't soften. But something adjusts, recalibrates, like a lens finding focus.

"Welcome to the family, then," he says.

And he walks away, and I stand there with a glass of water that's gone warm in my hand, and I think about what Nikolai's face looked like when he saw me. The fear. The calculation. The thing behind his eyes that wasn't about me at all.

Iris found something. She found it and she died for it.

And whatever it was, it's still here. In this house. At this table.

I set my glass down and I smile at the nearest camera, because there are always cameras at Voss events, and Iris always knew how to perform for them.

I'm learning.

I have to learn fast.

***

*Author's Note: We're just getting started. Wren is inside the house. Damian knows. And Nikolai is already watching. Chapter 3 drops soon — follow the story so you don't miss what happens the first night she sleeps under his roof.*