The Billionaire’s Twin Bride

Chapter 4 — It Fits Like a Verdict

Calla POV

The dress fits perfectly, and that's the worst part.

I stand in front of the full-length mirror in the bridal suite of the Four Seasons and look at myself in Cara's wedding gown — ivory silk, structured bodice, a skirt that moves like water — and it fits like it was made for me, because it was made for someone who shares every measurement I have.

My sister is dead and her dress fits me and I am about to marry her fiancé, and the face looking back at me from that mirror is hers and mine at the same time and I cannot tell anymore where she ends and the performance begins.

"Stand straight," Lenora says from behind me. She's adjusting the veil at the back of my head with quick, efficient hands, like she's packing a suitcase. "Cara always carried her shoulders back. You're rolling them forward."

"I'm aware of my shoulders."

"Then fix them."

I pull my shoulders back. The woman in the mirror looks more like Cara. Less like me. I wonder if that's going to get easier or if I'm going to spend the next weeks watching myself disappear one posture correction at a time.

The ceremony is smaller than I expected — Lenora mentioned a guest list, a venue, a reception, and I built a picture in my head of something enormous, something befitting a tech billionaire and a society wedding and five years of public engagement. What I get instead is a room with forty chairs, half of them filled, afternoon light coming through tall windows, and the kind of quiet that feels deliberate.

Rhys Alderton requested a small ceremony. I did not know that.

I file it under things I don't know about the man I'm marrying, a list that is distressingly long.

I don't see him until I'm at the end of the aisle.

The coordinator gives me the nod and I take my first step and the forty-odd people in those chairs turn in unison and I keep my face neutral and my shoulders back and my eyes moving forward, because the one thing Lenora drilled into me last night was don't look for him until you're halfway down, it reads as eager and Cara was never eager.

So I count my steps and I breathe and I do not look for him until I'm halfway down.

And then I look.

He's taller than I expected. That's the first thing — the photographs don't capture the height, or the way he fills a room even a room this size even standing completely still. Dark suit, no tie, dark hair slightly longer than strictly formal. His hands are clasped in front of him and his jaw is set and he is looking at me the way people look at something they are trying to resolve.

Not warmth. Not nerves. Something more precise than either.

He looks like a man who has just noticed a discrepancy in a document he thought he understood.

I keep walking. I keep my face arranged. I count my steps and I breathe through my nose and I think about Cara's voice on the burner phone warning me that they know, and I use the fear of that to keep everything else at a manageable distance.

I reach the altar and stop, and we look at each other.

His eyes are very dark. Not unreadable — I'll learn later that he's only unreadable to people who haven't studied him. Right now, standing three feet away in my dead sister's dress, I can read exactly one thing in his expression: he is paying attention.

Not to the room. Not to the officiant. To me. Specifically, carefully, with the kind of focus that makes my skin feel like it's been touched without being touched.

The ceremony begins and I say what I'm supposed to say in the order I'm supposed to say it, and Cara's voice work comes back to me automatically — a fraction lower, a fraction slower, the small careful breath before each sentence. I hold his hands when the rings come and his hands are warm and dry and I feel the calluses on his right palm and think, inexplicably, that's not in any profile I read.

"I do," I say.

He says it back.

His eyes don't leave my face for the entire duration of it.

*****

My mother finds me in the anteroom twenty minutes after the ceremony ends, before the small reception begins, before Rhys reappears from wherever he went to speak with the two board members who attended.

She closes the door behind her.

"You did well," she says.

"Thank you." I'm still in the dress. There's nowhere to change yet and I'm not sure I'd take it off even if there were, because removing it feels like stepping off a ledge I haven't fully committed to yet.

"The next part is more important." She stands close to me, lower her voice even though we're alone. "Tonight—the thing couples do."

I look at her. "Mom…"

"You are his wife." Her voice is completely flat. "You will perform every function of that role. Every function, Calla. Without hesitation, without reluctance, and without giving him any reason to feel that something is wrong."

My mouth goes dry. "You want me to…"

"I want you to do what is necessary." She holds my gaze. "You are not there to find a line. You are there to maintain a life. His wife lived in that house. His wife shared his bed. If you behave like a woman who finds the arrangement distasteful, he will notice it, and noticing it leads to questions, and questions lead to everything unraveling before you've found what Cara hid."

"I understand the strategy," I say. My voice is steadier than I feel.

"Then you understand what I'm telling you."

I do. I understand it in the specific, visceral way of someone being told that the line between undercover and something else has just been erased, and the person erasing it is your mother, and she is watching you to see if you flinch.

I don't flinch. I've been not flinching in front of Lenora Morne since I was seven years old.

"He barely noticed Cara," I say. I throw her own words back at her, quiet and deliberate.

Something moves across her face. Not guilt — Lenora doesn't carry guilt the way ordinary people do. But something adjacent to awareness. "That was the engagement," she says. "This is the marriage. He'll notice now."

I turn away from her and look at the window. Outside, the Austin skyline sits in late afternoon gold, and somewhere out there my apartment has paint drying on three canvases and a week's worth of unwashed coffee mugs and a life that is still technically mine even though I am standing in a hotel anteroom in a dead woman's dress being instructed by my mother to be a wife to a stranger.

I think about his eyes at the altar. The precision of his attention.

He'll notice now.

I believe her. I believed her before she said it.

The question I'm carrying when I walk back out into the reception, the question I'll be carrying for longer than I can anticipate is whether that's a threat or something I don't have a name for yet.