The Billionaire's Second Wife

The last thing I smelled was the perfume. Chloe's wedding gift. The one she'd pressed into my hands the week before, laughing, saying it was her grandmother's recipe, a family secret. I'd worn it every day since. It smelled like jasmine and something underneath, something I'd never been able to name. I was naming it now. My body didn't want to cooperate. The floor of the bridal suite was cold against my cheek, and the carpet smelled like the cleaning solution they used between events, and my hands were doing a strange thing, curling and uncurling, reaching for a phone that wasn't there anymore. Above me, a voice. "—check the pulse." "Dead. Or close enough. Twenty minutes, tops." "Make sure it looks natural. She was stressed, planning the wedding, weak heart—" "Her heart is fine. I've been checking her medical records for six months. Her heart is the strongest thing about her." A laugh. Quiet, pleased, like a compliment. I knew that laugh. I'd heard it a thousand times, over dinner, over breakfast, over the small daily betrayals I'd been too blind to see. I'd heard it the day he proposed, the day he got down on one knee in the rain and told me I was the only thing that had ever made sense to him. Marcus. "Finish it," he said. "I have a meeting." The door clicked shut. The other voice — the one that had checked my pulse — moved closer. Shoes on carpet. The smell of jasmine came with them, stronger now, and a gloved hand turned my face toward the ceiling. Chloe looked down at me. Her eyes were dry. That was the detail that stayed with me, later, when I had time to go through the memory the way a jeweler goes through a stone. No tears. No trembling. She looked at me the way she'd look at a dress in a window she couldn't afford. "You know what the worst part is?" she said. "You never saw it coming. All those years, and you never once asked yourself why I was always there. The one who held your hair back at parties. The one who knew his schedule better than you did." She tilted her head. "We've been together for three years, Lila. You just never looked." She lifted the bottle of perfume and let it drip onto my lips. The taste was bitter. Sweet and bitter, like crushed almonds. "He was going to marry me, once," she said. "Before your name came with a company attached. So don't tell me this is cruel. You took my life first. I'm just taking mine back." She straightened. "He'll cry at the funeral. He's good at that. I'll hold his hand, and everyone will say what a comfort I am, and in a year we'll move to the coast and your name won't be in any room we walk into." The ceiling was going gray at the edges. The last thing I saw was her heels walking away, and the door closing, and the light from the hallway shrinking to a line. I should have known, I thought. I should have seen it. And then there was nothing. --- Except there was something. Sound first. The wrong kind. No carpet, no heels, no bridal suite. A hum, like an air conditioner. A bird. Traffic, distant, the sound of a city waking up. Then smell. Coffee. My own coffee, the way I made it, dark, with too much sugar, the way Marcus said was bad for me. Then the sheets. Familiar. The slight rough spot near the seam, where I always hooked my toes. I opened my eyes. My bedroom. My apartment. The one I'd sold after the wedding, the one Marcus had called a "starter home" while he was closing on the penthouse in my name. The alarm clock on the nightstand said 6:14 AM. The calendar on the wall — I'd kept the paper kind, because I liked tearing off the days — said three days before the wedding. I sat up. My heart was pounding, and I pressed my hand to my chest the way you press a bruise to see if it hurts. It was beating. I'm dead, I thought. I died on the floor of the bridal suite with Chloe's perfume on my lips. And yet. I got up. My legs shook. I walked to the bathroom and looked in the mirror, half expecting to see the gray face, the closed eyes, the girl in the white dress with poison in her blood. I saw myself. Twenty-six. Alive. The small scar on my chin from when I'd fallen off a bike at ten, the one Marcus said he found endearing. The phone on the counter buzzed. A text from Marcus. Good morning, my love. Counting down. Three days until you're mine forever. ❤️ I read it three times. And I remembered, against my will, the other Marcus. The one from the beginning. The one who'd found me crying in the appraisal office over a client's lost heirloom — a locket, worthless, but the client's daughter had wanted it and I couldn't find it anywhere. He'd bought me coffee and asked me to describe the locket, and two days later he'd shown up at my door with it in his hand. Found it in a pawn shop across town. The chain was cheap, the locket was chipped, but he'd paid the man double without blinking. "You don't even know me," I'd said. "I know you care about things other people throw away," he'd said. "That's the rarest thing there is." That was the man I'd agreed to marry. That was the man I'd loved, the one who made me believe I'd finally been seen. I didn't know where he'd gone. I didn't know when he'd been replaced by the man with the meeting to attend and the poison in his pocket. Maybe he'd always been both. Maybe the coffee and the locket and the rain proposal were the performance, and the cold man at the door was the real one. I put the phone down, walked back to the bedroom, and sat on the edge of the bed with my hands in my lap. Three days. I had three days until my death. And I had a choice: run, hide, warn someone, scream until someone believed me. Or stay. Walk down the aisle. Smile. Say I do to the man who'd planned my murder. And then — before the perfume, before the poison, before he could finish what he'd started — take everything from him. I looked at the calendar. Three days. In the kitchen, my coffee was getting cold, and on the counter, next to the fruit bowl, was the gift Chloe had brought over "to celebrate." A bottle of perfume. Jasmine. And something underneath. Three days, I thought. Plenty of time to plan a wedding. Or a funeral.