MARRIED TO MY ENEMY’S BROTHER

Chapter3

The wedding happened four days later, and it was nothing like I’d imagined weddings to be, even the practical kind.

There was no church. No guests beyond a handful of Cole Dynamics executives whose names I forgot as soon as I heard them, and Nadia, who’d been allowed to come as my “plus one,” sitting in the second row in a dress she’d borrowed from her cousin, looking like she was attending a funeral she hadn’t been told the rules for.

It was held in a private room at the Cole Dynamics headquarters—glass walls, a view of the city, a registrar who looked bored, like he did this exact ceremony three times a week and had stopped finding it remarkable.

Damian wore black. I wore something Mira had picked out without asking my opinion—pale gold, simple, expensive in the way that doesn’t announce itself. When I’d asked if I could wear something of my own, Mira had said, not unkindly, “There will be photographs. Mr. Cole’s people have opinions about photographs.”

I’d spent the morning getting ready in a room down the hall, with a stylist who didn’t talk much and a makeup artist who did, filling the silence with commentary about the weather and the traffic and how lucky I was, really, that the ceremony was indoors, because it had looked like rain earlier.

I hadn’t told her it wasn’t luck I was thinking about.

By the time I walked into that glass-walled room, I’d mostly managed to settle my nerves into something manageable—a low hum instead of a scream. The ceremony took eleven minutes. I know because I counted, because counting was easier than thinking about what was actually happening, which was that I was marrying a stranger in front of people who worked for him, for reasons neither of us had been honest about.

When it came time for the rings, Damian took my hand, and his fingers were warm, which surprised me—I’d expected cold, somehow, the way you expect a statue to be cold even when you know better. He slid the ring on without looking at me, his eyes somewhere over my shoulder, on the skyline maybe, or on nothing at all.

“You may—” the registrar started, and Damian cut him off, quietly.

“That won’t be necessary.”

The registrar blinked, recovered, and moved on to the paperwork instead. No kiss. I felt Nadia’s eyes on the back of my head from the second row, felt the question in them—are you okay—and I didn’t turn around, because I didn’t trust my face to answer it honestly.

We signed. Damian’s signature was quick, economical, the signature of a man who’d signed a thousand documents and stopped thinking about what any individual one meant. Mine took longer. My hand wasn’t quite steady, and I hoped no one was close enough to notice.

And then it was done. Just like that. I had a new name on paper, a ring that fit perfectly because someone had apparently measured my finger while I slept or something equally unsettling, and a husband who was already turning to shake hands with one of his executives before the registrar had even finished gathering the paperwork.

Afterward, there was a reception of sorts—not a party, more a room full of people in good suits holding drinks they weren’t really drinking, talking about quarterly projections within ten feet of a woman who’d just gotten married. Someone had set up a small bar near the windows. Someone else had arranged flowers that matched nothing about the room’s cold glass-and-steel aesthetic, like an afterthought, like someone had been told there should be flowers and complied with the bare minimum.

I drifted toward the window because it was the only direction that didn’t require making conversation, and stood there with a glass of champagne I didn’t want, watching the city spread out below—gray rooftops, the river cutting through it like a seam, the kind of view that made you feel very small and very high up at the same time.

Nadia found me a few minutes later, slipping in beside me with her own glass, mostly full, like mine.

“So,” she said. “How does it feel? Being Mrs. Cole.”

“Like wearing someone else’s coat,” I said. “It fits, technically. But it’s not mine, and I keep waiting for someone to notice and ask me to take it off.”

“For what it’s worth,” she said, “you looked good up there. Terrified, but good.”

“Thanks. I think.”

She bumped her shoulder against mine, gently, the way she’d done since we were nineteen and this was the kind of comfort that actually worked between us—no big speeches, just proximity, just I’m here.

“He barely looked at you,” she said quietly, after a moment. “During the ceremony. I noticed.”

“I noticed too.”

“Do you think that’s just—I don’t know, rich-person reserve? Or is it something else?”

“I think,” I said slowly, “that I am the least interesting part of whatever is actually going on here, and I haven’t figured out yet what is the interesting part.”

Nadia opened her mouth to respond, but before she could, my attention snagged on something across the room—a flicker of motion near the bar, a man turning his head, laughing at something someone had said.

The angle of the light caught his face.

My whole body went cold from the inside out.

I knew that face.

I’d known it for six years, in flashes, in the half-second between sleep and waking, in the moments right before I fell asleep when my guard was down and my mind went back to that stairwell without asking permission. Smoke. Heat through the soles of my shoes. A man in the doorway, turning, his face lit orange by the fire behind him for two seconds—maybe less—before he disappeared into the alley and out of my life, except he never really left it, not completely, not ever.

The man at the bar laughed again, tipping his head back, and for a moment the resemblance seemed to waver—just a stranger, someone’s colleague, a trick of memory and bad lighting and six years of half-formed nightmares finally catching up to me on the worst possible day. That was the rational explanation. That was the explanation I wanted.

Then he turned his head again, fully this time, scanning the room the way people do at parties—casual, idle, looking for someone to talk to next—and his eyes passed over the window where I was standing.

For one second, his gaze caught on mine.

And he didn’t look away first. I did.

My hand was shaking hard enough that champagne sloshed over the rim of my glass and onto my wrist, cold and sharp, and I barely felt it.

“Lyra?” Nadia’s voice, closer now, an edge of concern creeping in. “Hey. You went white. What’s wrong? Do you need to sit down?”

I couldn’t answer her. Not yet. I was doing the math, fast and frantic, the way you do when your brain refuses to accept what it’s just been told and keeps running the numbers again hoping for a different result.

Six years ago, a man left my father’s burning building through a propped-open fire door, and I was the only person who saw his face.

Six years ago, on that same night, Felix Cole—Damian Cole’s twin brother—died in a car explosion on the other side of the city.

And right now, on my wedding day, in a room full of Cole Dynamics executives, that same man was standing twenty feet away from me, laughing with people who clearly knew him, completely at ease, like he’d always belonged here.

Like he’d never had any reason to think anyone might recognize him.

“Lyra, you’re scaring me,” Nadia said, gripping my arm now. “What is it? What did you see?”

I opened my mouth, and the only thing that came out was barely a whisper, more breath than words.

“I have to tell Damian something,” I said. “Right now. Before that man leaves this room.”

But even as I said it, some colder, quieter part of my mind was already asking the question underneath the question—the one that made my stomach drop even further than the sight of that face had:

If this man worked for Cole Dynamics, if he was here, comfortable, among Damian’s own people—

then how much of what Damian had told me about why he married me was actually true?

And how much of it had been a lie from the very first handshake?