The roses smelled like applause, too sweet to be real. I kept my hand steady around the bouquet, the lace at my wrists whispering as I turned toward the man who was supposed to be my future.
Iden smiled—precise, practiced, something warm tucked inside his eyes—and then the aisle split. A woman in black walked through the hush like a verdict, heels clicking a metronome to my heartbeat.
"Iden Vale is already married," she said, voice calm enough to cut. She held up a document in a clear sleeve. "Certificate on record, notarized. Today would be bigamy."
Gasps fanned through the pews in waves. Somewhere behind me, Aunt Victoria’s pearls clicked. The pastor paled. Iden’s jaw didn’t move, but his eyes did—sharp to the paper, sharper to the woman.
"Elise," he said, a warning and a history in one name. "You planned this."
She tipped her head, dark hair pinned like an armor piece. "You planned worse."
"Ava," Iden called to me without looking away from her. The way he spoke my name steadied something in my chest that shouldn’t have steadied. "She came to kill us both. That paper is a cover."
I didn’t answer. My mouth was full of cotton and vows. I kept seeing my father’s ring on my finger, the one he’d pressed into my palm before he died. I felt the tiny key stitched into the seam of my gown, metal cool against skin—my own quiet secret comfort—that steadied me more than Iden’s voice did.
The doors at the back blew open. It wasn’t wind.
Men in dark suits without boutonnières poured in, wrong in a room full of flowers. One lifted a jacket edge and I saw the hard line of a gun like a new kind of aisle.
The pastor dropped his book.
"Down," Iden snapped, moving, reaching for me—
A hand caught my wrist first. The grip was familiar, warm, uninvited by three years and every night I’d trained myself not to miss it.
"Move, Ava." Luke’s voice slid under my ribs, rough with urgency and something else. "Now."
I didn’t think. My body did. I pivoted with Luke, lace tearing, bouquet falling, petals scattering like small resignations. Iden’s fingers brushed air where my sleeve had been. I heard him swear, and I hated the way it tried to pull me back.
We ran.
Sound changed the second the side door closed behind us—hushed carpet to sharp tile to the clatter of a service hall that smelled like lemon cleaner and steam. Luke pulled me through a ribbon of light into the kitchen. A silver pan crashed to the floor. Someone screamed. Shots cracked distant, then nearer, like thunder coming home.
"What is happening?" I choked, taste of acid and sugar on my tongue.
"Your wedding is the wrong kind of headline," Luke said, not slowing. "Someone inside didn’t want you to finish it."
"Who?" I had names. Dorian’s smile. Victoria’s calm. Elise’s lethal calm.
He pressed me into a shadow beside a walk-in freezer as two men jogged past. His palm flattened over my sternum. Not possessive—hiding my breath from the bright doorway. We were chest to chest, his jacket cool, his heartbeat a steady drum through layered fabric. My veil brushed his jaw. The smell of him—soap and motor oil and rain—tore at memories I’d duct-taped in the dark.
"You disappeared," I said, ridiculous in a corridor where people were trying to kill me.
A muscle in his cheek ticked. "Not now."
"When, then? After? There is no after if—"
"There is." His voice lowered to a blade. "I’m making sure there is."
We slipped to a service elevator, a metal box that looked like a dare. He hit the button. Nothing. He swore softly and dragged me toward the stairs instead. My heels bit the concrete, then gave up; I kicked them off and went barefoot, cold and stained in seconds. The stairwell stank of stale air and spilled champagne. Above us, shouting. Below, distant horns.
"Iden—" I started, because even betrayal carries a weight you have to name.
"—is not your problem for the next five minutes," Luke said. "Living is."
"He said Elise came to kill us." My voice bounced off the cinderblock walls, thin and unbelieving. "She had the paper."
"Elise always has paper."
We reached the bottom. A loading bay opened like a mouth to the alley, white sunlight a slap after the ballroom’s chandeliers. The cold hit my damp skin and everything in me shivered in a new language. A delivery truck idled. A driver stared, unsure whether to get involved with a barefoot bride and a man who looked like the wrong answer to several questions.
Luke shrugged off his jacket and threw it over my shoulders. The lining was warm. It swallowed the bodice of my gown, hid the part of me that still thought I could fix everything by walking back upstairs and pretending this could be salvaged if my posture was perfect.
"Ava." He framed my face with his hands, thumbs careful near the veil pins. He never used to be careful. "Listen to me. Someone paid for that chaos, and it wasn’t Elise. Her timing is never random, but her motives aren’t simple."
"Whose are?" I tried for lightness and got static. "What do you want from me, Luke?"
His mouth softened without smiling. "The same thing I’ve always wanted. For you to make it out."
My chest stung. "Out of what? My own life?"
"Fielding Group," he said, and heat lit his eyes in a way that always looked like loyalty wearing anger. "Aunt Victoria’s board treats you like a brand asset, Dorian like a chess piece. You’re valuable and in the way."
There it was, the part that felt like knowing and trespass. "You’ve been talking to Elise."
He didn’t deny it. "Information keeps people alive."
"So does honesty." I stepped back. The jacket slipped and I caught it, fingers scraping the rough wool. "Did you come for me, or for the ledger I supposedly have a key to?"
He flinched, small and real. "I came for you."
Heartbeat moment—something broke and reformed in the space between us, like glass soldering itself in a new pattern. I felt the thread of my veil tug in the breeze and thought, If I choose to believe him and I’m wrong, I die stupid. If I don’t and I’m wrong, I die alone.
"We need to move," Luke said, voice returning to logistics, to safety. "You can’t go home. You can’t go to the office. Both are compromised."
"Says who—" My phone buzzed in the clutch I’d refused to let go. The screen lit through silk. I pulled it out with wet fingers.
The text was a single line from a number I didn’t have, tagged with a name the phone supplied like a whisper from some shared contact: Elise Voss.
Don’t go home if you want to live.
