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.
