Chapter 5

I thought I was going to die in that warehouse.

Instead I woke to the same white ceiling, the same antiseptic quiet, the same drip line taped into the crook of my arm. My throat felt like gravel. I reached for the water glass on the nightstand and made it about two inches off the pillow before my body overruled me entirely—I dropped back hard, and the damage across my back lit up all at once, white and total. I pressed my molars together and breathed through it.

"You're up."

The door. His voice. I turned my face toward the wall before the rest of me caught up.

I heard him stop—one beat, the recalibration—and then his footsteps crossed to me without rushing. Water being poured. The mattress dipped as he sat, and his hand came under the back of my neck, steady and careful, lifting me just enough. He brought the glass to my lips the way you handle something you're not sure of.

The water was exactly the right temperature. I drank in small pulls and kept my eyes on the middle distance and did not look at him.

He set the glass down. When he spoke, his voice was the operational register—the one with nothing underneath it.

"I've set the date. Engagement ceremony, four weeks. Family only, Fontana hall."

I coughed—sudden, wrenching, the kind that pulls at everything below it. I waited for it to finish.

"I don't want that," I said. Quieter than I meant it to come out.

"Elara." He frowned and reached for my jaw on instinct—the old gesture, tipping my face up so I'd have to look at him. I turned my head and his fingers met air. His hand hung there for a half second before he pulled it back. "I waited five years. Once it's done, Cecilia gets a sanctioned relocation. Somewhere outside the territory, full protection arranged. It's already in motion."

I closed my eyes.

"But before the ceremony." His voice came again—level, even, the particular evenness that meant the next thing was going to cost me something. "I want to give her a proper send-off first. A wedding. She's held an unofficial position for five years, and that's not—" A beat. "She deserves the formality. She's young. These things matter to her."

A pause with specific dimensions.

"She doesn't have many people in her corner." He said it like he was reading from a file. "I'd like you there. As her bridesmaid."

The slap connected before I'd finished processing the sentence.

The sound of it cracked through the room. My arm was shaking—I'd used everything I had left in that one movement. Nico's head turned with the force of it, and the color rose in his cheek immediately, and I watched the anger come up into his face like a tide—

And then stop.

He looked at me. At my eyes, which I couldn't manage the way I managed everything else. Whatever was in them made the anger recede into something more complicated. He was quiet for a long moment, his jaw working.

"It's one afternoon," he said finally, his voice gone careful and low. The tone he used when he thought I needed to be talked down. "Think of it as—"

"Don't."

He stopped. He didn't leave.

They came the next morning without knocking.

Two of the household staff and a soldier from my father's detail, which told me this had been coordinated above my head. Garment bags over one arm, a full makeup case in hand. I told them to leave. The soldier took up position in the doorway with the blank, immovable expression of a man whose orders came from someone whose rank outweighed my objections.

They did my hair. They did my face. They laced me into a blush-pink bridesmaid's gown with a structured waist seam that sat directly across the worst of my back—tight enough that every full breath required a small, private act of will.

I was guided to the car without being consulted.

It wasn't a hotel ballroom or a family club.

It was the Ferrante coastal estate—the property that had hosted treaty negotiations and quiet burials of inconvenient agreements for three generations. White rose arches at the entrance. A crystal-studded runner that caught the afternoon light and scattered it in every direction. A string quartet playing something slow and familiar. Champagne-silk bows on every chair back, tied in the specific style I recognized because I had described it once, in detail, without meaning to.

I stood at the entrance and the air went out of me.

Every detail was right.

At nineteen I had been folded into Nico's side on the sofa in his father's study, half-asleep, paging through a magazine that had a wedding editorial—the roses, the crystals, the ribbons catching light. I'd talked about it the way you talk about things when you feel safe enough to say inconsequential things out loud. Something like that. One day, maybe.

He'd laughed. Pressed his mouth to my hair. I'm keeping a list, he'd said, every last thing.

He had kept the list.

He was using it today.

Nico was near the arch in a white suit, his back partially to me, both hands raised to settle Cecilia's veil. Attentive. Unhurried. The expression on his face was one I was cataloguing in real time, because I had never seen it directed at me—something open, something without the usual management in it. Cecilia was in full embroidered lace, luminous, her face—that face that echoed mine like a frequency I couldn't unhear—bright with a happiness she wasn't bothering to temper.

She found me over his shoulder.

She didn't look away first.

I took my position with the other attendants. Shoulders back. Chin level. The expression I had been trained since childhood to maintain in rooms where showing anything was a liability.

The waist seam pressed steadily into my back with every breath. Even, insistent—the only thing in the room that knew what was happening underneath the composure.

Nico had called it a formality.

But the roses were the ones I'd pointed at. The crystals were the ones I'd described. The music was the piece I'd heard in a café in Mayfair at twenty-two and sent him a recording of, at two in the morning, with no message attached.

He had remembered all of it.

Every detail was something he'd taken from a conversation I'd trusted him with.