Chapter Eight

“I am very glad to hear this from you, thank you for telling me,” I said finally, and meant it, in the strange, hollowed way you can mean something that should have broken you open and somehow didn’t.

“Now I’d like you both to leave.” I let my eyes move away from them, back to the officiant, back to the unfinished sentence still waiting. “There’s a wedding happening here. And neither of you are part of it anymore.”

Chapter 7: The Second Try

Julian didn’t move at first. Selene did, taking his arm and pulling him a step back toward the side door, murmuring something too low for the rest of the room to catch. Whatever she was saying, it had the practiced, urgent cadence of someone who’d done damage control for him before, who knew exactly which tone of voice made him stop digging.

“Mira,” Julian tried again, his eyes finding mine over Selene’s shoulder. “If you’d give me a chance to explain properly, without all of this,” a small, almost helpless gesture toward the assembled guests, the flowers, the towering arrangement of white lilies that now struck me as faintly absurd, “I think you’d understand why.”

“I understand enough.” I looked at him until he stopped talking. It didn’t take long. “You explained it well enough the first time. I’m not interested in a second draft.”

He held my gaze a moment longer, searching, I think, for the version of me that might still waver. Then he let Selene pull him toward the door. It clicked shut behind them, quiet and final, somehow carrying further than all that brass and strings ever had.

Strange, how a sound that small could draw a cleaner line than any of it.

Two hundred people exhaled at once.

The officiant cleared his throat, glanced down at his ceremony book with the particular focus of a man who needed something to look at, and then looked up at the two of us with the particular helplessness of someone whose job had just gotten considerably stranger than the training had covered.

“Should we,” he started carefully, “continue?”

I looked at Sebastian.

He hadn’t let go of my hand through any of it, not when Selene walked in, not when Julian’s confession landed in the room like a stone dropped into still water, not now, in the ringing silence that had followed. His grip wasn’t tight. It wasn’t possessive. It was simply steady, the way a person holds something they intend to keep.

His face gave me nothing. No smugness, no quiet gloating, none of the sharp-edged triumph I’d spent three years learning to recognize. He’d just watched his oldest rival admit, in front of two hundred witnesses, that the engagement had never been real. And he simply stood there, expression unreadable, as if he hadn’t won a thing. There was just him, watching me, waiting.

“Your call,” Sebastian said quietly. Only to me. “If you need time, take it. I’ll stand here as long as you need.”

That was what did it.

Not the wedding, not the shock of Julian’s confession, not the council rivalry that had shaped the last three years of my professional life into something I’d barely recognized as my own. Not even the strange, sudden tenderness in a man I had spent years deciding I understood completely, and clearly hadn’t, not even close.

It was that he was offering me the exit. Fully, cleanly, with nothing attached to it, in the one moment where taking it would have cost him everything he’d apparently been circling for three years.

A man who wanted to win wouldn’t have done that. A man running a strategy wouldn’t have handed me the door and told me to use it if I needed to. Whatever Sebastian Calloway was, and I had called him many things, many of them in print, he was not performing right now.

“I don’t need time,” I said. “I need you to actually marry me. Not as a favor, not as a way to win something against Julian. If we’re doing this” I paused, and felt the pause land exactly where I meant it to, “I want it for the reason you said in the courtyard. Because you’ve been waiting three years.”

Something moved behind his eyes, fast and unguarded, gone before I could fully name it. Some interior door, briefly open.

“Then let’s not keep the officiant waiting any longer than we already have,” Sebastian said, and the corner of his mouth moved, just slightly, in a way that wasn’t quite a smile, and turned back toward the front of the room.

The ceremony resumed.

I don’t remember most of the words. You never do, with the things that matter too much, they move through you without catching on anything, too large for the ordinary mechanisms of memory. But I remember the weight of Sebastian’s hand closing fully around mine when the officiant reached the second question.

I remember the quality of the quiet, two hundred people holding their breath, like movement alone might break something.

And I remember thinking, with a clarity that almost frightened me: three hours ago, I was ready to give my whole life to a man who had never once told me the truth.

Now I was standing across from one who had spent three years doing exactly that, just never in words.

Every argument, every contested vote, every late-night negotiation where he’d pushed back hard enough to make me better without ever letting me know that was the point. Losing, on purpose, every single time, just to stay close enough to be the one I called.