Chapter Seven

Chapter 6: The Wrong Bride

For a long second, nobody moved. The officiant’s mouth stayed frozen around a half-finished word. Two hundred guests held their breath in unison, and somewhere near the back, my aunt Renata muttered something that was probably a curse word dressed up as a prayer.

Selene didn’t look at me. She looked straight at Sebastian, and her face moved through something too fast to catch, surprise tipping forward and spilling into something sharper on the other side.

“You,” she said. “Of all people.”

“Selene.” Sebastian’s voice didn’t waver. It was firm and stayed exactly where it was, low and level. The voice of a man who’d learned that the less you gave a room, the more it gave back.

His hand tightened around mine, one quiet, deliberate degree. “This isn’t the time.”

“It’s exactly the time.” She stepped further into the aisle, and I felt every head in the room pivot between us like a pendulum that hadn’t decided where to land. “You’re standing at an altar that was supposed to have my fiancé in front of it, and instead it’s you. Did Julian know? Does he know his ex-rival swooped in to marry his bride the second his back was turned?”

“Julian,” I said, before Sebastian could answer, “made his choice three hours ago when he asked me to postpone my own wedding so he could finish whatever this is with you. I don’t owe him an explanation. I don’t owe you one either.”

“You don’t understand.” For the first time, something other than spite crossed her face, something closer to panic, raw and unpolished. “I didn’t come here to stop your wedding. I came because Julian never told you the truth about why he was really three hours away, and you deserve to hear it before you sign anything with this man.”

The room had gone so quiet I could hear the water against the harbor wall outside.

“Then say it,” Sebastian said. Beside me, his grip on my hand tightened one more degree, not painful, just absolute, like he already suspected whatever came next was going to rearrange everything we’d built in the last three hours, and wanted me to know he wasn’t going anywhere while it happened.

Selene drew a breath and opened her mouth.

The side door swung open.

Julian Reyes walked through it, breathless, suit jacket half-buttoned, looking like a man who’d run the last quarter-mile from wherever he’d parked. His gaze swept the room once, found me at the altar, and stopped.

“Mira.” He said my name like it had cost him the whole flight home. “What is this?”

“You tell me. You’re the one who needed three hours.”

He moved toward the altar, and Sebastian’s hand on mine went rigid, not threatening, just present, the way a wall is present. Not angry. Just there, and not moving.

“I came back,” Julian said, and his voice had shed its careful diplomatic finish, the smooth surface I’d stopped noticing was a surface at all. “I got on a flight the second I hung up with you, because the moment I heard your voice, I knew I’d made a mistake.”

“You made several,” I said. “I’m only marrying my way out of one of them.”

A ripple moved through the guests, somewhere between a gasp and a laugh, the sound two hundred people make when they realize they’re watching something they’ll be retelling at dinner parties for years.

“Selene.” Julian turned to her, something shifting in his face. “What did you tell her?”

“Nothing yet.” Her arms stayed folded, the panic burned down to something quieter now, colder. “Should I keep going, or do you want to say it yourself? In front of everyone. The way you should have done four years ago.”

“Say it yourself,” Sebastian said, the same flat, unhurried authority I’d seen him use twice in three years of council sessions, both times right before he won an argument everyone assumed was already lost. “Whatever it is, Mira deserves to hear it from you. Not from her.”

Julian looked at Sebastian the way you look at someone when you realize you’ve badly miscalculated who they are. Then he turned back to me, and for one second, just one, the practiced calm cracked enough to show me something underneath that I hadn’t seen once in four years.

“Selene and I were never broken up,” he said. “Not really. Our families arranged the split publicly so I could marry into yours, because the Voss name carried weight with the council that the Brandt name didn’t anymore. The plan was simple: marry you, secure the seat, and quietly return to her once the politics settled.”

The words landed somewhere past anger, into a cold, clear stillness.

“You proposed to me,” I said, “as a council strategy.”

“It wasn’t only that. I did care about you, Mira, in whatever way I had left to care about anyone after my family decided who I’d marry before I was old enough to object.” His jaw tightened. “But this morning I realized I couldn’t go through with any of it. I came back to call it off properly, face to face, the way I should have from the start. I didn’t expect this.”

Nobody spoke. I felt my father’s hand pressed flat against my mother’s shoulder, Aunt Renata gone completely still in the back row, the officiant still holding his book open to a sentence none of us had finished.