Chapter one

Chapter 1: Three Hours

The wedding portrait was the first thing to go.

I didn't plan it. My hand closed around the brass candlestick on the vanity and sent it through the glass before I'd even finished hearing the rest of the sentence Julian had just said into my ear. The frame hit the wall, cracked down the center, and dropped to the floor with my own painted smile staring up at me, split clean in half.

Three hours. That's what he needed to get to an airport that didn't exist near wherever he was, with whoever he was with, and somehow that math worked out to *I can't make it back for our wedding.*

“Just postpone it a day,” he’d said, like he was asking me to reschedule a dentist appointment.

I was still holding the phone when Aunt Renata pushed through the door. She took one look at the broken frame. Then at my face. And went still.

"Mira. What happened."

“Ask Julian.” The words left my mouth flatter than I’d meant them to. Flat was better than the alternative. “Ask him where he is right now. Ask him who he’s with.”

Renata's mouth went thin. She didn't ask. She already knew the way everyone in my family had quietly known for months and said nothing, because Julian Reyes was a rising name at the Foreign Office and the Voss family did not air grievances in public, and because I'd told myself the rumors were exactly that. Rumors.

I should have listened.

Downstairs, someone was testing the microphone.

A loop of strings drifted up through the floor. Two hundred guests were already seated at the Harlow Pavilion, or nearly there, my father’s business partners, the council members I’d spent three years arguing against across a chamber floor, my mother’s entire side of the family flown in from three countries.

"Leave it."I said as I set the phone down on the vanity, the screen still lit with the call log. His name. A duration far too short for a man calling off his own wedding. "I need to think."

"Think about what? There's nothing to think about. You call your father. You call the venue. You tell two hundred people the wedding's off, and you let me deal with the Reyes family, because I have wanted an excuse to deal with the Reyes family for four years."

Four years. I'd known about Julian and Selene Brandt for nearly that long, in the way you know something you've decided not to know, filing every late work trip and every too-warm mention of her name into a drawer I told myself I'd never have to open.

Today the drawer opened itself.

“I’m not calling it off,” I said.

Renata stared at me like I’d switched languages mid-sentence. “Mira.”

“I am not standing in front of two hundred people and telling them my fiancé chose his ex over his own wedding.”

I'm not giving the Reyes family that satisfaction. I'm not giving her that satisfaction. And I am not spending the next year as the woman the entire council quietly pities every time I walk into a room." My hands had started shaking. I pressed them flat against the vanity until they stopped. "There's a ceremony booked. There's an officiant standing there right now with nothing to do. There's a marriage license sitting in that drawer with my name already on it, waiting for a second signature."

"Yours and Julian's."

"The license needs a groom's signature. It doesn't specify whose."

That pulled her up short. For a moment she just looked at me, piecing it together, realizing where this was headed, and liking none of it.

"Mira. What exactly are you about to do."

I picked the phone back up and scrolled past Julian's name, past my father's, past the wedding planner's, until I reached the one number that had never once, in three years, been associated with anything close to peace.

*Sebastian Calloway.*

My oldest rival on the council. The man who'd killed my heritage rezoning proposal twice out of pure institutional spite. The man who'd once told a packed boardroom that I argued like someone who'd never lost anything in her life, which was such a wrong thing to say to me that I didn't speak to him directly for half a year afterward.

The man who, at a council gala four months ago, half-drunk on the open bar and watching me argue with Julian across the room, had leaned over and said: *wouldn't it be something, if you married me instead. At least then we'd both know exactly what we were getting.*

I'd laughed at him. Told him to go home.

My thumb hovered over the call button.

"Mira," Renata said carefully, the way you talk to someone standing too close to a railing, "who are you calling."

I hit the dial instead of answering her, lifted the phone to my ear, and listened to it ring once, twice, three times, my pulse climbing with every unanswered chime. If he didn’t pick up, I had no second plan.

Nothing standing between me and walking into the Harlow Pavilion alone in three hours to tell my family the wedding was off.

The line connected.

"Hello?" A pause, like he'd checked the screen mid-greeting and not quite believed it. "Mira?"

His voice held something I’d never once heard from him in three years of arguing across a council table. Hesitation.

“I need to ask you something,” I said, “and I need you to actually think before you answer me, because I am not joking right now.”

“You hesitated before you said anything.” He watched me. “Why.”

"I'm asking the question. You're answering it."

"Fair enough." A short breath on his end, almost a laugh. "Ask."