Chapter 1: The Wrong Brother

Chapter 1: The Wrong Brother

The whispers reached her before she reached the doors.

Clarissa heard them bleeding through the wood, low and urgent, the kind of whispers that had weight to them. The kind that meant something had already gone wrong inside that hall before she even walked in.

She stopped.

Her father stopped beside her.

She turned to look at him and that was all it took. One look at his face. The jaw locked too tight. The eyes that found somewhere else to be the moment hers reached them.

“Dad.”

He said nothing.

“Look at me.”

He looked at her. And she saw it. All of it. Everything he hadn’t said since he knocked on the bridal suite door forty minutes ago and told her it was time.

She pushed the doors open herself.

The music died.

Three hundred people turned and the silence that replaced it was suffocating. Not the reverent silence of a wedding. Something heavier. Something laced with secondhand shame and the particular discomfort of people watching a woman walk into something she doesn’t yet fully understand.

Her eyes found the altar.

Her body found it before her mind did because her feet stopped moving on their own, just ceased, like something in her refused to carry her any further until she understood what she was seeing.

The man standing at her altar was not Luca.

He was broader than Luca. Stiller. He stood like the room had been built around him rather than the other way around, shoulders straight, hands clasped, nothing in his expression suggesting he was anything other than exactly where he intended to be.

Charles Richard.

The air left her body.

She turned to her father. “Where is he.”

Silence.

“Where is Luca.”

Her father reached for her arm. She stepped back from it.

“Don’t.” Her voice came out low and controlled and she was grateful for that because underneath it everything was shaking. “Just tell me where he is.”

“He’s not coming.” Her father’s voice was barely above a whisper. “Clarissa, he’s—”

“Not coming,” she repeated.

The words landed somewhere deep. Too deep to feel properly yet. That would come later, she understood instinctively, the real feeling would come later when she was alone and there was nobody watching.

Right now there were three hundred people watching.

She looked at the altar again.

Charles had not moved. He was watching her with those dark unreadable eyes and an expression so composed it made something in her chest twist because how was he calm right now. How was he standing there like that while her entire life rearranged itself into something she didn’t recognize.

He stepped down from the altar.

He walked toward her slowly and the guests watched and the silence held and he stopped in front of her close enough that she could see the faint tension along his jaw, the only crack in the composure, so small she wondered if anyone else in the room could see it.

“Clarissa,” he said quietly.

“Don’t tell me to calm down.”

“I wasn’t going to.”

“Don’t tell me this is going to be alright either.”

“I wasn’t going to say that.”

She looked at him. At the steadiness of him. At the way he stood in front of her like an immovable thing while the ground shifted under her feet.

“Then what were you going to say,” she said.

He held her gaze for a moment that stretched longer than it should have.

“That you are the strongest person in this room right now,” he said. “And every person sitting in those seats knows it.”

Something moved through her. She couldn’t name it. Didn’t try.

She looked past him at the altar. At the white roses she had chosen herself, at the arch of flowers, at the place where the rest of her life was supposed to begin with someone who had apparently decided it wasn’t worth showing up for.

She thought about Luca.

She thought about four years of believing in something completely.

Then she lifted her chin and walked forward.

Charles turned and fell into step beside her and the music started again and three hundred people exhaled all at once. She felt his presence at her side like heat, steady and close, and when they reached the altar his hand found the small of her back for just a moment, just briefly, guiding her into place.

Such a small thing.

Such a devastatingly certain thing.

The ceremony began. The officiant spoke. She answered when she was meant to answer. Charles answered when he was meant to answer. His voice was calm and even and completely sure of every word leaving his mouth in a way that made her feel unsteady by comparison.

And then it was over.

I now pronounce you husband and wife.

The hall filled with applause.

Charles turned to her. He leaned close, one hand coming to rest against her waist, drawing her toward him with a quiet authority that left no room for argument. His lips brushed her ear.

“You was never meant to be his,” he said softly.

The applause swelled around them.

Clarissa’s breath stopped.

She turned her face toward him slowly.

He was already pulling back, already turning toward the crowd with the composed unreadable expression the world always got from him, already raising his hand in acknowledgment of the applause like a man who had simply done what needed doing.

Like he hadn’t just said what he said.

Like he hadn’t just cracked her world open for the second time in one day.