My Three Fiances Betrayed Me, So I Married the Heir

On the night of my twenty-sixth birthday, Julian put the moonstone crown he had promised me on my sister Vivian's head.

The ballroom went quiet all at once. Everyone there knew the crown had been made as my birthday gift. A year ago I had sketched a crescent moon on one of Julian's design drafts on a whim, and he flew to Sri Lanka to choose the rough stone himself, then brought in a Paris jeweler to rework the setting seven times over. Alexander and Nathan had argued more than once about which of them would place the crown on my head, and in the end Julian laughed them both off and said no one was allowed to fight over it, that he would be the one to hand this moon to me.

But now the cold white moonstone sat against Vivian's long black hair, glowing quietly.

Vivian reached up to touch the crown without thinking, her eyes bright with delight and unease. "I've never owned anything this expensive," she said softly. "Foster families don't throw you birthday parties. I don't even know what a real birthday party is supposed to look like."

Julian had been standing in front of me, holding the crown. When she finished, his fingers stilled for a few seconds. Then he turned, walked over to Vivian, and bent down to fasten the clasp for her himself.

I stared at him and said, "Julian, that's my birthday present."

I said it plainly. For twenty-six years I had never had to hint at anything I wanted. At sixteen, when reporters blocked me in at the school entrance, Alexander pushed the cameras aside and pulled me in against him, only afterward asking quietly whether I had gotten into trouble again. At eighteen, on a winter night, I twisted my ankle on the long bridge, and Nathan carried me on his back through a downpour for forty minutes and came down with a fever the next day. At twenty, when the power failed at the estate and I complained offhand that I couldn't see the moon, Julian took a crew onto the roof that same night and hung three hundred silver lanterns.

He told me then that if he couldn't pull the moon down out of the sky, he would bring the moonlight to me instead.

In their private club there was a fourth chair that belonged to no one but me, my name engraved on the back. In the emergency-alert system the three of them shared, I was the only person flagged red, the highest priority. Once I set off the alarm by accident in the middle of the night, and all three of them reached the estate in under ten minutes. Not one of them could bring himself to scold me.

I had always been certain that kind of devotion would never fade.

Everything changed six months ago, when my mother found Vivian after all those years.

She had wandered off at an amusement park at four and drifted from one foster family to the next. It took twenty-two years for her to come home. On her first day back, I cleared out half my closet, moved the family albums into her bedroom, and told my mother we could give her twenty-two belated birthday celebrations.

Back then Alexander still pulled out my chair, Nathan still had every one of my allergies memorized, and Julian still kept every design draft I had ruined and tossed aside.

The real change came a month ago.

The Blackwood family sent a letter invoking the old winter betrothal pact. The contract between the two families stated that the eldest Ashford daughter had to marry into Black Harbor, up in Maine, and Vivian happened to be the eldest daughter.

Roman Blackwood, the heir to Black Harbor, had a vicious reputation. People said he was cold and controlling, that his last fiancee had died in a storm, and that he had never offered the public a single word of explanation.

Everyone took it as settled that Vivian had only one month left before she was sent to Black Harbor.

From that day on, they threw themselves into making it up to her. I reasoned with myself: she had lost twenty-two years with her family, and she was about to be sent to a place she knew nothing about. I already had more than enough. Giving way for one month didn't matter.

But what they asked for kept growing. First it was every hour of my mother's attention. Then it was every priority I held in the three men's lives. Now even the birthday gift made for me had become something she was owed before she left for Black Harbor.

"I didn't know it was your gift." Vivian pulled the crown off, her fingers shaking so badly she could barely hold the metal clasp. "I'm sorry, Evelyn. I shouldn't have touched it. Maybe I shouldn't have come back at all, if everyone is going to fight over me."

The crown slipped out of her hand and Julian caught it fast. Nathan reached her first and steadied her shoulders, and Alexander simply stepped between Vivian and me.

Once, all I had to do was frown a little and their first instinct was to find out who had upset me. But now Alexander looked at me as if I were a petulant child. "Do you really have to humiliate her in front of a room full of guests?"

"I'm only saying that the gift is mine."

"It's just a crown." Nathan's brows pulled tight. "She's leaving this family in a matter of days. You had to pick tonight to set her off?"

Julian set the moonstone crown back on Vivian's head, his voice as gentle as if he were soothing me, though he never once looked at me. "I'll make you a better one later."

I gave him a humorless smile. "That's the sixth time this month you've told me, 'Later.'"

Only then did my mother walk over. She didn't ask why I was upset. She simply reached up and carefully straightened the crown on Vivian's head. "Evelyn, you've had this kind of love for twenty-six years. Vivian has seven days. Can't you let her have this one thing?"

Seven days.

Every eye in the room was on the moon sitting on Vivian's head, as if in seven days Black Harbor would swallow her whole. I didn't argue anymore.

Near the end of the party, a courier from Black Harbor delivered a letter marking the countdown to the wedding. My mother only glanced at the envelope and went white. Alexander, Nathan, and Julian clustered around Vivian at once, trying to calm her.

The wind blew the letter to the edge of the long table and lifted one corner of the inner page. I bent to pick it up and saw a line of fine print under the body of the old contract: Any adult daughter of the Ashford family may fulfill the betrothal, provided she does so willingly.

I read that line over and over, folded the page carefully, and slid it into my clutch.

Everyone was certain the bride who went to Black Harbor in seven days would be Vivian. But the real bride never had to be her.