3: The Man Who Should Be Dead

Daphne's pov

My words rang through the church.

For several seconds, nobody moved. The officiant stared at me with his mouth half open, like a man who'd misread his own script. Guests exchanged bewildered glances. Somewhere in the back, a child asked loudly what "I do not" meant. Dad rose halfway from his seat in the front pew.

In the second row, Emmeline sat upright in a lilac dress, pink-cheeked and perfectly healthy, watching me breathe. Seeing her without the fever made my skin crawl. John leaned toward her and whispered something, and she gave him a short, sharp look I recognized from the shopping mall.

Edward's smile faltered.

"Sweetheart," he whispered, tightening his fingers around mine. "What's wrong?"

I pulled my hand free and wiped my palm down the front of my dress without meaning to.

"I said I don't want to marry you."

His face slid from confusion to embarrassment. He glanced at the guests, then turned back to me with a wounded little smile, the one that had talked me out of a hundred arguments.

"Are you nervous? It's all right. We can take a moment if you need one."

He reached for my hand again.

I stepped back, and my heel caught the hem of my dress.

"Don't touch me."

Edward blinked. I had never spoken to him like that. Not once. I was the woman who trusted his reassurances, believed his promises, and apologized even when I wasn't at fault.

That woman was dead. I had watched her bleed onto a tile floor.

"Daphne, please," he murmured. "Everyone is watching. Whatever happened, we can discuss it privately."

"I don't want to discuss anything with you. I want to leave." I turned to my father. "Daddy, please take me home."

Ronald was already moving into the aisle, but Edward got there first.

"Daphne, wait."

I kept walking. My veil snagged on the end of a pew, and I yanked it free with a rip I felt in my teeth.

Edward caught my wrist.

"Stop making a scene," he whispered through clenched teeth.

Pain shot up my arm. I looked down at his fingers pressed white against my skin, and the church tilted. For one moment I was back on the cold floor of the shopping mall, coughing blood while this same man watched. His fist in my hair. The knife at my throat.

"Let go of me."

"Not until you explain what this is about."

His grip tightened.

My arm moved before my brain caught up.

The slap cracked through the church like a dropped plate. Gasps rolled through the pews. Edward's head snapped sideways, and a red mark bloomed across his cheek.

My palm burned. I barely noticed.

He turned back to me slowly. For half a second, the loving mask slipped. His eyes went flat. His jaw locked. It was the look he'd worn over the broken cup, and I knew it the way you know a smell from childhood.

Then he noticed the guests staring, and his face softened like warming wax.

"Daphne," he said quietly, touching his cheek. "Why would you do that? I love you."

My stomach turned over. He had said those same words while I begged him for water.

"Don't you dare say that to me," I whispered.

"What has gotten into you?"

"I don't owe you an explanation."

"You're my fiancée!"

"Not anymore."

I wrenched my wrist free and hurried to my father. Ronald stepped between us like a wall.

"That's enough."

Edward straightened his jacket and tried to smooth his voice. "Mr. Alistair, I don't understand. Daphne was perfectly fine this morning. I think we should all calm down before she makes a decision she'll regret."

Ronald looked at me. "Daphne, did he hurt you?"

The question nearly broke me. My mouth opened, and the whole truth crowded behind my teeth: the money, the poison, the necklace Dad would one day press into my hand on his deathbed. I closed it again. No one else remembered that future. I had no way to prove it to a church full of people holding programs.

"Please, Daddy." My fingers dug into his sleeve. "I just want to go home."

He studied my face. Whatever he saw there made his own harden.

"All right. We're leaving."

"You can't be serious," Edward said. "Our families are here. We've spent months preparing for this!"

"And my daughter has said she doesn't want to marry you. I won't force her. This discussion is over."

Viola was already at my side, her hand firm on my back. Gavin trailed behind us, looking from me to Edward with his eyebrows nearly in his hair. Ronald guided us up the aisle.

"Daphne! Please, just talk to me!"

I didn't turn around.

Each step away from the altar felt like slipping out of a chain I hadn't known was around my neck. My shoulders loosened for the first time all day. My breath came easier, deeper, as if someone had finally opened a window.

I had done it.

But relief barely had time to settle before something colder moved in underneath it. Edward had seen the hatred I couldn't quite hide. He would want answers, and a man like him did not let a question go.

I couldn't let him find out what I knew. Not yet.

The moment I stepped outside, the roar of engines hit me.

A military van and five dark vehicles swept around the corner and stopped in front of the entrance, blocking the driveway. Soldiers climbed out, brisk and coordinated. One spoke into a radio while another scanned the crowd on the steps.

"Dad, what's going on?" Gavin asked.

"I don't know." Ronald's face had turned serious.

I barely heard either of them. The van's side door slid open.

A tall man in uniform stepped out. Broad shoulders. Dark hair. The soldiers around him straightened without being told to.

The blood drained from my face. My fingers went numb around the hem of my dress.

No.

General Adrik Hale.

The same man who had knelt in an alley. The same man whose blood had spread across the ground, whose lifeless body I had crept toward, whispering an apology I hadn't understood.

He was alive.

My feet carried me one step backward before I could stop them.

Adrik's gaze swept over the people outside the church. Then he started walking toward us, his expression stern and unreadable. He didn't look confused. He looked like a man who had come to handle something important.

My pulse hammered in my throat. Hadn't I watched him die? Was this another memory I couldn't trust, or had I really been given a second chance at everything?

His eyes passed over me briefly before settling on the man beside me.

My father.

Ronald's expression changed the moment he recognized the general. I saw it, and the question rose in my throat, but Adrik stopped directly in front of me.

Close enough that I could see the faint scar near his eyebrow. Close enough to know this wasn't a face my mind had invented.

I had watched this man bleed out in an alley.

Now he was looking at me.