She Said Yes to the Wrong Man

Ava had worked enough private events to know the difference between rich and dangerous, and tonight was both.The venue ran more per hour than she made in a month. High ceilings, low lighting, men in good suits who kept their hands near their jacket pockets not checking their phones, just resting there, which meant something different entirely. She kept her tray level and stayed close to the walls, visible enough to do her job and forgettable enough to avoid becoming anyone's problem.Her phone buzzed against her thigh for the second time.The sitter had texted an hour ago he's asking for you and Ava had sent back tell him I love him, give him the iPad and hoped it would hold until midnight. It usually held until midnight. She cut through the side panel into the service corridor, already reaching into her apron, and stopped.The veil was on the floor outside the bridal suite. White silk, beaded along every edge, half-draped over the baseboard like it had slid off someone's shoulder

The reception was already in full swing by the time Ava figured out how to hold a champagne glass like she belonged to one.Not to drink it. To carry it. There was a difference she'd picked up somewhere between the ceremony and the coat check, a difference in how you held your shoulders and let your wrist go loose and looked at a room full of people who had more money than God and treated it like a burden.She was getting better at it by the hour, which was honestly the most unsettling thing about this entire night.The ballroom was beautiful in the exhausting way that very expensive rooms always were. High ceilings, low gold light, music that stayed just under the conversation so nobody had to raise their voice. The Moretti guests had resettled after the ceremony with the practiced ease of people who had survived worse surprises than a substitute bride. Some of them watched her. Most had decided that watching Dante was more informative.Dante was across the room talking to two men sh

The mansion was the kind of beautiful that made you nervous and it was not because anything was wrong with it but because nothing was. Every surface was deliberate, every room was a statement about what kind of man lived here and what he expected from the people around him. The ceilings were high and the lighting was low and the staff moved through the corridors with the quiet efficiency of people who had learned that being noticed was its own kind of risk.Ava noticed all of it on the way in.The car had pulled through a gate she hadn't seen coming until they were already past it. Two men on the inside, two on the outside, the kind of security that wasn't meant to be subtle. The driveway was long and curved and the house at the end of it sat back from the tree line like it was watching you approach. She'd counted three cameras before they reached the front entrance and stopped counting because it was starting to make her hands sweat.A woman was waiting at the top of the steps.Lucia

Nadia cried, she tried not to, Ava could tell, but her eyes went red the moment she opened the apartment door and saw the bag in Ava's hand and Leo standing beside her with his dinosaur backpack on and his shoes on the right feet this time, which meant Nadia had redone them before she answered the door."Okay," Nadia said, crouching down to Leo's level. "You be good.""I'm always good," Leo said."You're usually good," Nadia said, which was exactly what Ava always said, and Leo grinned at her with all his teeth.Nadia stood up and looked at Ava and kept her voice low. "Call me. Okay? Not just when something goes wrong. Just…. call me.""I will," Ava said."Promise.""Nadia.""Promise me.""I promise," Ava said, and meant it, and then picked up the bag before she could stand there any longer feeling the specific weight of leaving a person who had held things together for her when she couldn't hold them herself.In the car Leo lasted approximately four minutes before the questions starte

She couldn't sleep again and this was becoming a pattern, lying in the dark of the mansion bedroom with the curtains drawn and the room so completely black that she couldn't tell whether her eyes were open or closed, her brain running the same loops it always ran when she was in a new place and hadn't yet figured out all the sounds it made. The radiator in the corner knocked once at eleven and then went quiet. Somewhere down the corridor a door opened and closed. One of Rafe's men doing a circuit, probably. She had started to recognise the rhythm of the house at night and she wasn't sure whether that was reassuring or just a sign of how long she had been lying awake.She thought about the card in her jacket pocket.She had moved it twice since she found it, once from the jacket to the inside pocket of her bag and once from the bag to the back of the top dresser drawer under a folded scarf, because she didn't want Leo finding it and asking questions she didn't have answers to, and also