Chapter 1

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 mid-run. It cost more than her rent, probably more than her car, but she picked it up without thinking because eight years of cleaning up after people had made it pure reflex. She was still holding it when the voices came through the door.

"She's gone." Low, controlled.

"What do you mean gone?"

"She left the building. Twenty minutes ago, maybe more. Nobody saw her go."

Ava went still.

She should have put the veil down and walked back to the main hall. She was staff — paid to pour champagne and stay invisible — and whatever was happening behind that door was not her problem and had never been her problem.

She was still standing there when the door at the far end of the corridor opened.

The man who came through was tall, dark suit, no tie. He checked left, then right, not nervous, just thorough the way someone moves when they've learned the hard way not to skip that step. His eyes found her and stopped moving.

They went straight to the veil.

"What's your name?" he said.

"Ava. I work the event." She held up the veil slightly. "I found this on the floor, I was about to bring it to someone—"

"The ceremony starts in three minutes."

"Right, so I'll just leave it at the suite and get back to—"

"Walk with me."

She looked at him. He wasn't moving toward her, wasn't raising his voice, wasn't doing anything that should have felt like a threat — but her stomach dropped anyway because of the way he was watching her. Patient. Certain. Like the conversation had already ended and she just hadn't caught up yet.

"I'm sorry?"

"Keep holding the veil," he said. "Walk with me."

"I think you have the wrong person." She took a step back. "I'm not the bride. I pour champagne. You need to find whoever is actually supposed to be in there."

"The bride left."

"Then find her."

"There isn't time for that."

"Sir, that is genuinely not my problem," she said, and she meant every word of it, but even as she said it she noticed the two men who had appeared behind him in the corridor — dark suits, hands visible, not touching her, just standing there in a way that made the exit feel much further away than it had sixty seconds ago.

He studied her for a moment. Not unkindly, which somehow made it worse.

"The Romano family is seated in that room," he said. "No bride means no alliance, and no alliance means people get hurt. Not tonight. Down the road." He paused. "Twenty minutes. You stand there, you say the words, and then you walk out the back and none of this happened."

Her phone buzzed again.

Leo. It had to be Leo by now, done with the iPad, done with the sitter's distractions, sitting up in bed waiting for her voice. She thought about the hospital bill sitting on her kitchen counter, the one she'd been shuffling between piles for three months because she couldn't make herself throw it away and couldn't make herself pay it. Twenty minutes was nothing. Twenty minutes was survivable.

She didn't put the veil down.

He turned and she followed because there was no version of not following that ended well, and the two men fell in behind them, and the corridor got shorter and the music from the main hall swelled and the doors at the end opened wide and the whole room got to its feet.

He held out his hand.

She took it. Behind her, somewhere close, a gun safety clicked — soft, almost polite — and that was the moment the choice stopped being a choice at all.

The veil went over her face.

From somewhere to her left, she heard him speak quietly to someone near the altar. "It's handled," he said. "She'll hold."

Ava stood very still under the veil and realized she had no idea who she had just agreed to become.