THE BILLIONAIRE OF MANHATTAN'S FORCED BRIDE

The gate won't open.

I've been pulling on the iron bars for what feels like an hour, but it's probably been thirty seconds. My dress is soaked through at the hem, mud and something darker climbing up the white satin like it's trying to swallow it. Behind me, the street is on fire in three places.

"Julian!" My voice tears on the way out. "Julian, open the gate!"

Through the glass doors of the estate, I can see them. Warm light behind them, like nothing in the world has gone wrong. Julian in his father's old wedding suit, the one that was supposed to be mine to unbutton tonight. And Celeste, my sister in every way that matters except blood, standing where I should be standing, wearing white.

She sees me first. I watch her see me. She doesn't move.

"Celeste!" I slam both palms against the bars. "Let me in, they're coming, let me in—"

She says something to Julian. I can't hear it through the glass, but I know the shape of her mouth well enough after twenty years to read the words. Not yet.

Not yet.

Behind me, something screams that used to be a person.

I don't turn around fast enough. I feel it before I see it — hands, too many joints, closing around my arm and yanking me off my feet. The iron bars scrape my knuckles as I lose my grip. I'm screaming Julian's name and my own name and God's name, all of it useless, all of it swallowed by the sound of the city dying around this one house that decided it would keep its lights on.

The last thing I see through the glass is Celeste, watching. Not screaming. Not moving to help.

Smiling.

Then there's only pain, and then there's only white, and then there's nothing at all.

*

I wake up gasping like I've been underwater.

Sunlight. Actual, ordinary morning sunlight, slatting gold through curtains I recognize — my curtains, the cream linen ones I picked out two years ago because they matched nothing and I liked that they matched nothing. My hands come up in front of my face on instinct, checking for the wounds, and they're clean. Whole. No blood under the nails, no torn skin at the knuckles where the gate tore me open.

My heart is going so hard I can feel it in my teeth.

I'm alive.

I don't understand what that means yet, not really, not in the way that will matter in about four seconds, because right now all I understand is the animal fact of breathing, of my ribs expanding, of the ordinary weight of a comforter over ordinary legs that both still work.

Then I understand the second thing.

This is my old room. My room from before I moved into the west wing to be closer to Julian's family. The one with the water stain on the ceiling shaped like a rabbit that Celeste used to tease me about. I haven't slept in this room in over a year.

My phone is on the nightstand, screen dark. My hand is shaking when I pick it up.

The date is wrong.

I sit with it a long moment, thumb over the glass, waiting for the numbers to rearrange themselves into something that makes sense. They don't. Three months. The phone is telling me it is three months before my wedding day. Three months before the fire, before the gate, before Celeste's mouth shaping not yet while I died in front of her.

I laugh. It comes out wrong, cracked down the middle, nothing like a laugh at all.

"Okay," I say out loud, to no one, to the rabbit-shaped stain on the ceiling. "Okay."

There's a knock at the door before I've decided what okay is even supposed to mean.

"Ivy?" Celeste's voice, muffled through the wood. Bright. Careless. The voice of a girl who hasn't decided yet whether she wants my life or just wants me gone from it. "You're going to be late for the tasting. Mom's already threatening to strangle the caterer without you."

Every hair on my arms lifts at once.

I know that voice. I heard that voice through glass three months from now, watching me die, saying two words I will never stop hearing as long as I live, however long that ends up being this time.

"Ivy?" She knocks again, softer. "You okay in there? You've got, like, a look on your face already and I haven't even seen your face."

I make myself stand. My legs hold. That, at least, is new information — everything about my body works exactly the way it's supposed to, which means whatever just happened to me happened somewhere else, in some other version of this morning that this version doesn't remember living yet.

I open the door.

Celeste is standing there in an old sweatshirt and no makeup, hair scraped back, holding two coffee cups like she does every morning, one of them already made exactly how I like it because she's known how I like my coffee since we were nine years old and our fathers decided we'd be sisters whether either of us agreed to it or not.

She looks at me and her whole face changes.

"You've been crying," she says, and there's something in her voice I haven't let myself hear in months — actual worry, the kind that used to be real before it stopped being real, or before I stopped being able to tell the difference. "Ivy. What happened?"

I look at her for a long time. Long enough that her smile falters completely.

Not yet, she said. Standing behind glass while the city burned. Not yet.

But this Celeste, this morning, hasn't done that. Not yet, either. Three months of not-yet stretch out in front of me like a road I've already driven once, blind, and crashed at the end of.

"Nothing," I say, and I take the coffee she's holding out to me, and I don't spill a drop, and my hand doesn't shake at all anymore. "Bad dream."

"Must have been a hell of a dream."

"You have no idea."

She laughs, relieved, already turning to head back down the hall, already talking about the caterer and the flowers and whether Julian's mother is going to have opinions about the seating chart again. I watch her walk away from me in a sweatshirt three sizes too big, this girl I loved my whole life, this girl who watched me die and didn't move.

I have three months.

I take a sip of coffee made exactly the way I like it, and I start making a list.