Chapter 3 — Say Yes or Watch Him Die

Chaos erupted before Alexander could answer me.

The sound came from the back of the church, sharp and wrong, nothing like a dropped microphone or a chair going over even though for one dumb second that's what I told myself it was. Then people started screaming, and you don't scream over a dropped microphone.

Everyone moved at once. Guests climbed over each other getting out of the pews. A woman's heel skidded across the marble somewhere behind me and she went down hard, and nobody stopped to help her up, they just kept moving. Men in dark suits I hadn't even noticed standing along the walls were suddenly running toward the sound, hands going inside their jackets.

I grabbed Alexander's arm. Didn't think about it. Just did it, the same way you grab whatever's closest when the floor moves under you.

I still had the bouquet crushed in my other hand. I'd notice that later and think it was insane, that some part of my brain had held onto a dozen white roses through all of this like they mattered.

He didn't shake me off. He pulled me behind him, one arm swept back to keep me there, angling his whole body between me and the back of the church.

"Down," he said.

That was it. One word, and something in his voice had gone completely different from anything he'd used with me at the altar, no strain in it, no guilt. Just flat and certain, like giving orders was something his body already knew how to do without asking his brain first.

One of the men in dark suits reached him. "Sir, we need to get you out"

"Seal the exits. All of them. Nobody leaves, including guests, until I say otherwise."

"There could still be a shooter in the"

"I'm aware of that. Seal the exits."

The man went. No argument. I stayed crouched behind Alexander's back watching grown men who probably outweighed him by forty pounds do exactly what he told them without a single question, and I thought about every Thanksgiving I'd sat two seats down from him thinking he was just cold. He wasn't cold. I'd never actually seen him do anything before tonight.

"Was that a gun," I said. My voice came out smaller than I wanted.

"Yes."

"Why would somebody shoot at a wedding."

His eyes were moving across the room, tracking something I couldn't see. "They weren't aiming at the wedding."

"Then what were they"

"They wanted people moving. Guards, guests, everybody. A shot does that faster than anything else." He grabbed my hand, not gentle, just fast. "And when everybody's moving, it's a lot easier for one specific person to disappear in the confusion. I'd guess that person was you."

I didn't say anything. I just let him pull me.

He took me past the altar, past the priest who'd gone flat against the wall with his hands over his head, toward a narrow door behind the choir stalls I would've walked past a hundred times without noticing. Looked like a supply closet from the outside. Wasn't.

Behind it was a stone staircase, narrow enough we had to go one at a time, lit by a string of small bulbs bolted into the wall every ten feet or so. My heels kept catching on the stone, uneven and worn smooth by however many decades of people running down these same steps for whatever reason people used to need to run down them, and at some point I just kicked them off and carried them, which felt like the single most ridiculous thing I'd done all day, and it was competing with a lot.

The screaming got swallowed up fast once the door closed behind us, replaced by our footsteps and my own breathing, which I could not get to slow down no matter how many times I told it to.

"Where does this even go," I asked.

"Under the church. Comes out near the rectory garden."

"How do you know that."

"Had someone map the whole building three days ago." He said it the way you'd mention checking the weather. "In case this happened."

I stopped walking. In the dim light I watched him turn back, waiting for me to catch up.

"You knew somebody might come after me at my own wedding," I said, "and you didn't say anything."

"Would you have believed me."

I didn't have an answer, and neither did he wait for one. He started walking again, and I followed, because there wasn't really another option down here.

"Tell me what's going on," I said to the back of his head. "For real this time. We're underground, Alexander. There's nobody left down here to overhear."

He didn't answer right away. The passage narrowed and he had to duck under a beam, and I copied him without thinking, following him more on instinct than anything else at this point.

"Adrian found something," he said finally. "About six weeks ago. Something in the accounts between Vale Holdings and your father's company that shouldn't have been there."

I almost stopped walking. "What, exactly? Because 'something in the accounts' could mean a rounding error or it could mean somebody's been laundering money through my father's company, and those are not the same emergency."

"He never told me the specifics. Only that it scared him enough that he wasn't going to say a word until he had proof nobody could argue with."

"So he ran."

"He didn't run. He went looking. He wanted something solid enough to hand to me, because I run legal, because I'm the one person in this family who could actually do something with it once he had it." His jaw worked before the next part came out. "Then he stopped picking up his phone."

"And you have no idea who he was investigating."

"No."

"That's not good enough, Alexander."

"I know it isn't." He stopped and turned to face me, close enough in the narrow passage that I had to tip my head back. "There's more. My security lead radioed while we were coming down here. They found the round that got fired upstairs. It's not something you buy off a shelf."

"Meaning."

"Meaning it traces to a private security contractor that does work for a couple of companies in my father's circle. Somebody close enough to this family to sit at the same table as us."

I felt my mouth go dry. "So this isn't some outsider."

"No. Whoever's doing this has probably shaken your father's hand at a dinner party."

For a second neither of us said anything. Then a sound came from somewhere above, muffled through several feet of stone, could've been a shout, could've been nothing, and Alexander went still so fast I felt it before I understood why. His hand came up flat against my collarbone and pushed me back against the wall of the passage.

I ended up pressed against him, my back to the stone, his chest solid in front of me. Close enough I could feel him breathing, could smell whatever was left of his cologne under the sweat.

I tried to shift sideways, put some space back between us.

"Don't," he said, barely a whisper.

I stopped moving. "Why?"

"Because they're listening."

I didn't know if that meant someone was actually in the passage, or above us, or if he even knew for sure. I believed him enough to hold still anyway. We stood there, not talking, his hand still against my collarbone, mine curled without permission into the front of his jacket, and I hated how much I noticed every single place we were touching. I hated that some stupid, traitorous part of me felt steadier right now than I had all morning.

The sound didn't come again. After a while his hand dropped from my collarbone and he stepped back, giving me room to breathe properly.

His other hand stayed at my waist a beat longer than it had to before he let go of that too.

Neither of us mentioned it.

"We should keep moving," he said, and his voice had gone rough in a way that had nothing to do with fear this time.

"Alexander." I caught his sleeve before he turned. "Why do you even care? Why are you the one down here with me instead of upstairs handling your family's mess?"

He looked at me a long moment in the bad light, like he was deciding something.

"Adrian asked me to protect you," he said. "Before he disappeared. He called me. Only time he called me in months. Made me promise."

I didn't say anything for a second.

"He trusted you with me," I said finally. "The man I thought hated me for three years. Adrian handed me over to you."

"I know how that sounds."

"You've hated me for three years, Alexander."

"I never hated you." It came out fast, like it slipped past him before he could stop it, and he looked almost as caught off guard by it as I was. "We're almost there. Come on."

He led me the rest of the way without talking, down a final stretch that ended at a heavy metal door set into the stone. He pressed his palm to a panel beside it and it clicked open onto a room I would never have guessed existed under a two-hundred-year-old church. Bare concrete. One bulb overhead. A folding chair sitting alone in the middle of the room like somebody had set it there on purpose.

A phone sat on the seat.

"What is this place," I asked.

"Supposed to be somewhere safe."

The phone rang.

It was so loud in that bare little room I actually flinched. Alexander didn't. He crossed to the chair, picked it up, and answered without a word, angling it so I could hear too.

A voice came through, stretched and flattened by whatever was distorting it, impossible to tell if it was a man or a woman, old or young.

"If she doesn't marry you in the next ten minutes, Adrian dies."

The line cut before either of us could say anything back.

Alexander lowered the phone slowly. Above us, faint through the stone, I heard the wedding music start up again, the exact same processional I'd walked down the aisle to less than an hour ago, drifting down like nothing in the world had happened at all.

I looked at him.

He looked back and didn't say a word.