THE WRONG NAME

"Ryker, the lights."

"They'll come back on." His voice was rough, closer than I expected in the dark. "Everything comes back eventually. Except her."

"I should go find a candle. Or check the fuse box."

"Stay."

One word, quiet, and something about the way he said it made my whole body go still, the way an animal goes still when it senses the exact wrong moment to move, every instinct screaming at me to leave and my feet somehow refusing to obey.

"Ryker, I don't think…"

"You never think. That's the problem with you, Selene. You just stand there, quiet, careful, taking up exactly as little space as everyone's always wanted you to." His hand found my arm in the dark, his grip loose but certain, like he already knew I wasn't going to pull away, and some furious, tired part of me hated that he was right. "She would have laughed by now. Made a joke. Made this easier."

"I'm not her."

"I know." His voice cracked on the word, just slightly, grief bleeding through the whiskey. "I know you're not her. I keep telling myself that."

"Then let go of my arm."

He didn't. His other hand found my face instead, careful in a way that didn't match anything else about that night, his thumb tracing the line of my jaw like he was trying to memorize something he was terrified of losing twice.

"Ryker, stop." I said it clearly, as clearly as I could manage with my heart slamming against my ribs. "Whatever you think this is, stop."

For one second, I thought he heard me. His hand stilled. His breathing caught.

Then the storm outside cracked the sky open with thunder, and something in him broke along with it.

"Vivian," he whispered, and I understood, in that single word, that he wasn't in that room with me at all. He was somewhere else entirely, six months in the past, still standing at the edge of a hospital bed, still begging a version of my sister that no longer existed to come back to him.

"Ryker, look at me. It's Selene."

He didn't stop.

I said his name again. Then my own, over and over, a losing argument against a grief too large for either of us to control. I don't remember deciding to stop fighting him. I only remember the fire long gone cold in the grate, the wind rattling the windows, and somewhere far away, the sound of my own voice, small and breaking, saying his name like it might still be enough to wake him up.

It wasn't. By the time the words stopped meaning anything at all, the only thing left in that dark study was the storm, and his hands, and a mistake neither of us would be able to undo by morning.

I woke before he did, gray light bleeding through the curtains, the storm finally spent outside. I lay very still for a long moment, staring at the ceiling, cataloguing the exact shape of everything I'd lost in that room overnight. My body ached in ways I didn't want to examine too closely. My throat was raw from saying his name so many times it stopped sounding like a word at all.

I thought about getting up quietly, slipping out before he woke, sparing us both whatever conversation was waiting on the other side of his eyes opening. I didn't move fast enough.

Ryker stirred beside me, and I felt the exact second he woke fully, the exact second his body went rigid.

"What did you do."

It wasn't a question. It was an accusation, delivered flat and cold, like I was the one who'd said the wrong name in the dark.

"What did I do?" I sat up, pulling the sheet with me, my voice shaking despite every effort to steady it. "I told you to stop. I said your name. I said mine. You didn't hear either one."

"That's not what I remember."

"Then your memory is doing you a favor, because I remember every second of it."

He turned to look at me then, something raw and unguarded crossing his face before he shut it down again, replaced by the same cold mask he wore for everyone. "This doesn't leave this room."

"Don't worry." I found my dress crumpled on the floor and pulled it on with hands that wouldn't stop shaking. "I have no interest in telling anyone I spent the night with a man who thought I was someone else."

He flinched at that. It was the first thing he'd done all morning that looked like guilt instead of anger.

"Selene…"

"Don't." I kept my back to him, focusing on the buttons of my dress instead of the sound of his voice. "I don't want to hear whatever you're about to say. Not this morning. Maybe not ever."

"I need you to understand…"

"I understand plenty. I understood it the second you said her name into my hair, clear as anything, no confusion left in it at all." I finally turned to face him, my composure held together by nothing more than sheer stubbornness. "You don't get to explain your way out of this, Ryker. Some things don't come with an explanation good enough to fix them."

I was halfway to the door when his phone rang. He answered without checking the screen, his voice hoarse, distracted.

"...what do you mean, photos," he said slowly, and I watched the color drain out of his face for the second time in twelve hours. "No. That's not possible. Nobody was…"

He stopped talking, listening, his jaw tightening with every second that passed.

"How many people have seen it?" His knuckles had gone white around the phone.

I stood frozen by the door, my hand on the handle, watching whatever remained of that man's composure collapse in real time.

"Send me everything you have. I'll be there within the hour." He hung up and stood there for a moment, staring at nothing, before he finally looked up and found me still standing in the doorway.

He stopped talking. He looked at me, really looked at me, like he was seeing me for the first time since I'd walked into that study the night before.

"Selene," he said, lowering the phone from his ear. "We need to talk."

"About what, exactly?"

"Someone photographed you arriving here last night." His voice was flat, careful, like he was already calculating the damage. "It's already online. And there are reporters camped outside the gate right now, waiting for you to walk out that door and hand them the rest of the story."

I had no idea yet, standing in that room in yesterday's dress with my whole life already unraveling behind me, that this was the morning everything changed, the morning that would end with lawyers instead of apologies. That within days I would be wearing his ring, carrying a secret I hadn't even discovered yet, and standing in a marriage neither of us had chosen.

I only knew, watching his face, that whatever came out of that phone call next was about to be so much worse than a single mistake made in the dark.