Moving On

Riya's POV

I knew this day. I had lived it once before.

Kelvin wasn't coming, within minutes, someone would murmur to the pastor that the groom had been "delayed." By noon, the whole hall would know that Kelvin had sent me a single line: Hannah's been in an accident. I'm at the hospital. I'll explain later. And I had believed every word. 

Hannah had been in the bridal suite with me that very morning, fixing my veil and laughing at my nerves. It never crossed my mind to wonder how she could have been hurt between breakfast and noon.

Back then, I had stood at this altar for two humiliating hours while my guests pitied me. Then I had gone home and apologized to the man who left me standing here.

Never again.

I gathered my skirts and slipped away while the murmurs grew, nodding stiffly at guests who looked at me as though I were a wounded animal. Behind the wall of flowers near the side door, I found a corner where no one could see me. My hands trembled so badly that it took three tries to unlock my phone.

I dialed one number. Daniel, my assistant, the only person in my company who had never looked at me like a walking bank account.

"Boss? Is something wrong?"

"Find Kelvin," I said. My voice came out low and steady in a way I hadn't known it could. "Find Hannah too. I want to know where they are right now and where they've been since this morning. Send me everything the moment you have it."

He paused. "Is this about the wedding?"

"Just do it, Daniel."

He didn't ask again. Eight minutes later, my phone buzzed.

It was a video, grainy security footage from a hotel lobby. Kelvin walked through the revolving doors in the black suit I had picked out for our wedding, one hand resting on the waist of a woman in a long beige coat. She kept her face turned away from the camera, her hair swept over one shoulder.

I didn't need to see her face. I knew those bright red heels. I had seen them lined up beside my own front door on the night I died.

My chest burned,band for one terrible second I almost smashed the phone against the wall. Then I smiled, a small, cold smile that felt like it belonged to someone else, and I wiped my face clean.

If you two want me gone so badly, then I'll become your worst nightmare. Starting today.

I walked back into the hall with my head bowed and my shoulders shaking.

The whispers rose as I passed.

"Did Kelvin run away?"

"I heard she's the one who chased him for years. Maybe he never loved her."

"Poor thing. Look at her."

The same words I had heard in my first life, in the same hushed voices. I let them wash over me. The projector at the front of the hall was still warm from the slideshow Kelvin and Hannah had insisted on, forty photographs of our "love story" set to soft music. I handed my phone to the startled technician and whispered, "Please. Play this for me."

He hesitated, then did as I asked.

The screen flickered, and the lobby appeared, ten feet high. Kelvin. The woman in the beige coat, his hand at her waist, the way he leaned in close to her ear.

The hall fell completely silent.

"I loved him," I said, and let my voice crack. Tears spilled down my cheeks, and I didn't have to fake them. They had been waiting five years to fall. "I gave Kelvin everything he ever asked for. But he never loved me, not for a single day."

Gasps rippled through the crowd.

"Oh my God. I can't believe he'd do this on his own wedding day."

"Who's the woman?"

"How shameless can a man be?"

"I won't beg for a man who's in another woman's arms," I said, lifting my chin. "This wedding is over."

I let them wonder who the woman was, let them whisper, a woman who knows exactly who her enemies are can afford to be patient. My tears, my trembling hands, my broken heart: all of it was a costume, and I was wearing it beautifully.

The guests began to file out, some of them glancing back at me with pity, others with greedy curiosity. By the time the doors closed behind the last of them, I had dropped the act entirely. My face went blank, my fingers curled into fists around the silk of my gown.

That was just the first move. I had no illusions. Kelvin and Hannah wouldn't be so easily undone.

Just as I was deciding what to do next, the doors of the hall burst open.

A tall figure strode in, his dark coat flapping at his heels, a few strands of black hair falling across his forehead. He was breathing hard, as if he had run all the way here.

Mateo.

"You can't marry him."

I blinked, convinced for a moment that I was hallucinating. In my first life, I had ordered the guards to keep this man out of my wedding. I had never seen him at the altar at all. Beside that, Kelvin had whispered to me once that Mateo had tried to slip something into my drink at a charity dinner, and, like a fool, I had believed him.

But I knew better now. I knew exactly who had tried to hurt me, and it wasn't the man standing in front of me.

"Mateo," I said softly, putting on a fragile expression as he came closer. "What's wrong?"

"He doesn't love you. He's..." His voice died. His eyes flicked to the projector screen, where Kelvin's frozen face still hung ten feet high, and then to the empty rows of chairs. For the first time since I'd known him, Mateo Rutherfurd looked lost for words.

"How did you find out?" he asked at last.

What could I possibly tell him? That I had died? That I'd come back from the grave? He would think I'd lost my mind.

"This morning," I said. "I meant to cancel quietly, but then I thought, why not use the wedding to my advantage?"

His brows lifted. His gaze searched my face. "You..." He stopped, and a strange expression crossed his features. "You're talking to me."

I realized what I'd done. In the last year, I had ignored every message and returned every gift from this man. Careful, Riya. I cleared my throat.

I opened my mouth to answer, but a sudden stab of pain ripped through my chest. I clutched my gown and gasped, my vision swimming. "Riya?" Mateo's voice sounded very far away, and then I was falling into the dark.

The first thing I heard was the steady beep of a machine, the second was a voice, muffled and indistinct, speaking somewhere above me. My eyelids felt like they were weighed down with stones, and my whole body ached as though it had been crushed in a vise.

I turned my head weakly and saw a white ceiling, an IV line taped to my arm, and a pale band of afternoon sunlight sliding across the blanket.

Then I noticed my wrist.

There was a mark on it that hadn't been there before. At first I thought it was a tattoo, but the longer I stared, the sharper it grew, until I could make out tiny glowing numbers ticking steadily downward. Beneath them, a line of characters appeared, as if burned into the skin:

YOU HAVE A LIMITED TIME. CHANGE YOUR FATE.

The message faded, leaving only the countdown.

Cold crept down my spine. I understood at once what I was looking at. I had been given a second life, but not an endless one, the numbers on my wrist were a clock, and the time I had left was less than a year.

If I didn't change my fate, I would die all over again.

"You're awake."

I jerked my sleeve over the mark. Mateo sat beside the bed, his coat draped over the back of the chair, his tie loosened. He looked exhausted, had he been sitting there the whole time?

He helped me sit up, and I let him, my mind already turning. I needed a powerful ally. Someone with enough influence to find my biological parents, the Davidsons, before Hannah could claim any more of my life, someone who could help me build a new company that no one could take from me.

And there, sitting right beside me, was the only man in this city who could do all of it.

"Why do you care about me?" The question came out before I could stop it. "After everything I said to you, I don't understand why you keep showing up."

He was quiet for so long that I thought I'd offended him. Then he answered, his voice low. "Because your face resembles an old friend of mine."

That wasn't what I'd expected. A substitute, then. If that was why he was helping me, I wouldn't waste a single heartbeat worrying about him. I could use that.

Then why did my chest feel strangely tight?

"I..." I began, but the door swung open.

Kelvin rushed in, with Hannah right behind him.

I rolled my eyes where they couldn't see. "Riya, are you okay?" Kelvin hurried to the bedside, shoving Mateo out of the way, and I glared at him with all the hatred I had left.

Mateo moved back in front of him without a word. "She made it perfectly clear at the wedding that she was done with you."

Hannah stepped forward, putting on her sweetest, most wounded voice. "You forget how much Riya hates you, Mateo. You've always wanted to drive a wedge between her and Kelvin. Everyone knows how much she loves him."

"I'm sure you don't want me to repeat myself." Mateo turned his gaze on her, and the temperature in the room seemed to drop. Even from the bed, I could feel the cold fury in it. It was a hatred he'd clearly been holding back for years. "Someone."

Four hulking bodyguards appeared in the doorway.

"Get them out of here before I lose my temper."

His commanding presence filled the room, and I felt something I hadn't felt in a very long time: safe.

"If I walk out that door, Riya, you'll never see me again!" Kelvin shouted as the guards closed in.

I stood up slowly, my fists clenched, my heart pounding. I looked at Kelvin. I looked at Hannah, and then I turned and faced Mateo.

And I did something none of them ever expected.