CHAPTER 10: The Call

Julian waited until the car had gone through the gates.

He stood by the fountain with his mother's nails digging into his arm, and he let her drag him two steps toward their own car before he pulled free. His father was shouting into a phone about lawyers. Celeste was weeping with her mouth shut, the way she did when something was truly lost.

Julian walked to the far side of the fountain, where the water covered his voice, and made a call he had hoped never to make.

It was answered on the second ring.

"Yes?"

"Mr. Dray."

He wet his lips.

"It's Julian Marsh. I thought you'd want to know. She's going to the church."

"Who is?"

"Vivian. Right now, sir. She's with my godfather, with Vincent Cross. They're going to be married."

The words tasted like metal.

"In your church. At noon, the time you set. I thought... I thought it was only right that you should know."

There was a pause long enough that Julian checked whether the line had dropped.

"You feel sorry for me," Magnus said.

"I feel that it isn't fair. Another man is trying to take what you paid for."

"Do you, now."

Something shifted in the silence, a chair creaking, a glass set down.

"Mr. Marsh, I've bought a good many things in my life. Warehouses, ships, men. I've never had one of them walk out of my hands and into another man's. Not once."

The voice was very gentle.

"Nobody takes what is mine."

The line went dead.

Julian stood with the phone against his ear and did not notice that his hand was shaking until his father said his name for the third time.

St. Aurelia's was already full of flowers.

Vivian stopped in the doorway of the nave and could not make herself go further. White roses banked every pew end. A long ivory runner stretched down the aisle toward the altar. It was all exactly as she had ordered it three months ago, to the shade of the ribbons, and nobody had been told to take it away.

"Don't look at the pews,"

Vincent said quietly, at her elbow.

"Look at me."

"It's my wedding."

"Yes."

"It's the wrong one."

"No." He turned her gently to face him. "It's the only one that will hold."

Guests were already arriving. They filed in along the side aisles in their best clothes, nodding at one another, murmuring, and she saw confusion sweep through the room like a draft as they noticed the empty groom's side and the line of men in dark coats standing along the walls. Dario had placed them at every door. One stood behind the font. One stood in the choir loft, very still, looking down.

In the front pew, in a lilac suit and a hat that had cost too much, sat Aunt Ruth.

She stood the moment she saw Vivian and came down the aisle at a speed unbecoming a sixty-three-year-old woman in heels, and caught her niece against her chest so hard the breath left her.

"Thank God. I read your message forty times."

She pulled back and held Vivian's face between her palms, searching it.

"Gerald Marsh called me four times this morning. He said you'd lost your mind. He said you'd been taken."

"I wasn't taken, Aunt Ruth."

"Then why are you in that blouse?"

Vivian laughed, and it turned halfway into a sob. "It's a long story."

"I have all day."

Ruth glanced past her at Vincent, at the scar through his brow and the ink at his collar, and she took him in with the cool, thorough gaze of a woman who had raised three children and buried a husband.

"This is the man?"

"He looks like trouble."

"He is," Vivian said.

"Hm." Ruth looked at him a moment longer.

"Does he make you laugh?"

"Today, he did."

"Then that's a start."

Ruth put a garment bag into her arms. It was long and white and smelled of tissue paper.

"I brought the dress. I didn't know what else to bring."

The vestry smelled of beeswax and old hymnals.

Vivian stood in front of a spotted mirror while her aunt did up forty tiny buttons, and she did not recognize the woman looking back. She looked pale. Her eyes were too large. But the dress fit as it had in the final fitting, three weeks ago, when she had turned in front of another mirror and thought, this is the happiest I will ever be.

"You don't have to do this,"

Ruth said, very quietly, to the buttons.

"I know."

"If it's the money, or the company, or that dreadful family, I'll sell the house. I'd rather live in a flat than watch you marry out of fear."

"It isn't fear."

Vivian met her aunt's eyes in the glass.

"It was, yesterday. It isn't now. I think I'm choosing this."

"You think."

"I'm choosing the part where they don't get to decide anything about me ever again."

She breathed.

"I'll learn to love the rest, or I won't. But I'm not going to be sold, Aunt Ruth. Not again."

Ruth was quiet. Then she kissed the back of Vivian's head, through the veil, once, hard.

"Then I'll hold your bouquet."

Father Benedict looked at her over his glasses for a long time.

He was a small, round man with an extremely tidy collar, and he stood at the altar rail with his book open and did not begin.

"Miss Hale. I'm told there's been a change of groom."

"Yes, Father."

"I'd like to hear you say that you do this freely."

"I do it freely."

"Without compulsion from any person."

"I was compelled yesterday, Father."

She did not look away.

"Today I'm not. If you need to ask me again, ask me."

He looked at Vincent, at the tattoos, at the man behind him with a hand inside his jacket. Then he sighed, in the way of a man who had buried gangsters and married their daughters in this same church for thirty years.

"I'll ask you only once,"

He said.

"And God will have to take your word for it."

The organ started. It was a soft, uncertain sound, as if the player were not sure what song would be wanted. Vivian walked down the aisle on Aunt Ruth's arm for the ten steps she allowed herself, then let go and walked the rest of the way alone. Vincent stood at the end of it in a black suit that must have been fetched in the last half hour. His eyes did not leave her.

When she reached him she saw that his hands, loose at his sides, were not quite steady.

"Don't tell anyone," he murmured.

"I won't."

"I've never done this."

"Neither have I."

Father Benedict cleared his throat.

"Dearly beloved," he began, and a hush rolled down the pews, and for four whole seconds, the length of one long breath, Vivian thought it was going to be allowed.

Then the great front doors of the cathedral boomed open, and sunlight fell across the white runner in a long, hard line.