CHAPTER 6: Right Now

Cameras swung toward the window like a field of sunflowers.

Vivian stepped back so fast that she hit the wall. She had been seen. In ten seconds every screen in the city would carry a photograph of her face in the blanket, in the house of a man whose name nobody said aloud.

She dressed with fingers that would not work, and went to the landing above the front hall. The great doors stood open to the courtyard. From the shadows she watched Vincent come out onto the steps.

He did not hurry. He stopped at the top and looked down at the crowd the way a man looks at weather he has already forecast.

"This is private property,"

He said. He did not raise his voice, and the reporters still went quiet to hear it.

"You have five minutes to leave it."

"Vincent, please."

Gerald Marsh pushed forward, one hand pressed to his chest like a man in pain.

"We aren't here to fight. We love that girl. She lost her father two years ago. She hasn't been herself since. She's been on medication, she's fragile, and I only want to know she's safe."

Vivian's nails bit into the banister. Medication. She had never taken so much as an aspirin.

"Godfather,"

Julian said, and his voice shook.

"You held me at my christening. You promised my mother you'd look after me. I never asked you for anything. I'm asking now. Please give her back."

Celeste Marsh sobbed outright. A reporter in the front row turned to his camera and murmured,

"An extraordinary scene outside the Cross estate."

"Mr. Cross."

A woman's voice carried above the crowd.

"Is Miss Hale being held against her will?"

"She isn't,"

Vincent said.

"Then why won't you let her come out?"

"Because she's a grown woman,"

He said,

"And she hasn't said she wants to."

"She's not herself,"

Gerald repeated.

"Let her speak to us, and you'll see."

Vincent stood very still. From above, Vivian could see exactly the trap that had closed on him. If he threw them off his land, he was a mafia boss hiding a girl. If he let them in, he handed them the room. And if she stayed upstairs, they would write the ending of her life without her.

They will ruin you, and they will smile while they do it.

She looked at Julian's wet face. Three years of practice had gone into that face, and it was working.

She thought of Laila's whisper. You don't know what I was promised. She thought of the shares that sat in a vault under Gerald's name, and of eleven million dollars, and of the way Julian had checked his watch while her life ended in that office.

There was only one door out of this, and Vincent had already shown it to her.

She would not take it because she was grateful, she told herself. She would take it because it was hers to take. There was a difference, and the difference was the whole point.

Vivian smoothed down her borrowed blouse. She let go of the banister. And she walked down the stairs.

The sound of her heels on the marble reached the courtyard before she did. Heads turned. A photographer swore softly and began to run backwards.

"Vivian."

Julian's face lit with an expression so convincing that, for a second, she almost admired it.

"Baby, thank God. I was so afraid."

He took a step toward her with his arms open.

"Come here. Come home."

"Don't touch me."

He stopped.

She walked down the steps to Vincent's side. He turned his head slightly. In his eyes she saw the question he was not asking, because he had promised her ten minutes and did not break promises. She slid her hand into his. His fingers closed around hers, warm and sure.

A murmur went through the crowd like wind through grass.

"Vivian, honey,"

Celeste whispered,

"you're confused."

"No, Celeste."

She heard her own voice carry. It did not shake.

"For the first time in three years, I'm not."

She turned to the cameras.

"My name is Vivian Hale. Yesterday, at St. Aurelia's Cathedral, I was supposed to meet a priest about my wedding. Instead I overheard my fiancé of three years in an office with my best friend."

A rustle of shock ran through the reporters.

"When I walked in, Julian Marsh told me I wasn't marrying him tomorrow. He told me his family had sold me. To a man named Magnus Dray, a drug dealer nearly fifty years old, for eleven million dollars."

Silence. Even the shutters faltered.

"That's a lie,"

Gerald said, too quickly.

"Is it?"

She looked at him.

"Then ask why Magnus's men came into that church for a bride. Ask why Julian told me to be grateful it was only a wedding."

"Vivian, you're hysterical,"

Julian said, and for the first time the tears were gone from his voice. He took a step closer and dropped his tone so that only she and Vincent could hear.

"Stop this. You have no idea what you're doing. You walk away from this house and Magnus will make sure you never walk anywhere again."

It was the first true thing he had said all morning, and he had said it to frighten her. She noticed Vincent's free hand close slowly into a fist, and noticed, too, that he did not lift it. He was keeping his promise to her, even now.

"Say that louder,"

Vivian told Julian.

"I'd like the microphones to hear."

His face drained. A reporter somewhere behind him whispered,

"Did he just threaten her?"

"She's not well,"

Julian said again, too loudly, to the cameras.

"Please, everyone, this is private..."

"I'm not finished."

She said it quietly, and it landed like a slap. Julian closed his mouth.

"My father built Hale Logistics from one truck," Vivian said.

"When he died, Gerald Marsh offered to hold it in trust until I was ready. I trusted him. I signed what he gave me for two years, because I was grieving and because I believed they were my family."

Her eyes did not leave Gerald's.

"I'm not confused. I'm just done being managed. Every share they've pledged, every document they had me sign, I will read. And I will take back what is mine."

"Miss Hale."

The woman from earlier pushed to the front, her microphone trembling slightly.

"You were due to be married at noon. Are you saying the wedding is off?"

"The wedding is not off,"

Vivian said.

"Only the groom has changed."

A gasp went up. Somewhere in the back a photographer dropped his lens cap and did not stoop to get it.

A reporter near the front shouted,

"Miss Hale, who's the man beside you?"

She felt Vincent's hand tighten. She felt him lean, about to speak, and she squeezed it once. Let me. He stayed silent, and in the thick quiet she understood how much that had cost him.

Vivian lifted her chin. She faced every lens in the courtyard, every face, Julian's white one and Celeste's and Gerald's, and she smiled for the first time that day.

"This is Vincent Cross,"

She said.

"He's my fiancé. And I'm marrying him today. Right now."