Chapter 1: The Substitute Bride

Amber’s POV

The wedding dress was two sizes too big, and I stood there letting my mother pin it tighter against my spine like that would somehow make me into the woman it had been made for.

It hadn’t been made for me. Everyone in this room knew that, even if nobody was going to say it out loud. Isabel was taller than me by almost four inches, and she had the kind of curves that made silk actually do something interesting, and for the last six months this dress had been fitted and re-fitted to her body in three separate appointments I wasn’t invited to. Now I was standing in the mirror wearing it instead, watching my mother’s hands move fast and sharp down my back, and I understood, in the quiet, humiliating way you understand things you’ve already accepted, that nobody in my family had spent a single minute thinking about whether it would fit me. Only whether I would show up.

“Hold still,” my mother said, not even glancing up from the pins. “If this seam puckers in the photos, I will hear about it for the rest of my life.”

I didn’t react. I just watched her in the mirror, this woman who had spent fifteen years teaching me how to disappear, and I thought that if anyone in this hotel was going to hear about something for the rest of their life, it probably shouldn’t be a seam.

It had been six hours since Isabel disappeared.

Six hours since someone found half her closet emptied out, since the hallway cameras had gone dark for exactly the fourteen minutes it would have taken her to walk out through the service entrance with a bag over her shoulder, since my stepfather had finally stopped shouting into his phone long enough to actually look at me. I still remembered the exact shape his face made when he did. Not fear, not even really anger. Calculation. Like I was a problem that had, for the first time in my life, turned out to be useful to him.

“You’re the same size, near enough,” he’d said. Not to me. To my mother, standing beside me like I wasn’t even in the room, like I was something they were allowed to discuss instead of someone they were allowed to ask.

I hadn’t said anything. I never said anything, not with my actual voice, not in front of any of them, and I’d stopped being surprised by how easily that silence let people talk over me a long time ago. I learned the shape of it when I was nine years old, in a hospital hallway that smelled like antiseptic and fear, with my mother’s hand wrapped so tight around mine that it left small purple bruises I didn’t notice until the next morning. My stepbrother was two rooms down, already gone, already under a sheet nobody had let me see. My stepsister was screaming from behind a different door, a sound I would later learn was the last sound she ever really heard herself make, because after that night, Isabel couldn’t hear anything at all.

And I was fine. That was the part nobody could forgive me for. I walked away from that crash without so much as a scar, and my mother knelt down in front of me right there in that hallway and told me, very quietly, very seriously, that I didn’t get to be the one who was fine. Not out loud. Not ever again.

So I learned to sign before I really understood why, and I let the world believe what my mother needed them to believe, and somewhere in there the lie became so old it started to feel almost like the truth. Even now, three years into my stepfather doing business with the Volkov family, I had never once let them hear my voice. I only ever let them see my hands.

The door opened without anyone knocking first.

I knew it was him before I even turned toward the mirror to check. There was something about the way the room changed when Nikolai Volkov walked into it, some old, animal part of me that sat up straighter without being told to. He stood just inside the doorway in a black suit that probably cost more than this entire wedding, and his face did the thing it always did around me, which was nothing at all. He looked at me the way I imagined he looked at contracts, searching for the clause someone had tried to hide from him.

My mother flinched, dropped a pin, and straightened up too fast to pretend she hadn’t been startled.

“Mr. Volkov. We’re almost finished.”

“Leave us.”

That was all he said. Two words, quiet, and my mother was gone before I even understood she’d moved.

I turned to face him fully then, because if years of practiced silence had taught me anything, it was how to hold my ground in a room without needing a single word to do it. I lifted my hands to sign something sharp at him, something about how if he was here to make sure I didn’t run, he really hadn’t needed to bother, since I had nowhere left to run to. But he crossed the room before I even finished the first sign, and his hand closed around my wrist to stop me.

It wasn’t rough. It wasn’t gentle, either. It was just certain, the way I was slowly starting to realize almost everything about him was certain, like he’d already decided how this moment would go before he walked through the door.

“I know you’re not the one I asked for,” he said, quietly enough that I felt it more than heard it.

I went very still.

“I know your sister is gone. And I know your family thinks I’m stupid enough not to notice I’m marrying a different woman than the one whose name is on the contract.” His thumb moved once over the inside of my wrist, barely anything, gone before I could decide if I’d imagined it. “I knew within four minutes of walking into this hotel.”

I stared at him, and for a second I forgot to be careful with my face. He hadn’t said a word downstairs. He hadn’t stopped the wedding planner or pulled my stepfather aside or done anything except stand in the lobby with his hands in his pockets, watching the chaos unfold around him like it was weather he had no interest in changing.

Then why, I started to sign, are you still

“Why am I still marrying you.” He said it like he already knew the question, like he’d been waiting for it. “Because it doesn’t matter to me which sister stands next to me today. It only matters that a Kovalenko-Reyes daughter does, and that a ring goes on her hand before sundown.” His eyes moved over my face slowly, like he was reading something written in a language most people couldn’t see. “You understand this isn’t going to be a marriage in the way you were probably raised to imagine one.”

My hands moved before I let myself think about it. I understand. You get a wife who keeps her mouth shut. I get a mother who finally stops threatening to send me back to the facility she’s been promising me since I was fourteen.

Something shifted behind his eyes when he read that. Not quite surprise, but close enough to it that I noticed, and I think he noticed that I noticed. Nobody in my family had ever answered him that honestly, that fast, and I had just done it without making a single sound.

“Careful,” he said, and his voice had dropped lower. “That’s the most honest thing anyone in your family has told me in years, and you managed it without opening your mouth.”

My pulse was doing something strange against the fingers still curled loosely around my wrist. I hadn’t meant to say that much. I never meant to say that much. It was the one rule I’d kept perfectly since I was nine years old, and somehow this cold, unreadable man had pulled more truth out of my hands in half a minute than my own mother had gotten out of me in years of trying.

He let go of my wrist the way you’d let go of something you weren’t sure you should have touched in the first place.

“They’ll be ready for you in ten minutes,” he said, already turning back toward the door, and his voice had folded itself back into that flat, businesslike tone, like he’d remembered, a little too late, that he wasn’t supposed to let it slip in the first place. “Wear whatever face you need to wear down that aisle. I don’t need love from you, Amber. I need silence and a signature. You’ve already given me one of those for free.”

The door closed behind him, and the room felt strangely emptier than it had before he’d even come in.

I turned back to the mirror. The dress was still too big. The pearls still weren’t mine. And the girl staring back at me was about to marry a man who had caught her in a lie within four minutes of walking into a hotel lobby, and married her anyway. For the first time since this whole nightmare started six hours ago, underneath all the noise in my head, I let myself ask the question I’d been too afraid to ask all day.

Where was my stepsister. And was anyone actually looking for her.