Chapter 2: A Marriage of Strangers

Amber’s POV

My stepfather’s arm was rigid under my hand, and I hated how steady he made himself look, like he was walking his own daughter down the aisle instead of a girl he’d been threatening to send away since I was fourteen. He didn’t look at me once. He was too busy nodding at people on either side of the aisle, small careful nods, the kind you give when you’re still working even at your own daughter’s wedding.

The room wasn’t big. I think that surprised me more than anything else that day. I had pictured something enormous, something with hundreds of eyes on me, because that was what weddings were supposed to be. Instead there were maybe forty people total, arranged in careful rows, and every single one of them felt like they belonged to a different world than the one I’d grown up in. Nikolai’s people didn’t dress like my stepfather’s business associates. They didn’t laugh the way normal people laughed at weddings, easy and loud. They sat very straight, and they watched everything, and I understood without anyone telling me that every person in that room could probably kill me and go back to their seat without breaking a sweat.

I found my mother near the front, dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief like this was a wedding she was happy about, like the daughter walking down the aisle was the one she’d planned for. She caught my eye for half a second and something passed over her face that wasn’t quite warning and wasn’t quite relief. I looked away first.

Nikolai was already standing at the front when I reached him, hands folded in front of him, watching me come toward him with that same unreadable expression he’d worn in the bridal suite. Beside him stood an older man I hadn’t met before, tall even with age bending his shoulders slightly, silver hair combed back, eyes sharp in a way that made me think of Nikolai immediately. His grandfather, I guessed, based on how the resemblance sat in his jaw and the set of his mouth.

And just behind them, a little further back than I expected for parents of the groom, stood a man and woman I assumed were Nikolai’s mother and father. They looked composed in the practiced way people look composed at events they’d rather not be part of, and neither of them was watching Nikolai the way I would have expected parents to watch their son on his wedding day. His grandfather was the one leaning forward slightly, the one whose eyes tracked every step I took like he actually cared how this moment went. His parents barely looked at him at all.

It struck me as odd, the kind of thought that surfaces and sinks again almost in the same breath. Maybe that was just how his family was. Cold people raising a cold son, I thought, and then my stepfather was releasing my arm and stepping back, and I didn’t have room in my head for anything except the man standing in front of me.

Up close, Nikolai looked different than he had in the bridal suite. Or maybe I was just looking at him differently now, knowing what I knew, knowing he’d caught the lie before anyone bothered to explain it to him and married me anyway. His eyes moved over my face for a moment, brief, unreadable, and then the officiant was speaking and I was only half listening, because my whole body had gone very aware of how close he was standing and how still he held himself, like stillness was a skill he’d practiced his entire life.

When it came time for the rings, he took my hand in his, and I braced myself for the fumbling I’d seen in other weddings, the awkward moment where a groom guesses wrong and has to force the ring over a knuckle. It didn’t happen. The ring slid onto my finger like it had been made for exactly this hand, exactly this size, and it took me a second to understand what that meant. Someone had gotten my measurements right. Not Isabel’s. Mine. Which meant, somewhere in the last six hours, someone in his organization had moved fast enough to correct for a bride who wasn’t even supposed to be standing here.

I looked up at him, startled, and for just a second something flickered behind his eyes, gone before I could be sure I’d actually seen it.

“Amber Volkov,” the officiant said, and I flinched slightly at hearing my own name spoken out loud in a room full of strangers, my actual name, not a placeholder, not my sister’s name mistakenly slotted into the ceremony. Nikolai had corrected that too, somewhere along the way, without making a single announcement about it.

I lifted my hands without thinking, the old habit taking over before I could stop it, and signed something small and useless just to have somewhere to put the nervous energy building in my chest. This is the strangest wedding I’ve ever been to, I signed, more to myself than to him, not expecting anyone in that entire room to actually understand it.

But Nikolai’s eyes dropped to my hands, and something shifted at the corner of his mouth, so brief and so slight that if I hadn’t been staring directly at him I would have missed it entirely. Not quite a smile. Just a fraction of one, gone before anyone else in the room could have caught it. He didn’t respond. He didn’t need to. That flicker was enough to tell me he’d understood every sign, and that whatever had passed between us belonged only to the two of us in a room full of forty people who couldn’t touch it.

The rest of the ceremony moved fast after that, formal words and formal motions, and then it was over, and people were clapping in that restrained, controlled way his side of the room seemed to do everything, and I was someone’s wife.

I looked out at the room while everyone stood, searching faces out of habit more than anything else, and it hit me somewhere in my chest before I even understood why. Isabel wasn’t there. Of course she wasn’t there. She hadn’t been there for six hours, and she wasn’t going to walk through those doors now, not with the ceremony finished and the ring already on my hand and every choice already made without her in the room to make it. I had known that all day. I had known it standing in front of the mirror in her dress and known it walking down the aisle in her place, but it hadn’t actually landed until this exact moment, watching people clap for a marriage that was never supposed to be mine.

She was gone, and I had just married the man who was supposed to be hers, and nobody in that entire room, not my mother, not my stepfather, not a single one of Nikolai’s men, seemed to be asking the one question that wouldn’t stop circling in my head.

Where was she. And why did it feel like I was the only one who still cared enough to ask.