The substitute Groom

CHAPTER 1- THE SUBSTITUTE GROOM

LUCIAN

"Whatever you do tonight," Constantine Laurent said, without turning from the window, "don't let the mafia king look at you."

I had been standing in the doorway of my father's study for two minutes, holding a coffee nobody had asked me to bring, and this was, as far as I could recall, the first instruction I'd been given in a month.

I considered it…thinking what might be the consequences of a little mistake to the order I was given ‘Don't let the mafia king look at you.’ As though that were a thing a person could control. As though the direction of Elias Lawrence's eyes were something a quiet, overlooked adopted son could steer like a boat.

"Should I look at him," I asked, "or just not be looked at?"

"You should be…” he paused as he ran his gaze over me before continuing “...forgettable…the way you're good at."

It wasn't an insult. In this house, being forgettable was a skill, and I'd spent fifteen years perfecting it the way other men perfected languages. I was nine when they took me out of the orphanage and set me down in the middle of marble and money, and I learned fast that a boy who asked too many questions was a boy who got sent back. So I stopped asking. I learned where to stand, always at the edge and where to sit…always at the end of the table, past the salt and how to fold myself into the background so neatly that guests sometimes startled when I spoke, as though the furniture had suddenly developed opinions.

My father turned from the window at last. He had spent his whole life being important and had recently begun to suspect that important wasn't the same thing as safe.

"She's gone," he said.

I set the coffee down and stared at him. "Who's gone?"

"Vivienne." He snapped tired, like a coin dropped on a table. "Your sister. Your elder sister. Three hours ago, on the eastern road, with a suitcase and the gardener's son."

I blinked in disbelief. Of all the things that might have gone wrong tonight, I hadn't imagined that… Vivienne, who had been promised to a mafia king. Vivienne, who had spent the last two months sighing at dress fittings and muttering that she was being sold. Vivienne, who was the reason this entire evening was even happening.

"Adrien" I said. "She actually –"

"She actually." He rubbed his temple with two fingers. "Three days before the announcement. Three days before the contracts go public. She might as well have walked up to Elias Lawrence and spat in his face and called it a wedding gift."

I said nothing to that…I was practically too good minding my business.

"She'll come back" said a voice from the doorway, and Evelyn swept in past me as though I were a drape. She was twenty-two, my younger sister, and she had dressed for tonight with carefully, almost like she suspected the evening might end up being about her. Silk. Diamonds. Her hair pinned the way the magazines pinned it. She dropped into the armchair by the fire like a queen taking a throne that had been vacant too long. "She has to come back. Where would she even go?"

"She went with Adrien" my father said. "That's the point. She didn't go anywhere. She went to him." He looked at her the way a man looks at a bill he can't pay. "And she did it now."

"You don't know that he'll take it badly."

"I know of him, Evelyn." His added, and the room got quieter. "He is not a businessman with a temper. He is a temper with a business. He broke a shipping family last spring because they delivered a month late…not stole Evelyn…delivered late. There is no family on this coast who can afford to make Elias Lawrence look abandoned, and your sister has just done exactly that."

The clock above the fireplace ticked. Somewhere down the hall, a footman was running literally running – to light lamps in rooms nobody used, as though brightness could dress a crisis up as a celebration.

I picked the coffee back up. I'd made it for no one in particular, which was its own small metaphor, and I stood with it warming my hands and waited to be told what to do but I wasn't told anything which meant, as always, that I was free to be forgotten.

---

By half past eight, the whole house had become quiet.

The staff moved through the corridors like they were evacuating a sinking ship and didn't want to admit it. My father made three phone calls and took one, and after each of them he looked a little greyer. Evelyn had positioned herself at the piano in the drawing room but not to play it, just to be at it, near the light – and had begun, with increasing confidence, to talk.

"The obvious answer" she said, watching our father's reflection in the dark window glass, "is that you don't need a replacement bride. You need a replacement Vivienne. And there's one of those already in the house."

He stopped pacing and turned to her. "You mean –"

"Me." She turned. "Obviously me."

She stood and smoothed the her gown, like she was rehearsing a gesture, as if she'd been holding this plan in her lap for years, waiting for a crisis she could spend it on. Evelyn Laurent had spent her whole life wanting the things her sister was handed, and here at last was a thing her sister had thrown away…the biggest bachelor in the city. A king. A fortune. A name that made rooms go quiet when it entered them.

"I'm a Laurent," she said. "Of age. Unmarried. And here, which is more than Vivienne managed. You offer me to him tonight. Before he even has time to be angry." A small certain smile tucked at her lips. "He'll take me. What man wouldn't?"

I watched my father's face do the arithmetic. I watched it arrive, slowly, at yes. "You're right," he said. "God help us, you're right. It's the simplist offer." He was already reaching for the phone then he continued "I'll offer you before he arrives. A daughter for a daughter. The alliance untouched. He'll see that we've made him whole –"

I set the cold coffee down again and didn't once think the word me.

Why would I? There were two daughters in this house and one mafia king, and the daughters were the currency and I was the loose change at the bottom of the drawer. You didn't pay a king in loose change.

---

Elias Lawrence arrived at half past nine, and I learned three things about him in the first ten seconds.

The first was that the house told me so before he crossed the threshold – doors opening, staff stepping back, footmen bowing, the whole machinery of the place bending like grass in wind.

The second was that he didn't hurry and didn't slow down. He walked through my father's foyer the way a man walks through his own house, which was to say the way he walked through every house, and he tracked faint water marks across the marble like he was staking a claim on it.

The third was that he was younger than I'd expected, and colder than the rain he'd come in on.

My father came to meet him with both hands extended and a smile rehearsed in a mirror. "Mr. Lawrence. Thank you for coming. Let me take your –"

"You have four minutes to convince me this is a misunderstanding," Elias said, and handed him nothing before walking past him into the drawing room.

Evelyn was already standing…already lit. Already a solution. She turned toward the door with a proud smile she had practiced since she was fourteen.

I, who had done none of the above, was standing by the drapes with the coffee tray, half in shadow, where I belonged.

Elias stopped in the centre of the room. He didn't sit. He didn't take the chair my father nudged toward him with a desperate little gesture. He just stood there, dripping faintly onto the rug, and let the silence do its work…and I understood, watching it, that this was a man who had never once in his life been the most nervous person in a room.

"Where is she?" he asked.

"She –" My father said clearing his throat. "She's run off. Vivienne. With…a man. A gardener's son. But it changes nothing, Mr. Lawrence, I swear to you, the arrangement is still on – we simply have another daughter, and she is better, she is more –"

"Show me." Elias cuts in

Evelyn stepped forward…She curtsied before lifting her chin. "Evelyn Laurent," she said. "The younger daughter. I'm prepared to take my sister's place, Mr. Lawrence. Tonight, if you like. I know what's at stake and I know what you expect, and I can promise you that I am not the kind of woman who runs."

It was a good speech. I, who had heard her rehearse pieces of it into her bedroom mirror, thought it was the best one she had.

Elias looked at her for a long time, almost like he was inspecting a house he's already decided not to buy, and the everyone held their breaths and waited for a reply.

"Your elder daughter," he said, "was promised to me but she ran away like a scared little girl." He tilted his head. "You think the solution to a girl who ran is another girl?"

My father's smile flickered as he slowly started speaking. "I –yes. Yes, of course. A daughter for a daughter, the alliance is –"

"No." Elias cuts in without letting father land and he almost staggered

Evelyn's practiced smile stayed up for a while before turning to a frown. "No?" she repeated, and for the first time all night she sounded twenty-two instead of forty. "What do you mean, no?"

Elias didn't answer her. He had already stopped looking at her, which was somehow worse than a dismissal, and was looking instead – slowly, thoughtfully – around the room. Past the patriarch. Past the daughters. Around the edges, where the shadows were. Where the furniture was. Where I was.

I felt it before I understood it. That prickle at the back of the neck, that animal certainty of being watched after fifteen years of being looked past. I glanced up from the tray – and met Elias Lawrence's eyes across the room, and could not, for the love of God, remember my father's instruction. ‘Don't let the mafia king look at you.’

Too late. "Who's that?" Elias asked.

My father followed his gaze and blinked, as though he had to remind himself of the answer. "That? That's –Lucian. Our adopted son. He's got nothing to do with this, really, he's just –"

"He's just what," Elias said.

"He's –" My father floundered, grasping for a word that would explain away the boy at the edge of the room. "He's quiet. He helps. He's not –he's not part of the arrangement, Mr. Lawrence. He's not the sort of –the girls, you see, they were raised for this, but Lucian –"

Elias turned away from the my father mid-sentence, which I would later learn was a habit of his, and looked at me properly…fully…the way you look at a thing you have decided to buy.

"What's your name?" he asked, though he'd just been told my name…

"Lucian," I said, and was annoyed at how thin my own voice came out.

"Lucian," he repeated, and then he looked around the room one last time…at my father then at my sister with the ruined smile, at the empty chair where a runaway bride should have been sitting.

He had made his decision. I could see it settle over him…and then the mafia king said the thing that no one in that house had spent a single second preparing for.

"Him," Elias said, and lifted his chin toward the corner of the room. "I want Lucian.”