The Substitute Bride

Sophia's chest hurt. She had only been running for two minutes, but it already hurt.

She had left the mansion to take a short walk. She wanted to calm her nerves before the wedding tomorrow. She had not walked far when a black SUV stopped next to her. The doors opened fast. She did not understand what was happening at first.

Then she started to run.

She lost her shoes almost right away. She did not feel it happen. Her feet hit the hard ground as she ran into a narrow alley. The car could not follow her there. Behind her, she heard car doors slam. She heard men shouting. One voice told the others not to lose her.

Then she heard something else. A sharp crack, loud and close, and something hit the wall beside her head, sending broken brick past her cheek.

They were shooting at her.

Sophia screamed and kept running, faster than she thought her body could move, her mind unable to hold the thought steady. They were not trying to catch her. They were trying to end this before she reached anyone who could help.

She turned a corner without looking and found herself on a bridge. Below her, the river moved fast and dark. The streetlights reflected on the water.

Behind her, the footsteps were getting closer.

"Sophia." A man's voice, sharp and impatient, cutting through the sound of her own ragged breathing. "There is nowhere left to run."

She turned around. Two men, maybe three, were walking toward her, one of them raising his arm again.

Another shot rang out.

Pain tore through her shoulder, hot and sudden, and Sophia stumbled hard against the railing, her vision going white at the edges. She did not decide to climb over it. Her body simply went, half falling, half throwing herself over the side, because whatever waited in the water below had to be better than whatever waited behind her.

She hit the river hard, the impact knocking what was left of her breath away entirely. The cold closed over her head, and the current caught her almost immediately, dragging her down and sideways at once. Her shoulder screamed with every movement. She could not tell anymore which direction was up.

The last thing she thought, before the dark water took the thought away completely, was Claire's face at dinner earlier that night, laughing over a glass of wine, saying she never stopped wishing Claire would come home.

---

The next morning, the mansion woke up wrong.

Claire came down the stairs pulling her robe tighter, drawn out of sleep by noise that had no business existing this early. Staff moving fast through the halls. Her father's voice, tight and clipped, coming from the study.

"Dad. What's going on?"

Richard Bennett turned to face her. He was Claire and Sophia's father, chairman of the Bennett Group, and right now he looked nothing like the composed man whose photograph appeared in half the business papers in the city.

"Sophia's gone," he said. "She went out for a walk last night. She never came back."

Claire's stomach dropped. "Gone since when?"

"Sometime in the night. We don't know exactly." Richard's voice cracked on the last word. "Security's already searching the grounds. I'm calling the police next."

Claire looked past him toward the staircase, toward the room that was supposed to hold a bride getting ready for the biggest day of her life. The door stood open. The wedding dress hung untouched in the closet, exactly where it had been left.

Her chest tightened. "We have to find her. Dad, we have to find her right now."

"I know." Richard's voice was unsteady. "Come into my study. Your mother's already there. There's something we need to talk to you about."

Claire followed him, dread building with every step. Eleanor was standing by the window when they walked in, her face pale, her arms wrapped tightly around herself.

Richard closed the door behind them.

"Claire." His hands were shaking badly now. "I need to ask you something. Something I have no right to ask. And I am asking it anyway, because I do not know what else might save her."

Claire stared at her father, at the desperate, pleading look on his face, and felt the ground shift under her entirely.

"I need you to take her place," Richard said. "Just for the ceremony. Just long enough to buy us time to find her."

For a moment Claire could not make any words come out at all. She looked from her father's shaking hands to her mother's pale, frozen face, waiting for one of them to say this was some kind of mistake, that she had misheard him completely.

Neither of them did.

"You want me," Claire finally managed, her voice barely above a whisper, "to marry a stranger. Pretending to be my own sister."

Richard didn't answer. He didn't need to. The silence in the room, and the terror still written plainly across both her parents' faces, told her he meant exactly what he'd said.