chapter five

The Groom

On the morning of the wedding, Wren woke before the alarm and lay still, listening to the house.

Three women worked around her for two hours: one on her hair, one on her face, one on the dress, ivory silk with a hundred small buttons down the back. When they were done and the door had closed behind them, Wren stood in front of the tall mirror and did not recognize anyone. The woman looking back was Sera: the chin, the shoulders, the faint bored curve of the mouth. Only the eyes were wrong. They were too awake.

“Not bad,” said a voice from the doorway. Sera leaned against the frame in her robe, arms folded. For once she wasn’t smiling. “Stand like that and nobody will look twice.” She hesitated. “The Lockhart men are all the same, you know. Cold. He’ll ignore you. That’s the one mercy of it.”

“Who is he?”

“Julian. A second cousin, I think. Nobody important.” Sera shrugged, but her eyes slid away. “Just don’t fall for him. People like us don’t get to.”

She was gone before Wren could ask what that meant.

Charles drove her himself, which he had never done before. For the first ten minutes he said nothing. Then, eyes on the road, he said, “Whatever happens today, you will be introduced as Seraphina. You will not correct anyone. You will not volunteer anything. If someone asks about your childhood, you were educated abroad and dislike discussing it.”

“And Julian?”

“Will not ask.” His knuckles whitened on the wheel. “The Lockharts are not a family one disappoints, Wren. I would remember that.”

It was the first time he had called her anything but you, and it sounded like a warning.

The church was cold and enormous, and every pew was full.

Stained glass threw bars of red and gold across the stone floor, and white lilies lined the aisle in heavy bunches that smelled like funerals. The guests were mostly dark suits and tight smiles, the kind of people who attended weddings the way they attended board meetings. In the front pew, Margaret sat perfectly straight in a pale blue suit, looking at the altar and not once at her daughter. Wren had never been looked at by so many people in her life, and not one of them was looking at her.

Wren stood at the end of the aisle in a dress she had been told cost more than her grandmother’s house. Charles stood beside her, his arm stiff under her fingers, steering her forward like a shopping cart.

She had been briefed. Margaret had been clear.

Your husband is Julian Lockhart, the second cousin. He is not a warm man. He will not speak to you. He will not look at you. The marriage will be on paper only. You will smile at the right moments and make no trouble, and in a year or two, once the companies have merged, you may be quietly released.

She had pictured a pale, indifferent man with a bored face and a cold handshake. Easy to ignore. Easy to endure.

She had even built him a name and a personality on the long drive, the way you build an imaginary opponent to practice against: Julian Lockhart, thin and pale and bored, a man who would never ask her a single question. It had been a comfort, in a cold way. It meant she would only have to pretend for someone who would not look closely.

Wren lifted her eyes to the altar.

There was no bored man waiting there.

The man at the altar was tall, with dark hair cut very precisely and a charcoal suit that fit like it had been built around him. He was perhaps thirty-two. He stood with his hands folded in front of him, perfectly still, and his face was the kind of face that gave nothing away. There was a stillness about him that made the whole church seem to lean slightly toward him.

His face had been carved with great economy: a straight nose, a jaw that looked as though it had never been surprised, a mouth set in a line so exact it might have been drawn with a ruler. A thin scar ran through his left eyebrow, the only flaw in the picture, and Wren found, absurdly, that she wanted to know where he had gotten it. Around him the groomsmen stood in a loose, nervous arc, like men waiting for a storm to pass. He looked like the storm.

He was looking at her.

For one strange, suspended second, the noise of the church fell away. She could hear her own pulse, the rustle of the organist turning a page, the creak of a pew somewhere behind her. She had spent three weeks learning how to be looked at without being seen, and this man had undone it all with a single glance.

Not at the dress or the veil, but directly at her, with eyes so dark and level they felt like being read.

A murmur ran through the pews. Someone near the front whispered something, and Wren caught only the name: Adrian.

Not Julian. Adrian Lockhart. The head of the family. The man the whole city said was made of ice.

Charles stopped walking. For one second his arm went rigid, and Wren understood, with a cold drop of her stomach, that Charles had not known either.

Or he had. And had lied.

She reached the altar anyway, because there was nothing else to do. The officiant began to speak, but the words came from far away. Adrian Lockhart stepped closer to take her hand, and the moment his fingers closed around hers, he leaned in. His voice was low and unhurried, meant only for her.

“Relax,” he said. “You’re shaking, Miss Calloway.”

The name hit her like a slap.

Calloway. Not Ashworth. Not Seraphina.

He knew.

He had known who she was before she ever walked into this church.

His thumb moved once across her knuckles, steady, almost gentle.

“Smile,” Adrian Lockhart murmured. “We have a great deal to discuss, and an audience to get through first.”