All Chapters of Claimed as the Wrong Bride: Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

The rack was exactly where she'd left it in her memory, which was where she left everything that might be useful later.Six garments in plastic wrap, hanging from a freestanding rail that the boutique had wheeled out to the sidewalk before closing, tagged and ready for the morning pickup. Standard practice for the dry cleaners that serviced this block. She had noticed it three weeks ago on a different late walk home and filed it without knowing why, the way she filed most things, because information had a way of becoming relevant eventually and the cost of remembering was nothing.She went through the bags quickly, by touch and by the dim light of the streetlamp, looking for weight and structure. Two of them were men's suits. One was something soft and formless that would read wrong in any room that mattered. The fourth was a cocktail dress in a fabric that had enough body to hold its shape, hemmed to just below the knee, with a neckline that was sophisticated without being precious.

The Carmine Gallery in full swing was a specific kind of beautiful that Occy had not let herself anticipate because anticipating things was how you set yourself up to be disappointed by them.She had not been disappointed.She had approximately four seconds to register this before Sol found her.Sol was a small person who generated an amount of energy disproportionate to their size, which was something Occy had noted the first time they met and had simply incorporated into her understanding of how Sol worked. They appeared at her elbow while she was still two steps inside the door, materialized the way Sol always materialized, out of nowhere and immediately mid-sentence."You came." Sol said it the way a person said it when they had spent a significant portion of the previous twenty-four hours genuinely uncertain whether the thing they were saying would be true. "You actually came.""You told me to come.""I tell you to come to everything. You came to approximately forty percent of th

Adler found him at ten-fifteen.Bastien was in a conversation with the gallery owner, a pleasant and entirely forgettable exchange about the Tripicity art market and the particular challenge of representing emerging work in a city that tended to value legacy over discovery. He was listening with the portion of his attention that the conversation merited, which was not the majority of it, and when Adler appeared at his shoulder with that specific quality of stillness that meant something required immediate attention he excused himself without ceremony."Problem," Adler said."Tell me."They stepped into the edge of the room where the crowd had thinned, the noise dropping by a fraction around them. Adler's face was doing the thing it did when something had gone wrong in a way that had implications Adler had already begun calculating."Olivia Maddox," Adler said. "She's not here."Bastien looked at him. "She confirmed.""She confirmed this afternoon. She is not in the building. Her famil

Adler had been doing this job for eleven years.In that time he had managed the legal aftermath of three territorial disputes, two hostile acquisitions, one extradition attempt that had required creative interpretation of four separate jurisdictions, and a situation in Monaco that he did not discuss and had expunged from every record he could reach. He had negotiated with people who wanted Bastien dead and people who wanted Bastien to owe them something, which were often the same people at different stages of the same conversation. He had drafted contracts that held and contracts that were designed to appear to hold and contracts that existed purely to give someone the dignity of a document when the actual agreement lived somewhere else entirely.He was not easily rattled.He was currently sitting in the back of the car outside the Carmine Gallery at eleven-forty with a legal pad on his knee and the expression of a man reviewing a problem he had not anticipated and was not certain cou

The third day she went back to The Meridian because she had a shift. The world did not stop for illegal marriages. Mona Lick had regulars who would notice an absence, and she was not in the business of being noticed for the wrong reasons.But first, the materials.The address Sol had given her was a courier depot on the west side of the grey zone, the kind of facility that handled specialist deliveries and asked no questions about the contents as long as the paperwork was in order. Legitimate. Neutral. The kind of location that had been chosen by someone who understood that it needed to be somewhere she could not reasonably refuse without breaching the contract.She went at seven in the morning when courier depots were busy and staffed by people who had been on shift since five and were not interested in anything except processing the queue. She wore the gym clothes, hair up, no eyeshadow. Nothing that read as the woman from the gallery. She paid cash for a transit card two stops from