All Chapters of THE LIE I MARRIED : Chapter 1 - Chapter 3

I always thought the day I married Adrian Vale would be the happiest day of my life.I stood in the small room behind the church, staring at myself in a gilded mirror, and I almost laughed at how perfect everything looked. The dress. The veil. The pearls my mother would have wanted me to wear if she were still alive to see this.Everything was perfect.Except for the feeling in my chest that refused to go away."You look beautiful," my father said from the doorway. His voice cracked a little, the way it always did when he was trying not to cry."Dad." I turned around, holding my bouquet like it might steady me. "Don't start. You'll ruin your tie."He laughed, but it came out thin. "I just can't believe my little girl is marrying into the Vale family."I could have said something about how it wasn't about the Vale family, how it wasn't about the money or the name or the empire Adrian would inherit someday. I could have told him that I loved Adrian long before I understood what his last

Chaos erupted before Alexander could answer me.The sound came from the back of the church, sharp and wrong, nothing like a dropped microphone or a chair going over even though for one dumb second that's what I told myself it was. Then people started screaming, and you don't scream over a dropped microphone.Everyone moved at once. Guests climbed over each other getting out of the pews. A woman's heel skidded across the marble somewhere behind me and she went down hard, and nobody stopped to help her up, they just kept moving. Men in dark suits I hadn't even noticed standing along the walls were suddenly running toward the sound, hands going inside their jackets.I grabbed Alexander's arm. Didn't think about it. Just did it, the same way you grab whatever's closest when the floor moves under you.I still had the bouquet crushed in my other hand. I'd notice that later and think it was insane, that some part of my brain had held onto a dozen white roses through all of this like they mat