THE WEDDING OF THE CENTURY

Kai had said nothing, in the end. He'd simply stepped aside the width of a single pace, enough to let Ethan's familiar footsteps close the distance behind her, and by the time Ethan's hand found the small of her back — warm, questioning, a silent *are you all right* pressed into her spine through nothing but touch — Kai had already melted back into whatever shadow had produced him, as though the entire encounter had been a trick of the corridor's dim gold light.

Luna had said nothing about The Ghost that night. Not to Ethan, not even to Freya once she'd finally found her way back to the ballroom's noise and light. She'd filed the conversation away instead, turning Silas's words over and over in the sleepless hours before dawn — *someone with access to information only a handful of people should have* — until the phrase had worn smooth and strange in her mind, a stone rubbed featureless by too much handling.

That had been three weeks ago. Tonight, she stood in a private dressing suite at the Cathedral of St. Aurelius with her heart trying to climb out through her throat, and the only ghost she had room to think about was the one currently being laced, pinned, and steamed into a wedding gown around her body by four of Aria's most trusted seamstresses.

"Breathe," Aria said, kneeling at Luna's hem with a mouthful of pins, dark hair scraped back beneath a silk scarf, sleeves rolled to the elbow despite the couture gown draped across her lap. "You've gone gray. You cannot go gray, this dress is *ivory*, gray will read as a design flaw and I will never recover."

"I'm breathing," Luna lied.

"You're doing the thing where you breathe from your throat instead of your stomach. Dad used to say you did that before every board presentation you were terrified of failing." Aria glanced up, something softer than teasing flickering behind her eyes. "It's just nerves, Lu. Every bride gets them."

*Every bride isn't marrying a man to save her family from a syndicate that burns warehouses for sport,* Luna thought, and said nothing, because the truth had never once been something she could hand her little sister without watching it break something delicate in her.

The gown itself was, even through the haze of Luna's dread, a masterpiece — the crown jewel of Aria-Couture's spring collection, reimagined and rebuilt in six frantic weeks once the engagement had become public and every fashion house in the city had begged for the commission. Aria had refused all of them, of course, insisting with a fierceness that had made Luna's chest ache that no one touched her sister's wedding dress but her own two hands. The result was a column of ivory silk duchesse so fine it seemed to hold light rather than reflect it, hand-beaded along the bodice in a constellation pattern that caught every candle flame in the dressing suite and scattered it back tenfold, a train that pooled behind her like poured cream, sleeves of French lace so delicate Luna was terrified to breathe too deeply for fear of tearing them. She smelled of orange blossom and beeswax candles and the particular, papery scent of raw silk, and beneath all of it, faint and traitorous, the ghost of Ethan's cologne still clinging somewhere to her memory from the last time he'd stood close enough to leave it behind.

"There." Aria rose, dusting off her knees, and turned Luna gently by the shoulders to face the full-length mirror at the center of the suite.

Luna almost didn't recognize herself.

The woman in the mirror looked like something out of an old oil painting — pale and luminous, dark hair swept into a low, soft chignon threaded through with seed pearls, her mother's diamond drop earrings catching candlelight at her jaw, the gown fitting her like it had been poured over her skin rather than sewn. She looked, Luna thought distantly, exactly like a woman about to marry the love of her life.

She felt like a woman walking into a courtroom to hear her own sentence.

"You look like Mom," Aria said quietly, coming to stand beside her in the mirror, her own eyes suddenly too bright. "She wore ivory too. I found the photograph last month, going through Dad's things. I wanted — I wanted you to have something of hers today, even if it's just the shape of a dress."

Luna's throat closed. She reached for her sister's hand and held it, hard, both of them staring at their combined reflection — the bride and the woman who'd built her gown out of grief and love in equal measure — and for one unguarded moment, standing in the golden hush of the dressing suite with the muffled swell of an orchestra tuning somewhere beyond the walls, Luna let herself feel something close to hope. Whatever this marriage was built on, whatever monstrous clause lived on page forty-one, whatever underworld shadows moved beneath the surface of the Vance family's empire — her sister was safe today. Her father, wheeled in by private car an hour ago, would witness his daughter married in a cathedral instead of watching Sterling Auto get carved apart by a hostile board. That had to count for something.

Her phone buzzed against the dressing table.

Luna almost ignored it — Freya had confiscated most of her attention for logistics an hour ago, and the last thing she needed was another vendor crisis thirty minutes before her own wedding — but some instinct, some cold prickle at the base of her skull, made her cross the room and pick it up.

**Unknown Number:** *Your husband knows who crashed your father's car.*

The words sat on the screen, stark and black, and Luna's whole body went still in a way that had nothing to do with nerves.

"Luna?" Aria's voice, from somewhere far away. "You've gone gray again. Actually gray this time."

Luna's thumb hovered over the message, heart slamming so hard she could feel it in her ears, in her wrists, in the tight lace cage of her bodice. She read it again. *Your husband knows.* Not *the Vance family.* Not *someone at Vance Global.* Ethan. Specifically, deliberately, Ethan — the man about to stand at the altar and vow to protect her, who had told her, weeks ago, across a mahogany desk, that he'd orchestrated the fire at her warehouse but had said nothing, not one word, about her father's car.

She thought of Silas's voice in that dim gold corridor. *Something's moving underneath us. Someone's picking off product and leaving no trace.* She thought of Ethan's own reply, careful and calculated even in what had sounded, for one unguarded second, like genuine unease. *If The Ghost wanted the girl dead, she'd already be dead.*

Had he known, that night? Had he known standing behind his desk, sliding a contract across mahogany and threatening to let her father's legacy burn, that he already possessed the answer to the question that had haunted Luna since the night she'd stood on that highway shoulder watching paramedics cut her father out of a mangled car?

"Luna." Freya's voice this time, sharp with concern, appearing in the doorway in a burst of taffeta and worry. "The processional starts in twenty minutes, we need — Luna, what's wrong, you're white as the dress—"

"Nothing." Luna's own voice sounded strange to her, thin and distant, as she pocketed the phone with hands that had gone unsteady despite her best effort to still them. "Nerves. Aria's right, every bride gets them."

Freya's eyes narrowed, sharp with the particular suspicion of a woman who'd known Luna since they were both twenty-two and broke and dreaming, who could read a lie off Luna's face faster than Luna herself usually managed to construct one. But the cathedral bells had begun to toll somewhere beyond the walls, deep and resonant, vibrating faintly through the floor, and there was no time left to unpack anything with the honesty it deserved.

"We'll talk after," Freya said, which both of them understood to mean *I know you're lying and I'm choosing to let it go for exactly as long as this wedding requires.* "Come on. Let's get you married."

---

The Cathedral of St. Aurelius had been built two centuries ago by a shipping magnate grateful to have survived a hurricane at sea, and it showed in every soaring inch of the nave — vaulted ceilings painted with faded gold constellations, stained glass windows three stories tall that scattered fractured jewel-light across marble floors polished to a mirror shine, the whole space thick with the smell of white lilies and beeswax and two hundred years of incense worked into old stone. Six hundred guests filled the pews in a rustle of silk and murmured anticipation, but Luna, standing at the threshold of the nave with her father's good arm — the one that still worked, still trembled but held steady — looped through hers, registered almost none of it.

She registered the orchestra swelling into the processional, deep strings and a soprano voice soaring up into the painted dome. She registered the sudden hush that fell across six hundred guests as the cathedral doors opened and every head turned as one. She registered her father's ragged, uneven breathing beside her, the pride shining fierce and wet in his eyes despite the paralysis still clinging to half his face, and the way his trembling hand tightened once around her arm — a silent, wordless *I'm here, I'm still here* that nearly undid every careful seam of her composure before she'd taken a single step.

And she registered Ethan.

He stood at the altar beneath an archway wound with white orchids and trailing ivy, dressed in a black tuxedo so severely, perfectly tailored it looked carved rather than sewn, dark hair immaculate, and as Luna began the long walk down the aisle on her father's arm, his pale gray eyes found hers and did not look away again.

The walk felt endless and instantaneous at once — six hundred faces blurring into a single wash of color and light, the soprano's voice climbing toward some impossible high note, the smell of lilies growing thicker with every step, her own pulse a frantic drumbeat beneath the lace at her throat — and through all of it, Ethan watched her come toward him with an intensity that stole the air from her lungs more thoroughly than any corset ever could.

He looked, she thought distantly, like a man actually getting married. Not performing it. Not executing a strategic clause in a merger contract. His jaw was tight, his throat working once as she drew closer, and something naked and unguarded moved behind those pale eyes that Luna had never once seen there before — not in his office, not on the terrace, not even in the electric, devastating heat of the kiss that had sent the whole city into a frenzy of speculation. He looked, God help her, like a man watching something he wanted with a hunger he hadn't fully given himself permission to feel.

Her father placed her hand in Ethan's at the base of the altar with a ceremony that felt heavier than the ritual required, his eyes locking with Ethan's for one long, silent second — a father's wordless warning, *hurt her and there will be nowhere in this world you can hide* — before he was helped to his seat in the front pew, and Luna was left standing at the altar with her hand in Ethan's, the anonymous text still burning like a brand against her thigh where her phone sat forgotten in the folds of her gown.

*Your husband knows who crashed your father's car.*

"You look like you're somewhere else," Ethan murmured, low enough for only her to hear, as the priest opened his book and the cathedral settled into reverent silence around them.

"I'm right here," Luna whispered back, and hated how much of a lie it was.

His thumb moved once, absently, against the back of her hand — a small, unconscious gesture that felt more intimate than the kiss at the gala had, precisely because it wasn't for the cameras, wasn't for anyone but her. Up close, close enough to feel the heat radiating off him through the space between their bodies, close enough to catch cedar and salt beneath the lily-thick air of the cathedral, Luna searched his face for some flicker of guilt, some crack in the composed, devastating mask he wore like a second skin — proof, one way or another, that the message on her phone was true, that this man standing before her in vows of protection had known, all along, exactly who had put her father in that hospital bed.

She found nothing. Only that same unreadable intensity, steady and unblinking, watching her as though she were the only person left in a cathedral full of six hundred witnesses.

"Dearly beloved," the priest began, and the words rolled out over the hushed congregation in the ancient, familiar cadence that Luna had heard a hundred times at other people's weddings and never once imagined applying to her own — not like this, not bound by threat and leverage and a clause that reduced her body to a contractual obligation, and yet here she stood anyway, hand in Ethan Vance's hand, his thumb still moving in that slow, absent circle against her skin like he couldn't help himself.

The ceremony blurred by in fragments — the priest's voice rising and falling, the murmured responses of the congregation, Aria's face in the front row wet with tears she made no effort to hide, her father's ruined mouth working soundlessly around what Luna suspected, with an ache that nearly broke her composure entirely, was an attempt to mouth the word *proud.* She heard none of the actual vows recited, too lost in the anonymous text still glowing behind her eyes, in the impossible, unreadable depth of Ethan's gaze, in the sheer electric wrongness of standing here promising forever to a man whose family had threatened her sister's life and who might, for all she knew, be the very reason her father could no longer speak his daughter's name clearly.

And then, abruptly, the cathedral's vast silence sharpened into something focused and absolute, six hundred held breaths compressing into a single suspended moment, and Luna surfaced from her own spiraling thoughts to find the priest's eyes on her, kind and patient and utterly oblivious to the storm raging beneath her ivory silk and seed pearls, his voice carrying clear and resonant through the painted, gold-flecked dome above them.

"Luna Sterling," the priest said, "do you take this man to be your lawfully wedded husband?"

Luna's gaze lifted, one last time, to Ethan's — to those breathtaking, unreadable pale eyes fixed on hers with an intensity that felt less like performance and more like a man silently, desperately asking her a question far more complicated than the one the priest had just posed — and the entire cathedral, six hundred guests, her father's trembling pride, Aria's tearful smile, the anonymous message burning against her thigh, all of it fell away into a single, suspended breath as she stood at the altar with her heart in her throat, waiting to hear what her own voice would decide to say.