Hope.
Dangerous, fragile, impossible hope.
I change. Fix my hair. Arrange my face into the mask I've perfected over these endless months.
Then I go back downstairs.
Back to the party.
Back to playing the role of the perfect bride.
For one more night.
TWENTY-FIVE
Vivianne: The Wedding Day
Five in the morning,and I haven't closed my eyes once.
The taste of Paul's kiss still lingers on my lips, a phantom warmth that makes everything else feel cold by comparison. My fingers drift to my mouth, tracing where his were just hours ago.
Was he really here? Did he really promise to come for me, or have I finally cracked under the pressure, my mind conjuring rescue where none exists?
No. The champagne stain on my discarded dress proves it was real. He was here. He's coming.
Today.
I sit at my window, knees drawn to my chest, watching the estate wake beneath a sky bleeding from black to bruised purple. The gardens spread below like a battlefield preparing for war—which isn't far from the truth. White chairs arranged in perfect rows, hundreds of them, each one a witness to my upcoming execution. The altar stands at the far end, draped in white silk and roses, looking more like a guillotine than a place where love should bloom.
A security guard passes beneath my window, his flashlight cutting through the pre-dawn gloom. Then another. Andanother. Donovan Price has them doing rounds every fifteen minutes now instead of every hour. Father's paranoia has infected everyone, turning our home into a fortress.
Or a prison.
I pull my hidden notebook from behind the radiator, its pages worn soft from my desperate sketching. The pencil trembles in my hand as I flip to a fresh page. I need to capture it before the memory fades—the Swan, as I saw it that night Father dragged me to the vault.
My pencil moves, recreating the massive ruby from memory. The size of a quail's egg, Paul had said, but that doesn't capture its presence. It had seemed alive in that glass case, pulsing with secrets and old pain. The gold setting, intricate as lace, delicate as spider silk, but somehow strong enough to bear the weight of all that blood-colored stone.
But it's what lies within the ruby that haunts me.
The swan itself, frozen inside the jewel's heart. Not carved, not painted—a flaw in the stone that nature shaped into something impossible. Wings spread wide, neck extended, forever suspended in that moment between earth and sky. Between bondage and freedom.
Like me.
I add shadows, depth, trying to capture how the light had bent through the stone, how the swan had seemed to move when Father lifted the pendant. My grandmother wore this once. Young Brigitte, in love with Anthony, who became Merlin, before my grandfather stole both her and the necklace. Building our family's empire on theft and betrayal.
The pencil stills.
Is that what I'm doing now? Betraying my family? Or am I finally breaking the chain of women in this family who surrendered to men who saw them as possessions?
The first delivery truck rumbles up the drive, its headlights sweeping across my window. Four forty-five. Earlier than expected. I lean forward, studying it in the growing light. "Celestial Catering" painted on the side in elegant script. Then another van—"Paradise Florals." Then another. And another.
Too many.
We're having five hundred guests, yes, but this is excessive even by Father's standards. Seven vans. Three trucks. More arriving.
My pulse begins to race.
I flip back through my notebook, past sketches of Paul's hands, his eyes, the way he looked at me in that garden in Paris before everything went wrong. Past drawings of escape routes I'll never use, floor plans of the house with all its secret passages. I find the page I'm looking for—my grandmother's face, drawn from memory and old photographs.
