“Parker!” Sienna waves her over, voice bright. “Come here! We were just talking about the dance number!”
Parker’s smile appears wide and wrong. Too bright to be real. She moves toward us with that unshakable grace she’s always had, the one that makes her look untouchable even when she’s bleeding inside. Her pulse flutters at the base of her throat when she stops in front of us, and she still won’t look at me. Which means she’s doing everything she can not to.
“Are you ready for the dance number?” Sienna grabs her hands and squeezes them, oblivious to the tension simmering between us. “It’s going to be so much fun! Rochelle sent me videos of the choreography—it’s incredible!”
Parker’s voice is smooth, but there’s a tremor under it, a note that only someone who knows her would catch. “Can’t wait.”
Sienna’s radiant. “It’s going to be the highlight of the week, right, Charles?”
“It’s going to be amazing,” Charles says automatically, grinning like he can feel none of this pressure suffocating me.
And still, Parker doesn’t look at me.
I shouldn’t take it personally, but I do. I feel it like a bruise forming beneath the ribs. So I decide to fix it.
I lean forward, forearms resting on my knees, voice pitched just low enough for her to hear through the noise of laughter and clinking glasses. “Little Parker’s all grown up now.”
Her shoulders tense. She freezes, just for a second. Then she turns, slow and deliberate, until her gaze locks with mine. The years vanish in an instant. That look—God, that look—hits me harder than any bullet I’ve taken. Her eyes are molten brown, all defiance and memory and pain she won’t let me see.
“Hi, Jace.” Her voice is polite. Flat. The kind you reserve for strangers you’d rather not talk to.
Two words, and somehow they hurt more than the six years of silence between us.
I smile. Slow. Calculated. “Hey, princess.”
The nickname lands like a spark in dry grass. Her jaw tightens. Her breath catches. Her fingers curl into small fists at her sides. And for just a heartbeat, I see her—the girl who used to snap back, who’d argue with me until the sun came up, who never flinched when I pushed her too far.
“Don’t call me that,” she mutters, her voice tight.
“Why not? You used to love it.”
“Iusedto be twelve.”
“And now you’re not.” My gaze trails down her body, unhurried, tracing the slope of her shoulder, the line of her dress, the curve of her hip. I meet her eyes again, letting her see the hunger I don’t bother hiding. “Hard not to notice.”
Her cheeks flush, anger and color blooming together. “You’re being inappropriate.”
“Just observant,” I murmur, my smile soft but sharp. “You’ve changed. A man notices these things.”
“You can fault a man for being an ass about it.”
There it is—that spark I’ve missed. The fire that always made me forget how to breathe.
But I can’t touch her. Not because I don’t want to, but because the line is still there, buried deep under years of loyalty and guilt. Charles’s sister. Our code. The one rule that never stopped mattering, even when every part of me wanted to break it.
Charles laughs, oblivious, tossing a balled-up napkin at me. “Ignore him, Parker. He’s allergic to good behavior.”
She doesn’t even look at him. “So he hasn’t changed.”
Sienna tugs her hand, already moving. “Come on, I want you to meet the other bridesmaids! They’re dying to meet you—Charles talks about you all the time!”
“Lucky them,” she says with a small, tight smile. But before she disappears, she glances back—just once—and for that brief second, something unspoken flashes between us. Anger, sure. But something else, too. Something I’ve spent six years pretending not to want.
Then she’s gone.
Charles eyes me like he’s reading the storm on my face. “You’re really not going to let that 'princess' thing go, are you?”
“Not a chance.”
