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He’s standing beneath the maple tree in a cream suit, no tie, his silver hair catching the summer light. His hands are clasped in front of him, his jaw is set, and he’s looking at me like I’m the only thing in the world that matters.

It feels like we’re truly free for the first time in a long time. The trial ended two months ago in a verdict of not guilty after the jury deliberated for less than four hours. The media hubbub has slowly eased. The company is a work-in-progress, but a happy one: now that he’s back in charge, Lukas has been quietlyrestructuring and simplifying with a handful of trusted advisors. Even the wedding planning, simple and lowkey as it was, is no longer hanging over our heads.

There’s just this. Him on the altar. Me, barefoot in the grass, wearing white silk and my parents’ memory and the reckless courage of a frightened woman who fell in love with the most dangerous man she’s ever met and decided to stay.

Gideon walks me down the aisle. His stride is steady, his arm is strong, and when we reach Lukas, my brother does something that breaks me open entirely: He takes Lukas’s hand, places mine inside it, and holds them together for a moment. An understanding passes between them that I don’t fully see but completely feel.

Then Gideon releases us and steps back, and it’s just me and Lukas under a maple tree in Brooklyn.

Lukas lifts my hand to his mouth and presses his lips to my knuckles, right above the ring. “I would have paid a hundred million, you know,” he whispers.

I rise onto my tiptoes and whisper back, “I would have been yours for free.”

We exchange vows. His are short, because Lukas Lazarev doesn’t waste words. He tells me I gave him a reason to live when he’d forgotten he wanted one, and promises to spend whatever time he has left making sure I never doubt that I was chosen.

Mine are slightly longer, because I’m me and therefore biologically incapable of brevity. I tell him that I spent six years believing love was just a prettier word for loss, that wanting someone was the fastest way to guarantee they’d be taken fromyou. And then he walked into a dark office on my birthday and looked at me, and I realized I’d been wrong about everything.

We sayI do.

He wastes no time in kissing me.

The twelve people in our garden applaud, and Gideon whistles, and Jillian sobs so loudly that a startled bird evacuates from the maple tree. I like to think that it’s the pigeon who saw me on the roof of Lazarev Global and the stoop of that bodega, with a smug smile on his beak, like he can finally go back to his life now that he sees that I’m in good hands. As the bird wings away overhead, Lukas holds my face in both scarred hands and kisses me until I can’t remember my own name, which is fine, because it’s about to change anyway.

The reception is cake and champagne in the brownstone’s living room. It’s intimate and warm and lit by a huge swath of candles on every flat surface. Lukas keeps one hand on the small of my back for the entire evening. Every few minutes, I feel his fingers tighten—a small, involuntary squeeze, as if he’s checking I’m still real.

I’m cutting the cake, a three-tier monstrosity that Gideon baked himself and decorated with slightly lopsided buttercream roses that are, in my completely unbiased opinion, worthy of television, when a flicker of movement catches my eye through the garden window.

I look up.

At the far edge of the garden, half-hidden by the ivy-wrapped fence, a figure stands alone in the blue dusk. Dark hair, lean build, hands in his pockets. The fairy lights catch just enough of his profile for recognition to hit me.

Kir.

He’s watching the reception through the glass, standing apart from it the way he always stands apart from everything—at the edge, observing, never quite letting himself belong. He looks thinner than I remember. Tanned, like he’s been somewhere warm. His expression is unreadable at this distance, but his posture isn’t hostile. It’s something quieter. Wistful, maybe.

Our eyes meet across the garden. The noise of the reception fades to a background murmur.

Kir nods. Just once. It’s a small, precise inclination of his head that contains multitudes, though even I’m not sure exactly what those multitudes might be.

Then he turns, and as he does, someone steps out from behind the maple tree and falls into stride beside him. A woman with red hair catching the fairy lights, her green dress unmistakable even in the fading light.

… Jillian?!

She slips her arm through Kir’s, casual as could be, and they walk together toward the garden gate, her head tilting toward his as she says something I can’t hear. He dips his chin to listen and the ghost of a smile crosses his face before they disappear around the corner and into the evening.

I blink.

What. The. Hell?

My brain attempts to process what I just witnessed and immediately short-circuits, like a computer being asked to divide by zero.

Jillian.

Kir.

Jillian and Kir.

Jillian and Kir, slipping away from my wedding together like two people who have somewhere else to be.Together. The woman who exposed the Lazarev family’s darkest secret, arm in arm with the man who threatened to destroy her for it.