The party was already happening. It was happening whether I was ready or not.
I unzipped the bag.
The lace at the cuffs was hand-worked. I could tell by the irregularity of it, the slight variance in the pattern where a needle had been guided by a human hand and not a machine. Someone had made this. Had sat in good light and worked every loop of it, stitch by stitch.
I thought about my mother. Not the one who died when I was too young to hold the memory clearly. The one who raised me. Who kept my school photos in a frame on the mantle even whenmoney was short and the frame itself was chipped at one corner. Who called me her miracle baby. Who was gone now too.
There was no one in this house who knew that about me. No one here who remembered me at seven years old, or sixteen, or my dress from the prom or my favorite Christmas cookie or how I cried when I lost my adoptive mom. I was about to walk into a room full of strangers wearing a dead woman's dress, and the dead woman's son was the reason I'd been in a jail cell only a few days ago.
I pressed two fingers to the bodice, just above the waist seam.
Pierce's mother had worn this. Had stood somewhere in this house in this dress and made some kind of promise. I didn't know if it had been a happy marriage or a cold one, whether she had been beloved or merely decorative, whether Pierce had inherited her eyes or her ruthlessness or both. I knew nothing about her except that she had loved Venetian chandeliers and that she was dead.
I put the dress on anyway.
My hips disappeared in the ivory silk and endless layers of tulle, and then the long curve of my back was shrouded in lace. I pinned my hair up into a simple updo and tucked the short veil in with a French comb, spreading it over my shoulders.
The woman in the mirror was not someone I recognized.
In the reflection, I caught sight of him. “Are you planning on saying something or just watching me all night?"
Pierce pushed the door the rest of the way open. The way he looked at me made it difficult to breathe.
"I was planning on saying something, but if those are my only two options..."
I gave him a soft smile and turned back to the mirror, fixing my makeup that was already perfect. "Is it showtime?"
"It is." He crossed the room with a large black velvet box in his hands. "You will need to wear this. It's what's going to tell everyone this is real."
I looked at the box. "What is it?"
"My grandmother's pearls." He opened the box carefully. They weren't the classic white, shiny, and uniform. The iridescent shade of ice blue shimmered under the reflected light. In the middle of the strand hung a pendant, a silver “W” in a fine French script.
"They are beautiful," I whispered. My fingers paused mid-air, afraid to touch them.
He set the box on the vanity and lifted the necklace. "May I?"
I nodded and turned toward him, and he slid the pearls over my neck, adjusting them so the W rested in the divot of my clavicle.
"Stunning," he whispered in my ear.
"Too bad it isn't real," I said, mostly to myself.
"I assure you the pearls are very real and very rare." He chose to misunderstand me.
He stepped back. His grandmother's pearls. His mother's dress. His family's crest at my throat. I was being absorbed into the Worthington name whether I wanted it or not, dressed in their dead women's things, about to walk downstairs and perform a love story for a room full of people who had watched Pierce destroy me.
The worst part was how much I wanted it to be real.
* * *
I stoodin the shadows of the mezzanine looking down on the ballroom with Pierce by my side. He’d barely let me out of his sight since proposing. If you could call a command to marry a man within the next forty-eight hours a proposal.
He was worried I was still a flight risk.
I was.
I sighed as I looked down on all the splendor.
