"Is that the dress?" Jillian asks.
I pat the silk down over my hip and grin shyly. "I think it's the one."
We drink the rest of the champagne and yap our little hearts out. Rae tells me about how she met Lukas—she was his executive assistant, of all things, and there's clearly a whole novel in that story she's only giving me the first chapter of. Jillian goes next, and her meet-cute is so insanely dark that I gasp and knock my glass over and have to pour a new one. Cass tells a story about Matvei that has all of us crying with laughter, and for a while, it really does feel like a girls' day, like I'm a normal bride with normal nerves and normal friends, and not a woman marrying the man who set in motion the deaths of her parents because the alternative is being hunted through the snow by the ghosts of his past.
How insane.
How certifiably crazy.
How freaking poetic.
I'm marrying the man who ruined my family.
Who isalsothe man who held me on the floor of his cabin until the fear let go, and tended my many wounds, and carried me down a mountain.
Same man. Same hands.
I thought, last night, that those hands were hideous. That they shoved my parents into their graves and heaped the dirt on top.
But Cass is right: A man who lies to keep you isn't worth keeping.
A man who tells you the truth that loses you—well, that's the sort of man you marry.
When the champagne is gone and the dresses are hung back up except for mine, and Rae and Jillian have wandered off to find their own husbands, Cass lingers at the door.
"You're going to be okay," she says. "I can tell. You've got the look."
"What look?"
"The look of a woman who just figured out what she's doing." She grins. "Welcome to the family, Caroline. We're a disaster, but we're loyal to the death."
She leaves, but I stand alone in the room a while longer, looking at the ivory dress on its hanger and smiling like Wolf lying in a patch of sunlight.
Then I go to find Afon.
I know exactly what I'm going to say.
Eyes open. On purpose.
I.
Choose.
You.
33
AFON
The night before the wedding, I find Lukas in his study.
I don't knock. I never have. He's sitting in the same chair as always, a glass of whiskey at his elbow, the fire low. He doesn't look up when I come in. He just nods at the chair across from him, and I sit.
For a long time, neither of us says anything. That's how it's always been with Lukas and me. We can sit in a silence that would make other men squirm. We've sat in worse silences than this one, in worse rooms, with worse things on the floor between us.
"She'll do it," I say finally. "She'll marry me."
"I know," Lukas says. He sips his drink. "I never doubted it."
