Page 2 of Claimed By the Silver Fox

I turn back to the mirror, staring at the person in front of me. A bride, sure, but a bride with no groom, if what she’s saying is correct. Sickness twists in my guts, and my knees tremble beneath me.

Fuck. Fuck. I don’t know what the hell is happening. Why the hell he would have done this to me? Wasn’t he the one who wanted to get married in the first place? Anger courses through me for a second, so intense it feels like I’m going to scream, and I grip the flowers so tightly that I can feel the stems digging into my fingers, bleeding cold damp over my hands as the petals begin to drift to the ground.

“He’s gone,” I finish for her.

She doesn’t need to make it any clearer than that. I can see it now. See it clearly.

That freakout a few days ago, it was his way of trying to warn me that he already had one foot out the door. And now, he’s gone. After everything he has done to me, everything I have put up with, clinging to the hope of what might come when I finally have the ring on my finger, Andreo has abandoned me, and it hollows me out in a way I don’t know if I will ever recover from.

I can hear Anna talking to me, her arm around me as she does her best to soothe me, but I can’t even begin to take any of it in. How the hell could I?

I know what this means. What he has always warned me of, from the first moment we met, the first moment we were seen together. There are threats against his family, against anyone close to him, enemies who are constantly circling, looking for a way in. And now, without him as my husband, I could all too easily fall prey to them.

Would he really have hung me out to dry like this? It’s difficult to believe that he would risk it, after everything he’s done to make certain that I belong to him, but maybe it was always more about ownership than care. Maybe I don’t know the difference, anyway.

“Come on, sit down,” Anna tells me gently, as she guides me back toward the bed.

I crash down, the weight of it landing so heavy on my shoulders that for a second I’m certain I’ll be crushed by it. I look to the door, which leads down to the church beyond, a little setup meant for weddings like this so the rich and powerful in this city don’t have to risk traveling between venues to attend their nuptials. I had been stunned when I realized that this would be my wedding, having pictured a cheap church or a registrar’s office when I was growing up. But maybe that’s what I was always going to be doomed to in the first place.

Maybe it’s always what I deserved.

I rise to my feet and stumble toward the door, the kitten heels pinching at my toes—the shoes are new, new enough that I haven’t had time to break them in, but I can barely feel the pain right now.

I need to talk to someone about this. Anyone. Someone who can tell me why the hell he has taken off on me like this and what the fuck I’m going to need to do to fix this.

I must have screwed this up, said the wrong thing, looked at him in the wrong way. Shit, I don’t know what I did, but if I lose out on all of this, I might have to go back to my life before.

To my parents.

The thought churns in my guts, but it’s not as though I have anywhere else to live, given that Andreo has been paying for our apartment and I don’t exactly have a job I can rely on to bring money in. He told me he would take care of me, and I, as stupid as I was, believed him.

“Julia, come on,” Anna pleads with me, slipping her arm through mine to try and keep me in place. “You don’t need to torture yourself⁠—”

“I need to see it for myself,” I mutter. I know that I won’t be able to trust this until I see it for myself. At the back of my mind, I want to believe that this is all some fucking joke, that he’s going to be waiting there at the end of the aisle for me like he promised, and that we would laugh about this later. I can already imagine how he would turn it around on me, ask if I really believed he would leave me like that, but at the same time, I don’t care. I just want to see this through. Anything to keep me from being dragged back into my old life, the life I’ve worked so hard to leave behind.

I rush down the stairs, lifting my skirts to take them two at a time. A handful of guests are milling in the entryway to the hotel, and I can feel them staring at me as I look around, trying to remember which way it is toward the church where the ceremony is meant to be held. I’m sure I can feel their sympathetic gazes on me, but I ignore them. They can’t know. Can they? If I only just found out…

I look this way and that along the maze of corridors, trying to figure out where I’m going, and then spot the large wooden arched door at the far end. I’m meant to be here now anyway, and I can hear the music drifting out from inside, the sweet sound of it meant to serve as a backdrop to me walking down the aisle.

My vision narrows as I force myself down there, wondering if Anna is still following me, praying that she isn’t, because the last thing I need right now is someone else coming here, telling me the truth, forcing me to face up to it in all the ways I don’t want to…

And then I reach the doorway, and as I look around—I realize that it’s true.

Andreo is not here. No sign of him at all. It’s like he has dropped into thin air, vanished off the face of the earth.

A few guests are in their seats, looking confused. I clutch at the doorframe, doing my best to keep myself upright, not wanting to keel over right then and there in front of everyone.

This can’t be happening. If I don’t get married today, that life I’ve tried to leave behind, it will come for me again, and there will be nothing that I can⁠—

And then, all at once, I see something. Someone. Stepping up onto the altar, the very place I’m meant to exchange my vows with the man I will spend my life with.

My eyes widen, and I look up, relief coursing through me. Oh, thank God, all of this was just some crazy misunderstanding, there was no way he would really have left me to do this alone. Relief grips me, and I stare up⁠—

Only to find someone else standing up there entirely.

Not my fiancé.

But my fiancé’s father.