I looked down at my dress. It was a Vera Wang, bought not with my money, but with Ryan’s credit card—a fact his mother had reminded me of every time we went for a fitting. “Don’t rip it, Maya,” she would say. “It costs more than your father makes in a year.”
My father had passed away three years ago. I had no one standing beside me today. No family to hold my hand. Just a sea of strangers—business associates Ryan wanted to impress, socialites his mother wanted to emulate, and the elite of the city who looked at me like I was a smudge on a diamond.
I risked a glance at the front row.
Mrs. Vance sat there, resplendent in a silver gown that looked suspiciously like a wedding dress itself. She wasn’t checking her phone. She wasn’t wringing her hands in worry for her missing son.
She was smiling.
It was a small, tight smile, the kind a cat wears when it has cornered a mouse. She caught my eye and raised her eyebrows, a silent mock: I told you so.
My stomach twisted. Ryan had told me he was running late because of a “work emergency.” He said he had to stop by the office to sign one last document for the merger. “It’s our future, babe,” he had texted me an hour ago. “Just wait for me.”
So I waited. Like a fool.
I looked toward the back of the church, seeking an exit, seeking air.
In the last pew, shrouded in the shadows of the choir loft, sat a man who didn’t belong.
Julian Thorne.
He was the CEO of Titan Corp, the multi-billion-dollar conglomerate where Ryan worked as a mid-level manager. Ryan had sent him an invitation as a “Hail Mary,” never expecting him to come. Julian Thorne didn’t go to weddings. He didn’t go to parties. He was a phantom—a brilliant, ruthless, reclusive billionaire who ran the city from the top of his glass tower.
Yet, here he was.
He was dressed in a black suit that absorbed the light around him. He wasn’t looking at his phone. He wasn’t looking at the exit. He was looking directly at me.
His gaze was intense, unblinking. It didn’t hold the pity I saw in the eyes of the other guests. It held something else. Anticipation. Calculation. It was the look of a grandmaster watching a pawn move into a trap.
I felt a shiver run down my spine, unrelated to the air conditioning. I knew Julian Thorne. Or rather, I knew of him. And I knew he had a scar on his right hand, hidden now by his gloves. I knew because I was the one who had bandaged it three years ago, on a rainy highway, amidst twisted metal and flames.
But he couldn’t possibly remember me. To him, I was just a blur of scrubs and bandages in the night. To him, I was just the fiancée of his employee.
The heavy oak doors at the back of the church groaned open.
