This time, I won't wait for anyone

"You're married?"

Ethan pushed his chair back so violently the legs screeched against the hardwood. His fingers remained gripped around his wine glass, white-knuckled and trembling.

"Answer me, Zelia," he demanded, his voice cracking down the center. "Married to who?"

"Ethan, calm down!" Serena reached for his arm, but he shook her off.

"To who, Zelia?" Ethan repeated, stepping toward me. "Who is Ashford?"

I buttoned the top toggle of my coat. Looking at his panicked, frantic eyes, the years folded backward, pulling me straight into the suffocating humidity of five years ago.

* * *

Back then, Ethan had never looked at me with panic. He had barely looked at me at all.

"Do you really want to marry me, Ethan?" Serena had asked him during the family engagement dinner, toying with an olive on her plate. "Just like that? No grand chase? No begging?"

"Our families belong together, Serena," Ethan had answered easily, leaning in to kiss her cheek. "Why complicate an easy victory?"

Serena had rolled her eyes in bored distaste. She hated easy victories. She hated feeling conquered before the war even began.

"He's boring," Serena complained in my bedroom three weeks before the ceremony, tossing expensive silk dresses across my bed. "He agreed too fast. There's no thrill in it. I feel like cattle being traded for port shares."

"He loves you," I had whispered, folding the dresses she threw aside. My chest had burned with quiet, shameful jealousy.

"Then he can love someone who actually wants his leash," Serena snapped. "I don't want an arranged life."

The next morning, she was gone.

No note for Ethan. Just a scrawl left on my mother's vanity: *Gone to Paris with Julian. Don't look for me.*

Julian was a broke European painter she had met at a Chelsea gallery opening two weeks earlier.

"The invitations are out!" my mother shrieked, pacing the parlor while my father poured scotch with shaking hands. "Five hundred guests! Senators, ambassadors, the entire board of directors! If a bride doesn't walk down that aisle, the family name is ruined!"

My father stopped pacing and fixed his cold, calculating eyes on me.

"Put the dress on," he ordered.

"Dad, what?"

"You've stared at Ethan since you were sixteen," my mother said, wiping mascara from her cheeks, her voice turning sharp and practical. "Don't pretend you haven't. We know how you look at him. You wanted him? Take him. Save this family."

"I'm not Serena," I argued, my voice shaking. "He won't want me."

"He wants a wife to secure the merger," my father cut in ruthlessly. "He won't care which daughter is under the veil. Get upstairs and fit into the gown."

I knew I was just a stand-in. I knew I was a counterfeit coin tossed into a broken machine. But standing before the chapel mirror in Serena's tailored silk, holding white lilies in sweating palms, a foolish, desperate seed of hope took root.

*Maybe this is destiny giving me a chance,* I had thought. *Maybe I can make him love me.*

The organ had roared. I walked down the stone aisle under the heavy gaze of high society. Ethan stood at the altar, rigid, his jaw tight. When he lifted the veil and saw my face instead of Serena's, his pupils flared, but he didn't run.

He stayed.

He took my right hand. The metal of the diamond band was freezing as he pushed it down my ring finger.

"Do you, Ethan—" the priest began.

A loud chime shattered the silence.

Ethan's personal assistant ran up the aisle, ignoring the gasps of five hundred people, and thrust a phone into Ethan's face.

"Sir," the assistant whispered, loud enough for the first three rows to hear. "She's at JFK. Terminal four. She called. She said she made a mistake and she's boarding a flight to Rome unless you stop her."

The world froze.

I squeezed Ethan's fingers. "Ethan, please. We're in the middle of our vows."

Ethan pulled his hand back as if my skin were hot iron. He looked down at the wedding band he had just slid onto my finger, then yanked it off.

"Ethan, don't do this," I begged, tears finally spilling over my eyelashes. "Look at me. I'm right here."

"I'm sorry, Zelia," Ethan said, his voice flat, stripped of everything except manic urgency. "I can't stand by and watch her leave again."

He threw the ring onto the stone floor. It bounced, ringing with a hollow clang, before settling against the hem of my dress.

Then he ran.

He sprinted past the altar, down the center aisle, bursting through the oak doors and into the pouring rain, chasing after Serena.

The silence in the church was deafening before the whispers erupted like buzzing hornets.

"You fool!" My mother stormed up to the altar, slapping my bouquet straight out of my hands. Lilies scattered across the marble. "You couldn't even keep him for twenty minutes! You let him walk away! You humiliated us in front of the entire city!"

"He went after Serena," I sobbed, clutching my bare ring finger. "How could I stop him?"

"Because you have no charm!" my father spat, turning his back on me. "Serena commands a room with a glance, and you can't even hold a man who was already standing at the altar! Get out of my sight."

They left me there. Every single guest filed out, averting their eyes or smirking behind their programs, until the vaulted ceiling echoed only with the rain outside.

I knelt on the cold stone. With both hands, I grabbed the heavy silk train of the gown and yanked. The expensive seams ripped, threads tearing violently until the fabric pulled apart. I threw the tattered mess into the corner.

The naive girl died right there on that stone floor.

Hours later, numb and soaked to the bone, I stood on the windy balcony of the hotel penthouse terrace, staring down at the glowing grid of Manhattan. The drop was terrifyingly far. My bare arms were covered in goosebumps, the ripped gown clinging to me like wet paper.

"The view isn't worth catching pneumonia," a deep, gravelly voice spoke from the shadows behind me.

I spun around, my back hitting the railing.

A tall man stepped out from the glass doorway. He was dressed in a tailored three-piece suit, an unlit cigar between his fingers. He had dark hair, sharp features carved from granite, and eyes the color of a stormy sea.

Before I could speak, he slipped off his heavy wool jacket and laid it across my bare shoulders. The warmth was immediate, carrying the scent of cedar and clean rain.

"I don't need your pity," I croaked, trying to shove the fabric away.

He caught my wrist. His grip was firm, unyielding, yet completely devoid of cruelty.

"It isn't pity," he said, his voice steady and calm. "I watched the circus at the chapel. Your parents are cowards, and that boy is an idiot."

"You were there?"

"Business obligation," he replied plainly. He leaned his forearms against the wet railing, gazing out over the city lights. "They threw you away to save their pride. And you're standing out here in the freeze, mourning people who aren't worth the cloth you tore up."

I lowered my head, my throat burning. "Nobody wants a replacement."

He turned his head, his storm-grey eyes pinning mine in the dark.

"Since none of them want you," he said quietly, "are you interested in learning to choose yourself first?"

I stared at him, bewildered. "Who are you?"

He reached into his pocket and handed me a heavy metal card embossed with silver lettering.

"Dylan Ashford," he replied. "And if you want a clean slate, you call that number tomorrow morning."

* * *

"Zelia!"

Ethan's sharp voice snapped me back to the present.

The restaurant was silent. The waiters had stopped serving. Serena stood beside Ethan, her manicured fingers trembling against his sleeve, her mouth open in shock.

"Who is Ashford?" Ethan demanded again, stepping closer, reaching out to grab my wrist just like he used to.

I stepped back smoothly, letting his hand grasp empty air.

"Someone who never left me behind," I said.

The private elevator behind the dining room pinged with a soft chime. The brass doors slid open, and a tall, formidable figure stepped out into the dining room.