I find the dress on a rack behind a curtain, sheathed in a garment bag that hasn't been opened. Ivory silk. Simple. Clean lines, no beading, no crystals, nothing that tries too hard. It moves when I pull it free, liquid, alive, the kind of fabric that remembers the shape of whoever wears it. The kind of dress that makes a woman look like herself, only more.
I hate that he knew. I hate more that he's right.
Elena helps me into it. Her hands are steady, professional, pulling the zipper with the ease of someone who's dressed for a thousand events. The silk settles against my skin like a second layer of something I didn't know I was missing.
In the mirror, wearing his choice, I look like a bride. Not a decorated one, not a purchased one — a real one. The silk catches light along my collarbones, pools at my feet like water. My red hair — darker than my brothers', closer to auburn — falls past my shoulders against the ivory and the contrast is striking in a way I didn't expect. I look pale and sharp-featured and fierce, nothing like the soft brides in the magazines the Romano women were flipping through. I look like a woman walking into a war in a beautiful dress. It's the most beautiful thing I've ever worn, and it fits like it was cut for my body, and the fact that Nico Konstantinos chose it from across the city without seeing me in a single gown makes me feel seen in a way that's terrifying and electric.
He's choosing for me. That triggers every alarm I have — a lifetime of men deciding what's best, what's appropriate, what a good girl wears to her own goddamn wedding. My father chose my school. Cormac chose my apartment. Even the terms I negotiated yesterday felt like choices made within a cage someone else built.
But this is different. This isn't a man choosing what he wants his wife to look like. This is a man who noticed what I'd choose for myself and put it where I'd find it. The way he rememberedthe Ricci function — what I wore, what I said, details from a night eight months ago that I didn't think anyone was paying attention to. The dress in the back of the boutique. Evidence of the same impulse: attention. Not control. Attention.
Both things could be true. A man who pays attention is also a man who collects information. A man who knows your taste is a man who's been studying you longer than you've known he existed.
I don't know which version of Nico I'm marrying. Maybe both.
"Oh," Elena says from the doorway. She stops. Looks at me. Her face does something complicated — admiration and something beneath it, something with teeth. "That's the one."
"He chose it."
"Of course he did." She says this without surprise, without jealousy, with something closer to resignation. "Nico notices everything. It's what makes him..." She doesn't finish the sentence. "You look stunning, Siobhan. Truly."
"Thank you." I turn back to the mirror. "For today. For all of this. I didn't expect to find a friend here."
"Neither did I."
She means it. That's the worst part — I can hear that she means it. Whatever else is happening behind those careful eyes, the warmth she shows me isn't entirely performed. It would be easier if it were.
Across the room, a phone buzzes, and it’s not mine. Elena's bag, on the chair by the window. She crosses to it quickly, glances at the screen. Something tightens in her jaw. She pockets the phone and turns back to me with her smile restored.
"Caterer," she says. "They always call at the worst time."
I nod. I don't think about it again.
The rest of the afternoon passes in champagne and fabric swatches and women who've accepted this life trying to prepareme for it. I listen more than I talk. I learn: which families matter, which wives have power, which marriages are real and which are theater. Elena narrates quietly beside me, a guide to a world I'm about to enter whether I'm ready or not.
In the car home — alone, finally, blessedly alone — I press my hand against the garment bag on the seat beside me and think about a man who chose my wedding dress without seeing me try it on. Dark hair going silver at the temples — not age but stress, the weight of an empire graying him before forty. A jaw that could cut glass. And those eyes. Gold, not brown, not amber — gold, like something molten that hardened into something harder. The kind of eyes that make you feel seen in a way that's either safety or surveillance, and I still can't tell which.
Two days. In two days I walk down an aisle toward Nico Konstantinos in a dress he picked out, in a church I've never been to, in front of families that are using our bodies to build a wall against the Russians.
And somehow, absurdly, the thing that terrifies me most isn't the marriage or the war or the man who kills with golden eyes.
It's that the dress is perfect. He knew exactly what I'd want before I wanted it.
And I'm starting to wonder what else he knows.
Chapter 5
Nico
The Night Before
* * *
The penthouse is quiet the way it's always been quiet — aggressively, completely, the silence of a space designed by a man who doesn't tolerate noise. I walk through it the way I walk through it every night: checking sight lines, testing locks, cataloging the exits and windows the way my body does automatically, the way it's done since I was twenty-two and learned what happens when you stop paying attention.
Tomorrow she'll be here. In this space. Moving through these rooms. Leaving her jacket on the couch, her coffee cup on the counter, her shampoo in the bathroom. Evidence of a person where no person has been in years. The thought should feel like an intrusion. It doesn't. It feels like weather approaching, a shift in pressure I can sense but can't control.
I stop in the doorway of the room I've prepared for her. Separate bedroom, as agreed. I chose the one with the east-facing windows because I noticed she squints in afternoon light — she did it twice at Elysium, turning her chair away from the west windows without seeming to realize it. The sheets are Italian cotton, high thread count, neutral colors. Fresh flowerson the dresser — white peonies, because she wore a peony pin on her jacket at the Ricci function eight months ago and I filed that the way I file everything.