Chapter 3 The Wedding

Liana's POV

Nobody answered.

They simply smiled, like they'd heard it all already. Like they already knew something about me.

"Come, Madam," the tallest one instructed, gesturing for me to follow. "For now you will take some rest."

I followed him. Not because I believed him. Trust had packed its bags and departed hours earlier. I followed because the corridor stretched out before me like a condemnation, and I had nowhere else to turn.

He stopped in front of a door that was too high, too lavish, as if it would engulf lesser people whole. Wood that glimmered like a mirror. Gold filigree that talked of nobility and other people's money.

He opened it in a ceremony. "Please go to your room, Madam."

My room?

He went away without looking over his shoulder, and the door clicked behind me with a kind of finality that made the walls vibrate.

I went in.

The air was perfumed with money and secrets. Fresh, crisp, and icy. The carpet swallowed my footfalls as if I had no right to leave a mark. The ceiling was so high that it looked as though the sky had been trapped within it. I turned around, bewildered, like a lost child in a museum.

And then I saw it.

The photograph.

Standing on the nightstand as though she were a guilt-ridden witness. Her. The boutique woman. The one I'd swapped clothes with in the fitting room-her face now defined in silver, beaming like she'd won.

What the devil?

My skin crawled. My mind raced. That smile. Soft, smug, carved. She knew. She had known this would occur.

I backed away, only to collide with a mirrored closet door. I shoved it open-and found a shrine.

Couture gowns. Designer purses displayed like masterpieces. Shoes I could never buy even if I worked five lifetimes. All spread out like they belonged to someone who was idolized. Someone inaccessible.

And yet, they thought that someone was me.

A bitter, idiotic laugh slipped from my lips.

I collapsed onto the bed-not because I was relaxing, but because my knees buckled. The photograph glared at me like a ghost in the room. I covered my face with my hands. Tried to scream. It was a wheeze.

Then there was the knocking.

The door creaked open against my will.

She came in.

An elderly woman. Ironed out. Bun on her head. The sort of woman who dared you to argue.

"There you are, dear," she burst out like I'd been away at war and had finally returned home. "You're back. Good. So much to prepare." Her bird-like hands fluttered about straightening imaginary folds from her apron.

"Prepare for what?" I snapped, my voice a rusty growl.

She blinked at me, stunned, as if I'd asked her what the sun was.

"Your wedding, sweetie. You need to be your best for the ceremony."

I gaped. My brain careened.

"What wedding? I'm not-"

She stopped me with a hand on my shoulder. "I know, I know, nerves are terrible. But you have to be brave. You have to do this... for your family."

Those words. That sentence. That line. It dropped with the weight of a guillotine.

For your family.

My blood turned cold. My mind broke apart.

For your family.

Was it what this was? A transaction? A whiskey- and guilt-conceived bargain in the closed rooms of his mind? My father always used to talk in a drowning-to-debt-island sort of manner. A bad year. A few mistakes. There were too many zeros on the wrong side. Did he get rid of me to save himself?

Did he sell me?

---

Two Days Later

It's been Two days already

Two days ago I was shoved into this mansion dressed like a palace and festering like a prison. Two days of marble silence and velvet lies. I was treated like a queen and watched like a threat. Isolated in a room where the gold molding mocked me and the chandeliers looked like eyes.

I did it all. Every window. Every door. I screamed. I begged. I pounded on the door until my knuckles were bruised and my voice crumbled into dust. And yet, no one came-except her.

The old woman.

She'd appear like a nursery rhyme on legs, with trays of untouched food and that pinpoint grandmotherly smile as if she pitied me for not being able to enjoy the poison.

She called me Stella. Stella, Stella, Stella. Like if she said it enough times, I'd forget I wasn't.

I complained about everything. The meals. The dresses she laid out for me. The plush dresses with pearl buttons and silk collars. Each one a funeral suit for a funeral I'd never agreed to go to.

And now... wedding day.

They did not knock. They burst in.

The door slammed open as if they had finally abandoned the pretense that I had a voice.

They swarmed down. Assistants brandishing clipboards. Headset women. Stylists with faces set like surgeons getting ready to cut. They revolved around me without so much as a by-your-leave, without an instant's pause, as if I was a mannequin who had ceased to function.

"What the fuck is going on here?" I insisted, digging my heels in.

She smiled, her teeth too perfectly white. "It's time to get ready, Miss. It's your wedding day."

The words hit me like a slap in the face. My heart didn't just sink-it fell out of my chest.

"No. No, no, no-"

But they weren't listening to me. They were already pulling out the dress.

A coffin of glass rolled in, gleaming like a fairy tale casket. Inside, a gown shone as if made from moonlight and folklores. Lace, gold thread so fine, a train like a curtain between me and my fate. It looked too expensive to breathe upon. As if it should be roped off in a museum.

A woman's voice whispered behind me, "It's all going to be fine, dear."

I spun around. It was her. The old woman. My captor with a tea cart.

Her eyes glistened like she thought this was beautiful. Like she was proud.

"You'll look perfect today," she said. "You have to do this. For your family."

There it was again. That phrase. That trigger.

For your family.

It churned my stomach. I remembered the way she spoke it on the first night. I remembered her silence when I asked whom I was going to marry and she gave me nothing.

And I knew now why.

Because maybe the truth was too horrific to speak.

Maybe my father had shaken some stranger's hand in the darkness and signed off on my life.

A transaction. Something that seemed survival to him and betrayal to me.

I was sick. Not just in body. In soul. In the recesses of me that still believed my parents loved me.

But I let them dress me. I let them pull me into the gown, cinch buttons along my back like stitching me into a lie.

Because I needed answers.

Because I needed to know who they'd sold me to.

Because if I had to get down on that aisle to get to the truth-then I'd do it.

2hours later

I looked at myself in the mirror, staring at the woman I barely recognized. The dress was gorgeous-better than anything I'd ever imagined. Silk and lace mingled together like a dream, draping itself around me like a mist. It was not designed for someone like me. It was designed for another-someone who was supposed to be here, in this world of wealth and beauty. Someone selected for this. Not me.

Not Liana Bellarose.

I swallowed the lump in my throat. The dress was not making me bride-like. It was making me doll-like, mannequin-like, all dressed up in something too fine to be touched.

When I turned to leave the room, the weight of the gown lay on me even more strongly. It was not the weight of the material; it was the reality of all that I had become in two days' time. A pawn. A stranger in a life not my own.

When I stepped out, the pandemonium hit me like a wave. Photographers, cameras clicking in all directions. Reporters yelling questions, calling my name as if I was obliged to respond.

"Mrs. Volmore! Mrs. Volmore, how do you feel on your wedding day?"

I flinched at the name, the sound of it clashing with every part of my reality. Mrs. Volmore. That was not my name. That was not me. I wasn't her.

But it appeared that the world thought I was.

The words were a cold hand against my throat, and the cameras, the audience-they all melted into one as I stepped further out into the light, being forced to stride as if this was my world. My destiny. My choice.

They continued, snapping, shouting. The smiles were too wide, too rehearsed. The questions, too personal. "Mrs. Volmore, what do you think of your husband-to-be?" A reporter stood in my path, a microphone thrust up to my face. I stood frozen, my mouth opening and closing in stunned horror.

I had no answers. Answers for them. Answers for me.

My legs kept moving, walking, because I wasn't brave enough to stop. I couldn't.

"Mrs. Volmore, do you know your fiancé well?" another voice yelled behind me.

I flinched again, trying to keep the nausea that was rising in my stomach under control. I didn't know him. I didn't know anything about him.

But they all thought I did.

They were stopped by the guards around me.

As I approached the car. To the next stage of this nightmare, I asked myself if I'd survive the day, if I'd get to the end of the aisle and insist on an answer. Who was I actually marrying? Why had they brought me here?

-

The grand doors swung open like jaws.

Golden arches. White roses climbing crystal pillars. A cathedral dome so high that it looked like God himself would be watching this mess with arms folded, wondering who had let humans play god.

Everyone stood.

Heads turned.

Cameras clicked.

And me?

I was at the end of the aisle, wrapped in silk and stillness, surrounded by a wedding dress that clung to me like a falsehood. Every stitch cried out some other person's name.

I stepped.

The veil stung like shame on my skin. My heels were flavored with chains. I didn't walk. I floated. Driven by invisible strings I couldn't cut.

"Here comes the bride," someone bellowed.

The bride. The bride. But whose?

People smiled. Cried. Clutched their pearls as if this were the great love story of the century.

They didn't see the girl who'd screamed her throat raw behind locked doors. Who'd begged. Who'd scraped her nails down marble walls and implored something-anything-to break the fantasy.

And now, she was walking down the aisle like she was born to do it.

My own breath caught in my throat. Not because I was scarednot because I was angry. Because I was betrayed.

Where were my parents?

Why hadn't they picked me up?

Then I saw him.

The groom.

He stood like stone statue of enigma, inscrutable face, folded hands in front of him.

Nobody had uttered a word as to who precisely this man was.

?