The air inside St. Jude’s Cathedral was thick with tension, not reverence. I gripped a bouquet of roses so tightly that the thorns pierced my palms, the sting the only thing keeping me upright. Forty-five minutes past the scheduled start, the organist had gone silent, leaving the whispers of four hundred social elites to echo off the vaulted ceilings. They murmured about my background—or lack of it—questioning how Ryan Vance could ever settle for a nurse.
I fixed my gaze on a stained-glass martyr, feeling the cold kinship of stone and lead. My Vera Wang gown, a gift Ryan’s mother reminded me cost more than my father’s yearly salary, weighed like a stone. My father had died three years ago. I stood alone, a solitary figure amid strangers: Ryan’s colleagues, his mother’s social circle, all seeing me as a flaw in their polished world.
In the front row, Mrs. Vance radiated triumph in silver, her eyes locking onto mine with predator-like satisfaction. Ryan had sent a text claiming a “work emergency.” “Just wait,” he’d said. And wait I had.
Then I saw him—Julian Thorne—at the back, a shadowed figure in the pews. The billionaire recluse, CEO of Titan Corp, never attended events like this. Yet there he was, staring at me with the intensity of a man who had never forgotten. Three years ago, I’d pulled him from a burning car on a rain-slicked highway, stopped his bleeding with my own clothing. I’d assumed he’d forgotten, just a blur of scrubs in a terrifying night.
But it wasn’t Ryan who walked down the aisle. It was Mrs. Vance, microphone in one hand, red wine in the other, announcing for all to hear that the wedding was off. Ryan was supposedly across town with Isabella Sterling, a “real” heiress. And me? I was a placeholder, a footnote in the Vances’ climb. Then, in a cruel gesture, she tore the lace veil from my head and splashed wine across my dress, turning silk to deep red.
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