Don't Mess with My Lethal Fiancée novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Hello, Fiancée
At her engagement party the fugitive killer meets her arranged groom and he is the man from the cabin; she slides on the ring herself, and he whispers that he kept her knife.
The man waiting at the end of the Corwin ballroom had his back to me.
I stopped just inside the doors with eighty strangers talking around me.
Three weeks ago I had put a knife to a man's throat in a lake cabin.
Then I had slept with him, and left before the sun came up.
I had never learned his real name.
The man at the end of the ballroom stood exactly like him.
Pavel had told me only one thing on the phone three days ago.
"A rich family needs a bride by Saturday, kid. Say yes, and the fifty grand on your head goes away."
I had said yes because the crew he trained me with was hunting me.
I had walked off my last job, and the crew does not forgive that.
Pavel had given me a groom's name, Bram Corwin, and no photograph.
He had given me a dress, too, and a ring size.
The dress was dark green and cut low in the back.
It left room for the spare blade strapped to my thigh.
My good knife was still in a cabin by a lake.
A silver-haired man in a navy suit crossed the floor with his arms open.
"There she is," he said, loud enough for the whole room.
"Everyone, this is Vesper Tierney."
Heads turned all along the ballroom.
"I'm Torben Corwin, the groom's uncle," he said, and kissed my cheek.
He smelled of cigars and expensive soap.
His hand stayed on my elbow a moment too long.
"Vesper is twenty-seven," he told the crowd, smiling.
"She comes to us from Gary, Indiana, and from nobody at all."
A few people laughed.
"No people to invite," Torben said. "It saves us so much on the seating chart."
More laughter, thin and polite, the kind rich people use to show they are in on a joke.
I kept my face still.
I had been called worse by men with their hands around my wrists.
I looked past Torben to the man at the end of the room.
He turned around.
Black hair, brown eyes, a nose that had been broken once and set straight.
A dark suit that fit.
It was him.
The floor tilted under my heels.
He looked at me across the ballroom and did not look surprised at all.
"My nephew Bram," Torben said. "Thirty-two years old, and finally settling down."
Bram walked toward me through the crowd.
Nobody moved in his way.
He stopped an arm's length from me, and I saw the small scar over his eyebrow where my forehead had cracked into it.
The cabin was three weeks ago.
I had told him my name was Jane.
He had told me his was Dean.
"Hello, Vesper," he said, in the same quiet voice.
Torben held up a small velvet box.
Inside it sat a ring with a stone the size of a hazelnut.
"Bram, put it on her, and let's all see how pretty she looks," Torben said.
He winked at the guests.
"Before she changes her mind about our family."
The laughing started again.
I understood the room then.
Torben wanted me small.
He wanted the bride from nowhere to stand there and take it while eighty people watched.
I took the box out of his hand before Bram could.
The laughing stopped.
I plucked the ring from the velvet and pushed it onto my own finger.
It was the right size, because Pavel had measured me.
"Thank you, Torben," I said, loud enough for the back wall.
"But I don't need anyone to put it on me."
I held up my hand so the stone caught the chandelier.
"I came here by myself," I said. "I'll stand here by myself, too."
A woman near the bar actually gasped.
Then I turned to Bram.
I took the front of his jacket in my fist, pulled him down, and kissed him in front of the entire room.
It was not polite.
His mouth was warm and exactly as I remembered it.
His hand came up to the small of my back, in the bare place the dress left open.
He kissed me back.
Somebody started clapping, and then everyone was.
When I let go, my pulse was slamming in my ears.
Bram bent his head as if he meant to say something sweet.
His lips were against my ear.
"You left your knife by my sink," he whispered.
"I kept it."
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