He Replaced His Groom, Then Begged for His Mate novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Veil
Felix lifts his wedding veil and finds Rowan's stepbrother Casper instead of Rowan; Rowan and Freddy mock him, he keeps the marriage and walks out, and in the car the crescent mark on his neck burns at Casper's touch.
Felix Ride lifted his wedding veil in front of four hundred guests, and the man across from him was not Rowan.
The grey silk slid off his face and the cameras caught it.
The groom in Rowan's vow coat was thin and young and trembling.
His sleeves hung past his knuckles, and his eyes were wet.
Felix knew him.
Rowan's stepbrother, who had stood at the back of the rehearsal dinner and spoken to no one.
"Where is Rowan?" Felix asked.
Nobody answered him.
Then someone in the front row laughed, and Felix knew that laugh too.
His brother had straightened his veil that morning in the dressing room.
"Don't peek," his brother had said, patting his shoulder. "Bad luck. Rowan's a wreck, so he asked to be veiled early. Trust me, he'll be perfect."
Rowan had texted at dawn: Under the veil. Love you.
Felix had read it forty times.
He looked down at the hand he had held through all the vows.
It was colder than Rowan's, and smaller, and it had no scent at all.
Rowan Wexley stood up from the front row, buttoned his jacket and walked to the dais.
"Congratulations, Felix," he said. "The register is signed. The pack seal is on it. A veiled vow can't be broken for a year and a day."
Casper made a small sound.
"Look at you," Rowan went on, loud enough for the livestream. "An omega married to an omega. I've never seen anything so sad."
Some of the guests laughed, and more of them lifted their phones.
"Why?" Felix said.
"Because I needed your head, not your heart." Rowan's voice was light. "Six years of your spreadsheets and your late nights. I'm grateful, truly. But I never wanted you in my bed."
He held out his hand without looking back.
Freddy came up the steps and took it.
"Freddy's the only Ride I ever liked," Rowan said.
"Sorry, little brother." Freddy was grinning. "It was my idea. You'd never have let him go if I'd asked nicely."
Felix looked at the two of them, hand in hand, under the flowers he had chosen.
Six years he had sat up past midnight with Rowan's numbers, and never once asked to be thanked.
An hour ago a voice under the other veil had promised to cherish him, in a whisper he had taken for nerves.
Felix thought of the hundred ways to scream at them.
He thought of the cameras.
So he decided to keep the marriage, and use it.
He turned to Casper Froster, who was crying without a sound.
"I'm so sorry," Casper whispered. "I didn't want to."
Felix took the thin hand in his, lifted it high and held up the ring where everyone could see.
"Then it's done," he said to the hall. "I'm married. Thank you for witnessing it, all four hundred of you."
Nobody laughed this time.
He walked Casper down the aisle, past every raised phone, and didn't hurry.
In the back of the car he opened an app that had no name on it and no photo of him anywhere.
Lantern Capital.
Behind it were six years of his own money, put quietly into one company, one lease, one loan at a time.
Wexley Group, standing credit line, forty million, due to renew Monday.
Felix pressed Freeze.
His thumb moved to the line below it, the monthly family-care payment Rowan had asked him to approve in the spring, and he left that one alone.
Casper was staring at the floor, shaking, with his hands in his lap and his borrowed sleeves bunched around his wrists.
"Please say something," he said. "Hit me. Anything."
"Give me your hand," Felix said.
Casper didn't move.
"Casper."
He held it out, and the cuff slipped back from his wrist.
Their skin touched.
At the back of Felix's neck, on the crescent birthmark he had carried since the day he was born, something began to burn.
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