Lethal Vows：Married to My Rival novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Bride
Nina breaks her fiance's wrist at the altar before two hundred guests, then drinks the water her adoptive brother hands her.
I had killed seven people for my family, and none of them had ever made my hands shake the way a wedding dress did.
I stood in the bride's room of St. Brendan's chapel, looking at a woman I barely knew in the mirror.
Ivory silk. A veil. A braid pinned up.
I had retired six months ago.
No more jobs, no more phone that rang at midnight, no more name whispered in the wrong rooms.
Crescent Moon was dead. Nina Harlow was getting married.
I pressed my left thumb into the half-moon scar across my palm and breathed out.
My father had died two weeks ago, and I still hadn't cried for him.
I wanted one thing from today, which was to walk down an aisle and be nobody.
Two hundred guests were waiting in the pews.
I went to find my best friend, because she had gone to check the flowers twenty minutes ago and hadn't come back.
The vestry door was open a few inches.
I heard Lacey laugh, low and wet.
"Stop it. She's right down the hall."
"She's in a dress, Lace. She's busy being grateful." That was Tobias, my fiancé, in the voice he used on me when I was sad. "Two more hours. Then I sign the trust papers and we never have to sneak again."
I stopped breathing.
Lacey Dunn had been my best friend since we were fourteen.
She had held my hair back at nineteen, on the worst night of my life.
I pushed the door open with two fingers.
Tobias had Lacey against the vestry table, his hand in her red hair, her pink bridesmaid dress hiked to her hips.
They didn't see me for one full second.
Then Lacey did, and her mouth made a perfect round O.
"Nina," Tobias said, pulling his hand away. "It's not what you think."
I looked at his hand.
I looked at the hickey on Lacey's neck, the dark kind that takes days to make.
"How long?" I asked.
Lacey fixed her dress. Her chin came up.
"A year," she said. "Since your engagement party. You really never noticed? And they called you sharp."
Behind me, the organ began to play.
I turned and walked down the corridor, and they came after me, Tobias saying my name in a whisper, Lacey saying nothing.
The chapel doors opened.
Two hundred faces turned to look at me.
I did not walk down the aisle. I stopped at the front pew, in front of the priest, and turned around to face the room.
Tobias came to my side, smiling for the guests with his teeth showing.
"Nina, honey, you're overwrought," he said under his breath. "Let's step outside."
"I'm not overwrought."
I took his right hand and held it up in the light, the one he had worn on Lacey's hip.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my fiancé would like to say something about his maid of honor."
A murmur ran through the pews.
Tobias yanked at his arm. "Let go of me."
I let go, and then I took his wrist in both hands and turned it a quarter turn the wrong way.
The crack was small, like a dry twig in a cold yard.
Tobias screamed.
He dropped to his knees on the carpet, white as the lilies on the altar, and somebody's grandmother shrieked in the third row.
"You broke my wrist," he sobbed. "You crazy bitch, you broke my wrist."
"Your other hand's next," I said, loud enough for the back rows. "Tell them where you were ten minutes ago."
Nobody moved.
Lacey stood in the aisle with her hands over her mouth and her hair mussed. Half the guests were looking at her neck.
"Nina, please," she whispered.
"You held my hair," I said. "You held my hair, Lacey."
A hand closed gently on my elbow.
"That's enough, sis."
Calvin.
My adoptive brother stood next to me in his gray morning suit, calm as a bank.
He had been my father's other child since he was eight years old and I was five, and he was the only person in the building who looked sad for me.
"Come on," he said softly. "Away from all this. I'll handle them."
He pressed a bottle of water into my hand.
"Drink something. You're shaking."
I was not shaking. But my throat was dry from shouting, and Calvin had never lied to me once in my life.
I drank half of it.
It tasted fine. A little flat. A little sweet.
Calvin watched me swallow, and the sadness slid off his face.
The floor tilted.
My knees hit the carpet, and the veil dragged across my eyes, and I saw Tobias's shoes, and Lacey's shoes, and Calvin's polished black ones stepping around me.
"Father left everything to you, Nina," Calvin said quietly above me. "The ships, the house, all of it. I couldn't let you keep it."
I tried to reach for his ankle.
My hand wouldn't close.
"Don't fight it," my brother said. "You've always been so good at the fighting. They'll love you where you're going."
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