I Saw the Ending Before My Wedding novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Door
The council bursts into the bridal suite and finds Lukas in bed with Thea; Ilse takes off the ring, and the eldest says the only clean house left is Kell.
The door of the bridal suite hit the wall, and my groom was in bed with my maid.
Lukas sat up with the sheet around his waist. Thea grabbed his arm and screamed.
Thea wore my hair down my back and my wedding veil on the pillow.
Behind me, the three elders of the harbor council filed into the room in their funeral coats.
I stood in front of them in a gas station sweatshirt, with three days of dirt on my face.
Thea saw the elders first. Then she saw me, and the color left her face.
"Who is she?" Thea said. "Lukas, who is that woman?"
"Ilse?" Lukas said.
He said it gently, with feigned confusion, his eyes lingering on me a moment too long.
He had said everything gently for six months. He had told me the wedding would be small, and that I should sign what his mother put in front of me, and that it was all just paper.
I had stopped signing on the second week.
"Ilse," the eldest said beside me. He was eighty-one and walked with a cane. "Say it again, for the room."
"I am Ilse Brandauer," I said. "Anton's daughter. The bride."
Nobody in that room had seen my face except Lukas, Thea and the eldest.
My family had kept me in a convent upstate for nineteen years so the feuds would never find me. They brought me home six months ago, to marry.
Thea knew that. Thea had unpacked my suitcase.
"She's lying," Thea said. "I'm Ilse. Tell them, Lukas."
"Of course you are," Lukas said. Then he heard himself and shut his mouth.
The eldest lifted my left hand and turned my wrist over.
The burn scar was there, the size of a coin. I got it from a convent stove when I was nine, and he had been at the hospital that day.
"That's her," the eldest said.
"A scar," Lukas said. "Anyone could have been told about a scar."
I pulled open my coat and tore the hem apart with my fingers.
My father's gold signet ring fell into my palm.
I had sewn it in there the week before the wedding, after I read what Lukas's mother wanted me to sign.
The eldest took it and held it under the light. Every man on the council knew that ring.
"Anton's," he said quietly. "His crest is cut inside the band, and he never let it leave his hand."
The room went very still.
Lukas pulled on his trousers and stood up. He had a plan ready, and I could see him reaching for it.
"Fine," he said. "Then ask her where she's been for three days."
"In a cellar," I said.
"Kell took her. Ask her who she walked out with. She's been in the enemy's hands since Tuesday, and I'd bet my life they've turned her."
"Lukas," a second elder said. "Stop talking."
"Her word is worth nothing, gentlemen. I'm trying to protect this house."
I remembered the cellar then, because he made me.
Three days on a cot with a bucket in the corner. Men with green rings on their right hands, who never once spoke to me.
One guard whistled the same two notes the whole time, low and flat, over and over.
On the third night he left the door open a hand's width. Under my bread he left an envelope, with bus fare inside.
He never said a word. I walked out, and I thought somebody had been careless.
I used a gas station phone to call the one number I had memorized at nine years old, the eldest's.
He believed me, and he brought the council.
"You know what I think?" Lukas said, softer now. "I think you're confused. You've been through something terrible. Let me take you to my mother."
His mother had sent me a gift basket on my first night home, with a card in her own handwriting.
It said: Whatever you need, my dear, ask me.
I had a lot of things I needed now.
"You did this," I said to Lukas.
"Ilse. Darling. I'd never."
"You and her."
Thea started to cry. Real tears, the same ones she had cried at my bedside when I woke with a cold.
I looked at the ring on my own left hand, the Reinholt diamond Lukas gave me in the spring.
I had worn it every day and never liked it.
So I took it off.
I put it on the council's table, between the champagne and the unopened guest list.
"I'm not marrying him," I said.
Lukas laughed, just once, in the silence.
The eldest cleared his throat.
"Ilse," he said. "You should understand what that costs you."
"I do."
"The treaty gives your father's dock share to whichever house the council finds clean. This house just lost its place on that list."
He looked at the other two elders. They looked at the floor.
"That leaves one house at the table," the eldest said.
I knew who he meant before he said it.
"Send for Matthias Kell."
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