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The music shifts and people start to stand, just slightly, shoulders turning, necks craning. Even the candles seem to hush, like they’re holding their breath at the event we’re about to behold.

She’s here.

The doors open at the far end of the aisle, and everything slows.

Arianette Hexley.

Not the girl I chased through the forest or the waif with bloody hands and a thousand-yard stare.

This version of her?

She’s unrecognizable.

The side door creaks open, barely audible over the hum of the organ. He enters like the boldest of shadows–our King. Face covered in an ebony mask with horns tipped in gold. He sweeps into the chapel in a long black cloak. His presence is calculated, quiet authority, while not taking away from his bride’s entrance.The pentagram ring glints on his finger. He doesn't glance at the crowd, or over at Graves, who is standing next to the altar prepared to officiate the ceremony. His eyes are locked onher.

Made of black satin, the dress clings to her body like a second skin, her waist cinched so tight in a corset it might as well be armor. A large bow sits at the back of her head, and I’m taken right back to the first day we went to campus and she was dressed like a schoolgirl.

Now, I get it. It suits her. That twisted mix of innocence and the taboo. It comes off her in waves, like the way her skirt flows behind her, lace trailing over the stone floor. Her hair is done up, coiled into an elegant silhouette with curls twisted in place, the bow mounted at the top of her ponytail, childlike and chilling all at once. A doll in a funeral dress.

Her face is covered by black mesh–a veil protecting her from this world. It’s impossible to see her face, her features hazy like a mirage, something intangible. I know Arianette is real. I’ve seen her run. Dance. Writhe in ecstasy. I don’t need to see her face to know the woman underneath.

She walks slowly. The music low as a whisper.

I’m an engineer. I deal in facts and figures. Calculations and hard truths. I don’t believe in religion. I don’t believe in fate, or curses, or whatever it is that makes men create agreements over a woman’s body, much less her soul.

But standing in that chapel, watching the shadows stretch long across the altar, it doesn’t feel like pageantry. It feels real. Ancient. Like the ground is shifting beneath us, ready to swallow us into the catacombs that run beneath the city.

Something bigger than us is about to happen.

I glance toward DK. His face is unreadable, but I think he feels the shift too. That somehow we went from outsiders to insiders, although she doesn’t look at anyone. Not me. NotDamon. Not the crowd of women whispering behind their hands.

Arianette doesn’t smile or flinch.

She justwalkstoward the King, a sacrificial lamb who already made peace with the knife.

34

Timothy

I stand at the altar,shadowed beneath the flickering chandelier of candles, my cloak heavy across my shoulders, the mask pressed firmly to my face. Every eye in the room, from the city's elite, to the snakes in elegant clothing, to the young Royals in the front rows–including my son–have their eyes on the bride as she walks toward me.

We aren’t the only ones in the room. There are ghosts dead and alive that seem to linger just beyond the candlelight, sitting in judgment, waiting for me to fail.

Again.

The chapel is cold stone and smoke, the scent of incense clinging to the air like blood to silk. My gloves are black leather. My vows memorized, twisted and old.

And then, she appears.

Arianette. Walking slowly, almost tentative, down the center aisle.

Black satin clings to the curves of her body, making her look both hard and soft. Her veil floats over her shoulders, grazing the swell of her breasts.

Then that bow. It’s bigger than the width of her head. Sexy, yet innocent.

Daughter of Darkness. The Barons’ Sinister Sister. Our Baroness.

My bride.