Page 9 of Bloody Wedding (The Order of the Owed #1)

FOUR

I DO

LONI

I don’t scream.

Someone else does. Probably half the church does. The shouts rattle around my stunned brain, echoing in my ears, but they sound so far away at the same time.

Maybe because the gunshots ringing out deafened me in their wake. Or maybe because a part of me is floating above the scene, taking it in like a stunned spectator, separate but here at the same time…

Shock, I think, my body trembling, my breath coming too, too fast, Desmond’s warm blood rapidly cooling on my skin. Most of it is pooled beneath him where he fell, a pretty crimson pond, with my bouquet lapping at the edge of it.

Oh. I must’ve dropped the flowers. I flex my fingers, noticing that my hands are empty, and swallow the hysterical laugh bubbling up my throat.

He’s dead.

Dead.

Dead. Dead. Deaddead dead .

And the man who killed my groom? Is stalking toward me as though the people screaming, running, escaping the pews aren’t anywhere near enough of a distraction to keep him from getting to me.

He’s definitely a distraction on my end.

I haven't seen Adrian Heller in almost a decade. He's as fiercely beautiful now as he was then, though the gun held lazily in his grip makes him dangerously so.

I hope I’m not too late .

To kill Desmond? To make me some kind of pre -widow, killing my groom before we could even get to the ‘I do’s?

Oh, no. He’s right on fucking time.

I notice small differences as the world falls away, leaving just the two of us standing here.

His hair is a little darker than it used to be, making his eyes seem even lighter in comparison.

He wears his suit like a second skin, only he doesn’t have on a tie like the other wedding guests.

His dress shirt is slightly unbuttoned, a sliver of his bare chest on display.

A pair of small golden hoops wink in his left ear.

His lazy expression hides the heat in his gaze.

Me. He’s looking at me .

And I’m looking back.

Because it’s Adrian. Adrian .

That does it. It might’ve taken me longer than it should to realize what was happening, but as reality zooms back in, I look around, seeing that there aren’t any wedding guests left.

Everyone has fled from the man with the gun until only me, Adrian, and the dead Desmond are arranged near the front of the church.

Run, I think. Run.

Grabbing my ruined dress, cursing my unwieldy heels, I turn from Adrian and start toward the empty first pew.

In my mind, I know I’m not getting away from an unrepentant murderer. I’m getting away from Adrian Heller.

From my past.

From him ?—

“Not so fast, Loni,” murmurs Adrian. The gun is gone, tucked away or tossed aside, but his hand is empty enough that he can grasp my upper bicep. The touch of his skin on mine short-circuits my brain, the sound of my long ago nickname in his suave voice only adding to it, and I stop.

I just… stop.

He’s not squeezing my arm. He’s not grabbing me, yanking me, pulling me the same way that Desmond did the other night at my dad’s place. He just has a firm, possessive hold on me as he easily guides me back to the altar.

And it hits me: I’m not getting away from anyone, am I?

I walk around Desmond, grateful that he fell facedown so that I don’t have to see the last expression on his face before Adrian killed him. He leads me, kicking Desmond’s shoe as he tucks me into his side, careful that I don’t come too close to the corpse.

I don’t have any idea what he’s doing. Killing Desmond… desecrating the church… showing up here when I haven’t seen him in so damn long… none of this makes sense. Moving me toward the altar of an empty church? That makes even less .

Only it’s not empty. Not entirely. The rest of the wedding guests have all rushed for the doors—including Dad—but there are still two others waiting to meet Adrian and me at the altar: Father Francis and Dallas Collins.

Dallas has a weapon of his own out. Holding a gun in his grip, standing right behind the priest, he nods at Adrian. Like he’s in on it. Like this was all some kind of plan…

In front of me, Father Francis is trembling. Speechless.

Terrified.

Adrian grins. “This is the part where you make Loni my wife.”

A squeak escapes me as I turn my head sharply, looking him dead in the face.

He winks at me.

My mouth falls open, but I still don’t scream.

He didn’t?—

He can’t?—

He is .

I jerk my arm. Without any other reaction, he releases me.

I shake my head, too stunned to find the words just yet.

Adrian shrugs. “You know what Jack said.” Jack.

The King is Adrian’s uncle, but for as far back as I can remember, he’s never referred to the man by either title.

Not the King, not Uncle Jack, but simply Jack as if he has nothing but contempt for the relative who controls the Order of the Owed.

“You need to be a married woman. Your other groom is sadly indisposed at the moment. Luckily, I’m more than happy to take his place. ”

I work my jaw, struggling to understand. Finally, I whisper, “You want me to marry you.”

A ghost of his old familiar smirk. “I insist on it.”

Can he do that? I admit, I forgot a lot of the Order’s ridiculous laws, bylaws, and loopholes.

As an Offering, I only needed to know about the ones that affected me.

The others were left to the men in the Order, and I foolishly believed that my husband could deal with all of that.

Then I was stripped of being an Offering and forgetting it all… that was my own tiny act of rebellion.

I was Claimed. Both Dallas and Desmond made that clear. Desmond Claimed me, and Jack Collins granted his Claim. He’s supposed to be the one marrying me, but he’s dead, and Adrian killed him.

Is this why? To get to me?

It can’t be.

Can it?

No. It’s not possible. This is just a decade’s worth of his animosity building up.

Instead of simply being my bully, he’s here to fucking ruin my life in the most public way he could.

Marrying Desmond wasn’t my first plan, but my family would be set for life as inducted, protected members of the Order if I did.

But what does Adrian do? Takes away the one benefit to me giving up my new life in favor of returning to my old one.

Murdering Desmond might be taking it a step too far, granted.

Too bad there’s never been a line he wouldn’t cross when it came to getting a rise out of me.

For so many years, I was his favorite target.

Not even falling for him and giving him my heart, body, and soul saved me from the dark side of Adrian Heller.

And now he’s here, showing it off. Shooting a man in cold blood, executing him in the middle of the church…

that hint of danger I was always drawn to has me unsure if I want to see if he’ll really go through with it…

really marry me… or if I should take my chances on whether he’ll shoot me next or not.

Would he? The boy I knew wouldn’t, but the man he’s become in my absence?

I… I don’t know.

He’s obviously capable of murder. That doesn’t shock me.

To ascend the ranks of the Order, an Owed needs to be.

To prove your loyalty to the society, plenty of its members have to kill in its name.

Then there are enforcers who are charged with eliminating threats to the Order, from within it or outside of it.

Dallas is one of them. Maybe Adrian is, too.

What do I know about him? Nothing… except that, ten years later, one possessive look from this man has my entire body suddenly on fire.

What does that say about me that, instead of freaking the fuck out, I want to get closer to him?

No .

He knows it. I can tell from his expression. He’s daring me to step into him, and when I don’t, he hikes up his pants, squatting down so that he can grab the bloody bouquet from the floor.

Adrian gives the bouquet a casual flick, knocking loose a few stray droplets of blood still clinging to the flowers. Then, satisfied, he offers it out to me. “Come here, my bride.”

Here comes the bride… all dressed in white…

I glance down.

Red.

I’m covered in red.

Seeing Desmond’s blood staining the white petals, dotting the white fabric… that snaps me out of my daze at last.

“You can’t do this, Adrian.” Even as he settles into his place in front of Father Francis, waiting for me, still holding the bouquet in his gun-free hand, I struggle to resist the urge to touch him, to make sure it’s him, to make sure he’s real .

I haven’t quite given up on running yet. To, from, away… but that’s impossible. With Dallas and his lazy grin watching both the priest and me with a predator’s gaze, I’m not leaving this church a single woman—and we all know it.

Still, I need to put some space between us, and even if it’s only a few feet, I stumble in my heels away from Adrian.

His eyes sparkle, one part mischief, one part dare. “Be careful of the corpse under your feet, princess. You don’t want to get any more blood on that dress of yours.”

Then, with the slightest movement, he transfers the bouquet from his right hand to his left. He twists the wrist on his right hand, drawing my attention to the brand on his palm. The ruined skin.

The mark of the Owed.

It’s a flash of a reminder that, in Harmony Heights, a man like Adrian Heller can do any fucking thing he wants.

Including marrying me, it seems.

He jerks his chin at Father Francis. “The longer you take, the more that blood will seep into your carpet, Father. Might want to get a move on.”

Father Francis’s eyes dart to Adrian’s hand. I can just about see the gears spinning in his mind, wondering whether he should force me to marry Adrian or find a way out of this for the both of us.

He doesn’t know that I didn’t want to marry the dead man on the floor. Or maybe he did, but that wasn’t going to stop him.

It’s not going to stop him now, either, because Father Francis…

he saw the mark, too. He knows that Adrian is a member of the Order, and that it’ll be up to the Order to deal with the fallout from Desmond’s death inside of St. Catherine’s.

For all he does know, this was arranged.

Maybe Adrian’s uncle gave him permission to do this.

Just like with Desmond, though, I don’t know why he would want to be my new groom—but he’s standing there, with Dallas as his witness, as he waits for me to do my part.

As if I’ve forgotten, Adrian holds out the bouquet to me once more. “Princess.”

Okay. I can’t help myself. This is insanity, all of it is, but that’s the second time he’s used a name for me that no one ever has before. I thought I was hearing things before, but that time… there’s no denying it.

Jack is the King. Dallas is his only child, and the first fistfight I ever saw in person was in second grade when an older kid called Dallas ‘Prince’.

Dallas blackened Stu Marone’s eye and knocked out his two front teeth.

After, Sebastien Reynolds took a pair of safety scissors out of his backpack and hacked off half of the older boy’s hair while Connor Heyward pinned Stu down.

Desmond took the cheap shot, kicking Stu in the nuts while he was already on the ground.

Adrian, of course, was the one who told Dallas about the unfortunate nickname before coming up with a way to distract the schoolyard monitors so that the other boys could get revenge on Stu for upsetting one of them.

From then on, I always thought of the quintet as a solid group. No one referred to them as anything other than the Boys, though I gave them my own secret nickname in middle school: the Heirs. Everyone knew that, one day, those five would rule the Order—and Harmony Heights.

Ten years later, Jack Collins is still in charge. Dallas is obviously a top enforcer, and Adrian must be right up there with him. Do I know what happened to Connor? Or Sebastien? No. Not yet.

And Desmond… being in the Order didn’t save him. In fact, I’m pretty sure it condemned him.

Or maybe that was just me.

But ‘Princess’? I have my legacy in the Order, my family going all the way back to the beginning, but I’m no princess. I was a sullied Offering who rejected becoming a Used until some way, somehow I ended up in this bloody wedding dress.

I swallow, and ask, “Princess?”

Adrian waits for me to accept the bouquet from him.

Knowing that he’ll only answer me if I do, I clutch it with trembling fingers.

He nods. “‘Princess’ because that’s what you look like to me right now, Loni.” He lifts his hand, dappled with blood, warm and alive, and he caresses my chin. “You look like mine .”

I swallow roughly. He shifts his hand, trailing it down the column of my throat, nestling his fingers in the curve of my shoulder before cupping the back of my neck.

He turns us both so that we’re facing Father Francis.

“Let’s get on with it, Father. And hurry, if you would.” His gaze slides my way. “I’d like to get to the part where I get to kiss my bride.”

My pulse jumps at the thought. With his gentle hold on me, he feels it.

And he laughs. “You seem a little eager, too, princess. Good. Because I fucking do .”

He does.

But what about me?