41. And Then There Was None
And Then There Was None
~CADE~
The crowd hits me like a wave the second I round the last corner toward the ceremony tent.
I flash my clearance badge at the first ring of security and put my shoulder down, and I have to physically fight my way through a wall of bodies that has no business being here.
It's chaos. It's so much worse than I let myself imagine when I sent that message, sitting safe and sick in my own cowardice by the fortune-teller's tent an hour ago.
There have to be two hundred people crushed up against the barricades, phones held high, elbows flying.
Photographers with lenses like cannons. Faces I've known my whole life — Ruth Kettle from the general store, a couple of guys I played summer-league ball with, Beatrice Honeywell up on her toes with her phone out — all of them shoving, craning, hungry.
Near the front, unmistakable, stands a woman in a blazer with a microphone and a cameraman at her back.
A news crew. An actual news crew.
My own scent is going rancid on me, spiced rum souring into something like turned fruit, and the people nearest me flinch from it even as they shove forward.
I did this. That's the drumbeat under everything, steady and merciless.
I did this. Every one of these hungry faces is here because I fed them the address.
Every phone held over every head is streaming a private moment I was hired — trusted, paid, believed — to protect, and I am the one who cracked it open like an egg for the whole world to gawk at.
What did I do.
Security's getting swallowed. I can see it happening in real time — four men in black polos trying to hold a line against a tide that outnumbers them fifty to one, their scents gone acrid with adrenaline, their arms straining.
It won't hold. Any fool can see it won't hold.
The whole thing is about to break open like a dropped melon, and every single one of these people is going to pour into a private ceremony because a coward with a phone told them exactly where to stand.
The regret comes on so fast and so hard it nearly buckles my knees.
I don't know what I think I'm going to do about it.
I've got no plan. All I've got is a body suddenly moving on pure animal panic, ducking under the tent flap security waves me through on my badge, striding down the long petal-strewn runner toward the front — toward Nolan, I think, toward warning Nolan, get Sloane out, get her out before this becomes something nobody can undo.
You absolute idiot. It hits me halfway down the aisle, the full stupidity of it.
I'm the bank robber sprinting to the teller to whisper hide the money — while my own duffel bag is still full of it.
I'm the arsonist calling in his own fire.
There's no version of this where I get to be the hero of the thing I set on fire myself.
My legs carry me forward anyway. Right up until they stop.
Because there, at the end of the aisle, up on the low platform under a floral arch dripping apricot roses and coral dahlias and trailing gold grasses, stands a woman in a wedding dress.
Everything in me goes very, very still.
The world drops its volume. The mob behind me, the shrieking, the camera flashes — it all recedes to a dull underwater roar, because I have seen this exact picture before.
Not with my eyes. In my head. A thousand times.
Every sleepless night for five and a half years I have built and rebuilt this image behind my eyelids — a woman in white, waiting at the end of an aisle, waiting for three men who never came, who turned their cowardly backs on the church steps and ran.
I pictured her face. I invented her patience.
I imagined, in the sick dark hours, what it looked like from her side while everyone else in that room waited for an arrival that never arrived.
Now here it is, in the flesh, in front of me. A bride, luminous, waiting.
My throat goes to sand. I can't swallow.
I try not to notice how devastatingly beautiful she looks under that beam of afternoon light spilling through the tent's open peak — the gown fitted close then blooming out soft at the hips, dark hair swept up with a few loose curls left down to frame her face.
I try not to notice the scent, either, the one reaching across the whole distance to hook itself into my nose and drag old wreckage up out of me: apricot and roses and warm vanilla, threaded now with something new, something rounder, sweeter, like honey warmed slow on a stove.
Amber.
It guts me in a way I have no defense against. This is the exact thing I stole from her.
Not a metaphor for it — this, the literal picture: a bride, radiant, ready, waiting under an arch of flowers for the men who love her.
She was supposed to have this five and a half years ago.
I took it off her. Now here she is having it anyway — resurrected, restored, glorious — and I'm not the reason.
I'm the villain who nearly took it from her a second time.
The math of that is more than I can hold up on my feet.
My feet start moving again before my brain signs off on it.
Step. Step. Drawn forward like the whole tent tilted and I'm just sliding toward the low end of it.
I don't stop until I'm at the bottom stair of the platform, staring up into that shaft of gold light haloing the bride, and a question I have no right to be asking rises up ugly and unbidden in my chest.
Would I have been happy?
If I'd stayed. If I'd been brave one single time in my life.
To be loved by a woman who handed us all of herself — every guarded inch of her, every exit she stopped counting, every soft thing under the armor — laid out on the table for us to claim and cherish and keep.
She gave us everything. All of it was ours.
I let it go. I dropped the whole shining pile of it and ran, because staying meant risk.
Risk meant fear. I have spent my entire life doing whatever the fear tells me.
The fear told me to run from that altar.
The fear told me to dig in at the bar the night they all finally came together.
The fear told me to take a stranger's money and betray a client I'd known for years, because the fear is a bottomless, hungry thing, and it has eaten every decent choice I ever got the chance to make.
I look up at her one more time, at the impossible resurrected picture of her, and I understand with total clarity that I would have been happy.
That's the cruelest part of the whole ledger.
Happiness was right there the entire time, and every last thing it ever asked of me was a courage I never once found.
The roar behind me changes pitch.
I spin. Just in time to watch the line break.
The barricade goes down with a sound like a snapped bone, and the crowd surges through the gap in a single churning mass.
Phones. Shouts. Bodies pouring into the tent, funneling down the aisle I just walked, and I see the security team from the far side of the tent break into a sprint to meet them — but they're seconds too slow.
The front edge of the mob is already inside, already spilling around me, already inches from the bottom of the staircase that climbs to the altar.
The whole thing has come apart exactly the way I knew it would. The way I made it.
The news crew is right in the churn, shoved up hard against the aisle rope on my left, and I hear the reporter's voice go up sharp and bright and practiced over the din.
"We're live at the Honeybell Harbor Harborlight Fair, where sources tell us that Sloane Carroway and Nolan Reeve — the two biggest names in the industry right now — are secretly tying the knot this very afternoon!
You can see the chaos behind me. And there, up on that platform, under those flowers — that has to be the bride herself! "
Then the microphone is in my face.
I blink at it. The foam ball of it, the little station logo, the reporter's bright hard eyes fixing on me like a hawk that's spotted movement. I don't understand. My mouth won't work.
"Sir — sir! You're inside the barrier. How does it feel," she says, and her smile has teeth in it, "to be the man who leaked this?"
The bottom drops out of my stomach.
"What?" It comes out cracked. "What — what are you talking about?"
"You're Cade Mercer." She says my full name into the camera like an indictment, and the way she says it, she's already got the whole story written.
"You've worked events for Nolan Reeve for years.
Seen at his shows, his sets, his private parties.
You're the man everyone in this business hires precisely because you keep things airtight — privacy, security, discretion, top to bottom.
So it's a little shocking, isn't it, that you're the source of the leak.
What happened? You and Nolan have a falling out? "
"Leak?" I can hear my own voice climbing, thin and baffled and stupid. "I didn't — I didn't leak anything."
She tilts her head. Almost pitying. Then she pulls out her phone, turns it to face the camera first so the whole broadcast can see, and then, slowly, she turns it to face me.
Every drop of blood in my body goes cold at once.
It's my message. The one I drafted. The GPS pin, the line built to detonate, SLOANE CARROWAY WEDDING, HAPPENING NOW, come see the dress before it's gone. It's there on her screen exactly as I wrote it, spreading across the town like a grease fire, screenshotted and forwarded a thousand times over.
Except.
Except the sender isn't the anonymous account.
The anonymous handle is gone. Stripped clean off. In its place, at the top of that message, right where the whole broadcasting world can read it, plain as a headstone, sits my own name.
Cade Mercer.