Chapter 57
MADISON
They had sent me up alone with it.
The dress was on a padded hanger inside a garment bag that smelled of cedar and something floral, lavender, maybe. I hung it on the back of the wardrobe door and stood in front of it for a long time before I touched it.
Downstairs, an orchestra was warming up. The resonant sounds of a bow being dragged across slightly off-key strings floated up the stairs, and beneath that, the first low rumble of conversation as guests began to arrive.
The party was already happening. It was happening whether I was ready or not.
I unzipped the bag.
The lace at the cuffs was hand-worked. I could tell by the irregularity of it, the slight variance in the pattern where a needle had been guided by a human hand and not a machine. Someone had made this. Had sat in good light and worked every loop of it, stitch by stitch.
I thought about my mother. Not the one who died when I was too young to hold the memory clearly. The one who raised me. Who kept my school photos in a frame on the mantle even when money was short and the frame itself was chipped at one corner. Who called me her miracle baby. Who was gone now too.
There was no one in this house who knew that about me.
No one here who remembered me at seven years old, or sixteen, or my dress from the prom or my favorite Christmas cookie or how I cried when I lost my adoptive mom.
I was about to walk into a room full of strangers wearing a dead woman's dress, and the dead woman's son was the reason I'd been in a jail cell only a few days ago.
I pressed two fingers to the bodice, just above the waist seam.
Pierce's mother had worn this. Had stood somewhere in this house in this dress and made some kind of promise.
I didn't know if it had been a happy marriage or a cold one, whether she had been beloved or merely decorative, whether Pierce had inherited her eyes or her ruthlessness or both.
I knew nothing about her except that she had loved Venetian chandeliers and that she was dead.
I put the dress on anyway.
My hips disappeared in the ivory silk and endless layers of tulle, and then the long curve of my back was shrouded in lace. I pinned my hair up into a simple updo and tucked the short veil in with a French comb, spreading it over my shoulders.
The woman in the mirror was not someone I recognized.
In the reflection, I caught sight of him. “Are you planning on saying something or just watching me all night?"
Pierce pushed the door the rest of the way open. The way he looked at me made it difficult to breathe.
"I was planning on saying something, but if those are my only two options..."
I gave him a soft smile and turned back to the mirror, fixing my makeup that was already perfect. "Is it showtime?"
"It is." He crossed the room with a large black velvet box in his hands. "You will need to wear this. It's what's going to tell everyone this is real."
I looked at the box. "What is it?"
"My grandmother's pearls." He opened the box carefully. They weren't the classic white, shiny, and uniform. The iridescent shade of ice blue shimmered under the reflected light. In the middle of the strand hung a pendant, a silver “W” in a fine French script.
"They are beautiful," I whispered. My fingers paused mid-air, afraid to touch them.
He set the box on the vanity and lifted the necklace. "May I?"
I nodded and turned toward him, and he slid the pearls over my neck, adjusting them so the W rested in the divot of my clavicle.
"Stunning," he whispered in my ear.
"Too bad it isn't real," I said, mostly to myself.
"I assure you the pearls are very real and very rare." He chose to misunderstand me.
He stepped back. His grandmother's pearls.
His mother's dress. His family's crest at my throat.
I was being absorbed into the Worthington name whether I wanted it or not, dressed in their dead women's things, about to walk downstairs and perform a love story for a room full of people who had watched Pierce destroy me.
The worst part was how much I wanted it to be real.
* * *
I stood in the shadows of the mezzanine looking down on the ballroom with Pierce by my side. He’d barely let me out of his sight since proposing. If you could call a command to marry a man within the next forty-eight hours a proposal.
He was worried I was still a flight risk.
I was.
I sighed as I looked down on all the splendor.
Tompkins had outdone himself.
The three Venetian glass chandeliers blazed overhead, their crystals throwing fractured light across the vaulted ceiling.
White roses and trailing ivy climbed the columns flanking the entrance.
The long banquet table gleamed with silver and bone china.
Champagne towers caught the candlelight, and the scent of gardenias drifted up the staircase, sweet enough to mask the faint bite of old wood varnish that was Ravenscroft's true perfume.
It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.
Too bad it was a trap.
I recognized some of the faces. The judge who had presided over my trial, now sampling canapés.
The sheriff and his wife. The women clustered in silk, whispering behind champagne flutes.
Every one of them had watched Pierce take a sledgehammer to my life.
Now they were here to drink his champagne and watch whatever came next.
I was just part of the show. A prop.
"Sir, your guests are arriving," Tompkins said from behind us, his distaste and disapproval clear with every syllable.
"Thank you. I will be down shortly." Pierce dismissed him without turning.
I waited until he was out of earshot.
I rubbed my silk-covered arms. “Do you think he’s here?” I asked, scanning the faces.
Pierce kissed the top of my shoulder. “Not yet, but soon. I have things in hand. Just stick to the plan and everything will be over soon.”
"I trust you," I said.
And the terrifying part was that I meant it.
A throat clearing had us turning.
Greyson walked toward us with his hands held out in front of him, showing that he was unarmed. "I come in peace and with a gift for your new bride."