Silveria woke up to shouting.
She sat up fast, heart already racing before she even knew why. Today was the wedding. Today her sister Lilibeth was supposed to marry Damien Crew, the coldest, richest man in the whole city. The house had been buzzing with preparation for weeks. Flowers delivered by the truckload. Caterers arguing in the kitchen about presentation. A dress that cost more than most people made in an entire year, hanging wrapped in plastic in Lilibeth's closet like something too precious to actually touch. And now, somewhere downstairs, something had clearly gone terribly wrong.
"Silveria!" Her mother's voice cracked through the house, sharp enough to cut through walls.
She threw on her robe and ran down the stairs, her bare feet slapping cold against the marble. Her mother was standing in the hallway with a piece of paper clutched in one shaking hand, her silk dressing gown hanging loose around her shoulders like she hadn't bothered finishing getting dressed before the crisis pulled her out of her room. Her face had gone the color of old paper, pale and stiff, like something inside her had already broken and she hadn't yet found the words to describe the damage.
"What happened?" Silveria asked, stopping halfway down the staircase, one hand gripping the banister.
"Lilibeth is gone."
The words didn't make sense at first. Gone where? It was her wedding day. There was a dress hanging upstairs, waiting. There were flowers already arriving at the church three streets over. There were cameras set up outside the gate, waiting patiently to catch the first glimpse of the bride stepping into her car. People didn't simply disappear on mornings like this one. Mornings like this one were supposed to be the whole point of an entire life's worth of careful planning.
"Gone how?" Silveria asked, coming the rest of the way down the stairs, her mind still catching up to the words.
Her mother shoved the note into her hands without answering, her fingers trembling so badly the paper nearly slipped free before Silveria caught it properly. The handwriting was messy, rushed, nothing at all like Lilibeth's usual careful, looping cursive that she used to practice for hours as a teenager, determined that even her signature should look expensive.
I can't marry a man I don't love. Don't look for me. — L
Silveria read it twice, her stomach twisting tighter with every single word. She looked up at her mother, searching desperately for some explanation that might make this feel even slightly less impossible than it currently did.
"She left. This morning. Sometime before anyone else woke up."
"This is bad," Silveria whispered, more to herself than to her mother, though the words felt woefully inadequate for the size of the disaster unfolding around them.
"You think I don't know that?" her mother snapped, her voice climbing rapidly toward something close to hysteria. "The wedding is in four hours, Silveria. Four hours. The Crew family is expecting a bride to walk down that aisle at exactly two o'clock this afternoon. If we don't give them one, they will destroy this family. Do you understand me? Destroy us completely, financially, publicly, in every way that actually matters."
Silveria's father came out of his office at that exact moment, phone still pressed to one ear, his face grey and drawn tight with tension. He said a few clipped, careful words into the receiver and hung up without bothering to say goodbye to whoever had been on the other end.
"I already told them the wedding is still happening as scheduled," he said, looking at his wife instead of at Silveria, like she wasn't even properly standing there in the hallway with them.
"How?" her mother demanded, her voice cracking now. "Lilibeth is gone, Mathews. What exactly are you planning to do, conjure a replacement bride out of thin air in the next four hours?"
"No," he said slowly, and for the first time since coming out of his office, his eyes moved to Silveria, sharp and calculating in a way that made her stomach drop even before he said another single word. "I'm not going to conjure one. I already have one standing right here."
The silence that followed felt like it lasted an entire minute, though it was likely only a handful of seconds stretched thin by shock.
"What?" Silveria said, though some small, terrified part of her had already understood exactly what he meant the moment his eyes had landed on her.
"You're going to wear the dress," her father said, his tone leaving no room whatsoever for argument. "You're going to walk down that aisle in her place. You're going to marry Damien Crew today, exactly as planned, except the bride's name changes."
"I can't marry a stranger," Silveria said, her voice rising despite her best efforts to keep it steady. "I don't even know this man. Nobody actually knows this man. He barely leaves that enormous house of his, let alone appears anywhere in public where people could properly meet him."
"That's precisely the point," her father said, already moving past her toward the staircase, like the entire matter had been settled the moment he'd spoken and there was nothing further worth discussing. "Nobody outside this family has ever met Damien Crew face to face. Not one clear photograph exists of him from the past five years, not since he took over the company. He sends representatives to handle everything on his behalf, meetings, negotiations, even social events he's technically supposed to attend. He won't know the difference between you and your sister until it's far too late to matter to anyone."
"And what happens to me after?" Silveria asked, following him up the stairs two at a time, panic rising fast and sour in her chest. "I simply live out the rest of my entire life married to a complete stranger, pretending every single day to be someone I'm not?"
"That's not our immediate problem," her mother said, appearing suddenly at her elbow, already reaching to pull Silveria firmly toward Lilibeth's bedroom. "Our immediate problem is four hours, Silveria. Everything else, we figure out properly later, once this family isn't facing public ruin."
Silveria wanted to scream. She wanted to run the way Lilibeth had clearly run, out into the pale early morning light, away from this house and everyone currently inside it making demands of her body and her future without ever once asking what she actually wanted for herself. But she knew her family far too well for that kind of fantasy. She knew, with the bone-deep certainty of eighteen years spent learning exactly how this household worked, what happened to people who dared say no to Mathews and Kassandra Hitler. She had spent her entire life being the quiet one, the adopted one, the girl who did precisely what she was told so that nobody would ever look at her too closely, so that nobody would decide, once and for all, that she simply wasn't worth the trouble of keeping around.
"Fine," she said quietly, the fight draining slowly out of her voice even as her heart continued racing beneath her ribs. "I'll do it."
Her mother didn't say thank you. She didn't even pause to acknowledge the enormity of what she'd just asked. She simply turned and began shouting orders at the maids gathered nervously in the hallway, demanding they bring the dress immediately, the shoes, the jewelry, everything Lilibeth had been carefully fitted for over the past several months, now needing to be forced onto an entirely different body in a fraction of the time originally allotted.
• • •
The dress didn't fit properly. It pulled too tight across Silveria's shoulders and hung loose and strange around her waist, made for a frame that wasn't hers at all, a woman two full inches taller and considerably curvier than Silveria had ever managed to be. Nobody had time to fix it correctly. A maid pinned the extra fabric into place along the back seam and called the job finished, though every single pin dug uncomfortably into Silveria's skin whenever she moved even slightly too fast.
"Hold still," the maid muttered around a mouthful of additional pins, jabbing another one carefully into the fabric near her spine. "We genuinely don't have time to redo any of this properly."
"I know," Silveria said, staring at her own reflection in the tall mirror, barely recognizing the pale, wide-eyed girl staring back at her from the glass. Her hair had been pulled and twisted into an elaborate style that already made her head ache dully. Makeup had been layered on thick enough to feel like an actual mask pressed against her skin. She didn't look like herself at all. She didn't look like anyone in particular, really. Just a shape, dressed carefully in her sister's stolen wedding gown, waiting to be handed over to a stranger.
By the time she was finally standing outside the church, her hands were shaking so badly she could barely manage to hold the bouquet without dropping the entire arrangement onto the pavement. Cameras flashed the instant the car door opened. People whispered behind cupped hands, craning their necks for a better look, already sensing plainly that something was different today, something was wrong, even if they couldn't quite place precisely what it was they were looking at.
"Smile," her mother hissed from just behind her shoulder, her voice pitched low enough that only Silveria could properly hear the warning underneath it. "Smile, and walk. Don't you dare ruin this for this family, not after everything we've built."
She walked.
The church was packed entirely full, rows upon rows of people Silveria had genuinely never once met in her life, business partners in expensive suits, reporters with cameras slung around their necks, employees of Crew Enterprises dressed in their absolute finest, all of them gathered together to witness a wedding that was about to become something none of them properly expected. At the very front of the church, standing exactly where the groom should have been standing, was a man Silveria had never seen before in her entire life. Tall. Sharp-featured. A dark suit that fit his frame like it had been made specifically, deliberately, for his exact body alone. He stood there with his hands calmly folded in front of him, watching her slow approach down the aisle with an expression she genuinely couldn't properly read at all.
Not Damien Crew. That much she felt certain of, though she had no photograph anywhere to properly compare him against, only pure instinct and the strange, cold energy radiating steadily off him even from this distance.
When she finally reached the front of the church, the man leaned in slightly toward her, his voice low enough that only she could hear it clearly over the low murmur of the gathered crowd.
"My name is Felix," he said quietly. "I work for Mr. Crew. He couldn't be here today."
Silveria blinked at him, momentarily forgetting to be properly afraid in her sheer disbelief. "He's not coming to his own wedding?"
"He sent me to stand in for him legally," Felix said, his tone perfectly calm and even, like this was a completely ordinary, unremarkable arrangement between two civilized business parties. "The marriage will still be entirely valid under the law. He'll sign the necessary paperwork himself later, once everything here has been properly finalized."
She almost laughed at that, right there in front of the entire watching congregation. It would have been almost funny, in some horrible, absurd way, if it wasn't her own entire life crumbling apart in real time in front of hundreds of complete strangers. She was marrying a man who couldn't even be bothered to show up and see her actual face.
The priest cleared his throat and began the ceremony without any further delay, his voice steady and practiced, clearly either unaware or simply unwilling to acknowledge that something was deeply, fundamentally wrong with this particular wedding. Silveria said the words when she was told to say them, her voice barely above a whisper the entire time. She let Felix slide a cold, heavy ring onto her trembling finger, his hands careful and entirely impersonal throughout, like he was simply completing a routine business transaction rather than standing in as a substitute groom for a woman he'd never once spoken to before this morning.
When the priest finally announced that she was now Mrs. Crew, the entire church erupted into polite, enthusiastic applause, as though everything about this particular moment was completely, perfectly normal, as though a groom skipping his own wedding entirely was simply another quiet Tuesday for people as wealthy and powerful as the Crews clearly were.
Silveria stood there in a dress that didn't properly belong to her, married now to a man she had never once laid eyes on in her entire life, and felt more completely, utterly alone than she had ever felt before in all her eighteen years.
• • •
After the ceremony finally concluded, Felix guided her firmly by the elbow toward a long black car waiting patiently just outside the church doors, steering her carefully away from the worst of the pressing crowd.
"Where are we going?" she asked, her voice coming out small.
"The Crew estate," Felix said simply. "That's your home now, Mrs. Crew."
She glanced back one final time toward her parents, who were already deep in animated conversation with a small cluster of eager reporters, her mother's face arranged carefully into a bright, practiced smile as she spun some elaborate story about how enormously proud she was of her daughter today. Her father didn't even glance once in Silveria's direction. Nobody waved goodbye to her. Nobody seemed to properly notice, or particularly care, that she was leaving absolutely everything she had ever known behind her, driving away in the back of a stranger's car toward a life none of them had bothered to ask if she actually wanted.
The car pulled slowly away from the curb, and Silveria watched through the rear window as her entire old life shrank smaller and smaller until it finally disappeared behind a bend in the road entirely, swallowed up by distance and morning traffic.
"Can I ask you something?" she said quietly, turning back around properly to face Felix in the seat beside her.
"Go ahead," he said, not looking up from his phone.
"Does he know? That I'm not actually Lilibeth?"
Felix glanced sideways at her then, something briefly unreadable flickering behind his eyes before he looked back toward the road ahead. "Not yet."
"When will he find out?"
"Soon, I would imagine." His jaw tightened slightly at the thought. "I'd get ready for that particular conversation, if I were you. He doesn't take surprises especially well."
Silveria's stomach twisted painfully at that warning. She thought about the note her sister had left behind on the dresser. Don't look for me. She wished, more than almost anything else in that entire moment, that she could simply disappear the exact same way, vanish quietly into the early morning light and never have to face whatever terrible confrontation waited for her at the end of this long, silent car ride. But she was stuck now, riding steadily toward a mansion she had never once seen with her own eyes, toward a husband who currently believed, at this very moment, that he had married someone else entirely.
The car drove on, and the city passed steadily by in a blur of grey buildings and passing streetlights. Silveria pressed her palm flat against the cold window glass and tried, without a great deal of success, to steady the frantic, uneven rhythm of her own breathing. Whatever waited for her at the end of this particular road, she understood now with sudden, sinking certainty, she was going to have to face it entirely, completely alone.