She wanted nothing to do with it any longer.
She was done with selfish, spoiled little rich bitches.
The other conversations had stopped. Everyone was silent, waiting on her response. Waiting for her to jump when he called. Magda was already taking a step in their direction, ready at the slightest provocation to step in and rescue her darling son. Her beloved son. The rich, cheating fucker who could do no wrong.
But Kallie’s mother caught her by the elbow, ripping her from her trance.
Twenty-four hours ago, Kallie would have let James get away with that tone. She would’ve backed down and written it off as one of his downfalls. Because she had them too. Everyone had downfalls, and marriage was about compromise. Any relationship was, really. But standing in the church where she was supposed to have been married, looking at the man who’d had his hands up another woman’s skirt while she’d been lacing up her wedding dress.
Kallie shook her head as anger bubbled in her gut.
“No,” she said.
James’s eyebrows drew together.
“What do you mean, ‘no’?” he asked.
“I mean no,” Kallie said, her voice rising with her words. “No, I won’t accept your bullshit excuses for why you couldn’t keep it in your pants on your own fucking wedding day. No, I won’t take your hand in marriage. No, I won’t try this again. No, you can’t take that tone with me any longer. And no, I won’t forgive you.”
She swallowed a sob. He wasn’t going to get the satisfaction of seeing her cry. That was a time for another day, when she was buried in the sheets of her bed and grieving over the life she thought she could’ve had with the man she thought she knew. A man she loved and had lost. A man she had dreamed about ever since she was a little girl, riding in on his white horse with his sword drawn with a duty and a passion to carry her away from all of life’s woeful sorrows.
A man who really had never existed at all.
Maybe that was what happened. Maybe they were simply ghosts of who they wished to be with. Maybe James was nothing but a failed attempt at a man she tried to change him into and maybe she was the phantom spirit of a woman James wished her to be.
Either way, she was done looking at him.
“Get out of my sight.”
James didn’t move, and she didn’t wait for him to. She gathered up the long skirt of her dress and swept past him without another glance in his direction. Eris and the other two girls followed in her wake, their eyes staring him down until they were around the corner and out of sight. They followed her up the steps and back into the bridal suite where she would unzip her wedding dress, watch it pile to the floor, and take with it the life she was no longer going to live.
And behind them all, someone started up a round of applause.
Chapter 2
Kallie
There were marks in Kallie’s palms where her nails had dug into them as she walked up the steps. She forced them to uncurl, stretching her fingers out at her sides and working the ache of tension from the muscle. The anger that kept her upright in the church had drained away, leaving her hollow where it had been. And she could hear the echoing of applause before the doors of the cathedral slammed open.
Her empty eyes gazed out the window, watching as James and his family poured out into the streets.
“Maybe they’ll get hit by oncom
ing traffic,” Eris said.
All the wedding gifts would have to be returned, she realized suddenly. Thank goodness she and James hadn’t shared an apartment lease. At least that wasn’t something she would have to deal with. Although, in retrospect, she found herself wondering if his reluctance to move in together had anything to do with his extracurricular activities.
More red flags she should’ve seen.
More excuses she made for him she never realized.
Was there some kind of sign she’d missed? Was she really that thickheaded? Or had the indiscretion at the church been a one-off? A manifestation of temporary insanity?
She supposed it didn’t matter in the end. The result was the same. Her life had come to an abrupt halt and he walked away, somehow still the victor in it all.
Her eyes watched as he got into the limo across the street. The limo that had been waiting to whisk them off to the reception, then the airport. She watched James and Magda and others pile into the car. She even watched that bitch of a woman get in as well. Where the hell was her husband? That was the wife of his best man.
Was this something they had planned?