Revenge On Love Rats After Rebirth

The doors open, and a thousand white roses turn to look at me.

I stand at the threshold on my father's arm, and the cathedral stretches ahead of me like a held breath.candlelight, soaring stone, every pew packed with the most important people in the country, and at the far end of that long white aisle, waiting for me beneath an arch of roses, Julian.

'This is the happiest day of my life. Remember all of it. Every second.'

The organ swells. My father pats my hand where it rests on his sleeve, and we begin to walk.

Cameras flash from the press gallery, a constant silver lightning, capturing the Lockhart heiress in forty thousand dollars of hand-sewn silk on the morning she marries Julian Vance. The dress whispers around my feet. The roses perfume the air so thickly I could drown in them. Faces turn as I pass, smiling, murmuring, and I keep my eyes fixed on the man at the end of the aisle.

Julian watches me come to him, and he's never looked more beautiful.dark suit, dark eyes, that mouth I've kissed a hundred times curving as he takes me in.

But something moves behind his eyes as I reach the steps. Something quick and complicated, there and gone, a flicker I don't have a name for.

'Nerves. Everyone's nervous today.'

I dismiss it. Of course I dismiss it. My father places my hand in Julian's, and Julian's fingers close around mine, and I look up into the face of the man I'm about to promise my life to, and I am so full of joy I can barely breathe.

The priest opens his book and begins to speak.

This is the last moment of my old life, and I don't even know it.

The cathedral doors crash open.

The sound rips through the priest's words, through the hush, through the candlelight, and four hundred heads turn as one toward the back of the church.

Isabelle stands in the doorway.

My sister.in a plain gray dress, no jewelry, her face streaked with tears, her shoulders shaking.comes stumbling down the aisle clutching a thick folder against her chest, sobbing so hard the whole congregation can hear it.

"Stop the wedding!" Her voice breaks on it, raw, devastated. "Please.you have to stop.before it's too late!"

A wave of shocked murmurs rolls through the pews.

"Isabelle?" I let go of Julian's hand and take a step toward her, my heart lurching. "What's wrong? What happened."

"How could you, Sera?" She reaches the foot of the altar steps and lifts her tear-streaked face to mine, and her eyes are pools of perfect heartbreak. "How could you do it to us? To the family? To me?"

"Do what?" The cold is already starting, low in my stomach. "Isabelle, I don't.what are you talking about?"

She hurls the folder at the marble floor, and it bursts open. Photographs and documents fan out across the steps, sliding, scattering. Glossy images. Printed pages dense with figures. The Lockhart logo on letterhead.

"You sold us." Her voice rises, shaking, carrying to the furthest corner of the cathedral, pitched for every camera in the room. "You sold the company's secrets to our competitors. You're a spy. I found it all, I prayed it wasn't true, and it's true." She collapses to her knees among the scattered pages, weeping. "My own sister. A traitor to her own blood."

The cathedral erupts.

I stand frozen at the altar in my wedding dress, and the world tilts under my feet, and I cannot make a single one of these words fit into anything I understand.

'This isn't real. This isn't happening. There's been a mistake, there has to be.'

"Isabelle." My voice comes out thin, stunned. "I don't know what those are. I've never seen any of this. Whatever you think you found, it isn't.I would never."

But the press gallery is a storm of flashbulbs now, and the guests are on their feet, and my sister is sobbing on the cathedral steps like her heart has been torn out, and not one person in this enormous room is looking at me with anything but horror.

Julian crouches and gathers the papers.

He stands slowly, leafing through them, and I watch the expression drain from his face.the tenderness, the warmth, everything I thought I knew.until what's left is something cold and flat and terrible.

"Julian." I reach for him. "Julian, you know me. You know me. This is insane, I would never betray my own family, you can't possibly believe."

"These are internal projections." His voice is quiet, lethal, and he doesn't look up from the pages. "Acquisition targets. The Hartwell defense bid. Things only a handful of people in the company have ever seen." Now he looks at me, and his eyes are a stranger's. "Things you had access to."

"Anyone could fake.Julian, please."

"There are wire transfers, Serafina." He says my full name like it tastes foul. "To an account in your name. Photographs of you meeting their people." He lets the folder drop, and the pages scatter again across the steps between us. "My God. I almost married you."

"Those aren't.I never." My voice is climbing toward panic, splintering. "Julian, I swear on my life, I have never seen these people, I have never."

"Save it." The words crack like a whip. He seizes the marriage license from the priest's stand.the document we were thirty seconds from signing.and he tears it down the middle, once, twice, and lets the pieces flutter to the floor. The sound it makes is the loudest thing I have ever heard. "The wedding is off."

The cathedral gasps as one creature.

"You disgust me." His face twists, and his voice rises now, meant to carry, meant to brand me in front of every camera and every guest and all the world watching. "I stood here ready to give you my name, and all this time you were selling your own family like a whore sells herself on a corner. To think I almost tied myself to a traitor. To filth."

The word whore rings off the stone.

Somewhere behind me a woman gasps. The flashbulbs are a hurricane. And I stand alone at the altar in my perfect white dress with my hand still stupidly outstretched toward a man who is looking at me like I am something scraped off his shoe, and I feel my whole life cracking apart beneath me like ice on a thawing lake.

And there, on her knees in her plain gray dress with her face buried in her hands.

Isabelle looks up at me through her fingers.

And just for an instant, just for me, the corner of her mouth curls.

It hits me like cold water. She did this. She built this. My sister.

"You." I turn on her, and the shock is finally burning into something else. "You did this. These are forgeries, you set this whole.Isabelle, tell them the truth, tell them."

I lunge for Julian's arm.the last thing I have, the only one who might still listen.and Isabelle surges up off her knees and throws herself between us.

"Don't hurt him!" she screams.

Our bodies collide. It's nothing.a stumble, a brush of shoulders.but Isabelle flings her arms wide and shrieks, a high, theatrical cry of terror, and pitches herself backward off the top of the altar steps.

She falls.

She tumbles down the marble stairs in a tangle of gray fabric, crying out at every step, and lands crumpled at the bottom, and the cathedral explodes into chaos.

"She pushed her!" someone screams. "She pushed her down the steps!"

"Isabelle!" Julian shoves past me, nearly knocking me down, and drops to his knees beside my sister, gathering her broken-doll body into his arms. "Isabelle, can you hear me.someone call an ambulance."

"She didn't mean to," Isabelle whispers, loud enough to carry, her hand fluttering weakly against Julian's chest, her eyes brimming as they find mine across the ruined altar. "Don't be angry at Sera. Please. She's my sister."

The cameras devour it. The guests are surging, pointing, shouting, a wall of horrified faces closing in on me from every side, and the flashes are blinding now, relentless, a strobe of white that turns the whole cathedral into a nightmare.

I back away from all of it. My heel catches on the hem of my gown. I stagger.

'No. No, no, this can't.someone has to see.someone has to.'

The room spins. The faces blur. I take another step backward and there's nothing beneath my foot but the edge of the stair, and I'm falling, and the world swings up sideways, and the last thing I see is the great vaulted ceiling wheeling overhead, white roses raining down through the candlelight.

My head strikes the marble.

A burst of white. Then a crack of pain. Then the white goes out, all at once, like a candle pinched between two fingers, and the dark rushes in and swallows everything whole.