Mia POV
I counted the flowers on my bouquet to stop myself from running.
Twelve white roses. Eleven of them were already dying at the edges, brown and soft like they knew this wedding was a mistake. I kept counting because if I stopped, I would have to think about what I was actually doing walking toward a man old enough to be my grandfather, in a church that smelled like dust and old regret, wearing a dress my aunt bought from a clearance rack because she said I did not deserve better than clearance right now.
Her exact words. I did not deserve better.
Two months ago, I woke up in a hotel room with no memory of the night before, a headache that nearly split my skull in half, and a stranger's watch on the nightstand. I had gone to the hotel bar to celebrate my first real job interview. I had one drink. Then nothing just black, like someone had cut the film and skipped straight to morning.
Two weeks after that, I found out I was pregnant.
I still do not know whose baby this is. That sentence sounds insane every time I think it, but it is the truth. I do not remember anything. I do not remember a face, a name, a voice. Nothing. Just the watch, which I kept in my purse because I did not know what else to do with it.
My aunt Gloria's solution to all of this was Harold Finch.
Harold was fifty-eight, recently widowed, and willing to marry me quickly and quietly in exchange for something I did not fully understand. Money, probably. A favor from my uncle Raymond. Harold did not ask questions about the baby. He did not look at me like I was a person, either more like a problem that had been neatly packaged for him. But Gloria said this was the only option. She said it so many times and in so many different ways that eventually I stopped arguing.
So here I was. Twelve dead roses. One terrible decision. Halfway down the aisle.
Harold was at the altar checking his watch again. Not looking at me checking his watch, like this was a business meeting running slightly over schedule. The guests were a blur of polite faces and Sunday clothes. Gloria was behind me, still squeezing my arm through my bouquet hand like she thought I might bolt.
I almost did. Three times.
But where would I go? I was broke, pregnant, and alone in a town that already thought I was a disgrace. I kept walking.
I was six steps from the altar when the church doors opened.
Not knocked. Not creaked. They opened like they had been waiting for permission, both of them swinging wide and hard, and the sound hit the room like a thunderclap. Every head turned. I turned too.
The man who walked in did not hurry. That was the first thing I noticed. He walked at the same pace you walk when you are completely certain that nothing in the room can touch you. Black suit. Dark hair. A face that looked like it had been designed specifically to make people feel small. He was tall really tall and he moved through the center aisle like the guests on either side of him were furniture.
Nobody made a sound.
Harold turned around from the altar. "What is the meaning of"
The man raised his arm. There was a gun in his hand.
I did not even have time to scream. One shot. Clean. Harold dropped straight down without a sound, like a puppet with its strings cut, and the church exploded into screaming around me. People scrambled for the doors, for the floor, for anything. My bouquet hit the ground. I could not move. I could not breathe. My feet were completely locked to the spot.
The man lowered the gun. He looked across the chaos, across Harold's body on the altar steps, directly at me. His eyes were gray not warm gray, not soft gray. The gray of a sky right before a storm that means it.
He walked toward me. People parted for him like water. He stopped two feet away and looked at me for one long second, just looked, like he was checking something off a list in his head.
Then he said: "You have my heir. You're coming with me."
My mouth opened. Nothing came out.
He reached out and put one hand very lightly on my arm not grabbing, not dragging, just a hand and turned toward the side door of the church. And I went. I do not fully understand why even now. Maybe it was shock. Maybe it was the fact that Harold was dead on the floor and the world had just become completely unrecognizable. Maybe something animal in me understood that this man, whoever he was, was not going to hurt me. Not today.
Outside, three black cars were lined up with their engines running. Six men in suits stood around them big, still, watching every direction at once. The man opened the back door of the middle car and waited. I got in. He got in beside me.
The door closed. The car moved.
I sat completely still and tried to remember how to breathe.
After a minute I turned to look at him. He was already on his phone, speaking in a language I did not recognize, completely calm. Like he had not just shot a man in a church. Like this was Tuesday.
I pressed myself against the door and looked out the window as Crestfield slid past the gas station where I had worked for two years, the diner where Gloria used to take me for my birthday, the church getting smaller and smaller in the side mirror.
Then I saw it.
My aunt Gloria was standing on the church steps in the chaos. People were running past her, screaming, grabbing each other. She was standing perfectly still, watching the car pull away. Not crying. Not calling for help. Not even covering her mouth in shock the way the women around her were.
Just watching. Arms at her sides. Face completely blank.
Like she already knew this was going to happen.
Like she had been waiting for it.
The car turned a corner and she disappeared from view, and something cold and certain settled into the bottom of my stomach that had nothing to do with the baby and everything to do with the fact that the most dangerous thing that had happened to me today was not the man sitting beside me.
It was the look on my aunt's face.