Chapter 5 - The Morning Dressing
The presidential suite of the Grand Velas Oceanfront Resort was ninety-four hundred square feet of Italian travertine, floor-to-ceiling hurricane glass, and suffocating, hysterical terror.
At 10:30 AM, the oceanfront terrace was bathed in the blinding, flat glare of a southern coastal morning. Down below, on the manicured bermuda-grass lawn overlooking the Atlantic, fifty hotel staff members were arranging three hundred white Chiavari chairs beneath an archway composed of four thousand imported white gardenias and pale pink peonies. The ocean breeze carried the sweet, rotting perfume of the flowers straight up to the fifth-floor balcony.
Inside the suite, the floor was covered in discarded tissue paper, empty bottles of Veuve Clicquot, and half-eaten trays of smoked salmon canapés.
Sutton sat in the center of the living pavilion, perched on a velvet dressing stool in front of a three-way illuminated mirror. She was wearing her second bridal robe—white silk with marabou feathers trailing from the sleeves—her face pale beneath a layer of foundation that her lead makeup artist was desperately trying to blend over the dark, swollen circles under her eyes.
“He’s not answering his phone!” Sutton screamed, her voice cracking into that high-pitched, metallic shriek that had terrified her sorority sisters for four years. She slammed her iPhone onto the glass vanity table, the screen splintering across the bottom corner. “His mother isn't answering! His brother isn't answering! Christopher said Alden packed his duffel bag from the groomsmen’s villa at three in the morning and walked out to the highway!”
Althia stood behind her, wearing an oyster-colored silk dressing gown that cost nine thousand dollars, her hands trembling as she pinned a four-carat diamond brooch to the lace collar of the wedding gown hanging from the mahogany armoire.
“Stop shrieking, Sutton,” Althia commanded, though the tremor in her own vocal cords was unmistakable. “The makeup girl has to redo your contour. Alden is a Van Der Bilt. They are dramatic, sensitive people. He was simply rattled by that grotesque scene on the staircase. He’s probably at the golf clubhouse having a steam with his father. Stellin has already driven over there to handle it.”
“He unpinned the boutonnière, Mom!” Sutton howled, tears cutting through the fresh powder on her cheeks. “He looked at me like... like I was something he found under a rock! Did you see the look on his face? And Briany—that little idiot—she posted the video to her private story before I could tell her to delete it!”
Althia froze, her fingers pausing on the diamond brooch. Her neck snapped toward the corner of the suite, where Briany sat curled in an armchair, clutching an iced matcha latte like a shield.
“What did you do?” Althia whispered, her voice dropping into a register of pure, lethal venom.
Briany shrank into the velvet cushions, her knuckles whitening around her plastic cup. “It... it was an accident, Aunt Althia! Sutton told me to film everything for the transition reel! She said, ‘Make sure you get Fallon’s face when she hits the third riser, it’ll be viral gold.’ I had the auto-upload set on my private account—it was only supposed to go to the bridal party group!”
“Did you take it down?” Sutton shrieked, lunging off the stool, her feather-trimmed sleeves flying like the wings of a deranged bird. “Did you delete it?!”
“I deleted it after ten minutes!” Briany sobbed. “I swear I did! But... but one of Alden’s cousins took a screen capture. He sent it to the family group chat with the caption: ‘Check out the new sister-in-law.’”
Sutton collapsed back onto the stool, her face buried in her hands, her breath coming in ragged, ugly gasps. “My wedding is over. The sponsors... the floral company gave us a fifty-percent discount on the gardenias because they were tagging the ceremony in their national campaign! If the wedding doesn't happen, the contract has a clawback clause!”
“The wedding is happening,” Althia said, her voice dropping into that terrifying, brittle calm she used whenever a bankruptcy filing was imminent. “The guests are already arriving at the marina. The Governor’s wife is on the shuttle from the airport. We have three hundred people coming to that lawn in five hours. Alden will stand at that altar because his father has two million dollars invested in Stellin’s Savannah terminal, and the Van Der Bilts do not default on their social commitments.”
The suite’s double doors swung open with a heavy, concussive thud.
Stellin walked in.
He was no longer wearing his tuxedo; he wore a rumpled linen shirt and khaki trousers, his hair uncombed, his skin gray as wet newspaper. He didn't look at his wife. He didn't look at his crying daughter. He walked directly to the wet bar, pulled a bottle of Macallan 18 from the mirrored shelf, and poured four fingers into a tumbler without using ice.
He drank it down in two long, throat-bobbing gulps.
“Where is he?” Althia demanded, stepping toward him, her silk gown rustling against the carpet. “Did you speak to Arthur? Is Alden in the locker room?”
Stellin set the heavy crystal glass down on the granite counter with a dull, wet clink.
“Arthur wasn't at the golf club,” Stellin said, his voice completely flat, drained of every drop of energy.
“Then where was he?”
“At the county clerk’s office in Brunswick,” Stellin said, turning around slowly. He looked at Sutton with an expression of profound, exhausted detachment. “He was filing a formal lis pendens against our property in Druid Hills. And an emergency petition to dissolve the Savannah partnership based on material fraud.”
Sutton stared at him, her mascara-streaked eyes blinking stupidly. “What... what does that mean? What about the wedding?”
“There is no wedding, Sutton,” Stellin said.
“No!” Althia screamed, her hands flying to her temples. “No! You tell him we’ll renegotiate the equity! You tell him the Savannah terminal was just an accounting variance! We have the timber trust—we can pledge the timber as collateral!”
Stellin let out a short, barking laugh that sounded like an engine backfiring in an empty hangar.
“The timber trust is gone, Althia.”
“What are you talking about? The land has been in my family for seventy years!”
“Fallon filed an emergency conservation lien at seven o'clock this morning,” Stellin said, leaning his heavy forearms against the bar. “She used her authority as managing director of the resource committee. She submitted the groundwater survey from the old fuel depot. The state EPA froze the parcel indefinitely pending an environmental remediation review. The land has zero commercial collateral value. It’s a swamp with trees on it.”
The room went tomb-silent.
The only sound was the distant, cheerful thud of a bass drum from the beach, where the resort’s entertainment staff was running a sound check for a party that would never take place.
“Fallon?” Sutton whispered, her voice cracking on the syllables. “Fallon did that? But... but she’s in the hospital. She doesn't even know about the card—"
“She knows about the card,” a new voice said from the open doorway.
Every head in the room whipped around.
Standing in the threshold of the presidential suite, her silver hair gleaming in the corridor light, was Vesper Thorne.
Behind her, seated in the high-torque Arctic transport chair, her right leg extended straight out on an articulating carbon-fiber bracket wrapped in black neoprene and silver surgical pins, sat me.
I was not wearing the blush-pink bridesmaid dress.
I wore my work clothes: a pair of dark gray canvas cargo trousers split up the right seam and secured with velcro tabs, an ironed black poplin shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbows, and a pair of steel-toed Red Wing boots on my left foot. My hair was pulled back into a severe, functional braid; my face was completely scrubbed of makeup, revealing the dark purple hematoma spreading across my left cheekbone where my head had struck the fifth marble tread.
In my lap rested the heavy, black leather corporate binder of Ward Aerospace Logistics.
Althia took half a step backward, her hand flying to the diamond brooch at her throat as if my presence were a physical contagion.
“Fallon,” Althia breathed, her voice trembling with an ugly mixture of horror and revulsion. “What... what are you doing here? How dare you bring this... this woman into your sister’s suite?”
I didn't answer her.
I touched the joystick on the right armrest of the transport chair. The electric motor emitted a low, powerful whine as the pneumatic treads rolled smoothly across the threshold, parting the silk-clad makeup artists and the cowering cousin like water before an iron prow.
I stopped the chair five feet from Sutton’s velvet stool.
May you like
I looked at my younger sister. I looked at the Chantilly lace, the marabou feathers, the splintered iPhone on the vanity, and the panic swimming in her pale gray eyes.
“Nice robe, Sutton,” I said, my voice quiet, clear, and perfectly level. “It matches the hundred-and-five-thousand-dollar catering bill on my corporate MasterCard.”
