The second gunshot had cleared the hall.
Caleb stood alone at the altar.
Not alone the way a person is alone in a quiet room. Alone the way something discarded is alone—left mid-sentence, in the middle of a ceremony, while the man who had just placed a ring on his finger disappeared into a corridor with his guards and didn't look back.
The wedding hall had emptied in under three minutes. Guests fled or were ushered out by security. The officiator had stumbled away mid-blessing. Crystal flutes lay overturned on cloth-draped tables, champagne pooling slow and golden into the carpet like something bleeding out.
Caleb hadn't moved.
He wasn't sure if that was obedience or shock. Lucian had said "stay here" and Caleb had stayed, and now the hall was empty and the chandelier was still throwing diamonds of light across the floor as though nothing had happened at all.
He looked down at the ring on his finger. Silver. Simple. Cold as everything else in this world.
Married.
Somehow.
Time passed in a blur of distant shouting and radio crackle from the guards beyond the doors. At some point, someone—a young aide he didn't recognize—appeared at his elbow and guided him into a side room. Caleb sat on a chaise that probably cost more than his childhood bedroom. He stared at a painting on the wall: a dark sea under a storm. It felt appropriate.
Nobody told him anything. Nobody asked if he was all right.
Nearly forty minutes later, Jaxon Reed appeared in the doorway.
"Car's ready," he said simply.
Caleb stood without being asked twice.
In the back seat of the armored car, the city lights streaked past the tinted windows. Lucian was already seated—jacket off, sleeves pushed to the elbow, a phone pressed to his ear. He didn't acknowledge Caleb's arrival. He didn't acknowledge it when Jaxon closed the door. He simply spoke into the phone, voice low and methodical, already several steps ahead of everything that had just happened.
Caleb pressed himself against the far door and watched the city disappear behind them.
His vows were still unfinished. The ceremony had ended in gunfire and controlled chaos and the blank back of Lucian Thorne's head.
And somehow, that felt exactly right.