Cellie's POV
The church was the kind of beautiful that made you feel underdressed just by existing inside it, all vaulted ceilings and stained glass filtering light into colours that had no business being that pretty. Every pew was packed with people in their finest, draped in silk and wool and jewels that probably cost more than my entire apartment building, and they all had the particular stillness of people who knew exactly how important they were and wanted you to know it too.
I sat near the middle, alone, because Penelope had been very clear that I was a guest at this wedding and not a participant in it, which was fine by me. I had found myself a seat at the end of a pew, close enough to the aisle that I could leave quickly if I needed to, and I was keeping my eyes fixed on the altar and my thoughts as quiet as I could manage.
It was not going well.
"She's so beautiful," said a woman somewhere to my left, her voice thick with genuine feeling. I could hear the tears in it.
"Beautiful?" The woman beside her sounded personally offended by the word. "She's a gold digger with tacky shoes and no shame. Look at the way she's holding his arm, like she thinks she belongs there."
"I heard Manuel didn't pay a single cent toward her dress," a third voice chimed in, conspiratorial and delighted. "It was some kind of test. He wanted to see if she'd go through with it even without his money."
The second woman gave a short, satisfied sound. "Well, that explains the fit. Did you see how that bodice is pulling?"
"Shh, shh, you have to keep your voice down. Demetrio is looking this way."
I heard his name and I turned before I could stop myself, scanning the rows across the aisle with a casualness I definitely did not feel.
He was already looking at me.
Not at the gossiping women. Not at the altar or his father or the ceremony unfolding in front of him. He was looking directly at me, grey eyes fixed and burning with the particular intensity of someone who had made a decision about you and wasn't interested in revisiting it. One of his men was leaning close to his ear, relaying something that apparently could not wait until after his father had said his vows, and Demetrio was listening without taking his eyes off me.
I turned back to the front and kept my face perfectly neutral.
He was going to be a problem. I had already known that, somewhere in the back of my mind, since I had walked out of his room that morning two weeks ago and tried to convince myself that I could simply never think about it again. But knowing something in theory and sitting across a church aisle from it while it stared holes through the side of your head were two very different experiences.
The ceremony dragged on the way ceremonies did when you were the only person in attendance who wasn't sure whether to feel happy or sick, and I spent most of it studying the stained glass windows and counting the flower arrangements and doing absolutely anything other than looking across the aisle again.
When the priest finally pronounced them husband and wife and the organ swelled and the guests erupted into applause, I clapped along with everyone else and told myself that was the hard part done.
I had genuinely no idea how wrong I was.
The reception was held on the grounds of the DeLeon estate, and if the church had been impressive, the estate was something else entirely. Rolling lawn stretched in every direction, edged with sculpted hedges and flowering trees, and white-clothed tables had been arranged across it in clusters, each one set with crystal and silver that caught the afternoon light. Waitstaff moved between guests with practiced invisibility, trays of champagne and canapés appearing and disappearing like magic. A string quartet played somewhere I couldn't see, the music drifting across the lawn like it belonged to the air itself.
It was perfect and it was beautiful and I hated every inch of it.
I had found myself a glass of orange juice, which was my compromise with the version of myself that desperately wanted champagne, and I had positioned myself near a flowering hedge where I could see the crowd without being in the middle of it. Close enough to be present. Far enough to breathe.
"Cellieaaa!" Penelope's voice cut across the lawn like a blade, and several heads turned in my direction before I had even moved. I fixed my smile in place the way you put on a coat before going out in the cold, necessary and automatic, and I turned around.
She was standing with Manuel, her hand resting on his arm with a proprietary ease that she had clearly been practicing. She looked genuinely happy, which was almost disarming. Penelope was a lot of things that I had complicated feelings about, but I had to give her this: she had wanted this life for a long time and she had gotten it, and the satisfaction on her face was real.
Manuel DeLeon was not what I had expected, which was saying something because I had expected quite a lot.
He was tall, with the kind of build that spoke to a younger life of physical work, broader than his son and carrying his age in the set of his shoulders rather than in any softening of his features. His eyebrows were heavy and dark, his beard full, his eyes the kind of deep brown that looked black in certain lights. He was watching me approach with an expression that was not unfriendly but was also very thoroughly unreadable, the way a man looked when he had spent decades learning to keep his reactions to himself.
He was not a man I was going to be comfortable around. I knew that immediately. But I squared my shoulders and walked toward them anyway.
"This is my daughter, Cellie," Penelope said, and there was a particular brightness in her voice that I recognized as the tone she used when she was performing for an audience. She reached out and touched my arm briefly, a gesture that probably looked maternal from the outside.
Manuel looked me over once, not rudely, just with the thoroughness of a man who assessed everything. "This is your daughter?" he said, glancing at Penelope with something that might have been gentle confusion. "She looks nothing like you, stellina."
Penelope's laugh was light and practiced. "That's because Cellie was adopted, actually. My ex-husband, Theo, he wanted a daughter desperately and we couldn't have more children, so we found Cellie." She patted Manuel's chest softly. "You remember I told you about Theo."
"Yes," Manuel said, his expression shifting into something quieter. "The car accident. I remember." He looked at me again and something in his face settled into a different kind of assessment, less about threat and more about calculation. "You are welcome in this family, Cellie. I mean that genuinely. But I want to be clear with you from the beginning: the DeLeon name carries weight and it carries expectations, and everyone who belongs to it, by blood or by choice, upholds both. You understand me."
It was not quite a question. I met his eyes and nodded. "I understand."
"Good." He almost smiled. "Call me Manuel. We are family now and I don't need formality from family."
He and Penelope drifted away toward another cluster of guests, and I turned to find that I was now standing beside a young woman who had been so absorbed in her phone that she had apparently experienced this entire exchange through a screen. Georgiana DeLeon, Manuel's daughter. I had seen her at a distance during the ceremony and up close she was striking in the way all of this family seemed to be, dark hair, sharp features, a particular quality of beauty that came packaged with the awareness of itself.
I gave her my most genuine smile. "Hi, I'm Cellie. It's really nice to meet you. I guess we're sisters now, which is kind of wild but also kind of exciting, right?"
Georgiana lifted her eyes from her phone slowly, the way you looked up when you wanted to make sure someone knew they had interrupted something important. She regarded me for a long, measured moment, her gaze dropping briefly to take in my dress, my shoes, and returning to my face with an expression that had gone from blank to coolly amused.
"The pleasure is mine, Cellie," she said, in a voice like a smile with no warmth behind it. "Your dress is interesting."
I looked down at it. Gold sequins, fitted, paired with my favourite boots. I thought it looked great. "What's wrong with my dress?"
"Nothing at all," she said easily, lifting one shoulder in a small shrug. "If your goal was to look like you're trying too hard at someone else's wedding, you absolutely nailed it." She glanced back at her phone. "Or something like that. Don't take it personally."
She walked away without waiting for my response, her heels clicking on the stone path, her posture perfect.
I stood there for a moment and breathed very carefully through my nose.
So that was Georgiana.
I turned back to my orange juice and the hedge and reminded myself, with great effort, that I was the new version of myself. The version that didn't chase after girls who wanted a reaction and didn't let people like Georgiana DeLeon see that they had landed anywhere close to the mark. I sipped my juice. I looked at the garden. I thought about my apartment and my couch and my television and the very reasonable plan I had made to spend the rest of this holiday weekend eating takeout and watching movies and recovering from this entire family.
It was a good plan. I just had to get through the next few hours first.