Cellie's POV
The afternoon wore on and the champagne flowed and the guests laughed and clinked glasses and the string quartet played something romantic that drifted across the lawn, and I stood near my hedge and watched all of it like I was observing a nature documentary about a species I didn't belong to.
I had been watching Demetrio without meaning to, the way you couldn't stop watching a fire you knew was dangerous. He had spent most of the reception moving through the crowd with two men at his back, stopping here and there to exchange words with people who straightened unconsciously when he approached. He didn't smile much. He didn't need to. People responded to him the way people responded to gravity, not always willingly but always completely.
He hadn't looked at me again since the church and I was choosing to count that as a victory.
I was halfway through a mental rewatch of the opening sequence of The Devil Wears Prada when the shouting started.
It came from the far corner of the lawn, near the hedgerow, and it was the kind of sound that cut through party noise instantly, sharp enough to turn heads all the way across the garden. I turned with everyone else and my stomach dropped before my brain had even fully processed what I was seeing.
Demetrio had a man by the collar.
Not metaphorically. His fist was knotted in the fabric of the man's suit jacket and he had him backed against the hedge, and there was a gun in his other hand, pressed flat against the man's chest with a casualness that was somehow more terrifying than if he had been shaking. The two men who had been trailing Demetrio all afternoon had fanned out slightly, not intervening, just ensuring that no one else was going to.
The entire reception went quiet.
Not the polite quiet of people pausing their conversations. The deep, held-breath quiet of people who understood immediately that something was happening and had the survival instinct to go very still.
"Repeat it," Demetrio said, and even from across the lawn his voice carried, low and deliberate and absolutely without any heat. That was the thing that scared me the most, somehow. He didn't sound angry. He sounded patient, which on him was much worse.
The man, someone who had been laughing and drinking champagne twenty minutes ago from the look of him, shook his head rapidly. "Don, I didn't mean any disrespect, I swear to God, I was just talking, people say things at parties, you know how it is, please, I would never-"
"Rico." Demetrio said just the name, and Rico stopped talking mid-sentence. "I'm not going to ask you again."
One second passed. Two. Rico's mouth opened and closed and nothing came out.
The gun went off.
The sound hit me like a physical thing, a crack of pressure against my eardrums that made me flinch hard enough to slosh orange juice over my hand. I stood there with citrus dripping off my fingers and stared at what used to be Rico and tried to remember how to breathe. Someone near me screamed, a short, high sound that cut off quickly as the person next to them grabbed their arm. Several guests had stumbled backward. One woman had dropped her champagne glass and it lay in pieces on the stone path, the liquid spreading in a slow pale pool.
On the hedge behind where Rico had been standing, there was a dark stain spreading through the leaves.
Demetrio lowered the gun. He looked around the gathered crowd with an expression of absolute composure, the way you looked around a room to check if anyone had questions after a presentation. His gaze moved across faces, across frozen bodies and white-knuckled champagne flutes, and then it landed on me.
I don't know why I thought it wouldn't. I don't know why I was still surprised.
He held eye contact for exactly three seconds and then he passed on, scanning the rest of the crowd, and he said something quietly to one of his men that I couldn't hear. The man nodded and moved toward the house, presumably to deal with the aftermath of all of this in whatever way these people dealt with such things.
Two minutes later, the string quartet started playing again.
I looked around at the guests and watched them, almost in unison, turn back to their conversations. Volumes lowered slightly. Laughter came a little less freely. But they adjusted, they recalibrated, and within five minutes the reception was a reception again, slightly more subdued but fundamentally unchanged.
Like this was a thing that happened.
Like this was just a thing that happened at DeLeon family events and everyone understood that going in.
I looked down at the orange juice on my hand. I looked at my glass, mostly empty now from the flinching. I thought about my hedge and my plan and the new version of myself that was making responsible choices.
Then I thought about Rico and the sound the gun had made and the way Demetrio had looked at me afterward with the exact same expression he'd had when he told me to get out of his room, that flat unreadable composure, like nothing in the world was capable of touching him.
I set my empty glass on the tray of a passing waiter.
"Excuse me," I said, and the waiter paused. "Do you have anything stronger?"
He presented me with a glass of champagne and I took it without guilt.
Somewhere across the lawn, I could hear Penelope laughing at something Manuel had said, bright and delighted, and the string quartet had moved into something waltz-like and pretty, and the afternoon sun was still warm and golden on the garden, and none of it matched the body that was currently being handled somewhere near the hedgerow.
This was my family now.
I drank the champagne in two long swallows and reached for another.
I was going to need a much better plan.