Marry Me To Destroy Them

Lyra POV

There is a particular kind of silence that comes from standing in a room full of people who believe you are dead.

I had forgotten what it sounded like the hum of a hundred conversations, glasses clinking, laughter stretched thin over old money and older secrets until I stood at the edge of the Calloway Enterprises gala in a dress the colour of dried blood, and none of it stopped for me. Nobody turned. Nobody gasped. I was a shadow at the mouth of a ballroom I used to own, watching my own funeral happen twice once, two years ago, in a closed casket my father wept over, and again now, in the easy, untroubled way this room breathed without me in it.

I found her within thirty seconds. I always find her within thirty seconds. Camille has never known how to stand in a room quietly; she has to be seen, has to be the centre of every axis, and tonight she was glowing under the chandelier light in a way that made my chest go hollow and hot at once. She wore my mother's emerald necklace. The one that was supposed to be mine. The one my father promised me the night before he died, his hand trembling in mine, telling me it would look beautiful on his little girl on her wedding day.

She wore it as she'd always owned it. Like it had never touched my skin.

I pressed my nails into my palm, hard enough to ground me, hard enough to remember why I had spent two years rebuilding myself into someone capable of standing in this room without shaking apart.

I am not the girl who died in that car.

I repeated it silently, like a vow, like a prayer, like the only thing keeping my knees locked and my spine straight. I am not her. I am something colder. Something they made.

A waiter passed with a tray of champagne, and I took a glass I didn't intend to drink, just to have something to hold. My hand didn't shake. That surprised me more than it should have. There was a time God, there was a time when the mere thought of this room, this dress, this necklace glittering under lights that used to shine on me, would have brought me to my knees. I used to cry in bathrooms after galas like this one, quietly, so my mascara wouldn't smear, so nobody would ask what was wrong with the golden girl of the Calloway family.

I don't cry anymore. I stopped somewhere in a hospital bed with a false name on my chart, watching my own obituary scroll across a stranger's phone in the waiting room, my body wrapped in bandages, my identity wrapped in silence. Grief burns down to something else if you let it burn long enough. Mine burned down to this woman in a red dress who watches instead of weeps.

Julian was near the bar, laughing at something one of his board members said, his head thrown back, easy and golden and utterly unaware that the woman he buried was standing forty feet away with a full glass of champagne and absolutely nothing left to lose.

I used to love that laugh. I used to fall asleep to the memory of it. Now it just sounds like a door closing on a version of me that doesn't exist anymore.

I could walk to him right now. I could set my glass down and cross this ballroom and watch his face when he realises the ghost he's been living guilt-free beside for two years just walked back into the land of the living. I could do it tonight, messy and immediate and satisfying in the way violence is satisfying a flash of pain, over quickly, forgotten by morning.

But I didn't spend two years learning to read a balance sheet, learning which banks don't ask questions, learning how to disappear a person's name from a system entirely, just to waste it on a moment of satisfaction.

I want more than his shock. I want his ruin.

I want Camille to feel what it is to have everything you love stripped away one careful piece at a time, the way I did, lying in a hospital bed listening to a nurse tell another nurse that the Calloway girl didn't make it, that it was a shame, that the family must be devastated not knowing I could hear every word, not knowing the family wasn't devastated at all. Not knowing the family had planned it.

I want Margaret to understand what it costs to lose the thing she guards most: her precious, curated image of herself as the doting stepmother, the grieving family matriarch. I want it gone. I want it burned down to nothing, the way my faith in this family was burned down to nothing on a stretch of coastal road two years ago.

I set my glass down, untouched, on a passing tray.

Someone brushed past me an older woman I didn't recognise, murmuring an apology without looking at my face and for one disorienting second, standing invisible in a room that used to orbit around me, I understood something with total, bone-deep clarity.

They don't see me because they aren't looking. Nobody looks for a ghost in a red dress. Nobody looks for the dead.

That is going to be my greatest weapon.

I turned before Julian could catch sight of me, before the champagne in my blood could talk me into something reckless, and I walked out of that ballroom the same way I walked into it unseen, unnoticed, untouched.

But as the valet brought my car around and the cool night air hit my bare shoulders, I allowed myself, just once, to look back at the golden light spilling from the ballroom windows, at the silhouette of my sister's laughter through the glass.

Soon, I thought. Soon you'll all remember exactly what it looks like when I walk into a room.

I just didn't yet know whose hand I'd have to take to make it happen or how much of myself I'd lose finding out.