Chapter 1: The Last Dress

Laura POV

The satin feels like ice against my fingers. Cold. Dead. Just like everything else in this hotel room, it costs more per night than most people make in a month.

I zip the garment bag shut, and the sound cuts through the silence like breaking glass. Wedding dress number seventeen disappears into darkness. Good. I never want to see it again. Never want to feel how it clung to my skin like a lie, how it made me look like something I'm not.

Something pure.

The mirror across the room shows me standing there in my cream reception dress. Not white. Never white. I gave up the right to white when I was nineteen and desperate, when the hospital bills kept coming and Dad's medical insurance ran out three months before his heart finally stopped fighting.

My makeup is still perfect. It always is. I've learned how to cry without smudging mascara, how to smile without meaning it, how to say "I do" while my soul dies a little more each time.

But my eyes give me away. They always do.

I see Roberto's eyes looking back at me from the mirror. My father's eyes. Dark brown, soft, disappointing. He's been dead for three years, but somehow he's still watching. Still waiting for me to become the woman he raised me to be instead of... this.

The champagne glass sits on the marble table, bubbles gone flat. Dead, just like the congratulations that echoed through the ballroom an hour ago. Each clap was fake. Paid for. Just like the smiles, just like the flowers, just like the love I pretended to feel when Gerald slipped that ring on my finger.

My phone buzzes against the table. The screen lights up with a text from Gerald Martinez, husband number seventeen. Former husband now, I guess. The divorce papers will be filed by tomorrow morning.

Transfer confirmed. Pleasure doing business.

The words taste like pennies in my mouth. Like blood and shame mixed together until I can't tell them apart anymore.

Fifty thousand dollars. That's what six months of pretending to love Gerald was worth. Six months of playing house in his mansion, six months of smiling at his business partners, six months of being the perfect wife to a man who needed arm candy more than affection.

I should feel relieved. The money will keep Mom quiet for a while, stop her calls about Vincent's latest "business opportunity." It will pay for the apartment in Lincoln Park, the designer clothes, the life I've built on lies and legal contracts.

Instead, I feel empty.

"Find someone who stays"

Dad's voice hits me like a slap. I can smell the hospital room again antiseptic and death and the wilted flowers Mom brought once before she disappeared for two weeks with some guy named Carlos.

"Find someone who stays."

His hand was so thin at the end. All bones and loose skin, but his grip was still strong when he grabbed my wrist that last day. His mechanic's hands, rough from thirty years of fixing other people's broken things, trying to fix me one last time.

"I will, Dad," I lied to his dying face. "I promise."

But staying means trust. And trust is something I pawned a long time ago.

My apartment smells like designer perfume samples when I walk through the door two hours later. Little glass bottles lined up on my dresser like soldiers.

Each one represents a different version of me. Sweet and innocent for the widowers. Sophisticated and mysterious for the businessmen. Whatever they want, I become.

The wedding photos line my walls like evidence. Seventeen different Laura Castillos smiling with seventeen different families. Hired families, most of them.

Actors paid to play loving relatives because my real family is just me and Mom, and Mom only shows up when she needs money.

I look good in every single picture. Radiant brides with perfect smiles and empty eyes.

My laptop sits open on the kitchen counter, glowing with new emails. Men are looking for wives. Men who need green cards or inheritance requirements or someone pretty to take to company parties. Men who want the idea of love without the mess of actual feelings.

I pour myself a glass of wine, the expensive kind Gerald taught me to appreciate and scroll through the messages.

Seeking a discreet arrangement...

Six-month contract preferred...

No emotional complications...

They all blur together. Same desperate needs, different bank accounts. I've gotten good at reading between the lines, at figuring out who's harmless and who might be dangerous. Who pays on time and who tries to change the terms halfway through?

Gerald was one of the good ones. Never raised his voice, never tried to make it real, respected the boundaries we set from day one. When his business

partners asked about our love story, he'd put his arm around me and say, "We understand each other perfectly." And we did. I understood his need for respectability. He understood my need for survival.

Clean. Simple. Safe.

My phone buzzes. Mom.

I let it go to voicemail, but I already know what she'll say. Vincent needs money. Always Vincent, the latest in her long line of dangerous men who promise her the world and deliver nothing but bruises and empty bank accounts.

The wine tastes bitter tonight. Everything tastes bitter.

I close my laptop and walked to the window. Chicago spreads out below me, millions of lights hiding millions of secrets. Somewhere out there, other people are falling in love for real. Getting married because they can't imagine living without each other. Having babies and buying houses and building the kind of life

Dad wanted for me.

But that life requires believing in forever. And I learned a long time ago that forever is just a word people use until they decide to leave.

My phone buzzes again. Not Mom this time. Email notification.

I almost ignored it. It's past midnight, and I'm tired. Tired of pretending, tired of choosing between paying rent and keeping my mother alive, tired of seeing Dad's disappointed face every time I look in the mirror.

But something makes me open it.

The sender's name makes my heart skip Hayes Industries.

I know that name. Everyone in Chicago knows that name. The Hayes family built half of this city, owned the other half. Old money, new power, the kind of people who decide elections and buy politicians like other people, buy coffee.

My hands shook as I read:

Ms. Castillo,

I require your professional services for a six-month arrangement. Complete discretion expected. Cohabitation required. Compensation: $500,000.

If interested, please respond within 24 hours.

A. Hayes

Five hundred thousand dollars.

The number burns behind my eyes. More money than I've made in two years combined. Enough to pay off Mom's debts, enough to disappear if I want to, enough to start over somewhere Vincent and his friends can't find us.

But cohabitation is required. That's new. Dangerous. All my other arrangements had clear boundaries: separate bedrooms, separate lives, separate everything. This sounds like playing house for real.

My finger hovers over the reply button.

Dad's voice whispers in my head: "Find someone who stays.

But this isn't about staying. This is about surviving. And I've gotten very good at surviving.

I start to type a response, then stop. Something about this email feels different. More desperate than the others, despite the corporate language. A. Hayes – I wonder which Hayes it is. The old man died last year, leaving behind a fortune and a family famous for destroying each other over money.

The cursor blinks at me. Waiting.

Five hundred thousand dollars.

I think about Gerald's goodbye kiss on my cheek, dry and polite. I think about the flat champagne and hired applause. I think about Dad's dying wish and Mom's latest crisis and the seventeen wedding dresses hanging in my closet like ghosts.

I think about the fact that I'm twenty-six years old, and I've never been in love. Not real love. The kind that makes you stupid and brave and willing to risk everything.

Maybe it's time to find out what I'm really made of.

My phone rings. Unknown number.

I answer without thinking. "Hello?"

"Ms. Castillo?" The voice is deep, controlled, but I can hear something underneath. Tension. Maybe fear. "This is Andrew Hayes. I believe you received my email."

The wine glass slips from my hand and shatters against the hardwood floor. Red wine spreads across the wood like blood, and all I can do is stare at it while my heart pounds so hard I'm sure he can hear it through the phone.

"Ms. Castillo? Are you there?"

I open my mouth to answer, but no words come out. Because suddenly, I realize this isn't just another contract.

This is something else entirely.

"I..." I start, then stop. My voice comes out as a whisper. "I'm here."

"Good. We need to meet. Tonight."