Page 7 of Carnal Wagers

With a last deep breath, I clapped and turned on my heels to face my family.

“Okay then. Adrien. Your knife. I need it.”

I held out my hand with a give-me gesture. We both knew he had it. He was great at always making sure the pocketknife stayed on him, even through security checks.

He pulled it out of his breast pocket. “Why?”

I plucked it out of his hand, careful not to touch him. “You’ll get it back.”

“Who’s hungry?” My mother asked.

My youngest brother absently raised his hand, obliviously lost in his game.

“I could go for a burger.”

“Thibault, no,” she admonished. “How about it? Our reservation still stands. We’ll just have less people. It’ll be more intimate.”

I lifted the mermaid silhouette of my wedding dress and punctured Adrien’s knife through the fabric, a hand’s width above the knee, ignoring my mother’s horrified gasp.

“No, thanks, Maman. I’m going to go get drunk.”

“If Alizé’s not going, neither am I,” my sister said, detached.

I ripped the knife through the layers of textile in a long cut all around. The designer would probably have a heart attack at the sight, but right now, after this farce of a wedding, I couldn’t care less. I needed to forget this ever happened, and I wasn’t about to embarrass myself by going anywhere in an overpriced wedding gown. At least this look was passable as a makeshift cocktail dress.

“Alizé…” my father warned.

“Nope. Don’t want to hear it.” I pulled loose strands from the new untrimmed hem, then tossed Adrien his folded pocketknife. “No bride wants to be with her parents on her wedding night.”

“In case your ears got clogged, there won’t be a wedding night.”

“Exactly.” I picked up my clutch, which I’d set on a chair when we first arrived, and shoved the bundle of severed dress fabric into the small trash can near the door. “I got married yet somehow still got left at the altar. That’ll be a new classic. Which definitely deserves a toast. To myself. Alone.”

I air-kissed them all, dropping my sunglasses over my eyes despite still being inside. For once, I didn’t care about the outrage on my mother’s face. She’d live.

“Tchatchao, à la revoyure, la famille.” Ciao, peace out, family.

I swaggered through the city hall’s hallways with confidence I didn’t feel, my heels clacking with purpose. Eyes followed me through the building and out onto the pedestrian zone directly in front of it. They all probably read “jilted bride” on my forehead, thanks to the veil I’d forgotten to get rid of. It sailed behind me like a big white flag of despondency.

As I walked through the uncongested square, shoulders back, head high, I unpinned the veil. In the remains of my colorful dress, there was no bride to be seen. If I scrubbed my brain of the last fifteen minutes, there never would have even been a wedding.

I parked my butt in the first available chair on a bar’s terrace, far enough to be unnoticeable but close enough to watch my parents and siblings converge in front of the city hall gates. The mayor followed them out and continued to fawn over my father, shaking his hand, gesturing animatedly, and full-on belly laughing at whatever was said.

I scoffed and rolled my eyes. My father would chew that little man up and spit him out for breakfast if it suited his agenda. I just hoped this didn’t mean my father intended to extend his reach to Lyon. Moving to Lyon for my studies had been as much about carving my place in the world outside of my family’s underworld contacts as it was about creating a business that was entirely my own.

I tracked my parents until they climbed into a waiting black sedan idling along the side of the square.

No one looked around for me. Neither of them showed signs of being conflicted regarding what had just happened to their daughter in that wedding hall.

Disappointment curdled the little breakfast I had stomached earlier this morning. Behind my sunglasses, the backs of my eyes burned. A sound scraped out of my throat, lost between a sob and a chuckle. I didn’t know why this kind of behavior surprised me anymore or why I kept trying to appease them. Why couldn’t I rip out this clawing craving inside me for my parents to see me instead of through me?

No matter what I did, it was never enough. I’d taken the initiative to learn languages and serve as the family translator. I’d earned top marks in school, skipped a few grades, and now was about to graduate with my Applied Chemistry Engineering Master’s degree next year. I’d built my own perfume business from the ground up, while also supplying my father with a few useful chemical creations. Now I’d even gotten married for the family’s survival, but it was all a due in their eyes. My importance depended on my worth. The more I tried to show my father what I could do, the more he seemed to want from me.

I shouldn’t even be surprised. I’d always been background noise to them since I was eleven. The worst part was that I didn’t completely blame them. They tried to be good parents to their traumatized eldest sons, who had been kidnapped and abused as kids, while I was supposed to be fine. I just wasn’t important enough for them to see that I wasn’t. And now my new husband saw me the same way. Troublesome and not worth his time.

A tear leaked out, and I frantically wiped it away. Tears never helped. I scrolled through social media for some cute animal pick-me-up videos. At this point, I would take any kind of distraction from the fact that one more person in my life made me feel invisible.

My phone pinged with a message from my best friend in the whole world.