Page 18 of Plain Sight

I look like shit.

I didn’t know I was grabbing my hair so hard. There’s a scratch mark on one of my cheeks, almost like I was in a fight, but I wasn’t. And the look on my reflection’s face isn’t good. I look haunted. Skittish. I look better than I feel, though. Because I feel like a corroded wire. I feel like an electrical fire waiting to start. I feel like I might die any second.

That’s not the right feeling for the happy ending of a story, I’ll tell you that.

Gabriel puts his hand on my shoulder and meets my eyes in the mirror. “Lily’s okay.”

“I know.” I give him a jerky, half-human nod. “I know. She keeps saying that.”

“You’re okay.”

“Sure I am.”

“You’ll be okay,” he says firmly. It could be possible, since Gabriel’s okay. He’s not pale and thin and coming home in the middle of the night with stab wounds anymore. His clothes are perfect, but he’s not obsessive about them. He looks comfortable in his body.

I try to believe him.

Jamie, my mom whispers.

Not now, not now, not now.

The nice thing about Jacob Chambers is that he’s a talker. He chats about how we should fix my hair and how the guests seem to think the delay is just some extra drama and practically none of them have realized that anything went wrong. All the ladies think I’m obsessed with Lily because of how I ran out of the cathedral. I accidentally stare at him for too long while Gabriel’s cleaning my face with a damp paper towel—no idea how I scratched my own face, or if some mystery person scratched me when I wasn’t paying attention.

Jacob claps my shoulder. “Cheer up, old chap,” he says in an aggressively American accent. “Wedding bells, and all that.”

“Right. Wedding bells.”

It’s weird as all fuck to be in a cathedral bathroom with Jacob Chambers and Gabriel, but it’s familiar enough that I don’t hear any other voices in my head. The shaking-Vesuvius sensation stops. I almost feel normal when Jacob goes out and retrieves my tux jacket, which I’d completely forgotten about.

“Is she still out there?” I ask him in my most normal voice when he comes back, the jacket held high.

“The bride, Lilith? Yes. She’s here. Mason is standing guard, along with his private security friends.”

“They’re not private security,” I tell Jacob. “They’re just guys.”

“Just guys,” he repeats. “Of course you’re right. Just guys. I would never presume to argue with the groom on his wedding day.”

“Don’t tease him,” Gabriel says.

“Sorry, handsome.” Jacob flashes me a smile, which falls into a frown as he shakes out my jacket. “What did you do? Step on this? How quickly do you think we could find an iron?”

The answer is, I guess, very quickly. Jacob’s gone for a minute or two. He returns with my jacket looking way better than it did when he left.

He and Gabriel get me back into it.

Then we’re out in the hall, heading away from the bathroom. The constant hum of voices from the nave is like white noise. Terrifying one second. Comforting the next. Gabriel opens a door, and we go through it, and I’m back at the front of the church like I never left.

This is so fucking disorienting.

Mason comes out after us and takes me by the elbow.

The shaking was more real than I thought. The people at this wedding have to be concerned by now. I wasn’t this much of a wreck before.

Part of the problem is that none of this seems real. Who has a wedding in a packed cathedral that gets interrupted by a kidnapping? Who has a wedding that wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for a different kidnapping? It would be less shocking to find out that I haven’t lived in reality since I was a teenager.

If the cathedral melted down to reveal a mental institution, that would make sense.

Mason squeezes my arm. “She’s fine.”