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We both nodded. “Lo siento,” I said. Lili rolled her eyes — she clearly didn’t believe me — and glanced up. A smile curled at the corner of her mouth. I tracked her gaze, and my chest went tight.
Emma came down the stairs in a lacy, white dress that was probably Lili’s, but it fit her body like she had custom-ordered it for herself; diamonds dripped down her neck and at her wrists. Her hair had been curled and framed her face, and Lili had put makeup on her face.She looks like an angel, I thought absently. It was impossible to ignore the woman’s beauty.
But when my eyes landed on thesmileon her face, it sparked an ugly rage deep in my gut. “What in the hell could you possibly be smiling at today?” I asked, putting voice to that anger.
Emma froze on the stairs, and the wide smile slipped a few notches before fading entirely. Her eyes slid to Lili for a moment before she zeroed back in on me. I watched her pull in a deep breath. Then, Emma rolled her shoulders back so that she was standing straighter than before. She walked down the last few stairs and stopped in front of me. “I apologize for trying to make the best of a shitty situation,” she said flatly. “I won’t do that in the future.”
Goddamnit, I thought savagely. Emma had tried to be cheerful. I should appreciate the attempt; it was more than I had done for her. Instead, my stomach was finding new ways to flip itself inside out. I studied her face — she was going to be my wife, after all. Somehow, she was even more beautiful up close. Especially her eyes, icy blue with flecks of darker blue around the irises.
“We should be going,” Omar said, and his voice sounded far too amused. “Our appointment at the courthouse is in half an hour.”
Emma’s haughty expression —the one she’d conjured after the fall of her smile —faded around the edges. She wasn’t nearly as confident as she pretended to be. For that soft, Bambi look on her face, I fought against my own anger at the situation. I offered her my elbow. “Shall we?”
She didn’t trust me, the shadow in her eyes told me as much, but she slipped her hand into my arm after only a split-second of hesitation. “It’s better than dying, right?,” she said, more to herself than to me, but I could see Omar smirking at me. I raised my middle finger at him over her head.
I walked her out of the house, tightening my grip on her as we walked over the threshold. The thought might occur to Emma to run. I might have tried it myself if I was in her position. But instead of tensing or trying to pull away, she leaned into me, seeking a comfort that I couldn’t —wouldn’tbecause I couldn’t stop the petty feeling in my gut—give her.
A large black Range Rover was parked, ready to go. Omar and Lili took the front seats, and I opened the back door for my bride-to-be. Emma paused, looking into the dark interior, and I leaned down. “Are you going to get in yourself, or am I going to have to put you in there?”
Emma glared at me, her shoulders tight, but she climbed resolutely into the back of the Rover and scooted as far from me as she could possibly get. Though, as I settled beside her, I realized that she wasn’t cowering away from me. Instead, she sat in her seat with her eyes forward, as if she were determined not to look at me.
Like I want her to look at me anyway, I thought. My hands curled into fists. I was not a fucking child, and I refused to feel something as petty as passive aggression. “You look —” Emma turned her head at the sound of my voice. Her eyes were almost comically wide, as if she hadn’t anticipated that I would speak to her at all. “You look nice,” I told her, almost gritting my teeth against the words.
Emma let out a snort. “You don’t have to do that,” she said.
“Do what?”
“You don’t have to make nice with me,” she clarified. “Honestly, you being nice is off-putting.”
Her words raised the hairs on the back of my neck. Maybe Emma hadn’t meant them as a challenge, but I couldn’t see them as anything else. “You don’t like me when I’m nice?” I asked and reached out to brush the back of her neck with my thumb. A tremble ran through her, but when she tried to shift out of my grasp, I cupped the back of her neck, keeping her in place. “Would you rather I be cruel?”
Emma shivered again. “I’d rather you didn’t touch me,” she snapped and pulled herself out of my grip.
I thought about reaching out again, pulling her against me and messing up all of the hard work that my sister put into Emma’s hair and makeup.Let’s see if she’d like getting married looking like she got fucked in the backseat, I thought, but my sister shifted in her seat before I could move. “Stop it,pendejo,” she hissed. “This is bad enough without you acting like a child.”
She was right, and I hated it. I sat back in my seat, drumming my fingers against my thigh as Omar weaved around the traffic. In less than twenty minutes, we pulled into the public parking adjacent to the courthouse, and Omar parked the car in a shady spot.
Beside me, Emma took a deep breath, but she paused before she reached for the door handle and looked at me. “Do we have rings?”
“I have a ring for you,” I said. It was in my pocket; it belonged to my mother. Padre gave it to me, and if I didn’t know him so well, I would say he was bestowing me with something precious to him. Instead, it was just a reminder: get this done quickly.
“And you?”
I hitched my eyebrow up in question. “Why should I wear a ring?”
“If you aren’t wearing one, why should I?” she shot back at me.
Omar chuckled from the front seat. “This is going well.”
“Shut up, Omar,” Lili hissed. She checked her watch and then glanced back over her shoulder at us. “We have to go if we’re going, or we’ll miss our appointment slot.”
I popped open my door and stepped into the Miami sunshine. Omar had opened the door for Emma on the other side, and when she climbed out of the car, the white of her dress gave her a literal glow that was hard to look at. Lili let out a little whistle. “I do good work, right?” she asked.
I glanced at my baby sister, who was grinning widely, and I dipped my head once. “You did good work,” I acknowledged.
Omar and I flanked Emma as we crossed the street to the courthouse. There was a metal detector inside the door, but Omar slipped his hand into the security guard’s, and we were led around the velvet rope without passing through it. “How —?” Emma started to ask, but she cut herself off and shook her head. “Never mind, I don’t want to know.”
“You get used to it,” Lili said as they walked up to the reception desk.
