The Forbidden Wife

Forty minutes before my wedding, my sister adjusted my veil for the third time.

Elisa had spent the last ten minutes hovering behind me, tugging at the tulle, stepping back to squint at it, then swooping in again to fix some flaw only she could see. I’d tried to hold still. But after nearly three hours of hair and makeup, photographers, phone calls, and a revolving door of well-wishers, I’d come to the conclusion that asking a bride to stay put was a special kind of torture.

“Turn your head one more time and I’m leaving it crooked,” she warned, a bobby pin clamped between her lips. “And when you’re looking at your wedding photos twenty years from now, I don’t want to hear a word.”

I caught her eye in the mirror, amused in spite of the nerves I’d been ignoring since dawn.

“In twenty years I’ll have bigger problems than a crooked veil. Besides, you’ve been saying you’re done for fifteen minutes. I’m starting to think you just like yanking my hair.”

She laughed and slid the pin home.

“What I like is keeping you from walking down that aisle looking like you survived a hurricane. Thirty more seconds, and then you can go back to running the national economy.”

I rolled my eyes, though I couldn’t quite lose the smile. Elisa had been teasing me about it for years. According to her, I couldn’t make it through a family dinner without bringing up interest rates or quarterly earnings. Marco joked about it too. One day, he liked to say, he’d walk in and find me asleep on a balance sheet instead of in his arms.

Which made it all the more ridiculous that the business press had spent weeks covering my wedding as though it weren’t a wedding at all.

The Borda-Ibarra merger. That was what they were calling it. I’d seen the headline so many times it had stopped sounding strange.

Banco Borda and Banco Ibarra had been rivals for decades, fighting over corporate clients, old money, and any deal big enough to earn a full page in the financial papers. My father ran the first. Vicente Ibarra ran the second. And Marco and I, apparently, were living proof that two families who’d spent years trying to crush each other could finally share something without it turning into a war. The timing couldn’t have been better. Both banks were in the middle of negotiating the joint acquisition of a third institution that had spent months fighting to stay afloat.

It was a huge deal. So, evidently, was my wedding. Four hundred guests: executives, shareholders, board members from both houses, and a handful of reporters who’d secured invitations by swearing they wouldn’t turn the reception into a press conference.

My father kept saying the wedding sent a message of stability. I preferred to believe I was just marrying the man I’d loved for seven years.

“You’re doing it again,” Elisa said.

“Doing what?”

“Drifting off to some boardroom in your head. You’re supposed to be thinking about your wedding night.”

She’d said it with such shameless innuendo that I wrinkled my nose.

“Thank you. Exactly what I needed, with five people wandering in and out of the room.”

She was still laughing when the door swung open and my father walked in without knocking. Héctor Borda had spent my entire life entering rooms as if doors were a courtesy meant for other people. His tuxedo was flawless, his phone was in his hand, and even on his daughter’s wedding day, he looked like a man one call away from a crisis.

“Thirty-five minutes,” he announced. “The Ibarras are downstairs, and a few of the board members were hoping to say hello before the ceremony.”

“I’m not talking business before I get married, Dad. If anyone asks me about the acquisition while I’m in this dress, I’ll act like I’ve never heard of a bank.”

“Now that would make the papers.”

He crossed the room, and for a moment he stopped being the chairman of Banco Borda. He kissed my forehead, careful of my makeup.

“Your mother would have been so proud of you.”

The laughter went out of the room. I tipped my head back and stared at the ceiling until my eyes stopped stinging.

“Don’t. Not now. The makeup artist already threatened to quit if I cry again.”

“Then don’t cry. We’ve invested too much in that face.”

“There he is.”

His phone rang, and he answered it on his way out the door.

“One of these days, I’m going to hide that thing,” I muttered.

“He’d be dead by lunch,” Elisa said, reaching for her clutch on the armchair.

I looked at her, and something snagged. She didn’t seem scared, exactly. Just distracted, as though half of her were somewhere else. Her phone lit up. She glanced at the screen, and for one flicker of a second, her whole face went blank. Then she locked it.

“Everything okay?”

“Fine. I just need the bathroom before things get crazy.”

She stood too quickly.

“There’s one right there.” I nodded at the side door of the suite.

Elisa’s gaze followed my gesture, and for a beat she seemed to have no idea what to say.

“I need some air, too. It’s so crowded in here. I feel like I can’t breathe.”

“Are you nervous?”

“You’re the one getting married, Irene. You’re the one who’s supposed to be a wreck.”

“That’s what I’m saying. It’s weird that you’re doing my job.”

She smiled and pressed a quick kiss to my cheek.

“Back in a minute. Don’t start without me.”

I watched her go and didn’t think twice about it. Why would I? She was my sister. We’d fought over clothes, bedrooms, and just about anything two sisters could find to fight over. She’d been one of the first people I called when Marco proposed. She’d come with me to every dress fitting, every menu tasting, my bachelorette weekend. I had never once had a reason to doubt her.

Ten minutes later, she still hadn’t come back. I called; it rang out. The wedding coordinator poked her head in, asking where she’d gone, since they needed to start the family photos.

“Bathroom,” I said. “At least, that’s what she told me fifteen minutes ago.”

That was when my phone buzzed with a text from Marco: Love you. See you at the altar.

The knot in my chest loosened, and I smiled. After seven years, it was finally happening. We’d survived long stretches at different universities, our first awful jobs, two families who turned every dinner into a negotiation, and two banks that kept competing even as we swore they had nothing to do with us.

I typed back: You’d better be there.

Then I stood. “I’m going to find her.”

The coordinator looked at me as if I’d said I planned to walk down the aisle barefoot.

“You can’t go out there. If someone sees you before the ceremony—”

“It’s a hallway, not the ballroom. I’ll be gone two minutes.”

I gathered my skirt and slipped out before she could argue.

The family wing was nearly empty. I checked the restrooms. Nothing. A hotel employee passed with a tray, and I stopped her.

“Excuse me, did you see a woman in a champagne dress? Dark hair, about my height?”

“I think so. She went into one of the private rooms at the end of the hall a while ago. Last door on the right.”

I thanked her and kept walking, more irritated than worried. If Elisa had holed up to take a phone call minutes before my wedding, I fully intended to bring it up at every holiday for the rest of our lives.

I was almost to the door when I heard a voice behind it. I didn’t need to catch a whole sentence. I knew that voice better than my own.

Marco.

For a few seconds, I couldn’t work out what he was doing in there. Then I heard Elisa, and she wasn’t speaking. It was a low, breathless sound, a rhythm I recognized, though I would never have imagined hearing it from my sister.

“Slow down,” she panted, her voice strained. “Marco, someone’s going to notice...”

“I don’t care.” His voice came out rough, unfamiliar, a side of him I’d never met. “I can’t stop. God, I can’t stop.”

Whatever came next was lost beneath the dull thump of furniture against the wall, faster and faster, and the sound of kisses that were nothing like goodbye.

My stomach clenched, then dropped, as if someone had let a stone fall inside me.

I didn’t knock. I didn’t stop to wonder whether there might be an innocent explanation. I wrapped my hand around the handle and pushed the door open.

Elisa sat on the edge of the vanity, her bridesmaid dress shoved up around her waist, her fingers digging into Marco’s shoulders. He stood between her knees, shirt hanging open, trousers barely lowered, one hand at her throat and the other gripping her hip, driving into her with a desperation I had never once seen in him.

They flew apart. Marco tangled himself in his own trousers and stumbled back against the table. Elisa tried to cover herself, but her legs were shaking so badly she slid right off the vanity, clutching at the wrinkled satin.

For a long moment, nobody said a word.

I looked at my sister first. The hair her stylist had spent an hour perfecting hung in damp strands across her forehead. Her neckline had been dragged askew, her lips were swollen and red, and the pale skin of her throat and shoulders was already blooming with fresh marks.

Then I looked at Marco. His shirt gaping open, his belt hanging loose, his chest slick with sweat. There were marks along his neck, and four red scratches ran in parallel lines from his collarbone to the center of his chest. A smear of her lipstick stained his jaw.

He stared at me as though I were the one who didn’t belong.

I was still in my gown, my veil still pinned in place, less than thirty minutes from becoming his wife.

And only seconds ago, he had been inside my sister.