The Second Waking
The candles smelled like vanilla and smoke, and Elena would remember that detail forever—if forever meant anything at all anymore. A hundred flickering flames lined the ballroom in gold hurricane vases, throwing warm light across silk drapery and crystal champagne flutes, across the faces of two hundred guests who had come to watch her promise herself to a man she loved.
She wore white. Her mother's pearls, sewn into the bodice by a seamstress who'd cried when she fitted the dress, because Elena had cried first, telling her how her mother would have loved to see this day. The gown pooled around her ankles like moonlight on water, and when she moved, it moved with her, a living thing, soft and generous and doomed.
She didn't know yet that it was doomed. That was the terrible mercy of it—she still believed, in that last hour, that her life was beginning rather than ending.
"You look like something out of a painting," Jake had told her an hour earlier, his hand warm against her cheek, his eyes bright with something she'd mistaken for love for six years. "I don't deserve you."
She hadn't argued. She should have listened.
The band played something slow and stringed, and her…
