“I take you home tomorrow,” he reminds me. “You should be thinking right now about what’s going to happen to you after the wedding.”
Everyone close enough to hear what he’s saying looks away from us, pretending they didn’t. Something inside me snaps. I know he’s going to hurt me. If I can’t stop it, I might as well earn it.
“Have it with one of your side bitches,” I snap back. “I won’t be there.”
Miguel laughs, a low rolling chuckle that sends prickling fingers of dread straight up my spine. He points at me and in a voice too soft to carry back to either of our fathers, says, “You remember this tomorrow. When you’re screaming in the bedsheets, begging me to stop, remember what put you there.”
He would have walked away, but a sudden commotion at the door stops him. A bouquet of flowers so huge, it takes two men to carry it through the door is being delivered, a giant heart with roses and white carnations on a stand, decorated with ribbons and bows and a giant white sash that reads, To my beloved bride-to-be.
The heart is taller and wider than I am and probably costs more than a Vegas mortgage payment.
I was sick to my stomach just looking at it.
“Thank you,” I dully told Miguel.
Looking from it to me, he says, “I didn’t send that.” He looks past me to his father, who stands, seeming every bit as confused as we are.
The senior Morales frowns at my father. “What is this?”
For the first time, my father visibly startles. “You didn’t send this?”
“No, I didn’t send anything.”
My father is going to blame this on me. I’ve never had a day go from bad to worse quite this fast. Knowing I have questions to answer and not knowing how even to begin, I approach the bouquet.
“Is there a card?”
If not Miguel, I have no idea who would send this. James. a part of me dares to hope, but he’d made no effort to contact me, not since my father had him so badly beaten.
My father’s men are already dismissing the couriers, who aren’t from the florist. Both are dressed in the familiar uniform jackets required of male casino workers.
“It was left at the front desk,” one offers helpfully.
A bodyguard searches among the flowers until he finds the card. “Here.”
I take it from him, looking back at the table where I meet my father’s questioning stare. Opening the envelope, I withdraw a card.
I keep what is mine.
I don’t realize I’d read that part out loud until my father bellows at his men.
“Did you check that fucking thing for bombs?”
All the guests, including Miguel, leap away from me and the flowers. The silence in the room is palpable, but I don’t see anything that could be a bomb, just flowers. Hundreds of dark roses. Hundreds and hundreds of bright white carnations.
Turning the card over in my hand, I see a message written on the back, every bit as cryptic and slightly more alarming than the first.
“Breathe deep, Princess.”
Yanking the card out of my hands, the bodyguard looks at both sides of the card.
“Who’s it from?” my father demands.
“It doesn’t say,” the man answers.
Every door into the ballroom suddenly slams shut. I can hear the scrape of metal rods sliding through the door handles, and apparently, so can the well-wishing guests, who remember there might be a bomb in the flowers. Startled and shouting, they run for the doors, but none of them open, not even the one right in front of me. Two of my father’s men try to force it open, but when the door only rattles in the frame, they take turns hammering their shoulders into it.
“What the fuck?” my father yells. “Get those doors open. Call hotel security!”
