Part 10: Where We Belong
Three months later, our actual wedding didn’t take place in a grand, heavily guarded cathedral filled with dangerous syndicate bosses.
Instead, it was held in a sunlit public garden overlooking the New York harbor.
There were no armed security guards scanning the rooftops, no hidden microchips, and no rival families threatening bloodshed. There were only fifty of our closest friends, Mrs. Parker crying happily into a lace handkerchief, Viktor and Sadie sitting in the front row, and a very proud five-year-old flower girl scattering white peony petals down the grass aisle.
I wore a simple, elegant ivory dress that moved softly in the ocean breeze. As I walked down the aisle on my manager’s arm, I looked up and saw Grant waiting for me at the altar. He wore a sharp navy suit, his gray eyes shining with unashamed tears as he watched me approach.
When I reached him, he took my hands in his. They were warm, steady, and entirely free of the shadows that had haunted us for so long.
“You look breathtaking,” Grant whispered as the officiant smiled at us.
“You clean up alright yourself, Whitmore,” I whispered back with a smirk.
As we exchanged our vows—real vows, spoken from the heart without any political treaties attached—I looked out at the sparkling harbor. The past five years of fear, loneliness, and running felt like a lifetime away.
When the officiant finally pronounced us husband and wife, Grant pulled me close and kissed me—not with the desperate urgency of a man hiding from his enemies, but with the deep, enduring peace of a man who had finally found his way home.
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And as Lily ran up to us shouting, “Yay! Now we’re a real family!”, Grant hoisted her up onto his shoulders with one arm and pulled me against his side with the other.
The war was over. The shadows were gone. We had our happily ever after, exactly where we belonged.
