Chapter 1

With the wedding almost here, my fiancée took a knife to her own wrist.

I was shaking all over. I lunged to stop her.

She pushed me away, her face pale and weak. "Nat Dickerson, don't stop me. Let me do it."

"Why?"

I wouldn't let go, not for anything. Then her best friend told me, her eyes red.

"Our village has a marriage custom. In the seven days before a girl gets married, she has to shower with a man for seven days, to wash off her bad luck so she can bring good luck to her husband's family!"

"If she doesn't follow it, then she has to cut seven pieces of flesh from herself as punishment."

"Aria Harding loves you so much, and she's so loyal to you. How could she ever do anything to wrong you?"

Hearing that cut me to the bone. To keep her from hurting herself, I took the knife out of her hand and told her to follow the custom.

I trusted her loyalty to me. She wouldn't do anything wrong.

But on the third day, I couldn't help myself. I went to find her, and instead I heard the room burst into laughter.

"Aria, that trick of yours was ruthless!"

"Playing the wounded victim to fool soft-hearted Nat. There's no marriage custom, no wrist-cutting. It's all fake."

"If I hadn't made it up, he'd never have believed it."

Then Aria sat down on her lover's lap, and the two of them kissed with everything they had.

"I'm going to make the most of the days I've got left. I'm going all in!"

...

1

"Aria, aren't you afraid Nat will find out you're lying?"

"There's no such custom in Camelback Village. If he goes and asks around, how are you going to cover for that?"

Aria didn't want to leave Ezra Delgado's mouth, but her hands still locked tight around his neck.

As if, once they'd said what needed saying, the two of them would just keep going.

The men watching them tangled up like that swallowed hard, envious.

"He trusts me so much, he'll never check up on me."

"Besides, he's a city man. He can't understand a word of our Camelback Village dialect, so he doesn't know any of the rules here."

When she finished, her cheeks were flushed, like a girl just out into the world who'd never known a man.

She let out a coy little sound, and only then did the others notice one of Ezra's hands, brushing along her leg, careless and deliberate at once.

"Damn! You two watch it, you'll screw yourselves to death!"

"Yeah, you only came out of the room this morning, and now you're already..."

"What? Jealous?"

Ezra looked around the room, pleased with himself. The next second Aria took a mouthful of red wine and, right in front of everyone, poured it into Ezra's mouth from her own.

"Damn! Nobody plays like Aria!"

"I bet Nat doesn't get any of this fun stuff, and that's why Aria went looking for Ezra before the wedding."

"I'm telling you, Aria, why not just break up with Nat and be done with it? Why put yourself through all this?"

Aria's face went cold in an instant, and she glared back at whoever had said it.

"In this life, no, in every life after this one, I will never break up with my Nat."

"Because he's the only one who truly loves me. For me, he gave up a bright future abroad and stayed in the country."

"If I so much as nick my finger cutting vegetables, he'll worry about it all day."

"I play around, sure, but I still know exactly how much Nat means to me."

Hearing that, Ezra wasn't happy anymore.

His arm snapped tight around Aria's waist, pulling her harder against him.

"So I don't love you, little minx?"

"Ha! Your love is cheap. Good enough for a hookup, not good enough to be my husband."

The others still didn't understand what Aria meant by that.

But they'd been friends for years, so they just let her be.

"Still, you'd better be careful!"

Aria brushed it off. "Relax! I'm more careful than you are."

"Every time Nat comes to see me at the set time, he's really just checking whether I've stepped out of line. So Ezra and I always look at each other like we can't stand the sight of each other, each keeping to himself, not saying a word."

Outside the door, every drop of blood in me froze in an instant.

I gripped the door handle, but I never found the courage to push it open.

The pain rising up from somewhere deep in me was almost enough to crush me and swallow me whole.