“Give Me Your Company,” My Brother Ordered in Front of 100 Wedding Guests. When I Refused, He Attacked Me—Completely Forgetting My Phone Was Recording.

The first thing I understood after Adrian threw me was that wedding guests do not scream all at once.

The sound comes in layers.

One woman near the bar gasped first. Then a chair scraped backward. Then a glass shattered. Then Nathan shouted my name. By the time my head struck the marble beneath the chandelier, the entire ballroom at Harbor House had turned into one bright, terrified blur of white roses, tuxedos, and noise.

I remember my veil twisting under me.

I remember the taste of blood at the back of my throat.

And I remember Adrian’s voice, sharp and panicked above the chaos.

“She slipped! I never touched her!”

But he had touched me.

One hundred people had seen him grab my hair, drag me toward him, and force those transfer papers toward my hand after demanding I sign over Lark & Ivory in the middle of my own wedding reception.

What he didn’t know was that the phone hidden inside the lace panel at my waist—put there because Rachel Monroe had warned me weeks earlier that my brother was becoming reckless—was still recording.

By the time I opened my eyes again, paramedics were kneeling beside me.

Nathan’s hand was gripping mine so hard it almost hurt.

The ballroom lights had been dimmed.

My brother was on his knees with plastic restraints on his wrists.

And my father stood in front of him holding a single page Rachel had pulled from her black briefcase.

Adrian was crying.

Not fake crying, the way he did when he wanted our mother to clean up a mess.

Real, ragged, ugly sobbing.

“You weren’t supposed to find that,” he choked out.

Dad looked down at the page.

Then he looked at me.

I saw horror settle over his face so completely it seemed to age him in one breath.