The Decoy Bride

I loved Harlan Pierce for five years.

Everyone in Manhattan knew me as the most agreeable woman on his arm — the Marchetti girl who laughed at the right tables, signed off on the right FDA filings, never once made the gossip column for the wrong reason.

The night he was attacked, I stepped in front of the blade.

I died in his arms on the marble steps of the Frick.

A week later, he walked into my memorial service at Frank E. Campbell with Sloane Rivers on his arm. He kissed her on the mouth in front of my parents and my photograph, and he smiled at the room and said, *Just a golden retriever. Saved me the trouble of putting her down myself.*

My mother fainted. My best friend got hauled out by PVP security with a bruise already blooming under her eye.

What none of them knew:

My soul did not drift anywhere.

I was upstairs, in a service corridor above the chapel, pulling off a wireless earpiece, watching the closed-circuit feed of Sloane slipping a coin-cell chip into the gold knot of his Bottega cufflink.

That chip carried enough to bury Pierce-Vance Pharmaceuticals to the foundation.

And the name I'd been wearing for five years was about to come off.