My brother tried to burn my fiancé alive on our wedding day, and I seriously owe him one. As I walked down the aisle, my brother sprinted past me carrying a gas can, doused the entire altar in gasoline, and lit it on fire before tackling my groom straight into the burning flowers. My veil caught fire as guests stampeded toward the exit, screaming while my brother pinned my fiancé down in the flames, punching him and yelling something I couldn’t hear over the chaos. The groomsmen dragged my brother off while my fiancé rolled on the ground with second-degree burns covering his hands and arms. My mother was sobbing so hard she threw up on her dress. My father was screaming at my brother about destroying our family, and 300 guests screamed and called 911. My brother kept fighting the four men holding him down, blood streaming from his nose where the best man had hit him, still screaming that my fiancé was trying to kill me.

Everyone was comforting my burned, bleeding fiancé, who was crying while elderly guests needed medical attention from the panic. The flower girl was traumatized beyond words. The priest was praying over the destroyed altar while bridesmaids sobbed about how my brother had ruined the most important day of my life, and security finally arrived to arrest him. My brother screamed as police cuffed him, his voice raw from smoke inhalation. “He’s been poisoning her with mercury for months, and today’s dose would have killed her before you cut the cake.” Everyone went silent except for the fire still crackling through what used to be our ceremony space. And my brother continued talking fast because he knew he had seconds before they dragged him away.

“Look at her hands shaking, her hair falling out in chunks. The confusion she thinks is wedding stress, but it’s actually mercury poisoning from the makeup he’s been switching out since March when they moved in together.” My trembling hands went to my thinning hair that I’d been finding on my pillow every morning. And my brother kept going, showing texts on his phone the cops hadn’t taken yet. “I have screenshots of him asking his pharmacist friend about lethal doses and how to make it look like sudden illness, plus receipts for mercury compounds he bought online using cryptocurrency so it couldn’t be traced.”

My fiancé started to stand up, but the best man held him back, though I noticed the grip had changed from supportive to restraining as doubt crept across his face. He took out a $3 million life insurance policy on her last month without telling her, and their honeymoon suite already had a syringe of concentrated mercury hidden in his luggage that would have caused complete organ failure within hours of injection. My aunt, who was a nurse, stepped toward the champagne table and dipped her finger in my glass, then immediately jerked back, saying it smelled wrong, like metal and chemicals mixed with the champagne. More guests started checking their phones, googling mercury poisoning symptoms, and staring at me as they recognized the signs I’d been showing for months that we’d all attributed to wedding planning stress.

My brother managed to pull up more evidence on his phone, showing bank statements where my fiancé had been draining my savings account in small increments I hadn’t noticed because I’d been too confused to check, setting himself up financially for after my death. “But that’s not even the worst part,” my brother said as two officers held his arms, and his voice broke with desperation. “My fiancé had already given me a partial dose this morning in my breakfast smoothie, knowing it would take effect during the reception to make my death look more natural, and the antidote window was closing fast because mercury binds to your organs within hours.”

My brother had broken into my fiancé’s apartment last night and found his journal documenting every dose he’d given me for six months with notes about my increasing symptoms and calculations for how much more I could take before dying, plus detailed plans for playing the grieving widower. He’d gone to the police at 2:00 in the morning, but my fiancé’s uncle was the chief who said there wasn’t enough evidence for an arrest, then called my fiancé immediately to warn him that my brother was causing trouble, which is why my fiancé moved up the timeline. That’s when my brother realized the only way to save me was to stop the wedding before I drank the final dose. And setting the altar on fire was the only way to make sure the ceremony couldn’t continue because my fiancé had manipulated me into thinking my brother was jealous and unstable.

The crowd turned to stare at my fiancé, whose face had transformed from victim to something cold and calculating as he realized his plan was completely exposed to 300 witnesses. Two groomsmen grabbed his arms, but he was already moving faster than anyone expected from someone with burns. Adrenaline overriding his pain. The cake table was right behind him, and he grabbed the decorative knife we were supposed to use for cutting, spinning toward me before anyone could react or stop him. His burned hand locked around my neck despite the pain it must have caused him. And the blade pressed against my throat as he pulled me back against his chest, using me as a shield. The police officers who’d been arresting my brother froze with their hands on their weapons. But my fiancé was using me as a perfect human shield, and they couldn’t get a clear shot.

“Everyone stay exactly where you are,” he said, his voice different now without the fake warmth I’d fallen in love with. Cold and methodical, like he was reading from one of his pharmacy textbooks. “Or I’ll finish what I started right here in front of everyone.” The blade cut deeper as he dragged me backward toward the kitchen doors while 300 people watched frozen in shock. My brother fought against the two cops holding him and screamed for my fiancé to let me go. His face twisted with pure desperation as he watched the man he’d tried to stop now using me as a shield. The best man who’d been holding my fiancé back dropped his arms completely and stepped away with his hands up. Finally understanding he’d been protecting someone who’d been poisoning me for months.

I forced myself to speak, even with the knife pressing into my skin, and told my fiancé that everyone knew the truth now, so hurting me wouldn’t change anything. He pulled me tighter against his burned chest and said if he was going down anyway, he might as well finish what he started since the mercury was already working through my system. The priest moved forward with both hands raised like he was approaching a wild animal and asked my fiancé to think about his soul and what this would mean for eternity. My fiancé actually laughed at that. This bitter sound that didn’t match anything I’d ever heard from him before and said God stopped listening to him years ago when the debt started piling up and I became his only way out.

Right then, a huge crack split the air as part of the burning altar collapsed and sent sparks shooting across the church floor, making everyone flinch, including my fiancé. I drove my elbow back into his burned ribs as hard as I could and felt his grip loosen just enough for me to drop my full weight down while twisting away from the blade. The knife caught my shoulder as I fell, and I felt it slice through my dress and into skin, but I kept moving, hitting the marble floor hard while my fiancé lunged after me. Three officers tackled him before he could reach me, and the knife went flying across the floor as they pinned him down, his burned hands leaving bloody prints on the white marble as he fought them. BMTs rushed over to me while the cops cuffed my fiancé, who was screaming that I deserved this for being too stupid to notice what he’d been doing for six whole months.

My brother broke free from the officers holding him and dropped to his knees beside me, apologizing over and over for not finding another way to save me. Tears mixing with the blood still running from his nose. The EMTs pressed gauze against my shoulder wound while explaining they needed to get me to the hospital right away for something called chelation therapy to counteract the mercury poisoning. My mother collapsed into my father’s arm, sobbing, and I heard my father tell my brother he’d saved my life, his voice breaking on the words. The EMTs lifted me onto a stretcher and rushed me out past all the wedding guests who were still standing there in shock, past the burning altar that was now mostly just smoking ruins, past the champagne table with my poisoned glass still sitting there.

In the ambulance, one of the EMTs who had a name tag reading Johan started an IV in my arm while explaining that mercury poisoning needed immediate treatment to prevent permanent organ damage. My whole body was shaking now, but not from fear. It was the poison affecting my nervous system, making my muscles twitch and jerk without my control. Johan kept talking in this calm voice about how the treatment would help, but I could barely focus on his words because my vision kept blurring and my head felt like it was full of cotton. The ambulance pulled up to the emergency room and they wheeled me straight in where a doctor who turned out to be the same Johan from the ambulance took over my case. He ordered blood tests right away to confirm the mercury levels while nurses hooked me up to monitors that started beeping with my vital signs.

Johan explained that the chelation drugs would bind to the mercury so my body could get rid of it, but we’d caught it just in time thanks to my brother’s intervention. The blood draw made me dizzy, and I could see my hands shaking worse now. These little tremors that I couldn’t control no matter how hard I tried to hold them still. Johan said that was normal for mercury poisoning and that the shaking would get better once the treatment started working, but it might take weeks or even months to fully recover. There’s something odd about how my fiancé’s uncle just happens to be the police chief who dismissed the evidence at 2 a.m. That timing feels awfully convenient for someone planning a murder during a wedding ceremony full of witnesses.

Nurses kept coming in and out, checking my vitals and adjusting the IV while Johan reviewed test results on his tablet with this worried look that made my stomach drop. He finally told me my mercury levels were dangerously high, way above what they’d normally see even in industrial accidents, which proved my fiancé had been giving me massive doses. The chelation medicine burned going into my veins and made me feel sick. But Johan said that meant it was working, pulling the mercury out of my organs where it had been building up for months. My parents arrived then with my aunt, who immediately started asking Johan about treatment protocols and recovery times using all these medical terms I didn’t understand.

The door opened and a woman in a dark suit walked in carrying a badge that said state police introducing herself as Detective Nissa Lawson who was taking over the case because the local police chief had a conflict of interest. She pulled out a notebook and started writing down everything Johan was telling her about my mercury levels. While my mother kept touching my arm like she needed to make sure I was still there, my aunt was asking Johan about something called chelation cycles and how long before the shaking would stop, using all these medical words that made my head hurt even more than it already did.

Detective Lawson said with 300 wedding guests as witnesses and all the physical evidence my brother found, my fiancé wouldn’t get away with what he’d done to me. She left to collect evidence but came back 20 minutes later carrying plastic bags with the champagne glass from the wedding and a sample from the smoothie my fiancé made me that morning. The field tests showed crazy high levels of mercury in both enough to kill me if I drunk all of it, and she sealed everything up for the crime lab.