Page 63 of Belong to Me
The officiant was saying something in French. She didn't hear it. She was too busy trying to breathe through the tears and failing, and Alexei's eyes were on hers, and his face was doing the thing it almost never did, which was show everything. Not the twitch. Not the crack behind the composure. Everything. His eyes were bright and his jaw was tight and his thumbs were tracing her knuckles in slow circles and he was present, entirely present, notbehind a wall or a door or a continent, and the nakedness of it was so unlike him that it broke her open.
"Oui," he told the officiant. His voice was rough. His eyes never left hers.
"Oui," she managed, and her voice was wrecked, and somewhere behind her Anton made a sound that might have been a whoop and might have been a sob and was probably both, and Daisy shushed him, and the baby didn't wake, and the room filled with something warm and enormous that Mia would never be able to describe and would never forget.
He kissed her. Not hard. Not desperate. Slow. His hands still holding hers, his mouth warm against her tears, and she kissed him back with the taste of salt on both their lips, and the sound she made was a laugh, wet and broken and joyful, because she was married. She was married to Alexei Almazov. In a penthouse in Monaco. With a Rottweiler who had been barred from attending because he couldn't be trusted around champagne flutes and a family of Bratva billionaires who were applauding, actually applauding, and Star was crying harder than Mia was, and Anton was definitely crying now too, and Andrei's hand had moved to the back of Ciana's neck in a gesture so unconscious and so possessive that Mia filed it away as evidence that the Almazov men loved like a geological event.
Alexei pulled back. His thumbs wiped her tears.
"You're a disaster," he informed her.
"You married the disaster."
"I did."
"No returns."
His mouth twitched. Not the micro-twitch from the left eye. An actual, visible, witnessed-by-his-entire-family twitch of his mouth, and Anton gasped audibly and said, "Daisy, tell me you saw that," and Daisy said, "I saw it," and Alexei's expression closed with the particular dignity of a man whose brothers had just observed him smile.
"I'm going to get champagne," Mia announced, wiping her face. "And I'm going to drink all of it. All of the champagne. Every drop. Because I just married a man who smiled at his own wedding and I need to celebrate before he denies it."
"I'm not denying anything."
"You're already composing the denial. I can see it in your left eye."
His left eye twitched.
"There it is," she told him. "Mental spreadsheet updated."
ALEXEI
The guests left at nine.
Not because Alexei asked them to. Because Anton read the room, which was what Anton did, and touched Daisy's arm, and Daisy touched Star's arm, and Star whispered something to Artem, and within ten minutes the penthouse emptied with the coordinated tact of people who understood that the eldest brother's wedding night was not an occasion for lingering.
Andrei was last. He stopped at the door. Turned. His eyes found Alexei's across the room, and something passed between them that had no words, that was composed entirely of thirty-five years of shared grief and shared silence and the particular language of men who loved each other and could not say it. Andrei's chin dipped. A single nod. Not congratulations. Something deeper. Something that said: you deserve this.
Alexei's chin dipped in return.
Andrei left. The door closed.
The penthouse was silent.
Mia was standing by the window with the Mediterranean spread behind her and her ivory dress still on and her bare feet on the cold marble because she'd kicked off her shoes two hours ago and no one had mentioned it, and her mascara was ruined and her hair was coming out of whatever Star had done to it before the ceremony and she was holding a champagne flute she'd forgotten to drink from.
She was his wife.
The thought hit Alexei like a physical thing. Not a crack or a tremor. A homecoming. Something that had been traveling toward him for years and had finally reached him, and the weight of it was not crushing. It was grounding. It pressed him into the floor and held him there and the floor was solid and the woman by the window was solid and the emptiness that had opened when Pavlov died was not empty anymore.
It had a shape. It had a name.
She turned. Caught him looking. And her face did the thing that destroyed him, the unguarded thing, where the bravado and the babbling and the self-deprecating panic stripped away and what was left was just Mia. Brown eyes. Bare feet. A champagne flute she'd forgotten.
"You're staring," she told him.
"I'm looking."
"That's the same thing."
