Page 75 of Ruthless Bratva's Forced Virgin
"I love you," she said.
"I chose you," she said. "Before I understood what that meant. Before the wedding and the confession and any of the thingsthat came after. In a library in a storm, or before that, or—" She stopped. "I don't know when it happened. I know that it did, and I know it was mine, and I know that the circumstances don't change it." She held my gaze. "I love you. I wanted to say it when I could say it to your face."
I looked at her for a moment.
Thirty years of understanding that the word was a vulnerability. Thirty years of the operational premise that what you loved was a coordinate and coordinates told enemies where to aim. Thirty years of building everything on the principle that control was the foundation and attachment was the crack in it.
She was standing in the desert in front of me having spent three days alone in an enemy compound tracking guard patterns and memorizing gate distances and waiting with the specific, active patience of a person who had faith not as a sentiment but as a working hypothesis–who had believed I would come because she knew me, had assembled the knowing from weeks of close attention and had trusted it through three days of testing.
Volkov had looked at her and seen a liability.
He had been wrong about nearly everything, but he had been most wrong about this.
"You are my wife," I said. "Not because of a document signed in a formal sitting room under circumstances that did not allow for the question I should have asked." I held her gaze. "I am asking it now. Not as a condition or a negotiation–as the thing I should have offered from the beginning and did not because I was operating from a premise that was wrong.
"If you want to leave," I said, "I will let you leave. I will ensure the debt remains gone and the threat from Volkov's network is permanently managed and your safety is not contingent on your remaining." I paused. "I will let you go if that is what you want.But I want you to know that what I want is the other thing. That I want you to stay not because the name protects you or the manor contains you or the marriage serves the operational function it was designed to serve, but because you are the center of the accounting." I held her gaze with the grey eyes that she had told me she associated with the ground being solid. "And I would like, if you are willing, to spend the remainder of my life making that the kind of ground worth standing on."
She looked up at me.
"I already answered that question," she said.
"In a formal sitting room under circumstances that didn't allow for the real answer," I said.
She looked at me.
"Right," she uttered, a smile playing around her lips.
"Okay," she said, and I knew the word meant yes. Completely.
I pulled her to me.
"Come home," I said.
She lifted her face and looked at me with the hazel eyes that I had been reading since a hotel suite and would apparently spend the rest of my available attention reading, because they were not a constant and I did not want to miss the variations.
"Yes," she said.
We walked toward the gate.
Viktor fell into step behind us at the appropriate distance, which was Viktor's specific form of both protection and respect–present, functional, and not in the space that was not his. Dmitri's voice somewhere in the compound, already on the logistics of the cleanup, the specific energy of a brother who hadbeen running at full operational capacity and had not yet found the gear that went slower.
The gate. The desert. The vehicle and the driver who had been waiting with the patience of someone who understood that events resolved on their own timeline and that his function in this one was the afterward.
Elena's hand was in mine as we drove off.
Home.
Chapter Twenty-Five–Elena
The dress was mine.
Not in the sense of ownership–everything in the manor was technically mine now, in the legal and Bratva sense. I meant it in the other sense. The sense of a thing chosen rather than assigned, selected from the options the world offered with the specific intention of a person who understood what the choosing communicated.
Katerina had taken me to three places before I found it.
The dress was ivory. Not white–I had been honest about that with myself, had looked at white and understood that white was a specific communication that was available to me legally and not available to me in the other sense, the one that mattered. Ivory, with the specific warmth of a color that acknowledged the full history of the thing being dressed for without making the acknowledgment the point.
I had stood in front of the mirror in the third showroom and looked at myself in it and thought, “Yes.”
