Page 77 of Ruthless Bratva's Forced Virgin
“That works for me,” I said.
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The ceremony happened in the manor’s garden.
Not the formal garden with the stone fountain–the eastern garden, the one with the low wall and the view of the desert, the one I had been in when Viktor had driven me back from Sofia’s visit and the atmospheric wrongness had been pressing through the gate behind me. The one that had been, in the months since, become mine in the unspoken way that spaces became yours when you occupied them enough–when you had sat in them in the early morning with Mariya’s tea and in the afternoons withAnya and in the evenings alone, pressing your hands flat on the bench and breathing.
The chairs were arranged in two rows, intimate, the specific scale of something that was not a display.
Sofia stood on my side, which was the only attendant I had asked for. She was wearing red, which was Sofia’s way of communicating both her feelings about the formality of the occasion and her absolute commitment to the person it was for, and she looked, in the morning light, like exactly what she was: the best version of a friend that the world offered, present at the moment that required her presence, doing the specific job of witnessing with the full force of her attention.
Anya stood on Mikhail’s side with the expression she wore when she was holding something large inside the composed surface–the complicated warmth, the legal mind present underneath, the specific quality of a woman who had pressed a map into a conversation and said *he’s going to be angry, know the shape of it before you’re in the room with it* and had been right about all of it.
Viktor was there. Dmitri was there, leaner and more attentive than his usual manner, the recklessness in him temporarily overlaid with the specific gravity of a brother witnessing something significant. Alexei had his financial composure and the faint quality of a man who had run the numbers on this outcome and found them satisfying in a way that had nothing to do with money.
Katerina stood at the back with her arms folded and her chin up and the expression of a woman who had chosen a dress and been right about the choice and was allowing herself the private satisfaction of this.
The officiant was the same man who had produced the documents the first time–legal, binding, the paperwork identical in its functional terms. What was different was everything else.
Mikhail was waiting.
He was standing at the garden’s center in the dark suit that was not the reception suit or the operational suit–something in between, the specific formality of a man who had considered the occasion and dressed for the actual thing rather than the performance of it. He was looking at me as I walked toward him with the grey eyes and the full, unmanaged quality of his attention, and for once the attention was not the comprehensive inventory of a man cataloguing threat and calculating response.
It was just him looking at me.
Just Mikhail, looking at Elena, in a garden in the morning.
I walked toward him.
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The vows were ours.
We had written them separately, which had been Anya’s suggestion and which I had received with the specific understanding that Anya’s suggestions were always more considered than they appeared. She had said: *write what is true, not what sounds like vows*. I had sat in the library with the lamp and the fire and a piece of paper for two evenings and I had arrived at something that was true.
He spoke first.
He held my hands and he looked at me directly as he started.
“I built thirty years of something on a principle that was wrong. The principle was that loving anything was a liability. You arrived and you were the specific evidence against the principle,and I was slow to receive it, and I am sorry for what that cost you.” He paused. “What I can tell you is that I am done with the principle. What I can tell you is that you are the reason the accounting matters–not the empire, not the structure, not the thirty years of mechanism. The mechanism exists so that what is inside it can be kept. What is inside it is you.” Another pause, the compression he used when the thing was large and needed to be said precisely. “I choose you. Not the document, not the operational logic, not the name as protection. You. I choose you every morning I wake up before you and look at the ceiling and do the accounting, and the accounting concludes with you, and I would not have it conclude any other way.”
The garden was very quiet.
I held his hands and I looked at him and I said what I had written in the library.
“I came to Las Vegas with nothing I intended to keep. I was going to take what the city offered and move through it and not let it mark me.” I paused. “You marked me in an alley before I knew who you were. You listened to me like the information mattered and you showed me what it looked like when someone chose honesty over comfort, and I learned the lesson so thoroughly that eventually I could not continue without applying it.” I looked at his face–the face I had been reading for months, the face I would spend the rest of my available attention reading, the face that I associated with the ground being solid when the ground was anything but. “I love you not despite what you are but because of it. Because you are exactly what you are and you don’t pretend to be anything else, and in a life where pretending was the primary survival skill, you were the first person who made the truth feel like the safer option.” I pressed his hands. “I choose you. I chose you before I understood what that meantand I would choose you again with the full understanding. Every morning. Every accounting.”
Anya made a sound that she would have denied making.
Sofia made no attempt to deny hers.
The officiant completed what needed to be completed.
Mikhail kissed me in the morning light in the garden with the desert behind us and the family around us and the specific quality of a man who was doing the thing completely rather than for the room, and I kissed him back with everything I had, and it was not a performance and it was not a statement and it was not the end of anything.
It was the beginning of the thing we had been building toward since an alley on the Strip at two in the morning when a stranger had stood between me and a car door.
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