Page 31 of Obsessed Bratva's Pregnant Claim
Then I crossed the room.
I took the dress off the wardrobe door and held it.
It was lighter than it looked. Of course it was. The most binding things usually were.
“Help me with the zip,” I said to Isla.
She stood and wordlessly came to me. Her hands were shaking slightly, which mine were not, and I did not know what that meant about either of us. She put her arms around me briefly and then stepped back and reached for the zip.
I looked at myself in the wardrobe mirror.
Sofia Reyes. Twenty-four. Golden-brown skin, thick dark hair. A woman who had walked down the wrong hallway and found that the hallway had dictated everything that came after.
A woman who was going to put on a white dress because the alternative ended in ways she could not afford for the people she could not protect.
“Okay,” I said.
Not to Isla. Not to Viktor, somewhere in the penthouse with his flowers and his filed registration papers.
To myself. The mirror. The woman in it, who had learned a long time ago that survival was not a choice.
I’ve got this.
Chapter Ten
Viktor
I arrived at the chapel an hour before anyone else.
This was not unusual. I arrived early to everything—meetings, negotiations, situations that required physical presence. Arriving early was information gathering; it was the elimination of surprise; it was the particular advantage of a man who had learned that environment was itself a variable and could be managed if you arrived before the environment filled with people. I had practiced this discipline for so long that it had ceased to feel like discipline and become simply how I moved through the world.
I told myself this was why I arrived an hour early to my own wedding.
The chapel was at the rear of the Golovin estate. Private. Walled. The chapel itself was older than the rest of the estate. Mikhail had been married here. Our parents were joined here. The Golovin family used this room for the things that required consecration, which in our world was not limited to what the church would recognize.
I stood at the altar end of the aisle and looked at the room.
White flowers, which Sergei had arranged by my instructions. Candles, lit now, the chapel’s overhead lighting dimmed in favor of the warmer register of flame. Twelve chairs on each side, the attendance kept deliberately small—family, inner circle, the two witnesses required by the registration. No press. No announcement beyond what was strategicallynecessary. The room held the quiet of something prepared and waiting.
I had stood in rooms like this before. I had stood at the edge of decisions like this before. I had made choices that could not be unmade—had been making them for twenty years, had long since stopped looking for reversibility as a feature of my decisions because the work I did didn’t traffic in reversibility.
But I had never made a choice like this one.
I stood at the altar and looked at the empty chairs and thought, plainly, about Sofia’s. More specifically about her face. I thought back to how she called me a monster. When she asked what would happen if she walked out of the arrangement, I plainly told her the protection went with it. That had to be the part of that conversation that I hated the most.
I acknowledged it now, alone in the chapel with the candles and the empty chairs.
I had sped things up because Cruz was moving, and the timeline had collapsed. The protection the marriage established was real and the most effective tool available.
All of those things were true. They had also stopped being the primary reason somewhere around the point where I had lain in the dark of my penthouse with Sofia’s hand in my shirt, listening to her breathing slow into sleep.
I had wanted this. Separate from strategy. Separate from Cruz, timelines, and operational necessity. I had wanted her close, built a structure that made it permanent, and was standing at the altar of the Golovin family chapel waiting for her to arrive, and the weight of what I had done settled into my chest and stayed.
Mikhail arrived forty minutes before the ceremony.
He came in alone, which meant Elena was elsewhere—managing something related to Sofia, I assumed. He walked the length of the aisle and stopped beside me.
“It’s done, then,” he said.
