Page 34 of Obsessed Bratva's Pregnant Claim
She was still looking at the register. At her signature beside mine, which had come out controlled and clear. I noted that Sofia’s handwriting was like her voice and posture, deliberate in ways that were not natural but practiced. She hadpracticed herself into this shape over the years, and the practice showed, always, as competence.
I brought my mouth to the space beside her ear.
“Tonight changes things,” I said quietly. I kept my voice low enough that it reached only her. “What exists between us now is real. Whatever you feel about how we arrived at it.” I paused. I let her hear the next part in the way I meant it, without strategy, without management. “I will keep you safe, Sofia. Whether or not you forgive me for the way I’ve done it.”
She didn’t move.
She didn’t pull away, didn’t turn, didn’t produce one of the sharp responses she deployed when she wanted distance. She stood very still with my voice in her ear and the ring on her finger.
And that—the stillness, the not-pulling-away, the absence of the resistance I had come to understand as her first language—went through me with more force than resistance ever had.
I straightened.
She turned, finally, and looked at me. Her face had composed itself into something unreadable, which was its own kind of signal, because Sofia’s face was unreadable only when she was working hardest to make it so. Her dark eyes held mine for a moment.
Then Elena was beside her, saying something quiet, and Katerina was on her other side, and the sisters had reformed their tide.
“Viktor, congratulations,” Katerina told me, inclining her head with a small smile on her face.
“Oh, I’m glad I’ve now become visible to you guys,” I answered.
“My girl comes first,” Elena answered, shrugging unrepentantly as she chuckled.
“See you around,” Katerina said as she took Sofia’s hand.
I watched her go.
Dmitri, my youngest-but-not-calmest brother, appeared beside me. He said nothing for a moment. Then he said, “She didn’t say no.”
“No,” I agreed.
“At any point.”
“No.”
He was quiet for another moment.
“Congratulations, Viktor,” he said, and moved away.
I stood at the altar end of the Golovin family chapel and looked at the room—the family, the candles, the register with two signatures that could not be unmade—and felt the weight of the completed thing settle into its permanent shape in my chest.
I turned from the altar and moved toward the gathered family, toward my wife, who was speaking to Elena with her chin at its characteristic angle and her red mouth in a direction that was not quite a smile but was more than she had been giving me.
I had told her I would keep her safe.
I would.
Everything else remained to be determined.
Chapter Eleven
Sofia
The drive back to the penthouse took 13 minutes.
I knew because I counted. 13 minutes of sitting in the back seat of Viktor’s car in a white dress that had been chosen for me, wearing a ring that had been placed on my finger in a chapel I had not chosen, beside a man who had arranged all of it, was now sitting a few inches to my left in a dark suit, saying absolutely nothing.
The nothing was the worst part. It gave me nothing to hold on to.
