Page 28 of Obsessed Bratva's Pregnant Claim
The car. His chest. His arm around me without comment or ceremony, simply there, and my grip on his shirt.
I sat up.
I was alone. The other side of the bed—the side where Viktor had been, on top of the covers—held only the impression of weight in the linen. I looked at it for a moment.
The room in daylight was spare and elegant in a way that screamedViktor.The furniture chosen for line rather than comfort, and achieving both anyway through the particular alchemy of expensive design. Morning light came through the window in clean angles. A tray on the low table near the wardrobe held food—coffee, I could smell it, and something covered—that appeared to be untouched.
Then I saw the dress.
It was hanging from the wardrobe door. White. Not the aggressive white of a statement, but a clean, structured ivory that fell simply and ended at the knee and was, in its total restraint, more deliberate than any ornamentation would have been. Beside it, on the wardrobe handle, hung something that I had to step closer to identify. A thin chain, a small pendant, understated, the kind of jewelry that costs more than it announces.
My stomach dropped.
I was staring at it, thinking of the dress and the chain and the perfectly organized intention of them hanging there, when the door opened.
“Oh my God, Sofia—”
Isla Monroe came through the door at speed, which was how Isla entered most rooms, and stopped when she saw my face.
“You’re awake,” she said. “Okay. Okay, you’re awake. You’re—are you okay? You look—”
“Isla.” I crossed the room and took her by the shoulders, partly from affection and partly because I needed her to slow down. “What are you doing here?”
“Men came to my apartment,” she said. “Like, an hour ago. Two of them, suits, very—” she gestured at her own face in a way that apparently described something about their expressions— “very serious. They said you were getting married today. That I was supposed to be here.” She looked around the room, at the dress, at the tray of food, at the quality of the walls. “Sofia. What is happening? Who are these people? Is this—are you in some kind of—”
“I’m fine,” I said.
“You are not fine,” she argued.
“I’m not in danger.” That one was more complicated, but in the immediate sense—in the sense of this room, this moment—it was accurate enough to say. “Isla. I need you to stay in this room for a little while. Don’t go anywhere, don’t talk to anyone on staff, just—stay here. Can you do that?”
“Sofia—”
“Please.”
She looked at me. Whatever she found in my face—and I was too tightly wound to know what I was showing—made her go still. She sat on the edge of the bed. “I’m staying,” she said. “But you’re going to explain this to me. All of it.”
“Later,” I said.
I left before she could change her mind and decide to follow.
*****
The penthouse had been transformed.
That was the only word for it. The sparse, deliberately uncrowded space I had moved through last night was now occupied. Flowers, white and structured, were arranged at intervals that suggested professional placement. Candles, unlit at this hour but positioned in groupings that telegraphed their evening purpose. Staff moving between rooms like people who had been briefed and were executing without needing to be told twice.
It looked like a wedding in progress.
It looked like a wedding that had been in progress for hours, organized while I slept, completed while I was unconscious in Viktor Golovin’s penthouse in borrowed linen, unasked and unaware.
I stood in the hallway and looked at it. I felt the full, cold shape of it settle over me.
He was near the balcony.
Black suit, no tie, jacket buttoned with the precise fit of something made for him specifically. He stood with one hand in his pocket, looking out. He looked the same as he always looked: totally in control, just complete. As if every situation arranged itself correctly around him and he had simply to occupy the center of it and wait.
He heard me coming. Or saw my reflection in the glass. He turned before I reached him.
