Page 33 of Obsessed Bratva's Pregnant Claim
I heard my sisters and Elena settle Sofia into the small anteroom to the right, which served as a preparation space, and I heard the door close. I stood and waited and looked at the altar with its candles and flowers.
Twelve minutes.
I had stood in worse silences.
When she came through the door, I was looking at her.
I had decided, at some point in the preceding twelve minutes, that I was not going to manage this. That I was going to look at Sofia Reyes walking down the aisle of the Golovin family chapel in a white dress that I had chosen and placed in a room while she slept, and I was going to let it be what it was without the management, without the professional distance, without the instrument of detachment I had spent two decades sharpening.
She was stunning.
Not because of the dress, though the dress was exactly what I had known it would be, highlighting those curves that her uniform did no justice to. But it was because of the way she wore it, as if she had decided, in the moment of putting it on, to claim it rather than be claimed by it. Her chin was up. Her shoulders were back. Her hair had been arranged into something at the back of her head that left her neck bare. The small pendant I had left with the dress sat at her throat.
Her eyes found mine immediately.
Dark, direct, and furious. She was angry at me. She had not stopped being angry at me. She was walking down the aisle of the Golovin family chapel toward me in a dress I had chosen—and she was angry at every step of it, and she was not stopping.
Elena walked beside her—they had agreed on this in the anteroom, I assumed, the closest thing to choice available in this arrangement—and Isla was seated in the second row with the expression of someone doing their sincere best to be present for their friend while looking totally out of place.
Sofia reached me.
Up close, in the candlelight, I could see what the composed exterior was costing her. The slight set of her jaw. The control in her breathing. How her eyes had gone bright in a way that I recognized was not sentiment.
She was holding herself together through the same mechanism she always used, which was the refusal to show anything to anyone she had not chosen to show it to.
I had not been chosen. I was receiving none of it except the fury, which she was not trying to conceal from me.
The officiant—a man whose connection to organized religion was pragmatic and whose discretion was absolute—began.
I listened to the words with the portion of my attention that was always reserved for things requiring legal precision, and with the rest of it, I watched Sofia’s face. She looked at the officiant, not at me, for most of the preliminary. Her profile was exact in the candlelight, the sharp eyeliner, the red mouth, the small pendant at her throat catching the flame.
When the vows came, she looked at me.
She had to. The structure required it. She turned her face to mine, and the distance between us was just a few inches.
“I vow to…” she paused, her voice shaking, “to cherish, respect, and love you.”
The trembling of her voice even as she said the vows told me what I already knew about how she felt about all of this.
“I vow to love and protect you. With my life.”
My own voice was level. I said what needed to be said with the same precision I applied to everything.
The ring was simple. I had chosen a band with a single stone, clean-lined and unornamented, the kind that lasted. Sofia looked at my hands when I took hers, which I registered as the first time she had looked at something other than my face since the ceremony began. Her hand was smaller than mine, with the specific disproportion of all the differences between us, and I held it with appropriate care and put the ring on her finger.
The words concluded.
The guests—small in number, significant in weight—produced the sound of applause, which in the Golovin family chapel at reduced attendance was measured and.
She is my wife.
I had expected it to feel like the completion of a strategy, the closing of an operational loop. It felt like something else—something that had less to do with Cruz and protective structures and more to do with the woman standing eighteen inches from me with a ring on her finger and fury in her eyes.
The register required signing. We signed. Witnesses signed. The officiant completed his portion.
The guests rose.
In the movement and the murmur of the room rearranging itself, I leaned toward her.
