Chapter 6
MIA
His hands were the thing that undid her.
Not the room, which was the Ace Royale penthouse and flooded with afternoon light, and not the officiant, who was French and brief and spoke with the brisk cadence of a man who had married enough Monaco billionaires to know that brevity was a luxury they paid extra for.
Not the dress, which was ivory silk and which she'd bought three hours ago because Alexei Almazov didn't do long engagements.
He did efficiency. He did decisions that moved continents, and when he'd told her the wedding was happening today, she'd opened her mouth to protest and then closed it again, because of course it was today.
Three days after the proposal. Three days of paperwork and phone calls and Alexei speaking rapid French into his phone while she sat on the kitchen counter with Biscuit's head in her lap and tried to comprehend the fact that she was marrying a man who organized weddings the way other people organized dinner reservations.
None of that was what undid her.
It was his hands. Holding hers. Both of them. His fingers wrapped around her fingers, and they were still.
Not the shaking-and-fighting-it stillness from the kitchen.
Not the deliberate stillness from the night he'd touched her on this same counter.
This was new. This was the stillness of a man who had stopped running so completely that his body had forgotten what running felt like, and the calm of it, the bone-deep stillness in his grip, made her eyes burn before the officiant had finished his first sentence.
She was going to cry. She was absolutely, categorically going to cry, right here, in front of his entire family, in an ivory dress she'd owned for three hours, and there was nothing she could do about it because Alexei Almazov was holding her hands and they weren't shaking.
The room was small. Deliberately. Alexei didn't do spectacle, and Mia hadn't asked for it, because the truth was that she would have married him in the underground garage with Biscuit as the officiant and a parking ticket as the marriage certificate.
The setting was irrelevant. The man was the point.
But the people in the room were not irrelevant, and Mia had spent the last half hour trying not to stare at them and failing.
Anton was grinning. She'd met him twice, both times briefly, and both times the grin had been present, as if his face's default setting was delight and anything less required conscious effort.
He stood to Alexei's left with a glass of champagne he'd poured before the officiant began, because Anton Almazov did not wait for occasions to begin before celebrating them, and beside him was Daisy, who was small and auburn-haired and holding a baby against her shoulder with the practised grip of a woman who colour-coded her days and scheduled her joy and was still, somehow, incandescent with it.
The baby was six weeks old and had her father's eyes and her mother's composure, and she was asleep, which was the smartest decision anyone in the room had made.
Andrei was by the window. Enormous. A scar running from temple to jaw that caught the afternoon light and turned silver.
Ciana was beside him, golden and poised, her hand in his, and the two of them stood together with the particular stillness of people who had already survived the worst thing love could do to them and had come out the other side holding on.
He hadn't spoken. He didn't need to. His presence was its own statement, the way a cathedral didn't need to explain why it was there.
And Artem. The youngest. Dark-eyed, standing slightly apart from the group with his hands in his pockets, the posture of a man who occupied the edges of rooms because the edges had the best sightlines.
Star was next to him, and Mia couldn't stop glancing at her, because Star Thornton was doing the thing Mia was trying very hard not to do, which was cry.
She was crying openly and without shame, tears streaming down her face, her hand gripping Artem's arm, and Artem's free hand had come up to cover hers, and the gesture was so gentle on a man who seemed able to dismantle a building with the other hand that Mia's own composure took a direct hit.
Don't cry. Don't cry. You are Mia Robertson and you are marrying Alexei Almazov and you will NOT be the second crybaby bride in Bratva history—
His thumbs traced her knuckles.
She cried.
The officiant was saying something in French.
She didn't hear it. She was too busy trying to breathe through the tears and failing, and Alexei's eyes were on hers, and his face was doing the thing it almost never did, which was show everything.
Not the twitch. Not the crack behind the composure.
Everything. His eyes were bright and his jaw was tight and his thumbs were tracing her knuckles in slow circles and he was present, entirely present, not behind a wall or a door or a continent, and the nakedness of it was so unlike him that it broke her open.
"Oui," he told the officiant. His voice was rough. His eyes never left hers.
"Oui," she managed, and her voice was wrecked, and somewhere behind her Anton made a sound that might have been a whoop and might have been a sob and was probably both, and Daisy shushed him, and the baby didn't wake, and the room filled with something warm and enormous that Mia would never be able to describe and would never forget.
He kissed her. Not hard. Not desperate. Slow.
His hands still holding hers, his mouth warm against her tears, and she kissed him back with the taste of salt on both their lips, and the sound she made was a laugh, wet and broken and joyful, because she was married.
She was married to Alexei Almazov. In a penthouse in Monaco.
With a Rottweiler who had been barred from attending because he couldn't be trusted around champagne flutes and a family of Bratva billionaires who were applauding, actually applauding, and Star was crying harder than Mia was, and Anton was definitely crying now too, and Andrei's hand had moved to the back of Ciana's neck in a gesture so unconscious and so possessive that Mia filed it away as evidence that the Almazov men loved like a geological event.
Alexei pulled back. His thumbs wiped her tears.
"You're a disaster," he informed her.
"You married the disaster."
"I did."
"No returns."
His mouth twitched. Not the micro-twitch from the left eye.
An actual, visible, witnessed-by-his-entire-family twitch of his mouth, and Anton gasped audibly and said, "Daisy, tell me you saw that," and Daisy said, "I saw it," and Alexei's expression closed with the particular dignity of a man whose brothers had just observed him smile.
"I'm going to get champagne," Mia announced, wiping her face. "And I'm going to drink all of it. All of the champagne. Every drop. Because I just married a man who smiled at his own wedding and I need to celebrate before he denies it."
"I'm not denying anything."
"You're already composing the denial. I can see it in your left eye."
His left eye twitched.
"There it is," she told him. "Mental spreadsheet updated."
ALEXEI
The guests left at nine.
Not because Alexei asked them to. Because Anton read the room, which was what Anton did, and touched Daisy's arm, and Daisy touched Star's arm, and Star whispered something to Artem, and within ten minutes the penthouse emptied with the coordinated tact of people who understood that the eldest brother's wedding night was not an occasion for lingering.
Andrei was last. He stopped at the door.
Turned. His eyes found Alexei's across the room, and something passed between them that had no words, that was composed entirely of thirty-five years of shared grief and shared silence and the particular language of men who loved each other and could not say it.
Andrei's chin dipped. A single nod. Not congratulations.
Something deeper. Something that said: you deserve this.
Alexei's chin dipped in return.
Andrei left. The door closed.
The penthouse was silent.
Mia was standing by the window with the Mediterranean spread behind her and her ivory dress still on and her bare feet on the cold marble because she'd kicked off her shoes two hours ago and no one had mentioned it, and her mascara was ruined and her hair was coming out of whatever Star had done to it before the ceremony and she was holding a champagne flute she'd forgotten to drink from.
She was his wife.
The thought hit Alexei like a physical thing.
Not a crack or a tremor. A homecoming. Something that had been traveling toward him for years and had finally reached him, and the weight of it was not crushing.
It was grounding. It pressed him into the floor and held him there and the floor was solid and the woman by the window was solid and the emptiness that had opened when Pavlov died was not empty anymore.
It had a shape. It had a name.
She turned. Caught him looking. And her face did the thing that destroyed him, the unguarded thing, where the bravado and the babbling and the self-deprecating panic stripped away and what was left was just Mia. Brown eyes. Bare feet. A champagne flute she'd forgotten.
"You're staring," she told him.
"I'm looking."
"That's the same thing."
"It isn't."
She set the champagne down. Her hands were trembling, and she put them behind her back so he wouldn't see, and the fact that she was trying to hide them from a man who had catalogued every tremor in her body since her first night here was so painfully her that his chest ached.
"I'm nervous," she admitted.
"I know."
"I've never—"
"I know."
"Would you let me finish a sentence?"
"No."