Chapter 8
Siobhan
The Wedding Night
* * *
His floors are cold enough to feel through my shoes. Everything in this place is beautiful, and nothing is warm.
I stand in the foyer of Nico Konstantinos's penthouse — my penthouse now, I suppose, though the word mine doesn't attach to any surface in this room — and I take it in. Glass walls facing the city. A skyline that glitters thirty floors below, indifferent and expensive. Furniture that looks like it was chosen by someone who wanted to exert control rather than comfort. It’s all clean lines, dark leather, surfaces you can see your reflection in, but wouldn't want to touch.
Art on the walls that I'd bet money is investment-grade.
A kitchen with a six-burner range that's never been loved.
The space is enormous. Three thousand square feet of silence arranged to intimidate.
It's a fortress, not a home, and the man who built it did so deliberately — no one lingers here because nothing invites lingering.
Even the lighting is strategic, and I'm starting to recognize Nico's signature in every angle and shadow: control made architectural.
This is what happens when a man who can't control the world builds himself a space where he controls everything.
And I live here now. That thought doesn't feel real yet. It feels like a sentence in someone else's story.
"This way," he says. His voice is careful. He's watching me take in his world and trying not to read my face.
He leads me down a hallway — wide, hardwood, fifteen feet long — and stops at a door on the left. His bedroom is at the end of the hall, thirty feet farther. I clock the distance automatically. Thirty feet. One hallway. Two closed doors. An entire war between them.
"Your room," he says, and opens the door.
I walk in and stop.
East-facing windows. The afternoon light won't reach here — I squint in afternoon light, and I've never told anyone that, but somehow, he knows.
The sheets are soft Italian, high thread count, I can tell by the weight without touching them.
White peonies on the dresser, full and open, the kind that cost more than they should because they're not in season.
Peonies. I wore a peony pin at the Ricci function. Eight months ago. I wore it once, on a jacket I haven't worn since, to an event where I spoke to Nico Konstantinos for exactly zero seconds.
He noticed. Eight months ago, at a party where we never spoke, he noticed a pin on my jacket.
My chest tightens.
And then I see the nightstand.
Three books. I cross the room and pick up the first one: The Secret History by Donna Tartt. The second: In the Woods by Tana French. The third: a battered copy of Seamus Heaney's collected poems, the spine cracked with use.
I know these books. I love these books. I mentioned Tartt to Finn at the Elysium meeting — offhand, barely a comment, something about the Ricci function and a conversation I'd had about Greek tragedy that reminded me of the novel.
It was a throwaway line. Nico was across the room. He wasn't part of the conversation.
He was listening. He's been listening for months.
I open the Heaney — it falls open to a bookmarked page. "Scaffolding." The passage marked in pencil:
Masons, when they start upon a building,
Are careful to test out the scaffolding...
I read the whole poem. It's about trust. About two people building something fragile and real, and the scaffolding that holds the structure up while the walls go in — external supports that come down once the building can stand on its own.
He bookmarked a poem about learning to trust someone.
He bookmarked it and put it on my nightstand and didn't say a word about it.
I set the book down. My hands are not steady.
There's a man standing in the doorway who runs a criminal empire, who killed a man in a warehouse, who hasn't felt anything in fifteen years, and he put Seamus Heaney on my nightstand because he heard me mention Irish poetry to someone who wasn't him, in a room where he was supposed to be running a war.
I don't know what to do with this. I don't know what to do with a man who pays attention like this — who catalogs the small things, the throwaway lines, the pins on jackets, and builds a room around them.
It's terrifying. It's the most romantic thing anyone has ever done for me.
Both things are true and neither cancels the other.
"There's no obligation tonight." His voice from the doorway.
Flat, factual, the same voice he uses for contracts and territory negotiations.
But his eyes are different — darker, watchful, holding himself still with the kind of effort that suggests he's said these words more to himself than to me.
"The marriage is legal. Consummation can wait. "
I should feel relieved. What I feel is something else entirely.
"And if I didn't want to wait?"
His whole body goes still. The way the air goes still before a storm breaks. Gold eyes darkening to something closer to amber.
"Then you'd come to my room." He nods toward the end of the hallway. "That door. And knock."
"Why would I come to you? Why not you to me?"
"Because I won't take anything you don't offer." The words are measured, careful, and they cost him something. I can hear it in the slight roughness at the edges, the effort of restraint. "If we do this, you choose it. You come to me."
I stare at him. This man — who takes what he wants from everyone, who runs an empire through control, who sat at the head of that table at Elysium and decided the shape of two families' futures with a single sentence — is handing me the only key that matters.
Not because he doesn't want to open that door himself.
I can see how much he wants to. It's in his hands, his jaw, the rigid line of his shoulders.
He wants to cross this hallway and kiss me until I can't think and carry me to his bed and make me forget every other man who's ever touched me.
He won't. Because the one thing he's decided not to control is me.
"And if I never knock?"
His jaw tightens. A muscle moves beneath the skin. He holds my gaze and the effort it costs him to say the next word is visible, physical, a man lifting something heavier than he expected.
"Then I wait."
The word wait fills the hallway. I feel it settle between us — patient, immovable, a vow that doesn't need a church or a priest. He will wait. He means it. This man who has waited for nothing in his life will wait for me.
"Goodnight, Siobhan."
"Goodnight, Nico."
He turns. Walks to his door. Disappears behind it. The click of his latch is the loudest sound in the penthouse.
I close my own door. Lean against it.
I pull out my phone. Among the congratulatory texts and the missed calls from Declan, there's a notification from my bank: a deposit confirmation, the account Nico set up per our terms. The amount is larger than we discussed with a note attached: Funded as agreed.
The difference is a wedding gift. Do what you want with it. —N
He honored the terms. Every one. The separate bedroom. The freedom. The money. The lack of obligation. And then he went further with the books, the flowers, the champagne switch at the reception that he thought I didn't notice.
The pattern is clear: he keeps his promises and then exceeds them. He gives me exactly what I asked for and then gives me something I didn't know I wanted. It's either the most calculated courtship in the history of arranged marriages or it's something more dangerous… Maybe it’s genuine.
I lie in bed. The sheets are soft. The peonies smell sweet. The city moves outside the east-facing windows and the light is gentle, exactly right, and the man who arranged all of it is thirty feet away behind a door I could walk through right now.
I don't sleep.
At midnight, I give up pretending. I get up. I'm wearing a T-shirt and shorts — I didn't bring anything romantic, didn't want to pretend this was something it wasn't — and I pad barefoot into the hallway. The hardwood is cold. The penthouse is dark except for the city glow through the glass walls.
I go to the kitchen for water. That's all. Water.
But his door is between here and there, and when I pass it my feet slow without my permission. I stop. Stand in the hallway in the dark. The door is closed. The gap at the bottom shows no light.
I listen.
A creak. The bed shifting. Then footsteps — slow, heavy, crossing the room. They stop. On the other side of the door. Close. Close enough that I can feel the change in the air, the weight of a body displacing the silence.
He heard me. He's standing right there, two inches of wood between us, and neither of us reaches for the handle.
Five seconds. Ten. An entire conversation happening in silence, in the dark, through a closed door. Are you there? Yes. Are you thinking about it? Yes. Are you going to open this door? Not tonight. Not yet.
His footsteps retreat. The bed creaks again.
I get my water. I go back to my room.
I don't knock. Not because I'm afraid. Not because I don't want to.
Because when I walk through that door, I want it to mean something.
I want it to be a choice I've made with my whole self — not impulse, not adrenaline, not wedding-night obligation.
I want to knock on that door because I've decided, with every part of me, that what's on the other side is what I want.
I'm not there yet. But I'm closer than I was this morning.
I press my hand flat against the wall that separates our rooms. The plaster is cool. Solid. On the other side: his bed, his body, the sound of his breathing that I couldn't actually hear but imagined so vividly it might as well have been real.
Thirty feet. One decision.
I close my eyes. I don't sleep. And somewhere on the other side of this wall, I know — the way you know things you can't prove, the way your body knows things your mind hasn't caught up to — he's awake too.
Waiting.
Just like he promised.