9. Celeste
CELESTE
One year later, and I still wake up sometimes expecting this to be a dream.
Morning sunlight spills across the bed, painting golden stripes on Viktor's bare back. He's sprawled face-down on the mattress, one arm thrown across my stomach, his breathing slow and steady. Even in sleep, he holds onto me like I might disappear.
I trace the tattoos on his shoulder blade, the Bratva marks that tell stories of violence and survival. He stirs at my touch but doesn't wake. He sleeps better now. We both do.
Our new penthouse is different from the first one.
Lighter. Warmer. I picked the furniture and the art, and there are traces of me everywhere: my books on the shelves, my sketches on the walls, the blanket my mother made draped over the back of the couch.
It feels like home in a way nowhere has ever felt before.
"You're staring," Viktor mumbles into the pillow, his voice rough and gravelly with sleep.
"You're stare-worthy."
He rolls over with a low groan and pulls me on top of him in one smooth motion, and I go willingly, eagerly, settling across his broad chest like I belong there. Because I do.
"What time is it?" he asks, his large hands sliding up my bare thighs, leaving trails of heat in their wake.
"Early." I lean down and kiss him, slow and deep, tasting sleep and warmth. "We have that meeting with Alexei today. The one about the shipment routes."
"Cancel it."
"Viktor."
"He'll survive." His fingers find the hem of my shirt—his shirt actually, the one I stole from his drawer last night—and start inching it up with deliberate slowness. "I won't survive letting you out of this bed."
I laugh, the sound turning into a gasp as his mouth finds my throat, and let him prove it.
Later, dressed and presentable, I sit at the kitchen counter while Viktor makes coffee.
He moves around the space with easy grace, comfortable in a way he never used to be.
The past year has softened something in him.
Not the danger, that will always be there, but the edges.
The isolation. He smiles now. Really smiles.
And every time he does, my heart does a little flip.
"I finished my degree," I say, because I've been waiting for the right moment to tell him.
He turns, eyebrows raised. "The certification came through?"
"This morning. I'm officially qualified."
The pride on his face is almost overwhelming. He crosses the kitchen and pulls me into his arms, kissing my forehead. "I knew you could do it."
I spent the last year finishing my degree online, the one my father's gambling destroyed years ago. Viktor paid for it, of course, though I made him promise to let me pay him back eventually. He agreed, but we both know he'll never cash that check.
Now I work with a charity that helps victims of trafficking. It's not exactly the career path I imagined for myself, but it feels right. I understand what it means to be treated like property, to be handed over like collateral. I understand what it means to be seen and valued for the first time.
"Celebratory dinner tonight?" Viktor asks, already reaching for his phone to make reservations.
"Actually, there's something I need to do first."
His expression shifts immediately, becoming careful, watchful. "Your father."
I nod, my throat suddenly tight.
We got word last week through channels Viktor maintains for exactly this sort of thing.
Marcel Duval is dying. Pancreatic cancer, apparently, caught far too late because he spent what little money he had on poker tables and cheap whiskey instead of doctor visits.
He's in a public hospital in Paris, alone, and he wants to see me before the end.
Part of me wanted to say no immediately.
Part of me wanted to let him die alone in that sterile room, the way he let me live alone for all those years after my mother died.
But I've been carrying him with me for too long now.
The anger, the hurt, the resentment. The little girl who just wanted her father to choose her, just once.
I need to let it go. For my own sake, not his.
"I'll drive you to the airport," Viktor says quietly. It's not a question.
"You don't have to come inside the hospital with me."
"I'll be right outside the room." He takes my hand, threading his fingers through mine, his thumb brushing over my wedding ring. "Whatever you need, however long it takes."
The hospital room in Paris is small and sterile, and my father looks nothing like I remember from my childhood.
He's shrunken somehow, diminished, the larger-than-life man who ruined my childhood reduced to a pale figure in a hospital bed. Machines beep around him. The room smells like antiseptic and approaching death.
"Celeste." His voice is thin, reedy. "You came."
"I did."
I stand at the foot of his bed, keeping distance between us. Viktor is in the car outside, probably watching the entrance through the security cameras he has access to everywhere. The thought is comforting.
"I heard you married that Sorokin man," my father says. "That you're happy."
"I am."
We got married six months ago. Small ceremony, just Marta and Dmitri and Alexei as witnesses. Viktor wore a dark suit and looked at me like I was the sun. I wore a simple white dress and cried through my vows. It was perfect.
My father's hand trembles as he reaches for mine across the stark white sheets. I keep my hands clasped together at my waist, deliberately out of his reach.
"I'm sorry," he says, his voice cracking on the words. "For all of it. For everything I put you through."
I consider the apology carefully, turning it over in my mind like examining a stone found on a beach.
It's inadequate, of course—painfully, obviously inadequate.
Two simple words can't undo a lifetime of calculated neglect and casual betrayal, can't erase the years of being invisible in my own home.
But that's not really the point anymore, is it?
"You sold me to a monster," I say, my voice steady and calm despite the years of pain behind those words. "And somehow, impossibly, he turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to me. The only person who ever truly saw me."
My father flinches visibly, his papery skin going even paler, but he doesn't attempt to argue or make excuses.
"So I forgive you." The words come easier than I expected, flowing out without the bitterness I thought they'd carry. "Not because you deserve it—you don't. But because I'm done carrying you around like a weight. I'm done letting what you did to me define who I am and who I can become."
He opens his mouth to respond, probably to offer more empty apologies, but I'm already turning away from the bed.
"Goodbye, Marcel."
I walk out without looking back, without giving him another moment of my time.
Through the antiseptic hospital corridors with their fluorescent lights, past the nurses' station where someone glances up curiously, out through the automatic doors into the Paris afternoon where Viktor is leaning against our car with his arms crossed over his chest, his dark eyes scanning the entrance, watching for me like he always does.
The moment he sees me, he opens his arms, and I walk straight into them without hesitation.
"It's done," I say against the solid warmth of his chest, breathing in his familiar scent.
"How do you feel?" His voice rumbles through his chest.
I think about the question seriously, examining my emotions the way you might check yourself for injuries after a fall.
I think about the invisible weight I've been carrying for twenty-five years, the desperate, aching need to matter to a man who was never capable of seeing past his own ambitions and disappointments.
"Free," I say finally, testing the truth of it. "I feel free."
Viktor kisses the top of my hair, his lips lingering there. "Good. Now let's go home."
That night, we celebrate in our own way.
Viktor takes me to the restaurant where we had our first real dinner together, the one with the impossible wait list that he somehow bypassed. We sit at the same table, drink the same wine, and I think about how different everything is now.
A year ago, I was a terrified prisoner in a warehouse basement, convinced I was about to die, never imagining I was actually stumbling headfirst into love with my captor.
Now I'm a wife. A partner in business and life. An equal in ways I never thought possible with anyone, let alone a man like Viktor Volkov.
"Thank you," I tell him over dessert, the rich chocolate melting on my tongue as I watch him across the candlelit table.
"For what?"
"For seeing me. Really seeing me. When no one else did. Not my father, not anyone in my life before you."
He reaches across the pristine white tablecloth and takes my hand, his thumb brushing across my knuckles with a gentleness that still sometimes catches me off guard. "You're not hard to see, солнышко. Everyone else was just blind. Willfully so."
I still don't know what that word means. He uses it sometimes, in moments of tenderness, whispered against my skin or murmured into my hair. I asked once, and he just smiled and said he'd tell me someday.
We go home and fall into bed together, slow and sweet.
A year of marriage hasn't dimmed the fire between us.
If anything, it's burned brighter. He knows my body better than I know it myself, knows exactly where to touch and how hard and how long.
And I've learned him too, learned the places that make him gasp, the rhythm that makes him lose control.
After, tangled in the rumpled silk sheets that still smell faintly of his cologne, I trace the platinum ring on his finger with my index finger, following its smooth contours. The one that matches the band currently warming against my own skin.
"Viktor?"
"Mm?" The sound rumbles deep in his chest where my cheek rests.
"Do you ever regret it? Taking me that night instead of leaving me in that warehouse to whatever fate my father had planned?"
He rolls me beneath him in one fluid movement, the muscles in his arms flexing as he braces himself above me, looking down at me with those ice-blue eyes that only ever warm for me. Eyes that once terrified me and now make me feel safer than anywhere else in the world.
"I regret every second I wasn't looking for you. Every year before that warehouse when you were suffering alone. Every moment you existed in this world that I didn't know you. That's what I regret."
I smile up at him, my heart swelling in my chest. "Smooth answer."
"I learned from watching you," he says, his accent thickening slightly the way it does when he's emotional.
I laugh, the sound bright and free in the quiet of our bedroom, and he swallows it with a kiss, deep and claiming. We make love again, slower this time, savoring each touch and whispered word like we have all the time in the world.
Because we do.
Later, as sleep starts to pull me under, I think about the girl I used to be. The one who was invisible, worthless, disposable. The one who was handed over like cargo and expected to disappear.
She's gone now. In her place is someone stronger. Someone who found love in the last place she expected, who built a life out of ashes, who learned that being kept isn't the same as being caged.
Viktor's arm tightens possessively around me, and I burrow closer to his solid warmth, breathing in his familiar scent.
"I love you," I whisper into the darkness, my voice soft but certain.
"I love you too." His lips brush tenderly across my forehead, lingering there. "Always."
I fall asleep smiling, safe in his arms.
Iwas given to a monster as payment for a debt, and he taught me I was worth more than all the gold in the world.
I was kept by a killer with blood on his hands, and he loved me back to life with a patience I'd never known.
They told me to run from the dangerous man who claimed me.
Thank god I ran straight into him instead.