Chapter 3
Akyl
The ring has been in my pocket for three days.
I've carried it to two meetings, a port inspection, and a conversation with a man who owed Rovin money and was unwise about how he expressed his feelings on the matter.
The whole time, it has sat against my hip like a decision I've already made and am simply waiting for the correct moment to execute.
Tonight is the correct moment.
Katriona comes down the stairs at six in a deep burnt orange dress that I had Kasimir source after I watched her look at it on a screen for slightly too long last week.
She doesn't know I arranged it. She thinks she chose it. In a sense she did, because I wouldn’t have known to find it if I hadn't been watching her face when she scrolled past it.
She's healing. I can see it in the way she moves down the staircase, one hand on the rail but not gripping it, her weight balanced instead of braced.
“Is this okay?” she asks, looking down at herself.
I take her in. The dress. The color in her face that wasn't there ten days ago. The way she's standing without protecting anything.
"You'll do," I say, which is the largest understatement of my adult life, and she knows it, because the corner of her mouth lifts.
"High praise."
"Are you in pain?"
"No. I took something an hour ago." She catches my expression. "The correct dose, at the correct time, before you ask. I'm an excellent patient."
"You're a terrible patient. You reorganized my office last week. The pantry yesterday…Kasimir is still pouting about it."
"I sat down for all of it. Mostly." She smooths an invisible crease on my lapel, a small possessive gesture she does without seeming to notice she's doing it. "Are your brothers going to interrogate me?"
"Volody will. He thinks he's subtle. He's the least subtle person I've ever met." I offer her my arm. "You don't have to win them over. You've already done it."
She takes my arm. "When did I do that?"
"Katriona. You comforted a stranger in a hallway the night of the dinner because you couldn't help yourself. My family operates on instinct about people. They decided about you weeks ago." I open the door. "Tonight is a formality."
The dinner is at Rovin's house, and it is louder and warmer than I expected considering why we’re here.
This is still strange to me. The house I shared with my brothers was, for most of our lives, a place of careful silences and the particular quiet that descends when everyone is calculating.
Our father made rooms cold simply by entering them.
We learned to occupy space the way soldiers occupy territory, with awareness and thorough knowledge of the exits.
Now there are five women at the table and the noise level is something my mother would not have recognized. Claudia at the head of the table beside Rovin. Volody is already too loud. Serik is refereeing some argument between Juliette and Dayan about a film none of them can correctly summarize.
And Katriona is in the middle of it, smiling.
I watch her. She has Liv on one side, still the most nervous of the women, and within ten minutes she's drawn the girl into a conversation that has her laughing instead of glancing at the exits.
She fields Volody's interrogation with a dryness that delights him so thoroughly he nearly knocks over the wine.
When Claudia mentions a name from the legitimate side of the business, Katriona asks a question so precise that Rovin's head comes up and he looks at her across the table with new attention.
She doesn't perform any of it. That's the part that undoes me.
Every other woman I've watched at a table like this has been working, managing impressions, building a position.
Katriona simply exists in the room and the room rearranges itself toward her, because she's interested in people and people can feel the difference between interest and strategy.
"You've gone quiet," Serik says beside me. "Quieter than usual. Which for you is essentially mute."
"I'm eating."
"You've eaten three bites. You've been watching Katriona the entire meal." He follows my gaze. "She's good, Akyl. She seems like a good fit."
I don't answer. I don't need to. Serik has always been able to read the things I don't say, which is occasionally useful and frequently inconvenient.
Across the table, Rovin taps his knife against his glass, and the table quiets, and the wedding conversation begins. The sequencing. The timelines. Who follows whom.
"After Rovin, we follow," I say when it's my turn. I'm looking at Katriona when I say it. "Within the month. I don't want a long engagement."
Katriona meets my eyes. "You haven't formally asked me."
"I outbid six men for you. Consider it implied."
"I don't accept implications."
The table is watching now. I hold her gaze and I let the moment stretch, because she's challenging me in front of my entire family and I have never enjoyed anything more.
"Then I'll ask you properly," I say. "Tonight. When we're alone."
Color rises in her throat. She picks up her water glass and takes a deliberate sip, composure intact, but I've spent weeks learning her now and I see the breath she takes, the small recalibration. She didn't expect me to say it out loud, in front of everyone. She expected me to deflect.
I don't deflect. Not about this.
The ring sits against my hip and the rest of the dinner happens at a distance, like weather observed through glass.
The drive home is quiet.
She sits beside me in the back of the car with the city sliding past the windows, dark and wet, the streetlights smearing across the glass.
Her hand is on the seat between us, and at some point I cover it with mine, and she turns her palm up and links her fingers through mine. Neither of us says anything about it.
"You meant it," she says eventually. "At dinner. About asking me tonight."
"I don't say things I don't mean. It's inefficient."
She laughs softly, but there's something underneath it. "You could have asked me anytime this week."
She squeezes my hand, and I feel it travel up my arm and settle in my gut. Calm. Peace. That’s what she brings to my life.
We get home and the house is quiet and gold-lit, the way I leave it now because she prefers warm light to the cold overhead fixtures my father installed. Kasimir has gone for the night. It's just the two of us in the hallway, and she turns to face me. I take the ring out of my pocket.
I don't kneel. She'd hate it, and it isn't who either of us are. Instead I take her left hand and hold it, looking at her, and I let her see all of it. The thing I keep behind the control, the thing that has only ever belonged to her.
"Katriona Bontoft," I say. "I have spent my life acquiring things.
Companies, leverage, property, the kind of power that means no one can touch what's mine.
None of it ever felt like enough, and I didn't understand why until you sat in a kitchen in a bathrobe and told me about the doctors like you were reading a weather report, and I realized I had spent thirty-six years building a fortress and never once thought about who I was building it for. "
Her eyes are bright. She doesn't blink.
"I want to build it for you," I say. "I want to spend the rest of my life with you." I hold the ring at the first knuckle of her finger. "Marry me. Properly. Because I asked, and you said yes."
"You haven't asked yet," she whispers. "You've made a speech."
"Katriona."
"Yes." She's almost laughing, almost crying, entirely herself. "Yes. Obviously, yes. Put the ring on before I take it from you and do it myself."
I slide the ring onto her finger. It's a dark emerald flanked by diamonds. It looks like it was always meant to be there.
She looks at it. Then she looks at me, and the expression on her face is one I've been waiting for without knowing I was waiting.
"Take me upstairs," she says.
I go very still. "Katriona."
"I know. I'm still healing. I've read every page of Marsh's instructions and I know exactly what I can and can't do.
" She steps closer, and her free hand flattens against my chest, over my heart, which is not behaving the way I would like it to.
"But I also know what I can. And I've spent a week listening to you tell me what you want to do to me, and I would like to collect on some of it. "
"You're sure?"
"I'm a grown woman who knows her own body better than anyone alive, including the surgeon. Yes. I'm sure." Her eyes hold mine. "Nothing that risks the stitches. I trust you to know the difference."
I take her face in both hands and I kiss her, and for the first time since the hospital I let myself stop being careful with the kiss, because the kiss was never the danger.
She makes a sound against my mouth that goes straight through me, and her hands fist in my shirt.
I lift her, carefully, one arm behind her back and one beneath her, and she wraps her arms around my neck.
I carry her upstairs to my room. Our room, now, or it will be the moment she's well enough to climb the stairs without me counting each one.
I lay her down on the bed with a care that has nothing to do with restraint and everything to do with the fact that I have never in my life held something I was more afraid of damaging and more determined to keep.
"Stop looking at me like that," she says.
"Like what."
"Like I might disappear."
"You spent years disappearing," I say, easing the strap of the green dress off her shoulder, pressing my mouth to the skin there.
"While everyone told you the pain wasn't real.
I watched you do it in a hallway the night we met.
You will not disappear in this house." I move to her collarbone.
"Not while I'm watching. And I'm always watching. "
She shivers, and it isn't pain. I've spent every moment since the auction learning the difference so precisely that I could chart it.