Chapter 12
Juliette
We're barely through the front door before I'm laughing again, and I've laughed more tonight than I have in the last three years combined, which I know because I keep that kind of figure.
"Admit it," I say, stepping out of my heels and leaving them where they fall, which is a small rebellion against twenty-three years of putting shoes away. "You were nervous."
"I was strategic." Serik shrugs out of his jacket. He's loosened, the way he only does inside this house, the careful stillness traded for something more relaxed around the shoulders. "There's a difference."
"There's no difference. You ran threat models on your own brothers all the way there.
I watched you do it in the car." I pad into the living room where the harbor sits below us in its chains of light, and I feel, for the first time since I was sent into that office and told I was attending an auction dinner, completely and stupidly happy.
"You were worried they wouldn't like me. "
"I was worried you wouldn't like them. I'd already factored their approval.
You're harder to predict." He follows me in, pours two glasses of something amber, hands me one.
"And I was right to worry, because you solved Akyl in under an hour and he hasn't been solved by anyone outside the family in a decade. "
"Akyl was easy." I take the glass. "He spends so much energy being unreadable that the effort itself is the tell.
He's not cold. He's a man holding very still over something he's terrified of losing.
You can see exactly where the heat is by where the ice is thickest." I sip.
"Katriona, by the way. That's where the heat is.
He watched her cut her own steak like it was a religious event. "
"You got all that across one table?"
"I got that across one table while pouring her wine.
" I set my glass down on the long table, and the memory of it warms me more than the drink does.
Katriona Bontoft, all clinical edges and dry precision.
I'd reached over and filled her glass before she could, because it gave me a reason to lean in, and she'd given me a look that was pure assessment, scalpel-clean, the look of one woman deciding whether another is worth the bother.
"I'm Juliette, by the way," I'd said. "Serik's."
Not Serik's fiancée. Just Serik's, claimed in my own mouth, chosen, and Katriona had held my eyes a beat and then poured me a glass in return, which I have since learned is the closest thing to a hug that woman issues to people she's met once.
"She likes you," Serik says, reading the memory off my face the way he reads everything. “They all do, which is saying a lot considering you all only met each other tonight. At least I already knew my brothers.”
I drop onto the couch, tucking my feet up, another small rebellion. "Well, the feeling is mutual, but I’m glad to be home."
It’s the first time I’ve called Serik’s place home, but it feels right.
“What do you think about the weddings?” he asks. “The timeline, the rush…Is the end of the month too soon for you?”
The end of the month. Twenty-some days. I do the math without meaning to, the way I do everything, and the number that comes back isn't a deadline or a transaction or a column in my father's ledger.
It's a door, and it's standing open, and for once in my life I'm the one walking through it instead of being pushed by my father and his demands.
"Yes," I say. Then, because the moment deserves the real currency: "Da."
I rise up onto my knees on the couch so I'm above him for once, looking down at this man my father sold me to and I bought my way out with, this man who asks before he does anything.
"I want to choose the dress. All of it. The date, the dress, the flowers I'm apparently contractually entitled to make optional. "
"All yours."
"And I want," I say, leaning in until there's no room left to measure, "to celebrate the fact that I'm marrying you at the end of the month somewhere that isn't a couch with a view of our work."
He's already standing, already lifting me with him, and the last coherent thing I think before his mouth finds mine is that somewhere in the middle of being the most expensive transaction my father ever botched, I forgot entirely to keep waiting for the catch.
There isn't one. There's just this. Him, and the end of the month, and a name I chose with my own mouth at a table full of people who wanted me there.
I stopped being cargo somewhere tonight, and nobody had to tell me. I just knew, the way I know everything, all at once, like it had been waiting in the next room my whole life for me to finally open the door.