5. Sofia #2
The music deepens, and he dances closer. The room dissolves into laughter and whistles, but my attention narrows. He puts one hand on the back of my chair and leans in, close enough that I can smell clean skin and cologne. His mouth curves like he knows exactly what the bride wants from him.
Maybe he’s right.
Maybe I want a kiss.
Not a proper one. Not something meaningful.
God, definitely not meaningful.
Just one reckless kiss from a stranger before I become someone’s wife. One last stupid, harmless thing that Dmitri can’t own because he will never know about it. One tiny proof that I didn’t go quietly.
The stripper’s face hovers near mine, and the girls are going wild. Anya is laughing so hard she almost spills her drink.
“Do it!” one of the twins shouts.
I almost do.
Then he turns his head slightly, and the gold light catches the angle of his cheek. Something in my mind changes his face.
Dark hair threaded with silver. A harder mouth. Winter-gray eyes.
Black leather sliding off long fingers.
Damir.
My whole body stills.
The room continues around me, bright and loud and delighted, but for one strange second, I’m not in the club anymore.
I’m back in the restaurant, feeling his gaze pass over me like a slow blade.
I’m in my bed, biting back a sound with his name burning behind my teeth.
I’m standing in front of an envelope, writing Mr. Damir Volodin with a pulse fluttering for a woman doing something harmless.
The stripper leans in a fraction more. I turn my face away, and his mouth lands near my cheek instead of my lips.
The room erupts in teasing shrieks.
“Oh my God,” Katya gasps. “She’s loyal.”
I blink. “What?”
Mila presses both hands to her chest. “That is so cute.”
“No, it isn’t.”
“It is,” one of the twins says. “You couldn’t even kiss him. You love Dmitri too much.”
I stare at her.
For a second, I actually consider explaining. I consider saying that I didn’t turn away because of Dmitri. I turned away because my mind, with spectacular cruelty, replaced a perfectly available shirtless man with Damir Volodin, a man who could probably ruin my uncle before breakfast.
I consider saying I don’t love Dmitri.
I consider saying I would rather chew glass than kiss Dmitri with the enthusiasm these women are currently assigning to me.
Instead, I start laughing. Not because it’s funny, but because if I don’t laugh, something much uglier will come out.
Anya watches me from the sofa. She’s not laughing now.
She knows.
Maybe not the Damir part. Please God, not the Damir part. But she knows enough to understand that loyalty has nothing to do with the way I turned my head.
The stripper, professional and merciful, moves back with a grin and continues the routine as if my near miss is part of the show. I give him a generous smile because he has done nothing wrong except briefly possess cheekbones my imagination could vandalize.
The girls keep teasing me.
“Our Sofia is secretly romantic.”
“She acts tough, but look at her.”
“Dmitri is lucky.”
“He must be so proud.”
I drink champagne while they talk. I smile.
I let them have the little story because it’s easier than correcting them.
They want to believe in reluctant love, in a sharp-tongued bride secretly soft for her groom, in a wedding that means something better than alliance and control.
They want the fairy tale because the alternative is sitting in this room with me and admitting that, in two days, I will stand in front of God and men with guns and give myself to someone I don’t want.
So I let them call it love. I don’t care.
Let them think I’m saving myself for Dmitri.
Let them think I’m sweet.
Let them think whatever helps them finish their champagne.
I know the truth.
The truth is that I wanted to kiss a stranger tonight because I’m terrified of losing the last pieces of myself.
The truth is that I could not do it because the only mouth I imagined was Damir Volodin’s.
The truth is that I have sent him an invitation, and some dark, reckless part of me is now waiting for the church doors to open.
The days pass too quickly after that. Time becomes cruelly efficient.
There are fittings, final checks, a quiet dinner with my uncle where he barely looks at me, and a visit from Dmitri, who brings a diamond bracelet I don’t want and fastens it around my wrist himself.
“It belonged to my grandmother,” he says.
The bracelet is cold against my skin.
“How touching,” I say.
His thumb brushes the inside of my wrist, and I fight the urge to pull away.
“You will wear it for the ceremony.”
“Of course.”
He smiles like my obedience pleases him. For a moment, he looks almost handsome in the way strangers might think handsome means safe. Then his fingers close too tightly around my wrist, just for a second, just enough to remind me that softness is something he intends to correct after marriage.
“I hear Anya took you out,” he says.
My heartbeat stays steady. “She did.”
“A bride should be careful where she is seen.”
“I was in a private room.”
“You are never private anymore, Sofia. Not when you are about to be my wife.”
There it is. That ugly feeling again. The one that starts in my stomach and spreads upward, thick and sour, until I feel like my skin is too tight. The one I get whenever Dmitri speaks like marriage is not something we are entering together, but something he is closing around me.
He lifts my hand and kisses my knuckles. I want to throw up.
Instead, I smile. Because I have become very good at surviving rooms by giving men the expression they expect.
The morning of the wedding arrives cold and bright.
The sky outside my window is a hard, pale blue, cloudless and pitiless.
The house wakes before sunrise. Footsteps move through the halls.
Doors open and close. Voices murmur. Steamers hiss.
Someone cries in another room, though whether from emotion or terror, I can’t tell.
I sit at the vanity while women turn me into a bride.
That’s what it feels like, being slowly stitched into something I’m not.
My hair is twisted into soft waves and pinned beneath a veil so delicate it looks spun from frost. My makeup is pale and perfect.
My lips are painted a soft rose instead of the red I prefer because Dmitri’s mother apparently believes brides should look like they have never had a dangerous thought in their lives.
The dress is beautiful.
I hate that it’s beautiful.
White silk. Long sleeves of lace. A fitted bodice. A skirt that falls around me like water. Tiny pearls stitched along the cuffs. A neckline modest enough to please old women and elegant enough to photograph well from every angle.
I look like a dream.
I feel like a body being prepared for burial.
Anya stands behind me, unusually quiet. That worries me more than tears would.
“You look beautiful,” she says.
I meet her eyes in the mirror. “Don’t.”
Her mouth trembles, but she catches it. “Fine. You look expensive.”
“Better.”
“You look like you could still run if you took the heels off.”
That almost breaks me.
I grip the edge of the vanity. For one wild second, I imagine it. Tearing the veil out. Kicking off the shoes. Running down the service stairs, through the back garden, into one of the cars, out of the city, out of my name.
Then the door opens. My uncle enters, and the room straightens around him.
Sergei Antonov stops just inside the doorway and looks at me. For a moment, something moves across his face that might have been tenderness in another man. In him, it’s gone too quickly to trust.
“You look like your mother,” he says.
The words hurt more than I expect.
I stand slowly. “Did she look this happy on her wedding day?”
Anya’s eyes close.