10. Sofia
SOFIA
Damir Volodin carries me out of the church like this is not the most absurd thing to happen in the history of organized crime.
Which is impressive, really, because I’m wearing a wedding dress meant for another man, there is blood on my mouth, my former fiancé has just been shot in the leg, my uncle looks ready to start a war, and I have apparently married the most dangerous man in Moscow because I was trying to be petty with stationery.
This is why people say not to make decisions while emotional.
Or horny.
Or trapped in arranged marriages.
Honestly, the warning labels should be more specific.
“Put me down,” I say for the fourth time.
Damir doesn’t even glance at me. “No.”
“I have legs.”
“I noticed.”
My face heats before I can stop it, because the way he says it makes me very aware that he has noticed far more than my legs in the last hour.
I grip his shoulder harder. “You can’t just carry me around like luggage.”
“You are not luggage.”
“Wonderful. We’ve established I have basic human status.”
His mouth almost moves.
That is quickly becoming the most irritating thing about him. Damir Volodin doesn’t smile properly. He just lets the corner of his mouth threaten the idea, then takes it away before anyone can prove it happened.
One of his men—I think his name is Mikhail—opens the back door of a black car waiting at the bottom of the church steps.
Damir lowers me inside with surprising care, which somehow makes everything worse.
I expect roughness. I expect command. I expect a man like him to toss me in and order the driver to leave.
Instead, he sets me down as if the fact that he has abducted me from my own wedding doesn’t mean he has forgotten manners.
Then he gets in beside me, and the door shuts. The world outside becomes muffled behind tinted glass. For a few seconds, neither of us speaks.
I look down at myself. My dress is ruined. Not dramatically ruined, not yet, but enough. The hem is dirty from the church floor. One sleeve has a faint smear of blood on it, though I can’t tell whose. My veil hangs unevenly over one shoulder. My bouquet is gone. My left shoe is missing.
My mouth still feels swollen. My neck still burns.
And on my throat, beneath the lace, Damir’s bite feels like a second pulse. I lift my fingers toward it before I can stop myself.
Damir’s gaze drops to the movement, and I snatch my hand away. “Don’t look so pleased with yourself,” I say.
“I am very pleased with myself.”
“At least pretend shame.”
“No.”
“Do you know how exhausting you are?”
“Already?”
“We’ve been married for twenty minutes.”
“Sixteen.”
I stare at him.
He glances at his watch. Of course he does.
“You are timing the marriage?”
“I like precision.”
“I should have married the bullet.”
This time, his mouth definitely moves.
I hate that I see it.
I hate more that I want to see it again.
The car pulls away from the church. Through the tinted window, I catch one last glimpse of the steps, the armed men, the guests spilling out in clusters, my uncle standing at the entrance like a statue carved out of rage.
For one second, his warning comes back so sharply I almost hear it in the car.
Do you know he killed his wife?
My stomach tightens.
I look at Damir. He’s sitting beside me in calm silence, one bloodstained hand resting against his thigh, the cut across his palm hastily wrapped in a strip of white cloth. He looks less like a groom than a man who has just conquered a small country and is considering whether to have lunch.
Killed his wife.
The words don’t fit with the heat of his mouth or the way he shielded me in the church or the careful way he placed me in the car.
That’s the problem with monsters. In stories, they are supposed to look like monsters. In real life, apparently, they wear beautiful suits and kiss like they are trying to ruin your ability to think.
I turn toward the window. The city thins gradually as we drive. Stone buildings give way to wider roads, guarded gates, stretches of old trees bare against the cold sky. The silence in the car becomes too full, so naturally I fill it with the first foolish thing that comes to mind.
“So,” I say, “do you regularly attend weddings and leave with the bride, or was I special?”
Damir looks at me. “You were special.”
My breath catches before I can stop it.
Then he adds, “Most brides don’t invite me.”
I exhale sharply. “I didn’t invite you to marry me.”
“No. You invited me to stop the wedding.”
“I invited you to annoy Dmitri.”
“You succeeded.”
“That seems to be the theme of my day.”
Mikhail, seated in the front passenger seat, makes a suspiciously controlled sound that might be a cough and might be laughter deciding it values survival. Damir’s eyes lift briefly to the rearview mirror, and Mikhail becomes very interested in the road.
I lean back against the seat, because my body is finally beginning to understand what happened.
The adrenaline thins. The ache in my feet arrives first, then the tightness in my ribs, then the bruised tenderness at my wrist where Dmitri held me too hard during the ceremony.
My chest feels hollow and full at the same time.
I am married. Not to Dmitri.
To Damir.
To the man my uncle hates.
The man my uncle says killed his wife.
The thought follows me all the way out of the city.
His house appears just when the road begins to climb. At first, I only see the gates. Black iron. Tall. Severe. No family crest. No ornate flourish. Nothing delicate or decorative. Just two enormous gates set into a stone wall, opening without a sound as the car approaches.
Then the trees part, and I see the house.
For one strange second, all I can think of is Bluebeard. Not the watered-down version from children’s books, but the old story. The young wife. The forbidden room. The husband with too many secrets. The beautiful house that looks like a gift until you realize beauty can be bait.
Damir’s house is perched on a cliff overlooking a black stretch of water, magnificent and lonely against the pale sky.
It’s built from dark stone and glass, all sharp lines and old-world grandeur, with terraces carved into the rock and windows that catch the light like watchful eyes.
The sea below beats against the cliff with a low, endless violence.
A man accused of killing his wife could not possibly live in a cheerful yellow house with flower boxes and a neighbor named Olga who borrows sugar.
No. He lives in a gothic nightmare with excellent architecture.
“Is there a forbidden room?” I ask before I can stop myself.
Damir looks at me. “What?”
“Nothing.”
His gaze holds mine a second too long. “You are thinking too loudly.”
“That sounds like a personal problem for you.”
“It often is.”
The car stops in front of the entrance. Before I can open my own door, Damir is already out, coming around to my side. He opens the door and offers his hand.
I stare at it. Large. Bare. Bandaged. His family ring still on his finger, dark metal, old design, the crest worn smooth in places by time.
I take his hand. His fingers close around mine, and the stupid part of my body, the part currently accepting nominations for national betrayal, goes warm.
Inside, the house is even more magnificent.
And even worse.
Not ugly, never ugly. It’s too beautiful for that.
The foyer is vast, with dark marble floors and a sweeping staircase that rises beneath a chandelier made of black iron and glass.
Tall windows overlook the cliffside and the water beyond.
There are old portraits along one wall, their faces solemn beneath layers of varnish.
The air smells faintly of woodsmoke, leather, and something colder I can’t name.
But the thing I notice most is the quiet.
There are men, yes. Guards near the door. Mikhail behind us. Two others entering from a side hall. But no wife waiting. No mother. No children. No female voices upstairs. No staff bustling with trays or flowers or instructions.
He lives alone.
Damir takes off his coat and hands it to a man without looking away from me.
“You’re staring,” he says.
“I’m absorbing.”
“That’s not what I’m seeing on your face right now. You’re suspicious,” he says without accusation.
“Because I am in the cliff house of a man my uncle says killed his wife.” The words leave my mouth before I can soften them.
Mikhail goes still behind me. So do the guards.
Damir does not. He looks at me calmly, as if I have asked whether he takes his coffee black. “Did he?”
I lift my chin. “Did he what?”
“Tell you I killed her.”
The silence stretches. There’s no point lying.
“Yes.”
For a moment, his face gives me nothing. Then he turns and walks toward the staircase. “Come.”
I stare after him. “That is not an answer.”
“No.”
“Do you always respond to murder accusations with interior tours?”
“Only on special occasions.”
“I’m not reassured.”
“You were not meant to be.”
I follow him because apparently that is the kind of woman I am now: one who walks deeper into Bluebeard’s house while arguing about manners.
He stops halfway across the foyer, beneath a portrait of a dark-haired woman with sharp eyes and a string of pearls around her throat.
Beside her, in a smaller portrait, is a man with the same severe bone structure as Damir, only younger, less hardened.
There are children too, painted in old-fashioned formal clothes, their faces solemn and pale.
Damir looks up at them. For the first time since I met him, something in his face closes in a way that is not calculation.
It’s older. Deeper.
“My family lived here before the fire,” he says. The words are quiet.
I stop beside him. “The fire?”
“Twenty-one years ago.”
He doesn’t look at me. His eyes remain on the portraits. “My father. My mother. Two sisters. My youngest brother. Three cousins who were staying with us that night.” He pauses. “Almost everyone.”
The foyer feels colder.
I look at the painted faces again.
Children. A woman with pearls. A young man who might have laughed once, before grief carved him into the man beside me.