10. Zane
ZANE
They are already seated when I walk in.
Gregor at the center, Fedorov to his left, Lev Maric on his right.
Three men arranged like a presentation, which is exactly what this is.
Gregor has his folder open on the table.
Fedorov has his hands folded. Maric is looking at the window, which means he’s not fully committed to whatever Gregor has told him they’re doing here today.
I sit down across from them. I don’t say anything. I wait.
Gregor clears his throat. “We want to formally raise a concern about the current domestic arrangement.”
“Raise it,” I say.
He opens the folder. Sets two pages on the table and slides them toward me. I don’t look at them yet. I look at him.
“Her name is Natasha Voss,” he says. “Twenty-nine. Her father is Dmitri Voss of the Eastern Council, with thirty years of experience in the organization. Her mother is connected to the Barinov family through her first marriage. She was educated in Vienna, speaks four languages, and has been present at organizational functions since she was seventeen.” He taps the page.
“She understands this world. She was raised in it. She knows what is required of a woman in this position.”
“And,” I say.
Gregor looks at me. “And Celine Varas is a personal assistant from Queens with no bloodline connections, no organizational history, and access to your inner structure that she has not earned.”
Fedorov shifts in his seat but says nothing. Maric is still looking at the window.
“Natasha Voss,” I say.
“Yes.”
“Dmitri Voss’s daughter.”
“Yes.”
I look at the pages now. A photograph, a one-page summary of her background, a list of her organizational connections laid out like a curriculum vitae. It’s thorough. Gregor spent time on this. I respect the preparation even as I’m deciding exactly how this conversation ends.
“Dmitri Voss,” I say, “approached me eighteen months ago about a route arrangement in the north that I declined. When I declined, he took it to Petrov’s faction.
He has been in Petrov’s orbit since.” I set the pages down.
“You want me to marry a woman whose father is currently aligned with the faction most actively working against this organization’s northern interests. ”
Gregor’s jaw tightens. “That arrangement can be renegotiated.”
“Can it.”
“With the right incentive, yes. A marriage connection between our leadership and the Voss family would bring Dmitri back. It would close the northern problem.”
I look at him for a moment. Then at Fedorov, who’s looking at the table. Then at Maric, who has finally turned away from the window and is watching me with the expression of a man who came to this meeting because Gregor asked him to and now regrets it.
“You want me to use my marriage as a trade instrument,” I say. “To pull a man back from a rival faction by handing him a son-in-law.”
“It’s how these things have always been done.”
“It’s how these things were done thirty years ago.” I close the folder and push it back across the table. “Celine Varas is my wife. That is not a negotiation. This meeting is finished.”
Gregor doesn’t move. “Zane. The council’s concern is legitimate. A woman with no understanding of this world, no protection inside it, no—”
“Gregor.” I stand up. “The next time you bring a folder with another woman’s photograph in it to a meeting about my marriage, that will be the last meeting you attend. Do you understand me?”
It’s not a question.
Fedorov pushes his chair back. Maric is already standing. Gregor looks at me for a long moment.
They file out. Roman closes the door behind them.
I stand at the window and stare down at the city.
Gregor is right. That’s the problem.
Three months ago, I would have looked at Natasha Voss’s photograph, considered the advantages, and made the decision without hesitation.
Now the thought leaves a sour taste in my mouth.
Celine is in the living room when I come through in the evening.
I know she registered the closed-door meeting this afternoon.
She registers everything. It’s the quality I chose her for, and the quality that’s currently the most inconvenient thing about her.
She looked up when Gregor and the others came out, and when I came out twenty minutes later, she went back to her screen without saying anything.
She’s good at waiting.
I make it to the kitchen before she appears in the doorway.
“Who were they?” she asks.
I open the cabinet. Take out a glass. “Council members.”
“I know they were council members. Roman had the floor cleared for thirty minutes.” She leans against the doorframe. Her arms are crossed, not defensively, the way she holds herself when she has decided to have a conversation she knows I will not want to have. “What was the meeting about?”
“Organization business.”
“Zane.”
I fill the glass. Drink. She’s looking at me from the doorway with the patience of someone who has nowhere else to be and no intention of going there.
“It doesn’t concern you,” I say.
Something moves across her face. “I’m sorry?”
“It was a council matter. It’s handled.”
“A council matter.” She pushes off the doorframe. Takes two steps into the kitchen. “Three men come to a closed meeting on a Sunday evening, and you tell me it doesn’t concern me.”
“It’s handled, Celine.”
“My name was in that meeting.”
I look at her. She holds it.
“You don’t know that,” I say.
“I know Gregor has hated me since the dinner. I know he’s been building toward something.
I know that whatever was in that folder Fedorov was carrying was not about the northern routes.
” Her voice is level. It’s the cold version, the one that costs her more than shouting would.
“I’m not an idiot. Do not manage me like one. ”
“I’m not managing you.”
“Then tell me what happened.”
“No.”
She stares at me. The kitchen is very quiet.
“No?” she repeats.
“The matter is resolved. You don’t need the details.”
“I don’t need—” She laughs once, short, a sound with nothing warm in it.
“I have been attending your dinners and your galas and performing at your table for the council, and you are standing in your kitchen telling me I don’t need information about a meeting where my name was almost certainly discussed by men who have decided they don’t want me here. ”
“They don’t get to decide that.”
“Neither do you.” She takes another step toward me.
“Neither do you, Zane. You decided I would be your wife. You decided I would move in here. You decided I would attend the dinners. You have made every single decision in this arrangement and called it protection, and I have gone along with it because the contract says I have to.” Her voice drops.
Not softer. Lower. “But you do not get to make decisions about what I know about my own life.”
The kitchen between us is not large. She has crossed most of it without either of us noticing.
“Gregor brought a name,” I say.
She goes still.
“A woman from a Bratva-connected family. He made a case for replacing you.” I set the glass down. “I ended the meeting. The case went nowhere. That’s all that happened.”
She’s looking at me. I watch her take it in. The way her jaw shifts when she’s processing something she didn’t expect to be told.
“Why did you tell me?” she says.
“Because you asked.”
“You never answer when I ask.”
“I’m answering now.”
She looks at me for a long moment. The kitchen is quiet. The city outside the window is doing what it always does, indifferent. She’s close enough that I can see exactly what the last sixty seconds cost her to hold together.
“He brought another woman’s photograph,” she says.
“Yes.”
“To replace me.”
“Yes.”
She breathes out once, slow. Looks at the counter. Looks back at me. “Say something,” she says.
“I just told you the meeting is over.”
“That’s not what I mean.”
I know what she means.
The distance between us right now is less than an arm’s length.
It has been less than an arm’s length for the last several minutes, and neither of us has moved to change that.
She’s looking at me with the look she gets when she has stopped deciding what to give and is just giving it, and I’ve been in enough rooms with this woman to know exactly what that means.
I reach out. Push a strand of hair back from her face. She doesn’t move away.
“You’re not being replaced,” I say.
She looks at me for one more second.
Then she closes the distance herself, and I meet her halfway. There is no grace in it, no careful negotiation of space. The moment her body collides with mine, the air between us ignites, weeks of restraint and resentment catching fire all at once.
My hand fists in her hair, thick and warm, and I drag her head back so I can take her mouth the way I’ve wanted to since the first time she looked at me like I was both salvation and damnation.
The kiss is brutal, open-mouthed, tongues sliding and teeth clashing. She tastes like fury and the faint sweetness of the tea she drank earlier, and I drink her down like a man who has been starving in the desert.
Celine makes a low, angry sound against my lips and bites me back, hard enough that the sting blooms bright and sharp.
The pain only makes me harder. I press her backward until the edge of the marble counter bites into her hips, then lift her onto it with both hands under her ass.
The movement is effortless; she weighs almost nothing to me, and the way her thighs part around my hips feels like absolution and sin at the same time.
I tear her blouse open. Buttons fly across the kitchen floor like scattered rosary beads. She gasps into my mouth, but her hands are already yanking at my shirt, greedy and furious. I shrug it off and let it fall, then reach behind her to unhook her bra.
When her breasts spill free into my hands, I groan low in my throat, reverent. They are perfect—soft, heavy, the nipples already drawn tight and dark. I cup one, thumb dragging slowly over the peak until she shudders, then lower my head and take it into my mouth.