Chapter Thirty-One #4
“Mirabel McLeod,” he says.
He reaches into his jacket and pulls out a small box.
Black. Velvet. He opens it, and inside there’s a ring—different from the sapphire I’m already wearing.
This one is a band of white gold set with a deep green stone flanked by diamonds, smaller than the sapphire but somehow more intimate, more deliberate, the kind of ring chosen by a man who noticed that his fiancée wears sage green like a signature and paid attention.
He doesn’t kneel. Arkady Laurov does not kneel. But he holds the box out with both hands, and the gesture—the offering, the openness of it, this man who keeps his hands at his sides or on weapons or in fists—is worth more than kneeling.
“Will you be my wife, Mirabel McLeod?”
There is only one answer. There has only ever been one answer, from the moment he handed me ten thousand dollars in cash in his study, from the moment he pulled me into his bed and then kicked me out of it, from the moment he showed me his dead brother’s ashes and trusted me with the worst thing he’d ever done.
“Yes,” I say. “Yes, obviously, yes.”
He slides the ring onto my finger. It sits beside the sapphire—two stones, two promises, one man. His hands are steady, but I can feel the tremor in his fingertips, the earthquake he’s holding inside himself that only I can detect.
The garden erupts.
Stefan whistles—a sharp, two-fingered blast that sounds more like a military signal than a celebration.
Diane has her phone up, snapping photographs with the frenzied urgency of a woman who lives for this exact moment.
Natalia is dabbing her eyes. Yanis raises his glass, and beside him, Debra is smiling—actually smiling, wide and open, her hand finding Yanis’s arm.
The cousins are clapping, and the caterers are clapping, and even the jazz trio joins in, breaking into something celebratory and bright.
Arkady pulls me into him. I go—belly first, graceless, laughing—and his arms close around me and his mouth finds my ear.
“Spasibo,” he murmurs. “For saying yes. Again.”
“You didn’t give me much choice. You did it in front of sixty people.”
“Forty-three.”
“You’re impossible.”
“Da.” He’s remorseless.
I press my face into his neck and breathe him in and let the applause wash over us like water, like something clean, like everything we’ve earned.
That’s when I hear it.
Shouting. From beyond the gates, past the gravel drive, out where the trees meet the road and Arkady’s security perimeter begins.
A man’s voice—rough, urgent—cut short.
Then a sound I know. A sound this body has learned to identify, even though my mind wishes it hadn’t. The hard, flat crack of gunfire splitting the afternoon in half.
One shot. Two. Three in rapid succession, overlapping, too close together to count.
The champagne glass in Diane’s hand drops. Shatters on the stone paving. Nobody moves to clean it up.
My eyes find Arkady’s. One second. Less than one second. A fraction of a heartbeat in which everything between us—the rings, the speech, the word yes still hanging in the garden air—is compressed and filed and put away.
His face changes. Not gradually. All at once, like a door slamming.
The man who whispered spasibo against my ear is gone.
Replaced by something older, harder, the thing he becomes when the world shows its teeth.
His posture locks—spine straight, weight forward, everything about him recalibrating into the version of himself that gives orders and expects them followed.
His hand goes to his waist—instinctive, automatic, reaching for a weapon he’s not wearing because this was supposed to be a party, this was supposed to be safe.
“Stefan,” he says. One word. That’s all it takes.
Stefan is already moving. The champagne glass he was holding is on the table, his hand is inside his jacket, and he’s crossing the lawn with strides that eat the distance. His phone is pressed to his ear, his expression emptied of everything except operational focus.
More shouting. Closer now. A woman screams—high and thin, one of the catering staff near the south gate—and then there’s the sound of boots on gravel, many boots, the thunder of men arriving in force.
I look at Debra.
My sister is standing beside Yanis, her glass forgotten, her face drained of color so completely that for a second she looks like a photograph—a woman developed in black and white, all contrast and no warmth.
Her hand is at her mouth, pressed tight, as if she’s holding something in. Or keeping something out.
Then she lowers her hand. Her lips move.
I can’t hear her over the noise—the shouting, the boots, the second volley of shots that sounds closer, louder, more deliberate—but I don’t need to hear her. I’ve spent most of my life reading that face. I know the shape of every word it makes.
And the words she mouths, across the garden, through the gunfire and the screaming, with six years of rape and terror and survival written in the hollow of her eyes, are these:
He’s here.