Chapter Forty-One
Mirabel
The sand is warm between my toes.
That’s the thing I keep coming back to—not the flowers, not the dress, not the sixty-odd people gathered behind us on white chairs borrowed from the resort. The sand. Warm and soft and real, working its way into the gaps between my toes.
Arkady stands across from me, barefoot in linen trousers and a white shirt with the sleeves rolled to his elbows, and I’m struck—not for the first time, not even for the hundredth—by the contradiction of this man.
The ink crawling up his throat. The black feathers disappearing beneath his collar.
The scar tissue on his knuckles that no amount of tailoring will ever civilize.
He looks like someone carved a weapon and then dressed it for a beach holiday.
And he’s smiling.
Not the version he uses at Empire Royale events, all teeth and charm. This is the other one—the private one, the one just for those of us he loves. It’s crooked and slightly bewildered, as if he can’t quite believe we’ve arrived at this moment without something exploding.
Fair. Neither can I.
Debra stands at my left shoulder, her arm warm against mine.
My maid of honor. My mirror. The sister I almost lost hope for and then got back in the most impossible way—through the very man I’m about to marry.
She’s in a soft green dress that skims her collarbones and hides the places she’s still learning not to be ashamed of.
She’s holding my bouquet because my hands are shaking, and she noticed before I did. She always notices.
Yanis is at Arkady’s right. Best man by title, brother by blood, the steady axis.
He stands with his hands clasped in front of him and his shoulders squared, and if you didn’t know him, you’d think he was relaxed.
But I know him now. I know the way his eyes move in slow, habitual sweeps across the treeline, the beach access, the cluster of guests.
Even here. Even today. Some training doesn’t switch off, and Yanis doesn’t pretend it does.
And Dad… Dad is in the front row. Sitting proudly, spine straight, in a linen suit that hangs looser on him than it would have two years ago, but fits the man he is now. The man who survived to give his daughter away at her wedding.
“You may now exchange your vows,” the officiant says.
Arkady goes first. Because of course he does—even at his own wedding, he leads.
“I had a speech,” he says, and his voice tells me that he’s working to hold himself together. Not gruff. Not hard. Just… deliberate. “I wrote it down. Stefan proofread it. Made me cut a paragraph about threat matrices.”
Laughter from behind us. Stefan, somewhere in the second row, mutters something in Russian that makes Yanis snort.
Arkady’s eyes don’t leave mine. “But I’m not going to read it.” He reaches into his trouser pocket and produces a folded piece of paper, then holds it up for me to see before tucking it back. “It’s there. In case you ever want proof that I tried. But what I want to say isn’t on that page.”
He takes my hands. His palms are rough, the calluses catching against my skin, and I feel the weight of him settle into the contact—all that controlled energy finding its outlet in the press of his fingers around mine.
“Years ago, I made a mistake that I never let go of. I let that failure become a wall, and I lived behind it because living behind walls was easier than admitting I was afraid.” A muscle works in his jaw.
He pauses. Breathes. “You came into my house, Mirabel. Then you came into my room. Then you found your way into every single locked space I had, and you did it with a personality that should come with a warning label.”
I laugh. The sound is wet and graceless, and I don’t care.
“You showed me that the thing I’d been protecting wasn’t a wound. It was a door. And behind it was everything I’d convinced myself I didn’t deserve.” His thumb traces a slow arc across my knuckle. “A family. Children. You.” He swallows. “Especially you.”
My throat aches. I squeeze his hands and hold on.
“So here’s my vow, zaychik.” His voice drops, intimate, as if the sixty people behind us have dissolved and it’s just us and the sand and the water.
“I will choose you. Every morning. Every argument. Every sleepless night with a baby who won’t stop screaming.
I will choose this life we built. And I will spend the rest of it being grateful that you didn’t listen when I told you to stay out of my things. ”
I’m crying. Obviously. I’ve been crying since he said the word speech.
“My turn,” I manage, swiping at my cheek with the back of my hand. The gesture is far from glamorous. My mascara is probably halfway to my chin. Debra will be furious—she spent forty minutes on my makeup this morning while Sara screamed from her bassinet and Aleks tried to eat a lipstick.
I take a breath. Then another. Not to calm down. To savor it.
“When I took the job at Ashwater Heights,” I begin, “I told myself it was about money. Dad’s treatment.
Debra’s memory. I had a list of reasons that all sounded sensible and responsible, and not a single one of them was ‘because the man who jilted his fiancée at the altar looked at me like he was drowning and I wanted to know why.’”
Arkady dips his head, a concession—his lips pressing together against the start of something amused, something fond, something that says guilty as charged.
“But that’s the truth. I was curious about you before I was anything else.
Before I was afraid of you, before I was angry at you, before I was—” I glance down at the sand between us, then back up.
“In love with you. Curiosity came first. And you hated it. God, you hated it. Every question I asked was a personal affront. Every door I opened was a violation. You had rules. Boundaries. An entire security infrastructure designed to keep people out.” I tighten my grip on his hands.
“And I am deeply, profoundly sorry to inform you that I have not learned my lesson.”
More laughter, louder this time. Diane’s unmistakable cackle rises above the rest, and I know without looking that she’s already filming this for Instagram.
“I will keep asking,” I say. “I will keep opening doors. I will keep making you tell me the truth even when it’s ugly and complicated, and you’d rather chew off your own hand than say it out loud.
Because that’s how we work, Arkady. You build walls, and I take them apart, and somewhere in the middle we find the thing that matters. ”
His eyes are bright. Not wet—he’s too stubborn for that, too trained in the art of composure—but bright. Lit from somewhere deep and unguarded.
“I love you,” I say. Simply. Without decoration. “I love the man you are and the father you’ve become and the terrifying, beautiful, utterly impossible life we’ve made. And I vow to keep choosing it. All of it. Even the parts that scare me.”
The officiant clears her throat. She looks deeply satisfied. “The rings, please.”
Yanis steps forward. He’s in navy linen, clean-shaven, his dark hair parted neatly—the composed counterpoint to his brother’s barely tamed edges. He produces both rings from his breast pocket.
He hands one to Arkady, one to me. As he passes mine over, he catches my eye and gives me a single nod. Small. Private. The Laurov brother equivalent of a standing ovation.
The ring slides onto my finger—white gold, slim, perfectly warm from Yanis’s pocket. Arkady’s hand is steady as I fit his, the metal settling against his skin with a rightness that makes my heart clench.
“By the power vested in me,” Carmen says, “I now pronounce you husband and wife. You may—”
He kisses me before she finishes.
It’s not polite. It’s not brief. His hand comes up to the side of my neck, and he pulls me against him with the determination of a man who’s been waiting for permission and has decided that close enough counts.
I taste salt—mine, his, the ocean air—and for a moment the applause fades to white noise.
Then there’s just the press of his mouth and the grip of his fingers and the sand shifting beneath our bare feet.
When we break apart, I’m breathless and grinning, and my nose is probably red and blotchy. Arkady keeps his hand on my neck, thumb resting against the line of my jaw. He’s looking at me with an expression I’ve learned to translate over the past year. It means mine. It always means mine.
“Mrs. Laurov,” he says.
“Don’t start.”
“Too late.”
Behind us, the ocean breeze catches the last of the ceremony’s closing words and carries them out across the water, mixing our “I do’s” with salt air and the sound of waves and the distant shriek of a gull that couldn’t care less about human love stories.
The sky is wide and cloudless and absurdly cinematic, the sort of backdrop that exists specifically so that people getting married on beaches can look at each other and think: we earned this.
We earned this.
* * *
The garden party is Debra’s doing. All of it—the fairy lights strung between the palms, the long tables draped in white cloth, the bar set up beneath a canvas canopy that ripples in the breeze.
She spent three weeks planning it from her laptop at the kitchen table in Ashwater Heights, color-coding spreadsheets and arguing with florists over the phone while Yanis sat beside her and pretended he had opinions about centerpieces.
It’s beautiful. It’s also dual-purpose, because today isn’t just our wedding reception—it’s Debra and Yanis’s engagement party. They announced it over dinner, with the quiet care that defines everything about the way Yanis loves my sister.
No ring at first. She’d told him she wasn’t ready for one. So instead, he’d given her a key. A skeleton key on a fine silver chain, the sort that opens nothing and means everything. She wears it against her collarbone now, the metal warming against her skin.