Anya
Saoirse takes me upstairs herself.
She doesn't hand me off to anyone, doesn't call for a housekeeper or point me in the direction of a hallway and wish me luck. She walks beside me with her hand on my elbow, steady and warm, guiding me through the house like I'm something precious she doesn't want to drop.
The guest room is at the end of a long corridor on the second floor.
It's beautiful in the way everything in this house is beautiful, understated and old and real. A large bed with a cream quilt, heavy curtains pulled shut against the dark night outside. There’s a dresser with a mirror that I can look in without hating what I see staring back at me.
"There are towels in the bathroom," Saoirse says, nodding toward a door on the far wall. "And I'll have Iris bring you something to sleep in. Are you hungry?"
I open my mouth to say no, but my stomach answers before I can, a low growl that makes Saoirse's eyebrows rise.
"I'll take that as a yes." She squeezes my arm. "I'll send something up. You don't have to come down if you're not ready."
"Saoirse." I catch her hand before she can leave. "Thank you. For not turning me away."
She looks at me, and for a second, I see my mother in the way her expression softens. In the way she holds space for someone else's pain without making it about herself.
"Your mother was my dearest friend," she says. "And you are always welcome in this house. That hasn't changed and it never will." She pauses. "Get some rest, Anya. You're safe here."
She closes the door behind her, and I stand in the middle of the room and breathe.
For the first time in three days, there's no walls closing in on me, no conversation to eavesdrop on, no clock ticking down to the end of the week.
I'm in the Orlov house. I've made my play.
And a man with a scar and a dead eye and a voice like gravel just offered to marry me, and I said yes, and now I'm standing in a guest room that smells like lavender and trying to figure out when my life became this.
My phone buzzes in my coat pocket.
I pull it out and the screen is lit up like a Christmas tree. Fourteen missed calls from Diomid. Twenty-six text messages, escalating in tone from Where are you? to Answer your phone NOW to a single message in Russian that is nothing but profanity.
I should have called him from the car. I should have called him the second I walked through Saoirse's door. But I didn't, because I knew he'd tell me to turn around, and I wasn't willing to hear it.
The phone buzzes again in my hand. Diomid. I swipe to answer before I can talk myself out of it.
"Before you start yelling," I say.
"Too late." His voice is low and furious in a way that tells me he's already past yelling and into the cold, controlled anger that's actually worse. "Where the hell are you, Anya?"
"I'm at the Orlov estate. Liam called you, I know he did."
"Liam called me and told me my sister showed up at their estate begging to marry one of his brothers.
So yes, I'm aware." A pause. Something slams in the background.
"Do you have any idea what you've done? You left the house.
You drove forty minutes across open road with no security, no escort, no one knowing where you were.
The Baron has people everywhere, Anya. Everywhere.
If one of his men had seen you, if they'd followed you, if they'd pushed you off the road—"
"But they didn't."
"But they could have." His voice cracks on the word, just barely, and that's what makes my chest tighten.
Diomid isn't furious because I disobeyed him.
He's furious because he's been sitting in his office for the last hour imagining every terrible thing that could have happened to me between our house and this one.
"I know," I say quietly. "I know, and I'm sorry.
But I couldn't stay in that house one more minute, Diomid.
I couldn't sit in my room and wait for you to come tell me it didn't work.
I heard the call. I heard what the contact said.
The Baron doesn't want your money or your territory.
He wants me. And you're running out of time to stop it. "
Silence. The kind that stretches and aches.
"You heard that," he says.
"I was outside the door."
He exhales, long and ragged, and I can picture him exactly. Standing behind his desk with one hand on the back of his neck, jaw tight, eyes closed. My brother carries every burden like it's his alone to shoulder, and the weight of this one has been crushing him for weeks.
"Liam says you've agreed to marry Connor," he says finally. His tone has shifted. Still tight, still angry, but there's something else now. Something careful, like he's trying to read me through the phone. "Is that true?"
"Yes."
"Do you even know him?"
"No. But I know his mother. And I know what the alternative is."
"Anya." He says my name like a warning and a plea at the same time. "This isn't... you can't just throw yourself at the first man who—"
"I'm not throwing myself at anyone. He offered. I accepted. And, I'm sure."
"You've known him for five minutes."
"I've known the Baron for five weeks and he has three dead wives. I think five minutes with an Orlov is a better foundation than that."
Diomid goes quiet again. I sit down on the edge of the bed and press my free hand against my knee to stop it bouncing.
The adrenaline is gone now, and what's left in its place is something shakier, something that feels a lot like the aftermath of a car crash where you walk away uninjured but your body hasn't caught up yet.
"Tell me about him," Diomid says. "Connor. What did you see?"
I close my eyes.
What did I see?
I saw a man fill a doorway. That's the first thing.
He didn't walk into the room, he occupied it.
Tall and broad and built like the kind of man who doesn't need a weapon because he is one.
Dark hair, strong jaw, shoulders wide enough to block the light from the hall behind him.
The sort of man who makes a room feel smaller just by standing in it.
And then I saw the scar. The ruined eye. The way he held himself like he was bracing for impact, chin up, shoulders squared, every line of his body daring me to react.
"He's big," I tell Diomid. "Tall. Strong. He has a scar on his face, through his left eye. The eye doesn't work."
"I'm asking what you saw, Anya. Not what he looks like."
I think about it. I think about the way Connor leaned against that doorframe and threw his worst self at me like a dare.
The roughness in his voice that was trying to be cruel but wasn't quite managing it.
The way his jaw tightened when I said yes, like he'd been ready for a blow and got a breath instead.
"I wasn't scared," I say. "That's what I saw. I looked at him, all of him, the scar and the eye and the size of him, and I didn't feel afraid. I felt..." I search for the right word, and the one that comes surprises me. "Safe. He felt safe, Diomid. I don't know how to explain it."
"Try,” he bites out.
"He's fierce. I could see that. He's got something hard in him, something that's been hurt and turned into armor.
But when he looked at me, it wasn't the way the Baron looks at me.
The Baron looks at me like I'm something to own and consume for his own selfish pleasure.
Connor looked at me like..." I stop. Swallow.
"Like he couldn't believe I said yes. Like he expected me to run. "
The silence on the other end of the phone stretches so long I pull it away from my ear to check we're still connected.
"Diomid?"
"I'm here." His voice is different now. Quieter. Some of the anger has bled out and what's left sounds tired and sad and something close to relieved, though he'd never admit it. "You really want this."
"I really want this. And if I can make him fall in love with me, I know he'll protect me with everything he is. I saw it. It's in him already. He just doesn't know it yet."
Diomid makes a sound that's almost a laugh, almost a sigh. "You sound like Mom."
My throat closes up. I press my lips together and blink hard at the ceiling.
"I'll talk to Liam," he says. "Properly. And I'll deal with the Baron." A beat. "But Anya, if he hurts you, if he so much as makes you flinch, I will burn that estate to the ground. Orlov name or not."
"I know you will." I love him for it, but we both know our family doesn’t have the same pull as the Orlov’s, or the Baron. That’s how we got in this state in the first place.
Diomid continues. "Don't leave the estate. Don't go anywhere without security. And answer your phone when I call. I mean it."
"I know."
Another pause, softer this time. "I'm glad you're safe. Even if you scared ten years off my life getting there."
I smile. "I love you too, Diomid."
He hangs up without saying it back, because that's who my brother is. The words live in everything he does, just never in his mouth. But I heard it in the crack in his voice when he talked about the Baron's men on the road. I heard it in the way he didn't say no.
I set the phone down on the nightstand and lie back on the bed, still in my coat, still in my boots, staring up at the ceiling of a room in the Orlov house.
Connor Orlov.
My future husband, if Diomid and Liam can make the pieces fit.
I think about the way he bent down in front of me, put his face inches from mine, one eye blazing green and the other pale as fog. He was testing me. I knew it even in the moment. He wanted to see if I'd look away, if I'd show him the reaction he's clearly used to getting from women.
But all I could think, with his face that close to mine and his breath warm on my skin, was that this man could wrap himself around me like a wall between me and the rest of the world, and nothing would get through.
That's what safety looks like.
Not a gentle man wearing a tailored suit and a bank behind him. A man built like a fortress who chose to put himself between me and the thing I'm running from.
I close my eyes and let my thoughts wander to Connor and what standing next to him will feel like.