Chapter 21
Laszlo
“Go home, get prepared,” Baron says, hanging up the phone. “Use Leonid and Grisha as witnesses and make sure they know that if they talk, they will be strung up by me personally.”
“Aww, I don’t need you to threaten my men. I can do that just fine.”
He gives me a sinister smile. “I know you can. Go now.”
I nod and take Galina’s hand. She looks at her phone screen and says to her dad, “Thank you.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” he mutters and hangs up.
She stares at it for a second before shoving it into the back pocket of her jeans. I see something pass over her face before she blinks, and it disappears. I ignore it. Now isn’t the time.
We move through the house and out of the front door on autopilot, climbing into the car, and I fire up the engine.
As we pull away, I say, “You don’t want to do this.”
She gulps. “I didn’t say anything.”
“I saw the look on your face upstairs.” I pull over to the side of the road and turn to face her. “What were the rules, Galina?”
“What?”
“The rules,” I clip out.
She licks her lips nervously. “One: I’m yours. Two: I will be protected. Three: If I run, you’ll bring me back,” she murmurs.
“If you run, I’ll bring you back,” I repeat.
“I’m not running.”
“But you want to.”
“You saw them upstairs,” she blurts out. “Baron knows what Dad wants with the corridor, and it’s not some stupid reason. He will use it once and then probably forget about it.”
“So you think Baron will forget about it? Is that it? Or are you hoping?” My voice is ice cold.
“Neither. Both. Don’t tell me the thought hadn’t crossed your mind as well.”
“No. It hadn’t,” I say honestly. I know my uncle. He wouldn’t let this slide in a million years. “You think you can break off this marriage and everything will be fine? Which part of I’ll bring you back didn’t you understand?”
Her face goes through something. Not fear. Not quite. The particular expression of a woman who has been logic’d into a corner and hates it.
“No,” she says quietly. “I don’t think it will be fine.”
“Then what are you actually scared of?”
She looks out of the windscreen for a moment. The grey London street goes on in both directions. Nothing moving. Just parked cars and wet pavement, and the two of us sitting here like we have all the time in the world, which we don’t.
“I’m scared of it being real,” she says finally.
I wait.
“And you’re not scared of this?”
I look at her properly. Dark hair, green eyes, a jaw set hard enough to cut glass.
“No, because I know what I want. And it has nothing to do with the corridor or our families. So we are getting married today in semi-secret, and that is the end of it.” I put the car back into gear and pull out into traffic.
“You’re just deciding that as if I don’t have a say?”
“You don’t,” I say and grit my teeth. “You are mine, Galina, and I’m not letting you go. Not for anything in this world. You can drag any excuse up that you like, but you are marrying me today.”
“You can’t bulldoze me into this,” she says.
“This was your idea. I’m not bulldozing anything. You made a commitment to end a war, and because your cousin has been dragged into this, you are changing your mind.”
“What?” she snaps. “How dare you?”
“Be offended if you must, but you know I’m right.”
“You are not right. I didn’t say I wasn’t going ahead with it.”
“You pretty much did.”
“I panicked, and you are acting like a total arsehole.”
“I am an arsehole. Do we need to go through this again?”
She lets out a frustrated noise and shoves her hands into her hair, but she doesn’t say anything.
After a few seconds, I say, “Make no mistake, if the Rusanovs renege on this deal, war will hit the streets.”
“I know. I’m not reneging.”
“Then what are you doing?”
“Having a moment. Shit got real, and I don’t want to end up like Yelena with my dad having to come and rescue me and end up causing a war anyway.”
“Excuse me?” I ask, my tone so fucking cold, I see her shiver.
“I can’t help it,” she whispers, staring out of the window.
“We’ve been over this—”
“I know. I know I’m being unreasonable. But I didn’t say anything. You dragged it out of me when I was prepared to leave it.”
Well, she has me there. I wish I’d left well enough alone.
We drive in silence for two full minutes.
I keep my eyes on the road and my hands on the wheel, and I do not say anything else, because she is right, and I am enough of a bastard to hate admitting it out loud.
I pushed. She was managing it. I pulled the thread, and now we are sitting in this car with the whole thing unravelled between us, and I have nobody to blame but myself.
Galina is staring out of the passenger window. Her jaw is still tight. She has her hands folded in her lap, very still, the way she goes still when she is working something out privately and doesn’t want me to see the process.
I let her have it.
The light ahead turns red, and I stop, engine idling, and I look at her profile. The straight line of her nose. The dark curve of her lashes. The ring on her finger, catching the flat grey light coming through the glass.
She is twenty-eight years old, and she has spent her entire life watching women she knows and loves get ground down by men who call it devotion.
I am asking her to trust me not to be one of those men.
And I just spoke to her like one.
“What do you want, Galina? And don’t hide behind anyone else. What do you want?”
The light is still red.
I stare at her profile, waiting for an answer that might destroy everything.
What does she want?
Her throat works as she swallows, and I see the moment she decides on honesty.
“I want this,” she says quietly. “I want you. I want what we were doing this morning before the tail and before we had to get married today, which I know was my idea, so don’t say it again.
I want the bed and the breakfast and the stupid argument about black not being a colour.
” She presses her lips together. “I want it to be mine. Not arranged. Not strategic. Mine.”
My jaw clenches. This woman makes me want to put a bullet in something.
“And I know that’s not how this works,” she continues.
“Two families may have needed a solution. That is not why I am marrying you now. I’m marrying you because somewhere between the ring, the bed, and every fight in between, this stopped being an arrangement I was enduring and became a vow I intend to keep.
” She finally turns to look at me, those green eyes unflinching.
“But you asked what I want, so that’s it. I want it to be real.”
Real. In my world, real does not mean gentle. It means binding. It means blood, oath, consequence. No easy exits. She wants real. I can give her that.
The light changes.
I don’t move.
A car behind me beeps.
I pull away from the light without looking at her again, because if I do, I am going to say something that cannot be unsaid, and I need five seconds to work out whether that is a disaster or not.
It isn’t.
It’s the only thing that makes sense in this entire fucking mess.
I take the next left and pull over again, properly this time, into a side street with nobody on it. I cut the engine. Galina doesn’t say anything. She is watching me with that careful, ready stillness, waiting for me to either confirm her fears or do something unexpected.
I turn to face her.
“It is real,” I say.
She opens her mouth.
“Let me finish.” I hold her gaze. “I am not marrying you because two families needed a solution. I am marrying you because I want to. That distinction is mine. Nobody arranged that part.” I watch the words land on her face.
She stares at me, and I see the exact moment she decides whether to believe it.
“You want to,” she repeats.
“Yes.”
“Not because of the war.”
“The war is why we met. It is not why I am sitting in this car telling you this.”
She is quiet for a moment. Not the defensive quiet she uses as a weapon. Something else. Something that costs her more.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “For the moment. For letting you see it.”
“Don’t apologise for that.”
“You told me not to make myself smaller.”
“That is not what that was.” I hold her gaze. “That was you being honest with yourself. There is a difference, and you know it.”
She holds my gaze for a long moment, and something in her face settles. Not all the way. Not permanently. But enough.
“Okay,” she says.
“Okay.”
“Don’t make me regret it.”
“I’ll do my best.”
Her mouth curves, just slightly, and I turn the engine back over and pull out of the side street and back into traffic.
The silence between us is different now.
Not hostile. Not loaded. Just two people sitting with something that has been said and cannot be unsaid, which in my experience is either the beginning of something or the end of it.
I’m choosing the beginning.
We are two minutes from the house. I use the time to think about what needs to happen in the next two hours.
Leonid will need warning. Grisha will need to be pulled from whatever he is doing and told to keep his mouth shut under pain of something creatively unpleasant.
The paperwork is already in order. That much Viktor and Baron handled between them, which means it is airtight and legal and will hold up to any scrutiny brought against it, because those two men do not do things halfway when it serves their purposes.
And then we will be married.