Chapter 22
Galina
We pull up to the house, and I stare at the front door for a second before getting out.
Married.
The word sits in my chest like something swallowed wrong. Not bad. Not good. Just there, solid and undeniable, pressing against everything I thought I knew about how my life was supposed to go.
I follow Laszlo inside, trailing behind him, which is becoming a habit I’m not sure how to feel about.
Leonid has the expression of a man who has been waiting for something to go wrong all day and is mildly surprised it hasn’t yet. He takes one look at Laszlo’s face and straightens.
“We need Grisha,” Laszlo says. “And your presence. One hour.”
Leonid blinks once. “Sir.”
“You know what for.”
A pause so brief it barely exists. “I’ll find him.”
He disappears, and I’m left standing in the hallway in jeans and a jumper, about to get married.
“I need to change,” I say.
Laszlo turns to look at me. “The dress is here.”
“Do you think I should wear it?” I ask in surprise.
He shrugs. “Why not?”
I take a moment to consider that. Why not, indeed?
“Actually,” he says as I turn to the stairs. “Scratch that. Wear something old and tatty.”
“I don’t own anything old and tatty. But why?”
His gaze heats up. “So I can rip it off you before I take what I’ve been wanting to claim since I laid eyes on you.”
Heat floods my face so fast it’s almost dizzying.
“You are absolutely not ripping my wedding dress,” I say, but my voice comes out lower than I intend, and we both hear it.
His mouth curves. “Then wear something I can destroy without either of us mourning it.”
“I’ll find something,” I manage, and take the stairs before he can see the full effect of that sentence on my face.
In the dressing room, I stand in front of the wardrobe for a moment, breathing. The dress bag hangs on the rail, white silk visible through the transparent cover, and I run one finger along the zip before stepping back from it.
Not the dress. Not today. Not like this, in a side arrangement with Leonid and Grisha as witnesses and two hours of notice.
The dress deserves better than that. I deserve better than that, even if the man waiting downstairs is the reason I want it at all.
I pull out a dark green silk slip dress instead. Fitted, simple, nothing I would cry over losing. I hold it up against myself in the mirror, and something settles in my chest that I don’t examine too carefully.
I dress quickly, twist my hair up, and reapply my lipstick in a shade that is too red to be subtle and not red enough to be a statement. Somewhere in between, which feels about right for today.
I look at myself in the mirror for one long second.
Green eyes. Dark hair. A ring that has been on my finger for only a few days.
I look like a woman who has made a decision.
I go downstairs before I can talk myself out of it.
Laszlo is in the hallway, and he has changed too, with clothes from somewhere. Dark trousers, a dark grey shirt with the top button open, no tie. His tattoos crawl across his skin, and he looks exactly like what he is. Dangerous, ruthless, and entirely too good-looking for anyone’s peace of mind.
His eyes move over me once, from the green silk to the red mouth to the shoes I grabbed at the last second, low-heeled and simple.
“Green,” he says.
“It’s a theme,” I say, flashing him the emerald ring.
His mouth curves. “It suits you.”
“Don’t be charming. It makes me nervous.”
“Good,” he says, and holds out his hand.
I look at it for a second. His tattooed fingers, the breadth of his palm, the particular stillness of a man who is not asking twice.
I take it.
His hand closes around mine, and we walk through to the sitting room, which Leonid has arranged with quiet efficiency into something that resembles an occasion.
The furniture has been shifted. Two chairs sit facing a third, where a man I don’t recognise is standing with a folder and the expression of someone who has been paid very well to be here and to forget he ever was.
Grisha stands off to the side, enormous and uncomfortable in a way that suggests he would rather be doing literally anything else. He catches my eye and gives me a stiff nod that I think is meant to be encouraging.
Leonid stands beside him, hands clasped, face arranged into the expression that I think means he is feeling something he has decided not to show.
“Miss Rusanova,” the registrar says, with a small incline of his head. “Mr Voronov.”
“That’s us,” I say, because someone has to say something, and Laszlo appears to have decided that standing very still and looking like a man who could break faces with just a look alone is contribution enough.
The registrar opens his folder. “Shall we proceed?”
I glance at Laszlo.
He looks back at me, blue eyes steady, and gives me nothing except his hand still closed around mine.
“Yes,” I say, realising he has left it to me to make the decision if this goes ahead or not.
It is not a long ceremony. That is the point of it, I suppose.
No flowers, no music, no aunts crying in the second pew.
Just a man with a leather folder reading words that have been read in registry offices across this country for decades, and two people standing in a sitting room in Mayfair deciding—in front of two armed men and a stranger who will forget this happened—to mean them instead of endure them.
Laszlo says his vows in a voice that doesn’t waver. He doesn’t look at the registrar when he says them. He looks at me.
I say mine in a voice that comes out steadier than I expect.
The registrar reads the final declaration. He asks if there are any lawful impediments. Grisha looks at the ceiling. Leonid looks at the floor. Nobody says anything.
The registrar signs the certificate. Laszlo signs it. He passes the pen to me, and I hold it for one second before I put my name next to his in ink that will dry in sixty seconds and hold for the rest of my life.
It’s done.
The registrar closes his folder with a soft, definitive click and says something about congratulations that I hear from a very great distance.
Laszlo shakes his hand. Money changes hands in the form of an envelope that Leonid produces from his back pocket.
The registrar is shown out with the kind of brisk efficiency that leaves no room for lingering.
And then there are four of us in the sitting room, and I am married.
Grisha clears his throat. “Congratulations,” he says, in the tone of a man who has rehearsed this word three times and is still not sure about it.
“Thank you,” I say.
He nods once, decisively, and fucks off as fast as if the devil were on his tail. I don’t blame him. Laszlo looks like he is about to start ripping people to shreds.
Nerves?
Surely, not.
I smile as I realise I’m probably right. The big, bad, Bratva man was nervous. Suddenly, it’s the funniest thing in the world.
As I let out an unladylike snort, which is apparently Leonid’s cue to also beat it in a hurry, Laszlo turns his fierce stare on me.
“Find something funny?” he grits out.
“You were nervous,” I snort.
His eyes flash. “I was not nervous.”
“You absolutely were. Your jaw was doing that thing.”
“What thing?”
“The thing where it goes hard enough to crack a walnut. You do it when you are pretending to be completely unbothered.”
“I’m always unbothered.”
“You were nervous at your own wedding. Laszlo Voronov, nephew to the most powerful pakhan in the south of England, was nervous in front of a registrar and two men who are terrified of him.”
He stares at me for a long second with those blue eyes that give nothing away, and then something shifts in his face. Not quite a smile. Something more dangerous than that.
“Keep going,” he says quietly. His voice has dropped to the register that does something deeply inconvenient to my nervous system, and the distance between us is suddenly much more relevant than it was thirty seconds ago.
He takes one step toward me, unhurried, and I hold my ground because I am not going to back away from him. The thought arrives without warning and does something strange to my chest.
“Nothing else to say?” he asks.
“I’m considering my options.”
“Smart, moya zhena.”
“Laszlo—”
“You are my wife,” he says. Quiet. Absolute.
I swallow. “I am aware. I was there.”
“Then stop talking.”
He kisses me, and it is nothing like the kiss upstairs where he lost control.
He is in full control this time. Deliberate and certain, and it undoes me completely.
His mouth moves against mine slowly, like he has decided there is no rush, like the entire afternoon hasn’t been a controlled disaster of tails and side streets and a registrar who will forget our names by morning. One hand comes up to cup my face, and the other settles at my waist.
Real.
I kissed him back upstairs with my hand on his cock and my heart hammering from adrenaline and want and the particular recklessness of nearly being caught.
This is different. This is slower and more deliberate and somehow far more dangerous because of it, because there is nothing to blame it on.
No adrenaline. No chaos. Just him, and me, and the fact that we are married and standing in the sitting room of a Mayfair house that I have lived in for less than a week and have already started to think of as mine.
He pulls back first and scoops me up into his arms, cradling me like I’m precious as he carries me upstairs.
I keep my arms around his neck as he carries me up the stairs, and I don’t say a word, because there is nothing left to say that wouldn’t cheapen what just happened in that sitting room.
Laszlo carries me through the bedroom door and kicks it shut behind us, and the sound of the latch catching is very loud in the quiet of the house. He sets me down at the foot of the bed. Not dropped. Placed. Like he means it.