3. Viktor
VIKTOR
My knuckles ache in a way that tells me they’ll ache much worse tomorrow, and I flex my hand once against my thigh as I pull the office door shut behind me.
Yuri won’t be skimming from the till again. He also won’t be walking especially well for a week, and everyone else on staff, doing the same math he was, will get the message without me saying a word.
I don’t enjoy it. I never have, whatever people assume about men in my position. But if I let it slide, every other employee will start stealing too, once they realize nobody’s checking.
The hallway behind the bar smells like bleach and last night’s spilled vodka, and by the time I push through into the noise of the main floor, my shirt’s stuck to my back, and my breath still hasn’t fully caught up with me.
I grab a water bottle from behind the bar without asking because nobody charges the owner.
I crack it open and drink half of it standing there, head down, letting the bass work its way back into something I can tune out, rather than something pressing on my skull.
When I finally straighten up, the room’s the same as it always is on a Thursday. Loud, full, and there’s nothing that needs my attention in the next five minutes.
That’s when Dimitri finds me, tablet in hand, the particular look on his face that means numbers, not trouble.
“You want this now or after you’ve stopped sweating through your shirt?”
“After I’ve stopped sweating.”
Dimitri huffs and slides the tablet into his back pocket. “Fine. Wouldn’t want to ruin the numbers with you dripping on my screen.” He looks me over once, smirking as he does. “You look like you just wrestled a bear back there.”
“Something like that.”
“Comforting, coming from my older brother, the one who’s supposed to be setting a good example.” He says it easy.
I almost smile. This is the version of my night that makes sense, my brother needling me about my shirt, nothing that requires anyone’s knuckles.
Then I look past his shoulder and stop listening entirely.
There’s a woman standing near the edge of the floor who doesn’t belong in this building.
Not because she isn’t beautiful; she is, dark hair pulled back like she left in a hurry, a coat that’s doing a poor job of pretending she’s dressed for a place like this. She doesn’t belong because she’s looking directly at me.
“Viktor.” Dimitri follows my line of sight, and his voice drops. “You know her?”
“No.”
She’s already walking over.
Dimitri steps back half a pace, an old instinct that’s kept him alive as long as it’s kept me alive, and I let him go without a word, because whatever this is, it isn’t a conversation you have in front of an audience I don’t think
“Hi,” she says, stopping a few feet away, close enough that I can see her hands are shaking slightly even though her voice isn’t. “Sorry, I know you’re working. I don’t want to get you in trouble with whoever’s in charge.”
What is she talking about?
“Can I talk to you for a minute?” she asks. “Somewhere a little quieter?”
Every instinct I own says this is either a setup or the strangest night of my year, and possibly both.
I glance at Dimitri, who gives me a look that says he’d very much like an explanation later, and then I nod toward the hallway that leads back past the offices, away from the speakers.
She follows without hesitation, which either means she’s braver than she looks or that she has no idea which building she’s in.
Either way, I’m intrigued now.
The hallway’s quieter, just the muffled thump of the bass through the wall and the hum of the ice machine. She stops by the wall, arms crossed loosely, working up to whatever she came here to say, and I use the pause to actually look at her.
She’s younger than I first thought, maybe late twenties, with an exhausted, wired energy, like someone who hasn’t slept properly in weeks.
Her eyes are a warm brown, tired at the edges, and there’s a tension in her shoulders that hasn’t let up since she walked in.
I notice her mouth before I mean to. I notice the line of her throat when she swallows, working up her nerve.
None of this is helping me figure out what she wants.
“I’m Harper Wilcox,” she says finally, holding out her hand as if this were a job interview.
“Viktor.” I take her hand. Her grip is firmer than I expect, and warmer.
“Okay. Viktor.” She exhales like she’s talked herself into something. “I have kind of a strange offer, and I need you to hear the whole thing before you say no.”
“I’m listening.”
“I need a husband. Not forever. Just for a few months, maybe six at most.” She says it fast, like ripping off a bandage is easier than peeling it slowly.
“I’m fighting a custody case for my niece.
Her grandparents are arguing I’m unstable, unmarried, not enough.
If I’m married, that argument mostly falls apart. ”
I stare at her. Somewhere behind me, through the wall, a song changes and the crowd cheers for absolutely no reason I can identify.
“You’re proposing to me.”
“I’m proposing a contract.” Color rises in her face, but she doesn’t look away from me.
“Money, obviously. I’ve got a trust from my grandparents I can’t touch until I’m married, so once we sign, that’s real money, not a promise.
We do it at the courthouse, quick, nothing dramatic, and once the case is settled, we file for divorce, and you never have to think about me again. ”
“You don’t know anything about me.”
“I know you look older than everyone else working the floor tonight, which honestly is a plus, and I know you didn’t laugh in my face in the first ten seconds, which most men would have.
” A ghost of a smile crosses her mouth, gone fast. “I’m not asking you to fall in love with me.
I’m asking you to sign a piece of paper and stand next to me in front of a judge a few times. ”
I should tell her who I am. That I don’t dance for anyone, that the men on that stage work for me, that agreeing to anything with a stranger who walked in off the street could get men in my business killed.
I don’t say any of that.
What I say is, “What’s in it for me, beyond the money?”
“Nothing,” she says, blunt enough that it startles a short laugh out of me. “I’m not going to pretend this is anything but what it is. You’d be doing me a favor I can’t repay any other way.”
I look at her for a long moment, longer than I need to, and she holds still and lets me, which tells me more about her than anything she’s said so far.
There’s no reason to say yes. I don’t need her money. I don’t need the complication of a stranger’s name tied to mine on a legal document, not in my life, not with the people who’d notice.
But there’s a flat honesty in her, the way she laid the whole thing out without dressing it up as anything softer than a transaction, that I haven’t run into in years. Everyone who wants something from me wraps it in flattery first. She didn’t bother.
“All right,” I say.
Harper blinks. “All right?”
“I’ll marry you.”
“Just like that?”
“You said it yourself. It’s a contract.” I hold out my hand again, and after a beat, she takes it. “We’ll work out the terms. Bring a lawyer if you want one.”
“I have one.”
“Good. Bring her anyway.”
Her hand is still in mine, and neither of us lets go right away.
“Give me your number,” I say.
She hesitates for half a second, as if handing over a number were somehow a bigger step than the marriage proposal, then recites it while I type it into my phone. I call it once, just so hers lights up in her hand.
“Now you have mine too,” I say. “Don’t waste it.”
“Thank you,” she says, and for the first time since she walked up to me, her voice actually shakes. “You have no idea what this means.”
I have several ideas about what this means, most of them inconvenient, none of which I say.
“Go home, Harper,” I tell her instead. “Get some sleep. We’ll sort out the rest tomorrow.”
She nods, backing toward the hallway exit, and I watch her go longer than I should, watching the door swing shut behind her long after she’s actually gone.
Dimitri appears at my shoulder approximately four seconds later, arms crossed, wearing the expression of a man with questions and intent to ask every single one of them.
“Are you going to tell me what that was?”
“I’m getting married.”
Dimitri doesn’t laugh, which is how I know he thinks I’m serious before I’ve even finished the sentence. “To a woman you met eight minutes ago.”
“Seven, probably.”
“Viktor.”
“I’ll explain tomorrow.” I hand him the empty water bottle, because I need my hands to do something other than remember the shape of hers. “Tonight, I just agreed to marry a stranger who thinks I’m one of the dancers.”
“You’re serious,” he says.
I am.